Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
what is he wrong about?
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.
What is this referring to?
* programs of mass sterilization in the third world
* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
I kinda think this answers the question as to why these ideas get a pass: they offer a way to be racist and advocate racist eugenics policies without admitting you are racist, even to yourself.
I see racism in the population collapse panic too unfortunately, at least in the popular discourse around it. Overpopulation was always about too many of the “wrong” people while underpopulation is about not enough of the “right” people.
Is there some shitposting fringe that says dumb things like “abolish all BC”? Yes, just as there are matching “sOcIaLiSt” idiots who think that if we “just” confiscate all of Musk and Bezos’ net worth, it’ll pay off everyone’s student loans plus pay for UBI, free college in perpetuity, and buy all of Gen Z nice houses.
This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.
I don't believe that would be true on a large scale because the seaside would quickly become polluted with brine, and then having an infinite supply of uranium wouldn't help you.
Desalination only works in the long term if there is an unlimited amount of body water to dilute the brine produced by the process.
There's no question of polluting all the oceans with brine. They get freshwater from the rain and the salt came from the oceans in the first place. We aren't net destroying water molecules.
We'd have nuclear desalinization in Los Angeles is it was that easy.
India's TFR dropped below 2 in 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Most never get held to account for their wrong predictions. But he seems a particularly egregious case.