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In Report About Overpopulation, CBS Brings on the Man Who's Been Wrong About It for Decades

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  January 03, 2023 11:45 AM

CBS is getting an earful over its decision to interview biologist and author Paul Ehrlich, who has been famously wrong in his predictions for decades. 

CBS's Scott Pelley spoke with Ehrlich about sustainability during a time when the population has reached 8 billion.

"The rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time," Ehrlich said, noting that "Humanity is not sustainable. To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you'd need five more Earths. Not clear where they're gonna come from." 

Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" predicted that during the 1970s, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…"

As critics point out, he was wrong then, which CBS does admit, but he continues to be wrong now. Why, then, the network decided to give him credibility to push its doomsday report about overpopulation is unclear. 

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[T]he world’s crude death rate per 1,000 people fell from 12.9 in 1965-1970 to 8.1 in 2020-2025. That’s a reduction of 37 percent. Famines, which were once common throughout the world, have disappeared outside of war zones. The world produces (or produced before the Russian invasion of Ukraine) record amounts of food. Hundreds of millions of people did not starve to death in the 1970s or thereafter. Quite the opposite happened; the world’s population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022. That said, some 400 million people were prevented from being born in China because of the misbegotten one-child policy (1978-2015), which the writings of Paul Ehrlich helped to inspire.

I realize that CBS has no time or space for the authors of Superabundance – a book showing that resources are getting more, rather than less, abundant. But why not interview Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Romer, Angus Deaton, and Michael Kremer, who never bought into the overpopulation nonsense? And if that’s a stretch, why not interview smart Democrats, like Lawrence H. Summers (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury) or Jason Furman (Barack Obama’s Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers)? They, too, argue that we do not have an “overpopulation problem.” Or was 60 Minutes only looking for scholars willing to confirm the pre-determined narrative of doom and gloom?

CBS claims that the world has too many people consuming too much stuff, which threatens the biosphere (a.k.a. human life-support systems). Once again, remember that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, human life expectancy was rising, and the death rate was falling – even though the world’s population grew by 129 percent between the publication date of The Population Bomb and the present. So, humans are doing just fine, thank you very much! (HumanProgress)

As the HumanProgress rebuttal goes on to note, the biosphere is doing fine as well and wealth continues to grow, meaning more nations are making investments to protect the environment. 

Twitter users also sounded off about CBS's decision to interview Ehrlich.