Population-Bombers Are Going Extinct

C BS disgraced itself by broadcasting the doomsday claims of biologist Paul Ehrlich, with hardly any qualifications, on 60 Minutes. Ehrlich, now 90 years old, has been publicly and confidently making completely wrong predictions for longer than most people have been alive.

His 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation in the ’70s and ’80s, only to have global extreme poverty and hunger go into steep decline. His predictions of increasing resource scarcity led him to make a wager with economist Julian Simon in 1980 that five commodities would become more expensive by 1990. The real price of all five commodities declined instead.

Simon was not mentioned once in the 60 Minutes segment, though anchor Scott Pelley did mention that the green revolution, the improvements in agricultural technology in the late 20th century that increased crop yields around the world, had proven Ehrlich’s starvation claims wrong. But in the entire 13-minute segment, CBS did not include a single person pushing back on the alarmism.

Ehrlich makes the same analytical errors that he made in his famous argument with Simon, namely, that humans won’t adapt to new circumstances. Simon’s argument, that humans are the ultimate resource because of their creativity in solving problems and creating value where none existed before, has still not penetrated his brain. From the interview:

PELLEY: You seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable.

EHRLICH: Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle, yours and mine, basically, for the entire planet, you’d need five more earths. Not clear where they’re going to come from.

PELLEY: Just in terms of the resources that would be required.

EHRLICH: Resources that would be required, the systems that support our lives, which of course are the biodiversity that we’re wiping out. Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.

Ehrlich is assuming that the amount of resources it takes to achieve an outcome today is the same amount of resources it will take forever. We all know this isn’t true. Think of the paper saved by the adoption of computers or the gasoline saved by the invention of hybrid car engines.

And as Simon knew, the price mechanism has a way of encouraging efficiency. The solution to high prices is high prices: If a commodity becomes scarcer and is permitted to become more expensive, in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, the incentive increases to economize the use of that resource or find alternatives to it. That will, in turn, avert the looming disaster because new technologies that were not profitable before the price increase become profitable, which means people are likely to develop them and use them. Resource allocation is an economic problem, not a biological problem.

As to whether humanity is sitting on a limb and sawing it off, it’s also wrong to suggest that people are doing little to preserve the environment. Wealthier societies are better at environmental conservation than poorer ones, as Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute argued:

We have the technology to reintroduce species at the risk of depletion and, perhaps, even to resurrect long-extinct ones. Just last year, thanks to knowledge and investment from a wealthy country, humanity deflected a small asteroid for the first time. If wealth is allowed to grow, we may one day save the biosphere from a true mass extinction. Economic development, in other words, is the key to environmental protection, which is why all the environmental ranking tables are topped by economically advanced nations. To stress: rich countries are better stewards of the environment than poor ones. Just compare the quality of the environment in Denmark with Papua New Guinea.

Aside from conscious choices to protect wildlife, humanity’s footprint on nature is shrinking, not growing. As Ronald Bailey pointed out at Reason:

As the result of continuing increases in crop productivity, the world has reached peak agricultural land which means that more land will be freed up to revert to nature as the century evolves. In addition, global human population will likely peak around 2050 and begin falling. Furthermore, people will be depopulating the landscape as they move into cities. Currently, some 56 percent of humanity live in cities and that number is projected to increase to 68 percent by 2050 and 85 percent by 2100. What that means is that the number of people living on the landscape (many as subsistence farmers) will drop from 3.5 billion now to around 1.2 billion by 2100. Again, this will free up land into which wild species can expand and grow.

There’s simply no reason to believe Ehrlich’s doom predictions are any less false today than they were in decades past. One of the government actions taken based on Ehrlich’s worldview was China’s one-child policy, which has inflicted a demographic disaster on China that its government is frantically trying to reverse. (In a way, the Chinese government’s nationalistic argument that Western ideas are a poison to Chinese society is correct: Both population alarmism and communism are Western ideas.)

There will always be a market for doomsayers. The existence of the 60 Minutes segment proves Simon right as well; he understood the incentives the media have to play up bad news and the limited bandwidth that good scholars have to refute it. But David Harsanyi was smart to ask, “Couldn’t 60 Minutes find a fresh-faced, yet-to-be-discredited neo-Malthusian to hyperventilate about the end of the world?”

It seems they could not. The other scientific “experts” CBS included in the segment were Ehrlich’s Stanford colleagues Tony Barnosky and Liz Hadly. Barnosky and Hadly are married. Hadly earned her bachelor’s degree in 1981, and Barnosky earned his in 1974, meaning they are both reaching retirement age or are beyond it already. Other statistics in the segment came from environmental activist groups, which have incentive to exaggerate the facts to justify their activism to donors.

A better framing of the 60 Minutes segment would have been: “Discredited 90-year-old Stanford biology professor and a couple in his department think we’re all going to die.” It might be slightly interesting as a story of how groupthink works in higher education. But it’s no cause for alarm. And if the best CBS could do to support Ehrlich’s scientific claims was to interview a gray-haired couple that Ehrlich knows, hard-core population-bombers will go extinct before all the fish do.