Many years ago, trying to debate a committed Climate Cultist (like trying to learn to play the octraventral heebiephone, a pleasantly futile task), said cultist rejoinded that there are people who’ve committed to not having children for the sake of the climate. I laughed, at the time. But it struck me later that I should have told them what a terribly sad fact that really was.
Think of it: a couple deliberately denying themselves the ineffable joys of parenthood, because they’d been terrified into thinking they’d kill the planet if they did. That’s not just sad, in fact, it’s profoundly evil. This is the way of true evil: it’s rarely a cackling psychopath twirling their moustache, it’s more often a bland nobody. In his study of dictators, historian Frank Dikötter notes that the most evil dictators are often men of modest talents, to say the least, blandly bourgeois origins.
What they are very good at, though, is telling the most outrageous whoppers and convincing millions of people to believe them.
That brings me to Paul Ehrlich – the godfather of modern environmental catastrophism and misanthropic evil.
Ehrlich, who died recently at 93, spent a lifetime peddling apocalyptic horseshit and never once admitted he was wrong. His 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb declared the battle to feed humanity over. Hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s. England would cease to exist by 2000. India was doomed. Even the United States would experience mass famine. Note that Ehrlich never, once, prefaced his predictions with a ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, or ‘it seems likely’: he was absolutely, unequivocally certain. These disasters could not be avoided. The future was set in stone.
He was spectacularly, comprehensively and hilariously wrong. World population has doubled since then. Famine deaths have plummeted. India exports grain. England persists, stubbornly. America’s biggest health problem is obesity.
Yet Ehrlich kept doubling down, collecting prizes and airtime from a media class that never met a doomsday it didn’t like.
The man wasn’t merely mistaken. He was a fraud who knew better. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution varieties were already in the fields when Ehrlich pronounced victory for the Four Horsemen. Ehrlich, a biologist, understood this – he simply didn’t care. The apocalypse was the means and coercion the end. He mused about sterilants in the water supply and writing off entire nations. Technical problems, not moral ones, stayed his hand. He probably wanted to kick the Nazis for giving gas chambers such a bad rep.
His influence lingers like a bad smell. The same Malthusian panic fuels today’s net-zero zealots who urge the West to deindustrialise while China builds coal plants. It convinced decent people to forgo children, condemning themselves to childless old age, all for a lie. One reader wrote to the Wall Street Journal admitting he took Ehrlich to heart: no grandchildren, just regret.
“I was a college student when I read Mr Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later, the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid” – Kenneth Emde, in the Wall Street Journal.
This is the true evil of Ehrlich’s creed: not the failed predictions, but the joyless, misanthropic, worldview it sold to millions. Humanity isn’t a plague. We’re the only species that turns scarcity into abundance through ingenuity. Borlaug saved a billion lives. Ehrlich wanted to triage them.
The Cult never learns. Every decade brings fresh prophecies of collapse – resources, climate, whatever – and fresh demands for power over the productive. Ehrlich didn’t lose. He was a prototype. His real legacy isn’t scholarship but the quiet sadness of people who sacrificed life’s greatest adventure on the altar of fashionable despair.
That, more than any chart, damns him.
