IntroductionRead more at location 107
Note: ehrluch: fisso al carson show ad evocare la catastrofe diventando celebrities simon: a casina a mangiarsi le dita problema: la sovrapopolazione ci pirterá a carestie rovinose eh converte nixon che fonda l epa il legame tra cibo e demografia la controidea di simon: benvenuta la crescita di uomini: piú upmini più idee simon il convertito: temeva la bomba demogr la scommessa semplice: 5 materie 10 anni prezzi su o prezzi giù? 1000 dollari il great divide delk ambientalismo anni 70. vince simon e i conservatori prendono coraggio i precursori di eh: malthus quelli di simon: goodwin e engels reaganvs carter il dilemma filisofico: cosa conta nella vita? simob: solo l uomo e la sua felicitá. debito vs bentham eh: la natura. l uomo è solo una parte il dibattito attuale sul riscaldamento. cosa nn riproporre: la contrapposizione frontale. cosa riproporre: la passione il rigore e la chiarezza. imho: anche la scommessa come strumento epistemologico INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Paul Ehrlich, a thirty-seven-year-old biology professor at Stanford,Read more at location 109
Ehrlich had made his name two years earlier with a blockbuster jeremiad, The Population Bomb. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich warned in his book, predicting that hundreds of millions of people “are going to starve to death.”Read more at location 110
As Carson introduced Ehrlich to millions of ordinary Americans, a new environmentalism was dawning.Read more at location 113
Nixon was about to create the Environmental Protection Agency.Read more at location 116
Zero Population Growth, the organization that Ehrlich had founded to advance his agenda of population control.Read more at location 118
in Urbana, Illinois, a little-known business administration professor named Julian Simon, also thirty-seven, watched Ehrlich’s performances with growing dismay and envy. Carson asked Ehrlich about the relation between population growth and the food supply.Read more at location 121
Ehrlich said it was “already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions.”Read more at location 123
The Chicago-trained economist had recently written that processed fish, soybeans, and algae could “produce enough protein to supply present and future needs, and at low cost.”Read more at location 125
Simon and Ehrlich represented two poles in the bitter contest over the future that helped define the 1970s.Read more at location 131
Ehrlich’s dire predictions underlay the era’s new environmental consciousness, whereas Simon’s increasing skepticism helped fuel a conservative backlash against federal regulatory expansion.Read more at location 132
Ehrlich commented broadly on nuclear power and endangered species, immigration and race relations. He readily denounced “growthmanic economists and profit-hungry businessmen”Read more at location 136
Meanwhile, Simon for years played the role of frustrated and largely ignored bystander. “What could I do? Go talk to five people?” he later asked.Read more at location 139
in the late 1960s, Simon too had argued urgently in favor of slowing population growth. He had written studies arguing that birth control programs were a “fantastic economic bargain” for countries seeking to raise incomes.Read more at location 141
Simon argued that more people meant more ideas,Read more at location 145
Rather than sparking the world’s crises, population growth would help resolve them. People, as Simon titled his landmark 1981 tome, were The Ultimate Resource.Read more at location 145
In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich in Social Science Quarterly to a contest that directly tested their competing visions of the future, one apocalyptic and fearful of human excess, the other optimistic and bullish about human progress.Read more at location 148
Ehrlich agreed to bet Simon that the cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would increase in the next decade. It was a simple thousand-dollar wager:Read more at location 150
Ehrlich’s conviction reflected a more general sense after the 1973 Arab oil embargo that the world risked running out of vital resourcesRead more at location 153
Simon argued that markets and new technologies would drive prices down,Read more at location 154
The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition for Ehrlich’s campaign against population growth and environmental calamity or promote Simon’s optimism about human resourcefulness through new technologies and market forces.Read more at location 156
their bet resonated with the cultural clash occurring in the country as a whole.Read more at location 159
The bet also captured the starkly different paths of Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.Read more at location 159
Ehrlich’s widely publicized fears about population growth revived the arguments of the Reverend Thomas Malthus,Read more at location 176
Early critics of Malthus, however, such as the English philosopher William Godwin, anticipated Julian Simon’s critique of Ehrlich, mocking Malthus’s conviction that humanity was doomed to misery.Read more at location 185
Other nineteenth-century critics of Malthus, such as Friedrich Engels, thought that agricultural productivity could be “increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.”Read more at location 189
What is the purpose of humans on earth? How should we measure the success of human societies? Simon was influenced by the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher. Bentham proposed that the “measure of right and wrong” in society should be “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Following this logic, Julian Simon welcomed continued population growth because it meant that more people could live productive and meaningful lives.Read more at location 197
Simon did not speak in the elementary terms of “pain and pleasure.” But he also placed human welfare at the center of his moral universe.Read more at location 201
Humanity, Ehrlich thought, could not serve as the measure of all things.Read more at location 204
Humans needed to accept their proper role in a larger balance of nature on earth.Read more at location 204
the bet epitomized the increasingly polarized rhetoric of American politics.Read more at location 208
prominent political debates over climate change, for example, starting in the 1990s slipped into rhetorical ruts established in earlier debates over population growthRead more at location 213
Instead of reading Paul Ehrlich’s clash with Julian Simon as a simple white hat–black hat morality tale, their story can move us beyond stereotyped portrayals of environmentalists and conservatives.Read more at location 216
Paul Ehrlich’s contribution—and that of environmental scientists as a whole after World War II—lay in the ability to reveal the deep connections between humans and nature and to show how the planet was changing. Through research and advocacy, Ehrlich and other scientists helped avert genuine ecological disasters,Read more at location 2957
If scientists had not raised the alarm about declining stratospheric ozone, nations never would have passed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which phased out chemicals that damage Earth’s protective cover against intense solar radiation.Read more at location 2960
The environmental scientists’ impact came not just through legislation but also through a new consciousness.Read more at location 2965
Julian Simon also had something important to contribute. He and many other economists argued that human creativity and market forces allow societies to adjust to changing circumstances and to expand efficiency and productivity.Read more at location 2969
Simon’s own studies, for example, countered unfounded attacks on immigrants as a burden on the American economy. His argument for the economic benefits of immigration was one of many factors that cleared the way for the major 1986 law legalizing the status of millions of immigrants.Read more at location 2978
Despite their respective strengths, both Ehrlich and Simon got carried away in their battle. The ready audience for their ideas encouraged them to make dramatic claims. Their unwillingness to concede anything in their often-vitriolic debate exacerbated critical weaknesses in each of their arguments.Read more at location 2981
human history over the past forty years has not conformed to Paul Ehrlich’s predictions. By the most basic measure, human populations have continued to grow and no population collapse or broad-scale famine—caused by population outstripping food supply—has occurred. To the contrary. With localized exceptions, life expectancy across the globe has risen, as have per capita incomes. Food production has kept pace with population growth. Energy remains abundant. Higher food and energy prices in recent years suggest short-term shortages, and perhaps a long-term tightening of the market, but not catastrophic failure. The discrepancies in average health and welfare among nations have declined rather than increased. Countries around the world generally continue to improve their well-being rather than slip backward into greater poverty and suffering.Read more at location 2983
In 2005, investment banker Matthew Simmons bet journalist John Tierney and Rita Simon (Julian’s widow) five thousand dollars that oil prices would more than triple from around sixty-five dollars to a 2010 annual average of more than two hundred dollars per barrel. But the 2010 price averaged just eighty dollars. Adjusted for inflation, oil prices increased less than 10 percent over the five-year period, nowhere close to Simmons’s dire forecast.Read more at location 3001
Simon’s victory in his bet with Ehrlich drove home an important insight relevant to these energy markets: scarcity and abundance are in dynamic relationship with each other. Abundance does not simply progress steadily to scarcity. Scarcity, by leading to increased prices, spurs innovation and investment.Read more at location 3012
Ehrlich, however, remains convinced by the essential logic of his original bet. He declared in a 2011 interview that humans were on track to “destroy their life support systems” at which point “society as we know it is going to collapse.”Read more at location 3017
Julian Simon and other critics of environmentalism, however, have taken far too much comfort from extravagant and flawed predictions of scarcity and doom. Simon frequently argued that problems lead to solutions that leave humanity better off than before the problem arose. But by focusing solely and relentlessly on positive trends, Julian Simon made it more difficult to solve environmental problems.Read more at location 3023
many economists tend to favor taxes on pollution that would force economic decision-makers to factor external, social costs into their private choices.Read more at location 3037
The most pernicious current reflection of Ehrlich and Simon’s clash is the ongoing political impasse over climate change. Inaccurate past claims about population growth and resource scarcity—such as Ehrlich’s forecast for massive famines due to food scarcity in the 1970s and 1980s—undermined the credibility of scientists and environmentalists advocating action on climate. “By repeatedly crying wolf,” the conservative judge Richard Posner wrote of Paul Ehrlich, “he has played into the hands of those who consider environmentalism a lunatic movement.”Read more at location 3047
Conservatives who questioned Ehrlich’s earlier dire claims have argued that climate warnings are just a new liberal strategy to expand government regulation and taxation.Read more at location 3056
What often gets lost in the climate debate are the lessons of the clash between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. There is a serious and significant discussion to be had over what policy actions to take, and when. How much will the impacts of climate change cost, and how urgent is the need for immediate action? There are two dramatically different versions of the future. Should we count on technological innovation and economic growth to help societies meet this new challenge and adapt to change?Read more at location 3073
