Paul Ehrlich, Mentor of Obama Science Advisor Holdren, Insists on "Population Shrinkage"

April 30, 2012 • 6:55AM

The man described by the London Guardian as "the world's most renowned population analyst, Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, responded to the recent Royal Society report on global population, by renewing his call for genocide, called "population shrinkage." Ehrlich's comments are of special importance because of his relationship to the man President Barack Obama appointed as his Science Adviser, John Holdren.

While Holdren claimed during his confirmation testimony, that he no longer held the views expressed in a 1977 book he co-authored with Ehrlich, about putting sterilization drugs into the world's drinking water supply, his record and statements indicate he maintains that anti-science, Malthusian view. In an essay he co-authored with Ehrlich in 1995, Holdren called for a "world of zero net growth" and "population limitation."

Speaking to the Guardian April 26, Ehrlich said:

"How many [people] you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage."

"The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."

Ehrlich insists that his predictions in the 1968 diatribe The Population Bomb have proved correct. "Things have been coming up worse than was predicted. We have the threats now of vast epidemics."

Ehrlich expressed his pessimism about avoiding disaster and called, like the Royal Society report, for a massive redistribution of resources from the rich to the poor—a grand Second Law of Thermodynamics leveling that will lead to even more rapid genocide.