“We progressives annoyed the average American into fascism”
Let’s stop helping hateful people gain power, okay?
If you haven’t read and shared Rob’s “The Shrimp Bet,” please do. Let’s stop the absurdities, please. Thanks.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Is there anything someone won’t believe? That is not snark. It is a real question.
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
I’m not even talking about thing like vaccines helping humans (or that the world is round). I’m talking about simple, absolute facts, like the obvious fact that average human is far better off today than ever before (i.e., much less likely to be starving, living in poverty, or dying young).
Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Professional joke Paul Ehrlich might be best known for losing a public bet with Julian Simon - a bet for which Ehrlich set the terms. But his entire life has been one long lie.
Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).
Not surprisingly, Ehrlich refuses to face facts to this day; this tweet is from 2023:
Paul R. Ehrlich @PaulREhrlich
60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones
10:14 AM · Jan 3, 2023
But this post isn’t (another) rant against one “peer-reviewed” quack who has consistently said thing like:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
This is a post about why, in 2026, the United States is fully ruled by horrible humans.
“In ten years [i.e. 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”
When the Left gets things wrong (very very wrong), we don’t admit our errors. Not even to ourselves.
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.”
If you tell someone something that turns out to be super-wrong, but you continue to insist you’re actually right, no sane person will trust you or your parroting, peer-reviewing allies.
Especially when you have actively called for policies that actually would have caused millions of people to starve to death:
In 1967, Ehrlich called to cut off emergency food aid to India as “hopeless.”
“India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”
(India now produces more than enough food to feed its population of nearly 1.5 billion. The liberal media still focuses only the negative. There is plenty to be done, but food production isn’t the problem.)
Again, this isn’t about Ehrlich. It is about liberals and the liberal popular media, which continues to promote him, e.g., 60 Minutes in 2022.
Serious question: Why would someone trust anyone who defends Ehrlich, or media source that gives Ehrlich a platform?
Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
I bring this up because I recently made the observation that Ehrlich has been embarrassingly wrong about everything, a clearly true statement. I received this reply:
Yeah, simply quoting Ehrlich is all just a right (wright?) wing conspiracy to smear him.
From John and Hank Green, quoted here:
Fewer children under five will die this year [globally] than have died in any year during at least the last 4,000 years. 2000 BCE, when the population was only maybe 100 million, might be the last time so few kids died.
How is this not the biggest story in the world? But this never shows up on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter.
In my last job, I wrote an article where I documented the many many times scientists had said humanity only had X years before Earth hits a “tipping point,” or a “point of no return.” (Example from 2009.) Again and again and again, humanity keeps blowing through those dates, and the world doesn’t end.
But you can’t go a day without seeing more claims like this, made with absolute certainty.
Look, I’m not here to dunk on Kaleberg. Being honest and facing facts isn’t good in-and-of itself; I’m not saying “Lying is always bad!” (Although always following dogma is bad.)
Being honest about the state of the world is important for two reasons:
1. Elections matter. Continuing to exaggerate and lie (and scold) very directly drives away the median voter. Racist, hateful xenophobes now run the richest, most powerful nation that has ever existed, because, to quote lefty comic Marc Maron, “We annoyed the average American into fascism.”
It’s funny ‘cuz it’s not funny.
Trump and co. don’t just annoy us. They’re causing immense harm in the world.
2. Things only ever get better on the margin because some people are willing to actually do the work, rather than just scream. As noted here:
Ask yourself, “Why didn’t any of [Ehrlich et al‘s promises of doom] come to pass?” It wasn’t because of “radical changes in almost every aspect of global society.” It was because of pragmatic, practical, politically-possible policies.
In addition to Carbon-Based Cruelty, more:
Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong
And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes
18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year
OMG, that tweet reads so much like something Trump would rite...write...right. Kind of emphasizes how certain levels of strained relationship with the truth are not particularly politically aligned. Oh, and maybe the observation was that Ehrlich did indeed successfully wright (build) an entire mindset among some people that survives any confrontation with the facts.
I would like to make a pitch to you about caution in using the word "left" in certain contexts, and perhaps shift to phrases like "codes left in our society" or better, "codes Democratic Party in our society", or at least the more vague "lefty". Ehrlich did not call for socialist solutions or nationalizing agriculture (which, of course, is empirically a disaster) or anything that "left" normally means. There are a lot of things that somehow become associated (actually statistically) with people of a particular political bent that might be genuinely left or right when those things are not particularly left or right. Cataclysm-ism is not particularly left or right, it is just that some on the left find it useful for criticizing capitalism so they suspend incredulity (meanwhile some on the right embrace it as a reason to not worry about the human or animal welfare). Wars on drugs are not particularly left or right, but they code left/Democratic in our country (somewhat if you only look at scheduled drugs, despite cannabis decriminalization, and overwhelmingly if you include alcohol and nicotine).
That said, I agree that many classes left-coded memes can be really annoying. I can vouch for having a visceral reaction to some of them that I do not have to far more toxic and even openly hateful right-coded memes. I think, however, a far bigger problem is that the "liberal" faction leaves potential allies and sympathizers with no "there" there to rally around. It is too piecemeal and layered with silliness that the likes of Ehrlich caricature. MAGA, by contrast, gives people something to anchor to.
Oh, and needless to say I appreciate the observation that once someone has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth or for the most basic epistemic modest, we really should stop listening to them. That is part of the theme of what I expect will be my next post.