The left’s prophet of doom is still wrong

The Left has found something to raise its cheer. Needless to say, it is someone predicting that mankind is doomed. The most-read piece on the Guardian website yesterday was an interview with Paul Ehrlich – not the one who did something useful, the 19th century immunologist, but Paul R Ehrlich, the Stanford Professor of Biology, who has made a career out of warning that mankind is doomed.

His latest thesis is certainly eye-catching. The Guardian quotes him as saying “the collapse of civilisation is a near-certainty within decades”. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita,” he says, “is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.” Our only hope is to rapidly reduce global population from 7.6 billion to 2 billion: the maximum level he calculates that the Earth can sustain. But if we don’t get round to effecting that reduction immediately and carry on gobbling up the world’s resources, well it will have to be an even more dramatic reduction.

The only thing is that Ehrlich has a bit of backstory which is – to resort to the terminology of a left-wing academic – just a little problematic.