Brane Space: WSJ Editors Boff It Again On Paul Ehrlich 'Losing A Bet' On Overpopulation

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his book, in 1976

Let's add another WSJ Editorial misfire to the one last week about the 'SAVE Act'. This from a March 18 entry: Paul Ehrlich, the Man Who Lost an Infamous Bet - wherein the editors squawked:

"The Stanford biologist bet against human ingenuity and lost to Julian Simon. Paul Ehrlich, who died Friday at age 93, made his most important contribution to the world by losing a bet. He bet against human ingenuity and lost to Julian Simon. It helped educate millions that his ideas about scarcity and human ingenuity were wrong.”

Not really, WSJ nabobs. In fact Ehrlich was simply years early. The fact is that Ehrlich’s "apocalyptic fear" was valid and remains as real as a heart attack. It's just that it was about a century ahead of its time - as then propounded by Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb.

This WSJ editorial isn't the first attempt by its scribes to try to diminish the import of Ehrlich's work. Another WSJ contributor (William McGurn) wrote a column ('The Population Bomb Was A Dud', May 1, p. A13) in which he tried to skewer Ehrlich's thesis.

He misfires on one count because he accuses Ehrlich of a hyped -up book title. Unaware that it was not the author's own choice- which was actually, 'Population, Resources and the Environment' - much less sexy and eye-catching. The publisher then insisted on the catchier title, clearly to get more sales.

McGurn - like the WSJ editors- then latches on to the book by Julian Lincoln Simon entitled 'The Ultimate Resource' . Therein, the author insists "we live in an epidemic of life" and it's all basically glorious bounty. Well, I'd sure love this fool to try to prove that to the people clamoring for housing across the nation right now, and all the water being sucked up by the ever spreading AI date centers.

McGurn also cites a bet that Ehrlich made with Simon based on commodities and which Ehrlich ultimately lost. The bet was for $1,000 - not a mammoth sum - but not unreasonable given the implicit uncertainties. The bet was that the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals (chromium, tin, copper , tungsten, and nickel would rise by 1990 (Ehrlich) or fall (Simon.) Simon ended up winning but likely because of dumb luck in timing and choosing those particular commodities. (Potable water and arable land would have been better choices given both are in precipitous decline.)

Ehrlich was right in one sense: the population continued to soar from 4.5 billion in 1980 to 5.3 billion in 1990. More importantly, a 2014 paper by David S, Jacks ('Front Boom to Bust: A Typology of Real Commodity Prices in the Long Run" ) disclosed Ehrlich would have won the bet had the time frame been extended. In summary, the Jacks' paper found that:

"Cumulatively, the picture emerging from this exercise is a clear patter of real, rising commodity prices from at least 1950."

Even The Economist's "free exchange" blog ca. 2014, pointed out that while Simon may have won the specific bet, the Capitalist Cornucopians hadn't yet proven their position. The blog pointed out:

"The (Jacks) paper does suggest that while innovation, substitution and conservation can reduce the price impact of rising demand for fundamentally scarce resources, they can't necessarily eliminate it entirely ."

Further (ibid.):

"Of course, rising demand itself might come to an eventual end given new technologies - or to validate Mr. Ehrlich - the ultimate decline and stabilization of the global population. It may still be too early to tell whether humanity faces Malthusian limits or not."

I concur with this - especially in terms of limits to freshwater access, already a problem in many countries. (Look for example at Capetown, S. Africa, narrowly avoiding "Day Zero" in 2018 but at the cost of 40 percent of the country's water intensive crops. Without freshwater resources, the whole 'enchilada' goes south, from crops to public health. It's a no brainer, given we are seeing the exhaustion of stores of fresh water globally..

One notable ‘State of the World’ report (2000, pp. 46-47), warned that the ever increasing water deficits will likely spark “water wars” by 2025. Even now, 1 billion-plus people live in water-stressed conditions, meaning that renewable water supplies have dropped below 1,700 cubic meters per capita, a critical survival threshold. As observed (p. 47):

“When a country’s renewable water supplies drop below 1,700 cubic meters per capita (what some analysts call the water stress level) it becomes difficult for the country to mobilize enough water to satisfy all the food, household, and industrial needs of its population.”

Anyway, McGurn – like the current WSJ editors- swallows Simon's codswallop hook, line and sinker that "human beings are more than just mouths to feed" (Really? Tell that to the underfed billions in sub-Sahara Africa, India). He also insists - on the basis of Simon's garbage -- that "Paul Ehrlich got it wrong because he never understood human potential", adding:

"Fifty years out, alas, Mr. Ehrlich remains as impervious to the evidence as ever. In an interview two months ago in the Guardian, Mr. Ehrlich decreed the collapse of civilization a 'near certainty' in the next few decades."

But in truth it is the market -worshipping Cornucopians like McGurn and the WSJ editors who are impervious to the evidence. That is, that a finite planet simply cannot support an ever expanding population that consumes more resources in one year than the planet is able to provide.

Ehrlich was 100 percent correct when he said (in a 1970 broadcast) that humans face: "An utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity,"

This is best illustrated in the concept of Earth overshoot, as embodied in the graphic below which shows humans are currently consuming the equivalent resources of 1.6 EARTHS per year, e.g

The interpretation of the graph (upward) is straightforward. By June, 2030 TWO full Earths - that is the resources therein - will be needed to support the then population. Already we are at 1.6 Earths. Every year Global Footprint Network raises awareness about global ecological overshoot with its Earth Overshoot Day campaign. Earth Overshoot Day is the day on the calendar when humanity has used up the resources that it takes the planet the full year to regenerate.

What is all of this telling us? Easy! We do not NEED any more people on this planet! Or...in the US of A. It helps to get some stats to register this overshoot:

- Every day humans permanently remove 4.2 billion gallons more water from aquifers than nature can replace. Much of this from AI data centers and bitcoin mining, i.e.

Bitcoin Mining Threatens Not Only Financial System - But Our Water Supply Too

- U.S. consumption of energy grows every day despite efforts to conserve it. This is important because each energy use is accompanied by entropy or degradation in the quality of energy remaining which also impacts our environment.

- To accommodate growth we pave over an area equal to the state of Delaware every year.

Common sense ought to inform one that this is unsustainable and can't go on indefinitely. This again gets back to that key quantitative indicator, the carrying capacity, first defined by Isaac Asimov:

Asimov explains carrying capacity in Bim Lecture

Carrying capacity =

(usable land-water resource base providing water + food + fuel) / (individual food, fuel + water requirement)

If the numerator is » 11.4 x 10 ⁹ hectares of usable aggregate equivalent land-water resource base and if 6 hectares is the ideal "mean individual requirement" over a lifetime (e.g. meet all basic needs and have a few private luxuries) , that means:

CC = (11.4 x 10 ⁹ hectares) / 6 hectares/person » 2 billion

That is a figure we are now on the verge of surpassing by a factor of four. Obviously, this can be increased if the numerator can be increased or the denominator (each individual's ecological footprint) decreased. The problem is how to achieve it? (Especially if the total population continues to increase at 2-3% per year)

A metaphor that Asimov used to illustrate carrying capacity has since become known as "the bathroom metaphor" and it works to get people to understand the debilitating, disastrous effects of too many people. As Asimov noted, if two people live in an apartment, and it comes with two bathrooms, they have a comfortable life. Either one can use the bathroom anytime he or she wants, and can remain in there as long as they desire, even reading while doing business.

One can say, that for the purpose of "Bathroom freedom" - 2 is the carrying capacity for a two -person apartment. Now, let there be twenty people occupying the same apartment, and what happens? Bathroom freedom evaporates. Visits now must be regulated by the clock, and no one may stay in for too long. Indeed, a timetable likely has to be set up for each person's bathroom use

The point is we're rapidly approaching the threshold at which there will simply be too many people to feed given existing resources: water, arable soil, fertilizers etc.. The projections now are for at least 10 billion people by 2050, and an 80 percent probability of 12.3 billion on Earth by 2100. Simply put, there simply aren't the resources to support even the lower population addition.

See Also:

Sustainability