The “undernourished” may as well never have been born, right Paul?
The San Francisco Chronicle spotlights the eternally-wrong Paul Ehrlich:
…People have been predicting disaster for centuries, including 18th century scholar Thomas Malthus and Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 with his wife Anne predicted famines from runaway population growth in “The Population Bomb.”
Ehrlich said he was right because at least 2 billion people are malnourished.
“You’ll find plenty of people who will tell you not to worry, technology will take care of it,” Ehrlich said. “We’ll feed, house, clothe and so on 9.5 billion people, give them happy lives with no problem at all. That’s exactly the line that Anne and I got when there were 3.5 billion people on the planet. … The answer is, they haven’t done it.”
Reducing population growth was central to the U.S. environmental movement at its birth in 1970, spurred in part by Ehrlich’s book.
Most environmental groups now steer clear of the subject…
Or it boils down to the more starving, dying people there are the more right Erhlich is. Never have the greens objected to people to dying. It just feeds their agenda. Humans are nothing to greens.
So how does the world bank’s refusal to give loans for developement to projects that they don’t feel are green enough fit into this. Or the preemptive banning of GMO food crops with no evidence. Even formula for babies is routinely under attack. The more you look at it, the more it seems like these people don’t want their favorite cause du jour to be helped. Every advancement that would increase the food supply is attacked. Every attempt at expanding developement is opposed. It’s all bluster and pomp for the good of humanity, but it all boils down to more for me, none for you.
Just as an aside, I would note there is a fine line between beggars who are easy to please and people who have nothing to lose. Should the right person show up and incite the latter to rebellion, things look bad for the dictator. People who have nothing to lose have nothing to lose…….
I’d put the “green” agenda under the same category as Luddism and other control agendas. Certainly the tyrants of poor countries can use the “green” agenda as one more way to manage their economies but managing economies is a bad idea.
Those tyrants may be elected, incidentally. Europe’s voters have elected their own masters and continue to do so. The same is true for India, although they seem to be improving their voting habits a little. South Africa’s voters are in a class by themselves.
The poorest countries are all tyrannies, though. As Glenn Reynolds says, “They’ll turn us all into beggars because they’re easier to please.”
Yes. War and politics cause famine, not too many people. Humans could feed the entire planet and deal with any climate if politics were amenable.
“1,000 scientists warned that “Earth is reaching a tipping point.”
How many times can they cry “Wolf” before people just start saying “Idiots” and walking away. Even if they were right, their credibility is zero.
There is a single cause of undernourishment today. The green movement in general and opposition to golden rice specifically. OK. OK. And Michelle Obama lunch programs.
2/7 of the world’s population undersnourished in 2013. Closer to half in 1970. The large majority in 1870. If we continue to damage the environment as Dr. Ehrlich fears, we’ll have everyone eating decently around 2050.
As edwardgallagher notes, the real problem is bad governance. There are virtually no examples of free countries having famines if they also have decent roads.
And lack of transportation and infrastructure to move the food around. I did a paper on it in 1978 and came out with numbers that said just 4 countries in 1975 produced enough calories to feed everybody in the world at 17% above a decent subsistence diet. Between them Canada, the USA, Australia, and Argentina burned or buried enough calories every year to feed nearly half the world’s population.
The reason they did so was that they was just no way to get that food to the people who were undernourished or suffering from local droughts etc, etc.
Erlich was just plain wrong when he wrote Population Bomb, he is just plain wrong now. But as is typical of the watermelons, being a watermelon means if the facts don’t fit the narrative, just ignore the facts.
The leading cause of hunger and malnourishment today is the same as it was in 1974 when I wrote a college paper on the subject. It is not food supply, overpopulation, or the environment, rather war and political upheaval. Ehrlich, who field of study was insects, not environmental science, was wrong then and he is wrong now. But the left is incapable of admitting an error and the entire academic foundation of their agenda is about as stable as drama movie quicksand. Admit any error, and the entire leftist agenda sinks into a morass of faulty logic and specious reasoning.
“Ocean acidification, a product of fossil fuel burning, is dissolving calcifying plankton at the base of the food chain.”
They have no qualms about telling blatant lies. Without such lies, there would be nothing to talk about and they know people will pick up on this and spread it around until it becomes a “fact.”