Ehrlich is a doomsday Malthusian who rather famously lost a very public bet with Julian Simon.
“In 1968, Ehrlich was the author of a popular book, The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon, a libertarian, was highly skeptical of such claims.”
Simon-Ehrlich wager
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
All of [Ehrlich’s] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about “famines of unbelievable proportions” occurring by 1975, about “hundreds of millions of people starving to death” in the 1970s and ‘80s, about the world “entering a genuine age of scarcity.” In 1990, for his having promoted “greater public understanding of environmental problems,” Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award.” [Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they’d been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days “experts” spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker.
So Ehrlich fits right in with modern Leftists.
Thanks for jogging my memory. ...very interesting reading. It appears that Malthusian thought is getting to be more common, as the economy worsens. ...some sort of guilt or fear avoidance, I reckon. The years to come may be harder on some of the people rationalizing that way than most—especially government-supported liberals. Cuts in spending will probably be made too late, and consequently, will be extremely large cuts.