That Moron Paul Ehrlich

The American Spectator reports on the usually wrong Paul Ehrlich:

Watching Gore and the reaction he receives from today's liberal crowd is reminiscent of another the-sky-is-falling and America-is-to-blame liberal. Four decades ago it was ecologist Paul Ehrlich who received the same rock star treatment and press adulation.

Instead of making an award-winning documentary film, Ehrlich wrote the smash best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich's thesis was that the world was becoming overpopulated at too fast a rate and that the end was near for mankind. Those people who did not subscribe to Ehrlich's the-end-is-near view he described as the "uninformed Americans, 'experts' and nonexperts alike," "ignorant," and "irresponsible." Sound familiar?

The science was in, there was widespread consensus and the conclusion was no longer debatable, according to Ehrlich. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he wrote in the prologue of his book. Civilization was likely doomed.

Ehrlich argued that population sacrifices must first begin in the U.S. He dismissed the responsibility of the two most populous countries, China and India, from having to adopt the drastic steps he advocated the U.S. must first take. Would Americans "be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to the starving masses in Asia?" Ehrlich wrote. One proposal often mentioned, according to Ehrlich, was "the addition of temporary sterilants [sic] to water supplies or staple food" in order to achieve a zero population growth.

In his book, Ehrlich forecasted one of three scenarios would likely occur. First, there would be global food riots owing to shortages and war could break out. He cast the U.S. as the worldwide villain because of this country's insistence in using agricultural chemicals that would have been banned by the U.N.

Second, more than one billion people would die in one year alone because of disease and plague precipitated by overpopulation. Third, people would simply perish due to mass starvations. "Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death" in the 1970s and '80s, he wrote.

Most of the grim results would occur by the 1980s and the calamitous outcome would be well-known before the year 2000. After the publication of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich made an updated pronouncement that the U.S. population would dwindle to less than 23 million people by 1999.

Ehrlich was so popular with the liberal crowd that they could not get enough of him. He made twenty appearances on NBC's Tonight Show to hype his claims, according to author Jack Cashill.

So people want a lot less people around.