STEVE MILLOY: The Real Population Bomb

Population control advocate Paul Ehrlich passed away March 13 at age 93, marking the end of an astonishing career built on unapologetic error. Ehrlich was a butterfly researcher at Stanford University in the 1960s when he launched himself into the overpopulation debate with a lecture at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 1967. Encouraged by the response to his address, Ehrlich authored the 1968 book The Population Bomb in which he predicted dire famines that would kill hundreds of millions of people during the 1970s.

But that never happened. Instead, food production and population growth boomed.

In 1969, Ehrlich told the New York Times that because of overpopulation, food production failure, and pollution: “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”

Though Ehrlich predicted complete doom for humanity by 1989, we are still here and thriving.

In 1980, Ehrlich famously bet free market economist Julian Simon $1,000 that the prices of five metals – chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten – would increase due to scarcity during the 1980s. But the price of the basket of metals declined by 43 percent. Wrong again, Ehrlich lost what became known as “The Bet.”

Until the end, Ehrlich insisted that the carrying population of the Earth was as low as 1.5 billion people. Global population is now at 8.28 billion people and growing. Ehrlich was more than 6.75 billion people wrong.

Ehrlich’s bizarre leap from studying butterflies to human population and commodity forecasting led him down a career path to celebrity (he appeared on Johnny Carson’s late-night show 20 times) and academic fame (he was elected to be a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences).

But none of Ehrlich’s predictions were ever correct. Worse, he never really acknowledged his own non-stop laughable errors.

In his 2009 article, “The Population Bomb Revisited