By Robert Bradley Jr. — October 30, 2025
Always wrong but never in doubt. Welcome to the-end-is-always-near world of Paul R. Ehrlich, where humans are the problem–or at least everyone that does not see what the neo-Malthusians warn against. The land of the living dead–something to think about this Halloween.
I was reminded of neo-Malthusianism come Halloween 2025 upon rereading a piece in the (Progressive Left) The Guardian, “Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of Civilisation Is a Near Certainty Within Decades‘”, published eight years ago (March 2018).
“Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge,” the subtitle of Damian Carrington article states. She continues:
A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.
But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever. The world’s optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change….
The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s – a fate that was avoided by the green revolution in intensive agriculture.
Ehrich admits his errors (Julian Simon creamed him decades ago on the facts and theory explaining the facts). Continues Carrington:
Many details and timings of events were wrong, Paul Ehrlich acknowledges today, but he says the book was correct overall. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.”….
“It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems,” he says. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”
High population and high consumption by the affluent are “driving a sixth mass extinction of biodiversity, upon which civilisation depends for clean air, water and food.”
“Sustainable” population is his goal. [Ehrlich] estimates an optimum global population size at roughly 1.5 to two billion, “But the longer humanity pursues business as usual, the smaller the sustainable society is likely to prove to be. We’re continuously harvesting the low-hanging fruit, for example by driving fisheries stocks to extinction.”
Carrington quotes Ehrlich:
No scientist would hold exactly the same views after a half century of further experience, but Anne and I are still proud of our book…. Its weaknesses were not enough on overconsumption and equity issues. It needed more on women’s rights, and explicit countering of racism – which I’ve spent much of my career and activism trying to counter. Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources.
Dr. Wrong. The Population Bomb is the stuff of jokes as obesity has overtaken famine in the developed (non-statist) world–thanks to more, not less, people. Game, set, and match to Paul Ehlich’s intellectual foe, Julian Simon.
[Editor’s note: Ehrlich is prominently featured in WUWT’s Failed Prediction Timeline]
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Funny how these doomsayers get more media attention when they propose these theories but none when they don’t pan out.
If it bleeds, it leads.
Paul Ehrlich will be right this time.
Not because one has eventually to be right after 90 years of failed predictions
but for the simple fact that all these measures that have been implemented as result of ice age and warming scare were designed to collapse civilization by destroying energy supply, promoting destructive people and behavior,targeting food production and perverting education and divisive rhetoric and mass invasion – yet the collapse will then be blamed on AGW. .
(but in his favour: he was way more generous with his 1977 plans to cut down global population to 2 billion than his rich masters who moved this goalpost down to >500 mio just 3 years later )
And I would not blame the media but Paul Ehrlichs colleagues.
They should have been pointing with fingers at him and declare him the village idiot of science long time ago for all his ridiculous and failed predictions .
Instead he is still considered a top scientists while real scientists have been ruined for making correct but politically verboten predictions.
You can not blame media when the experts fail to see the obvious and do the right thing.
I’ve come to wonder whether any species that becomes culturally obligate and rises to technical civilization will face a crisis wherein the collectivist variant wages a war against the individualist variant.
Reproductive success among competitive tribes of conscious individuals selects for moral coherence as a survival trait. Necessary early on, a recipe for tyranny later.
The collectivist variant will feel uncomfortable and endangered in a society negotiated by individualists. So, they’ll invent reasons to rationalize their feelings.
It once was heresy. Today it’s capitalism. All of them to the end of enforcing a collective.
Collectives are necessarily hostile to independent thinkers. Free-thinkers are suppressed. Collectivist societies inevitably become moribund.
An Earthbound one is unlikely to foster the creative genius to get off planet.
This may be a solution to Fermi’s Paradox. The reason aliens haven’t found us is that none of them (so far) survived their collectivist crisis.
The modern world requires many skills and that makes it a collective. So collectivism is an essential aspect of the modern world.
Individualism is expressed by the range of choices available to each within the collective. That is why free markets work so well They maximise individual choice and those things of low value get left behind.
Both the UN and EU are serious threats to individuality and free markets. The unelected individuals in control of these organisations have no accountability. They operate outside any notion of a free market. There is no choice only prescription of what our betters decide the plebs need.
Any form of cooperation is a collective?
You make an interesting point,
but I have to object a bit.
It is about balance.
There has always been the collective as number 1 of any society,
but only those who were able to support and promote individual quality within the system would get ahead.
Therefore the collective that respects and supports and knows about the quality of individualism will succeed.
The downside is that the success of individualism is (self)destructive.
The dumb collective tribe will get jealous and want what the successfull have.
The successfull tribe will suffer from lower birth rates and higher life expectancy and decrease in fighting power = will be wiped out by collective zombie tribe who acts like an army.
No, Ehrlich is always wrong. And his understanding of modern science and engineering is seriously defective. He was and is a strident antinuke. Nuclear power is the only expandable source of energy available that would allow an increase in human prosperity and a reduction in poverty. But it runs counter to Ehrlich’s permanent doomerism. So, he chooses to reject it on the basis of a silly, erroneous analogy.
Worse, never once did Ehrlich ever question the truth of all the normative statements he made about population or technological progress. His starting point was always that he was always right about everything. And he remained that way. He failed massively to learn from his smackdown by Julian Simon.
And his litany of lies covered over his advocacy of the greatest catastrophe he wanted for the future of humanity: the mass die-off of three quarters of the human population.
Ehrlich and his supporters probably have been profiting in one way or another by pushing his theories, so why would he retract any of them. The doomsday crowd has existed in one way or the next for centuries now, so even when Ehrlich disappears from the scene it’s a guaranteed that one individual or group will fill the gap; and if there are enough credulous people out there and enough con-men to scam them, we can expect for these end-of-the-world theories to be regularly thrown at us. The real problem occurs when governments adopt these scams to raise taxes, pass more laws and restrictions and force green-product mandates on the populace. All of these raise living costs without solving problems that were non-existent from the beginning.
“perpetual growth is the creed of” every single species on Earth. Each, except humans – and then only recently – is held in check by predation.
If we humans attain the solar system, there’s no foreseeable limit to resources or population.
Optimistically, in 500 year’s time, most humans (perhaps 100s of billions) will live off-planet. Earth will become a garden.
Oh yeah, that’s REALLY optimistic IMHO!
Are you thinking about O’Neill hollowed-out asteroids orbiting the Sun, perhaps a Niven ringworld, or maybe even a Kardashev Type I civilization?
Otherwise, are you imaging terraforming a moon or another planet within our solar system . . . Mars perhaps? . . . in just 500 years?
BTW, I confidentially predict all such will NEVER happen if mankind remains limited (hah!) to expelled-mass-reaction rocket propulsion for launching multi-ton+ payloads to LEO, let alone to Earth escape velocity.
Maybe the Reptilians (but assuredly not the Greys) will solve that problem for us . . . maybe.
(somebody a hundred and some years ago…)
. . . and undoubtedly on a galaxy far, far away. 🙂
“Kardashev Type I civilization”
I initially read that as “A Kardashian Type 1 civilisation”… and my mind reeled in horror. !!
Antarctica is less hostile than Mars, yet no permanent setlements are planned there.
The longest continuously manned station in Antarctica is the Orcadas Base, established in 1903 by the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition and transferred to Argentina in 1904.
Furthermore and more specifically regarding settlements (my bold emphasis added):
“The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 by 12 nations and came into effect on 23 June 1961. The central ideas with full acceptance were the freedom of scientific research in Antarctica and the peaceful use of the continent. There was also a consensus for demilitarization and the maintenance of the status quo. The treaty prohibits nuclear testing, military operations, economic exploitation, and territorial claims in Antarctica. It is monitored through on-site inspections. The only permanent structures allowed are scientific research stations.“
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
There are no useful resources in Antarctica, unlike Mars.
Hah . . . did you look under the rug?
Both oil and coal are believed to be located under Antarctica and coal in its mountain ranges.
Coal deposits are known to exist in the Transantarctic Mountains, and research has suggested large oil and gas reserves are also underneath the continent’s rock surface.
Surveys have indicated the potential for vast oil and gas reserves both underneath Antarctica and more specifically just offshore, such as as in the British Antarctic Territory, the Ross Sea, and the Southern Ocean’s basins. One survey by the Russian geological agency, Rosgeo, suggested potential reserves of approximately 511 billion barrels of oil in just the waters of the British Antarctic Territory.
There are useful resources, but by treaty, nobody is allowed to access them.
His motto might be…Empirical evidence be damned; I feel I’m always right!
In my email this afternoon is an article declaring that the world human reproductive rate has dropped to a low level from which civilization cannot recover and societal collapse is imminent, and this one declaring yet again that societal collapse will result from over-population. Like the one a few days ago about the Arctic warming, when added to another article declaring that the Antarctic is having the coldest October on record–the sum = 0.
China has lost 200M farmers this century. Their vehicle manufacturing is the most automated in the world.
There are already AI controlled drones waging war in Ukraine and Russia. Not long before the humanoid armies are hard at it.
I agree with Musk that human population is on a downward trajectory. South Korea the most likely to need someone to turn the lights off.
Skynet is what worries the living S outta me…anything human built has weaknesses or a hidden bias that always eventually surfaces be it an aluminum engine block with hard steel piston rings (thanks, Chevrolet-anybody remember that fiasco?) or an AI that’s learning to lie…which is happening now. How so fing wonderful are the deeper implications of that?
“ Chevrolet-anybody remember that fiasco?”
Was that the Vega?
Yes-pour oil in the front, watch and smell it coming out the back. You couldn’t give a used Vega away.
Love the first part of the above article’s title: “Land of the Living Dead: . . .”
Speaking of which, the subject of the article, Paul Ehrlich, is now 93 years old.
Today, approximately 90% of all pharmaceuticals are either purely synthetic or semi-synthetic (human-modified versions of natural products). Only 10% of such are of purely natural origin.
Therefore, Mr. Ehrlich just might want to reconsider his statement (my bold emphasis added):
“A shattering collapse of civilisation is a ‘near certainty’ in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth” given that it is almost certain he takes advantage of not-purely-natural drugs to sustain/prolong his life.
Not only that, there are untold billions of people whose life (yes, even civilization) on Earth has been vastly improved because humanity beneficially uses the world’s natural resources and life forms and does NOT just seek to destroy them. Duh.
P.S. The life expectancy of an adult male in 1800 (before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern medicine and pharmaceuticals) was in the range of 34–41 years.
if there is any societal collapse, it will have been caused by messing up the energy system by these same ideologues.
In the 1800s, child mortality was very high. If one excludes child mortality from the statistics, which one should if one is describing the life expectancy of an adult male, then the figure is higher than 34-41 years.
From an AI overview:
“Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy in the 1800s was likely around the mid-to-late 50s, though this varies by location and social class. For instance, a person in 1850 England who survived to adulthood could expect to live to their mid-50s, and potentially their 60s or70s.”
True. And now we’ve added twenty years or more to that. A whole third at least. It’s fantastic!
Optimist.
A dozen or so extinctions over more than a century, qualifies as the 6th mass extinction?
Actually I would be amazed if it was normally as little as this. We’ve probably saved more species from extinction than caused it.
Why are we still talking about this joker? I was questioning my university biology professor about something he didn’t have a ready answer for. He finally asked if I knew who Paul Ehrlich was and was I familiar with his book the Population Bomb. I said yes I was. He said well my wife worked with him. To which I said well she doesn’t know any more than he does. To which he became angry.
Bob, you keep that attitude alive and well; the future is going to need people like you. I remember having a discussion with a Palaeontology prof in the 1960’s where I stated that I’d had girlfriends with far greater variation (within the same species) in hair colour, breast size, and general body shape than almost all of the trilobites in the Treatise on Invertebrate Palaeontology.
He still disagreed of course, as a Paleontology professor’s livelihood relied upon the requirement of teaching us students all of the different species of Cambrian trilobites.
Ironically, “Ehrlich” means “honest” or “truthful” in German.
Ironically, “Ehrlich” means “honest” or “truthful” in German.
That figures. When anything has to declare itself as something, it’s probably not. I recall a competitor of mine stating on their website that they were honest. I immediately assumed the opposite, as any sensible person would.
It’s important not to confuse the living Paul Ehrlich with his great namesake (1854 – 1915) who won a Nobel Prize for discovering Salvarsan, the first antibiotic and effective treatment for syphilis, amongst other accomplishments.
A century from now people will have forgotten the former but remember the latter.
I’ve read astrology predictions more specific and accurate than Paul’s…
Isn’t that true of most/all of “accepted” climate science? After an event occurs, it is always predicted by climate science. Sadly, the prediction almost always follows the event.
Nick Stokes – where are you? Waiting, waiting for the Nickster to respond.
I have a theory, which I’ve made no attempt to develop formally, that a the level of technology attained and maintained by any civilization is dependent on population and the ease of communication among that population. Increasing population enables higher technological achievement, which in turn enables even greater population. Conversely, decreasing population reduces the technological level which can be maintained.
Put more simply, reduce population to X, whatever level X is, and you will eventually stabilize at the same technological level we had when population was at X originally. This will probably take a generation — until the people maintaining the current technology die off or otherwise leave the workforce.
The earth had a population of 1.5 billion around 1900; 2 billion in 1930. I believe if you magically reduce our population to 1.5 billion we will very quickly become unable to maintain our power grid, advanced communication infrastructure, etc., etc., and assuming total chaos doesn’t reduce population even further, we will stabilize at roughly 1900 technology. Say goodbye to advanced materials, semiconductors, integrated circuits, 3D printing, antibiotics, and so on.
The US average years of schooling was 4.5 in 1900, 6.8 in 1950, and 11.9 by 2010. The US adult literacy rate was about 60% in 1800, roughly 89% in 1900 and 99% today. Maintaining and advancing technological civilization requires high literacy and years of formal education. This doesn’t happen when a large part of the working day is devoted to producing food.
Over 80% of the US population was primarily engaged in food production (farming, ranching) in 1800. It has declined sharply since then and is less than 2% today. Even accounting for all the food we import, the production per agriculture worker is 10 times what it was 200 years ago.
This assumes that we somehow avoid total chaos in bringing about a controlled population decrease. This is an entirely separate discussion, but any notion that we could manage a population decrease to Ehrlich’s ideal level is pure fantasy that only an academic could believe.
“The US adult literacy rate was about 60% in 1800, roughly 89% in 1900 and 99% today.”
I dunno about that. Reading posts on X seems to indiciate otherwise. Of course, constant misspellings and wrong word usage could just be laziness, autocorrect, or both.
FWIW, I just asked Perplexity–
The present U.S. adult literacy rate is approximately 79%, meaning 21% of U.S. adults are classified as functionally illiterate and struggle with basic reading tasks. The lowest levels of literacy (Level 1 or below) have increased in recent years, with about 28% of adults scoring at or below Level 1 in 2023.
Key Figures
Interesting. I asked perplexity to give me US adult literacy rates by decade and those were the figures I used. I didn’t distinguish by literacy levels. Maybe this AI stuff ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Greater wealth along with greater population allows a society to have more people who are involved in creating new knowledge.
Once that knowledge is created it only needs to be preserved in order to be maintained.
What Ehrlich still doesn’t seem to understand is that people in modern societies actually use a smaller mass of resources per capita now than they did 50 years ago. This is due to things like efficiency, miniaturization, digitizing goods, and switching materials. As long as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of human ingenuity, he will always be wrong
While he seems wrong on every fundamental point, that does not mean he should be silenced.
Debate the points. Use validation and science to discover if there is or is not reason to be concerned.
Science is all about debate. Even on ludicrous topics.