My forthcoming book is about how people become blinded to reality by the causes that they serve. So naturally there is a chapter on environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. The Stanford professor has made a career out of imitating Chicken Little, with predictions of doomsday revised again and again after the selected date fails to bring humanity's demise. You'd think Mr. Ehrlich's penchant for being wrong would marginalize him. It hasn't, and he's back with a new book, One With Nineveh, that Ronald Bailey skewers.

One of the things that really pisses me off about Paul Ehrlich is his perverse use of Pascal's Wager in comparison to believing his doomsaying (he writes about this in his book, The Population Bomb). Like the idea of betting on God's existence in Pascal’s famous wager, Ehrlich claims that no harm and only good can come out of believing that apocalyptic disasters will come from overpopulation. But in fact, all hard, long term evidence has contradicted Ehrlich’s ideas and, it would only be more dangerous to take action to stop population growth. The late great economist Julian Simon wrote numerous books about the benefits of a growing population and brilliantly argues that individuals contribute to society more than they burden it. Simon argued that as population grows, the more knowledge there is, and the better society gets. So in fact, if we were to take action to stifle population growth, we are also stifling our chances at important technological growth. Simon is not so blindly optimistic as to say that the earth’s supply of oil is infinite, but he places more importance on the more reliable, “ultimate” resource: people themselves. Thus, as we take action to decrease population we are trapping ourselves into an even more dangerous dependence on now-existing technology. If our dependence on oil and other resources will become as disastrous as Ehrlich claims, our best bet would be to encourage population growth and thus increase our chances of developing more efficient sources of energy.