MaxedOutMama
Monday, June 27, 2005
Ehrlich's Wit And Wisdom
Some words of extinct wisdom from Paul Ehrlich, the man who singlehandedly made environmental idiocy a scientifically respectable and profitable endeavor (this was inspired by this WSJ article about how Americans refused to become hysterial over global warming):
You know what's really sad? This is the list (from Wikipedia) of this man's honors and awards:
"This vast tragedy, however, is nothing compared to the nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s) ... A situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death."I'll say! The entire world is getting fatter by the minute - now even the Chinese are getting porky. Who will stop the weight gain?
[Paul Ehrlich, "The End of Affluence" (1974), p.21]
"By September 1979, all important life in the sea was extinct. Large areas of coastline had to be evacuated... A pretty grim scenario. Unfortunately we're a long way into it already...based on projections of trends already appearing..."I also find that projections made from trends that haven't become trends yet aren't very solid. You see, the problem is when something that might become a trend is just beginning to appear there is no way of distinguishing a trend-signal from the noise of random variation. Make much on the stock market, Paul?
[Paul Ehrlich, "Eco-Catastrophe"
_Environmental Handbook_ 1970, pp 174]
"In ten 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."No, no, that just turned out to be the algae-eating health-food craze. Then came Atkins and matters righted themselves when people started eating animals again and leaving the algae and plankton for the fish.
[Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)]
"We must institute the Chinese Communist system of compulsory abortion in various forms of infanticide so that each couple will have only one child. We must hope that our government doesn't wait until it, too, decides that coercive measures can solve America's population problem.... The price of personal freedom in making childbearing decisions may be the destruction of the world."You know what's really cool? The German government is thinking about imposing penalties upon childless people in an attempt to boost their birthrate RIGHT NOW. Europe's decline and fall basically is rooted in the declining birthrate. One thing I love about these types - no matter what the problem, they can always come up with a reason why the government must to force people to do something for their own good.
[Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University]
"....we must go back to the spinning wheel, returning to a beatific state of endless drudge labor, six days a week, and exhaustion on Sunday."Tell you what Paul - you try it first and let us know how the beatitude is coming along in two or three decades. We'll be waiting anxiously in 2030 for your report. On your mark, get set, start spinning!
[Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University]
"The 'rich and the intelligent' must not propagate. They are dangerous because they promote overproduction [and have] the heaviest impact on the planet. The rich are the cause of most of the world's ills. Poverty is beautiful."I'll say! Just ask DU - now the literate Amerikkans are not only refusing to be poor and ignorant but the sick deviants have started voting Republican! How much worse can things get? I'm sure Paul donated all the royalties from his books, plus his salary, plus his pension to someone so he could be beautifully poor. Or maybe not.
[Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University]
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer."But it turns out that war and communism are what produce hunger and disease. Of course, if you believe the Communists should take over the world, I guess you will need population control and a belief in the beauty of poverty.
[Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)]
"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."Some bookie in London somewhere missed his opportunity to clean up!
[Paul Ehrlich in (1969)]
"Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion."Heh, heh, heh. Indeed. Did you ever pay Simon off on that bet you lost? Yeah. That's why zinc is worth more than gold, you know? Personally I'm hoarding a pound of magnesium in my backyard. You'll never find it!
[Paul Ehrlich in (1976)]
You know what's really sad? This is the list (from Wikipedia) of this man's honors and awards:
* The John Muir Award of the Sierra ClubSee, in the magical world of environmental Cassandraism, you don't have to be right. In fact, you can be completely wrong over a matter of decades. All that matters is your devotion to doom. And this brings me back to Thomas Bray, writing in the WSJ about the American public's refusal to scream and run in circles about global warming:
* The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
* A MacArthur Prize Fellowship
* The Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
* A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri in 1993
* The Volvo Environmental Prize in 1993
* The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize in 1994
* The Heinz Award for the Environment in 1995
* The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1998
* The Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences in 1998
* The Blue Planet Prize in 1999
* The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America in 2001
* The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2001
Aside from the crucial question of whether a government bureaucracy is smart enough to do so, even environmentalists confess that Kyoto or McLieberman measures would have been a small first step in clamping a huge indirect tax on the American and world economy.I think we can thank Ehrlich and his ilk for immunizing us against the Kyoto plague. Thank you, Dr. Ehrlich, for your service to humanity. By your dedicated and consistent service you have engendered a healthy skepticism in the American population. We are profoundly grateful to you for spending your entire life as a demo-project of environmental moonbattery.
The collapse of the latest global warming boomlet is thus more than another bump in the political road. It represented the profound unease of the public about turning so much economic and social power over to Washington.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
One Of The Best Blog Posts I Have Ever Read
It is only improved by the very high quality of the comments. And for those who still do not understand the power and beauty of the First Amendment, and its foundational importance to our modern (and technological) civilization, the quality of the comments is greatly improved by having counter-arguments presented.
Don't miss it. ChicagoBoyz - Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless
Update: I am not going to post until late tonight or tomorrow, because I don't think anything I could write could be as well worth your time as the post linked above. See also Mark's links here and here as a commentary on the larger problem. More good adjunct reading is Watt's post on the new ad-hoc group to defend climate science; one of the quoted individuals is Paul R Ehrlich:
Even economically, it is now an unfortunate reality that our future trajectory largely depends on public policy changes. Therefore it would behoove us to ensure that our public policies are based on very realistic assumptions; the risk of great failure in large-scale changes unless the concept is pre-tested is always quite large. Sadly, all the data we have shows that large-scale "green" power generates little usable power at a great cost, increases the utility bills of businesses and consumers, and depresses economic performance. Thus we have the strange phenomenon of a concept which has already been demonstrated to fail on testing becoming the basis for a policy that must fail. It's not that these power sources don't work as very small portions of the system - it's that they cannot be scaled up to become a large portion of the system. Our failure to recognize this is costing us a tremendous amount of money.
As for the monthly employment report, there is nothing notable about it. It is unlikely that the weather affected it much. The table I am watching is Table A-8 in the household segment. (Table numbering has been changed with the enhanced version of the employment release.) The bottom line is that on a seasonally adjusted basis, private industries lost workers but not very many. Since November, the number of non-governmental workers has remained essentially stable (changes are probably not statistically significant). Since October, that number has dropped. Government employment is quite erratic, probably due to the Census hiring. Moving down to the part-time section, we find that since October, the number of part-time workers due to slack work has dropped by over 10%, or over 700,000 persons. This is an effect of an improving business climate and expanding production runs. Needless to say that is part of the improvement in WIET tax receipts; the rest is primarily due to government hiring and government raises. A look at Table B-2 shows that the effect of the inventory cycle is probably tailing out; drops in average hours for manufacturing (39.9 > 39.5) confirm the general impression generated by other reports.
Don't miss it. ChicagoBoyz - Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless
Update: I am not going to post until late tonight or tomorrow, because I don't think anything I could write could be as well worth your time as the post linked above. See also Mark's links here and here as a commentary on the larger problem. More good adjunct reading is Watt's post on the new ad-hoc group to defend climate science; one of the quoted individuals is Paul R Ehrlich:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.Ah, yes, more of Paul Ehrlich's wit and wisdom. The man who was so wrong he couldn't be more wrong wants to form a group to explain why everyone who disagrees with him is, um, wrong? The "entirely different rules" he refers to must be those of evidence. No matter how beautiful Paul Ehrlich thinks poverty is, he never seems to want his money flow to be interrupted. The man who advocated forced abortion and infanticide to avoid a tragedy that has not happened is not precisely a source the American public will respect. Come on now, this guy really wants to be governing on Tarsus IV - his own words prove it.
Even economically, it is now an unfortunate reality that our future trajectory largely depends on public policy changes. Therefore it would behoove us to ensure that our public policies are based on very realistic assumptions; the risk of great failure in large-scale changes unless the concept is pre-tested is always quite large. Sadly, all the data we have shows that large-scale "green" power generates little usable power at a great cost, increases the utility bills of businesses and consumers, and depresses economic performance. Thus we have the strange phenomenon of a concept which has already been demonstrated to fail on testing becoming the basis for a policy that must fail. It's not that these power sources don't work as very small portions of the system - it's that they cannot be scaled up to become a large portion of the system. Our failure to recognize this is costing us a tremendous amount of money.
As for the monthly employment report, there is nothing notable about it. It is unlikely that the weather affected it much. The table I am watching is Table A-8 in the household segment. (Table numbering has been changed with the enhanced version of the employment release.) The bottom line is that on a seasonally adjusted basis, private industries lost workers but not very many. Since November, the number of non-governmental workers has remained essentially stable (changes are probably not statistically significant). Since October, that number has dropped. Government employment is quite erratic, probably due to the Census hiring. Moving down to the part-time section, we find that since October, the number of part-time workers due to slack work has dropped by over 10%, or over 700,000 persons. This is an effect of an improving business climate and expanding production runs. Needless to say that is part of the improvement in WIET tax receipts; the rest is primarily due to government hiring and government raises. A look at Table B-2 shows that the effect of the inventory cycle is probably tailing out; drops in average hours for manufacturing (39.9 > 39.5) confirm the general impression generated by other reports.
