… yesterday in the New York Post by Kyle Smith: “Profits of Doom.” It’s nothing that we haven’t talked about here on the program. He lays it out, though, exceptionally well, and his point is"Ha ha. Harold Camping – what an idiot! He predicted the end of the world on May 21. Last week, the Christian radio station owner said he was kind of right, though no one else noticed, and anyway the judgin’ will continue until (new date!) Oct. 21 of this year, when the world really and truly will be destroyed, probably. What you didn’t know is that after his loony prediction, Camping was promoted to full professor at Stanford and rewarded with adoring mainstream press coverage, more than a dozen appearances on ‘The Tonight Show,’ prestigious awards and praise from the Obama administration’s chief science advisor."
"Did you know any of that happened? “Sorry, I got one detail wrong. It wasn’t Camping who reaped those earthly rewards for his cosmic wackiness. It was Paul Ehrlich. In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe [book], ‘The Population Bomb,’ Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis.” I remember, folks, I was in Pittsburgh in 1972 working for a Top 40 radio station that at the time was owned by ABC. This is 1972. This book was '68, '69, Population Bomb, and it was about how we’re destroying the planet and we’re not gonna survive beyond the year 2000. Program director made us read it.
Well, didn’t make us but when he calls you in, suggests it’s important to read the book, you do it. It wasn’t mandatory, but it’s just like another program director I worked for in Kansas City who required me to read some book by Gail Sheehy called Passages. You remember that? Yeah, I had to read it. Well, I had to go through the motions. I had to make it look like I had read it. I know, I know. I know exactly what Passages was, Snerdley. It was the first of the feminazi book – well, one of the first of the feminazi, you know, “Get in touch with yourself wherever yourself happens to be” kind of books. But I remember the people telling me about the Ehrlich book in the early seventies. For some reason doom and gloom, people glom onto that.
It’s a magnet. It’s amazing how susceptible people are to believing this doom and gloom stuff, and yet a book about eternal happiness and so forth? That’s greeted with skepticism. But the end of the world? Oh, yeah? When? How can I sign up? "In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe [book], ‘The Population Bomb,’ Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis. He came by this not through Divine Revelation but through Divine Equation, a k a the liberal scripture of pseudo-science. Ehrlich ‘calculated’ using the equation I = P x A x T. This means that Human Impact (I) on environment equals the product of Population, Affluence and Technology. No room for imprecision there!
“Conclusion: 'In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death…” This is what Ehrlich wrote in 1968. “‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death… nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the human death rate.’ Ehrlich predicted England would cease to exist by 2000. (N.B. he meant the whole country, not just that pathetic soccer squad.) In 1970 he thundered, ‘In 10 years 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.’ He [said] that by 1980, life expectancy in the US would decline to 42 years. Not quite getting the message, the world population both a) continued to grow and b) lived longer and healthier than ever.”
In the face of all of this, “Ehrlich has [said] that he was kinda sorta right, and the worst you can say is that, like preacherman Camping, he was a little early,” but I’m still right! I’m just a little early, here. “President Obama’s point man on science, John Holdren, is an Ehrlich man,” and, as I say, we’ve talked about the all this but the way Kyle Smith lays it out, it’s really fascinating. "A text version of a speech Holdren gave in 2006 was accompanied by a footnote in which he praised Ehrlich’s call to end population growth ‘a key insight … the elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute [the theory].’
“There are Ehrlich-men everywhere, and that ehrlich is German for honest just makes it so much richer, doesn’t it? In 1970, when the first Earth Day caused the first spike in atmospheric baloney, LIFE ‘reported’ that ‘In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half …’” Mr. Smith has an aside here: “Note to younger readers: Visible smog was the thing we were all afraid of before we became afraid of invisible carbon emissions,” but there’s always something that’s going to kill us and wipe us out. “Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote at the time [in 1970], quoting with approval Dr. S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institute, that ‘In 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80% of all the species of living animals will be extinct,’” by the year 2000.
