If you think environmental catastrophism isn’t a cult, you only need to look at the career of Paul Ehrlich. For 60 years, this ninny has been preaching imminent environmental doom – and, for 60 years, he’s been wrong, wrong, wrongo, wrong. Yet, for 60 years, he’s remained the superhero-guru high priest of the environmental movement.
Ehrlich’s career in being spectacularly wrong about nearly everything began with his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Like climate catastrophists today, Ehrlich made a number of no-uncertainty predictions. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he declared. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
To make himself absolutely clear, Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in even the United States by the 1980s. No ifs, no buts: there was no avoiding it. Ehrlich was 100 per cent adamant about that.
It may have occurred to you that literally none of that happened.
Yet, even just over a decade ago, Ehrlich refused to admit that he was wrong. His only mistake, he insisted, was that he “was much too optimistic about the future”.
Ehrlich was even more disgruntled, though, by losing a famous bet.
In 1980, Ehrlich claimed that, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” So, business professor Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was.
Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date.
It’s no gamble to bet that Ehrlich lost. Badly. All five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.
Even though he was forced to pony up 500 bucks, Ehrlich and his cult refused adamantly to admit that he was wrong (again). No, they insisted, it was just cherry-picking. Just you wait, in a few more years, those metals will become increasingly scarcer and prices will soar.
Spoiler alert: they haven’t.
Since 1900, the average abundance of these five metals has increased 36.5 percent faster than population.
Hannah Richie at OurWorldinData.org recently published an insightful article on the five metals featured in the Simon-Ehrlich bet […] the long-term abundance of these metals has continued to increase significantly. Take a look at the staggering growth in the production of these five metals since the early 1900s:
Between 1900 and 2000, global population grew by 400 percent, from 1.6 billion to 8 billion. During the same period, the production of the five metals soared: chromium increased by an astounding 78,082 percent, copper by 4,062 percent, nickel by 26,918 percent, tin by 226 percent, and tungsten by 4,829 percent. On average, production of these metals rose by an extraordinary 22,823 percent.
It’s all very simple, really: what Ehrlich and his fellow Malthusian miserablists consistently fail to take into account is human ingenuity.
Simon’s argument [is] that human population growth, coupled with ingenuity and the freedom to innovate, increases resource abundance, not scarcity […]
The relationship between population growth and resource production is captured by the production elasticity of population, computed as the ratio of the percentage change in production divided by the percentage change in population. On average, every one percent increase in population corresponded to a 57.06 percent increase in the production of these five metals.
So, far from Simon just getting lucky and happening to pick an anomalous period where abundance increased (Ehrlich’s excuse), the long-term data, reinforce Julian Simon’s prediction: The more people, the more we produce and the lower the prices.
Yet, still the environmental movement remains addicted to Ehrlich’s catastropharian delusions.
Tell me again that they’re not a cult.
