Every one of Paul Ehrlich’s headline predictions was wrong, but The New York Times obituary tellingly spun that as “premature” — precisely because his doomsaying made him a leader of the modern environmental movement.
He rose to fame with 1968’s “The Population Bomb,” which claimed humanity within decades would be starving to death by the billions.
For the first Earth Day in 1970, he predicted 4 billion dead worldwide by the year 2000.
Instead, mankind finds ways to grow more food: The global population doubled with no hint of apocalypse.
His 1974 book predicted, “before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”
Instead, humanity entered an era of abundance; now the world only sees a famine when some government makes it happen.
In 1980, economist Julian Simon challenged him to a bet; Ehrlich chose five commodities he were sure would be more expensive in 10 years; all turned out to be cheaper in 1990.
Ehrlich had his wife sign the check paying off the wager.
Time and again, he predicted doom on the assumption that humanity is a plague on the Earth.
Every time he was wrong — because the “plague” fear is a figment of the progressive imagination; the need for “sustainable economies” is a myth.
Yet the media never stopped promoting him, because the left shares his core delusions: As recently as 2023 “60 Minutes” insisted his claim that “humanity is not sustainable” was finally proving true, with “mass extinctions” on the way.
(Spoiler: They weren’t.)
In reality, shrinking populations are now a growing problem — e.g., not enough young Americans to fund Social Security and Medicare for older ones, so both programs are headed toward bankruptcy; China’s “one child” policy, abandoned far too late, may cripple its drive to become a true superpower.
The left still can’t stop honoring Paul Ehrlich as a visionary, when his vision was the opposite of true.
