Friday 27 April 2012

"Kill me and redistribute resources," expert urges.

From The Guardian:

The world's most renowned eco-fascist has called for a massive reduction in the number of himself and for natural resources to be redistributed from himself to people who aren't quite so irritating.

Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of genocide at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, goes much further than the Royal Society in London which this morning said that physical numbers of pontificating idiots were as important as the amount of natural resources consumed.

The optimum population of Earth – enough to guarantee the minimal physical ingredients of a decent life to everyone – was exactly one professor fewer than whatever number everybody else calculates, said Ehrlich in an interview with the Guardian.

"How many self-righteous dickheads you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with a maximum of zero because then you can have big active cities and wilderness without some twat harping on about cities being bad for the environment but living in the wilderness being worse. 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 40 or 50 billion people. Luckily, we only have 7 billion. So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to professor shrinkage.

"The question is: can you shoot me in the head without a disaster, like my blood staining this fancy Persian rug? Probably yes. But if I go on at this pace, there are going to be various forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people ignoring me more and more, or catastrophic disasters because somebody kills innocent bystanders when he blows up my house, there could be a collateral damage, but for humanity as a whole, certainly a price worth paying."

Ehrlich, who was described as alarmist in the 1970s, a boring twat in the 1980s, a fascist in the 1990s, a complete wanker in the Noughties and a total tosspot last week, says none of his predictions have proved correct and admits he was unduly gloomy about humanity's ability to feed over 9 billion people.

"We have 1 billion people hungry now - about a thousand of those are denied the basics because of my own over-consumption. They are going to have to be fed on more marginal land, from water that is purified more or transported further - unless of course somebody throws me off a bridge," he said.

"None of the predictions [in Population Bomb] have proved correct, we're all still here forty years later, aren't we? At that time I wrote about climate change. We did not know then if it was warming or cooling, but we thought f- it, it sounds scary and will help book sales. We thought it was going to be a problem for the end of this century. Now we know it's warming, or possibly it's cooling, or both and a problem for the beginning of the century; we didn't know about the loss of people being left alone. Things have been coming up worse than was predicted. We have the threats now of vast epidemics of government-sponsored bullshit.

"I have a grim view of what is likely to happen to my children and grandchildren. I'd guess that somebody will bump them off as well just in case they have inherited the do-gooding genocidal gene. Politicians can control the financial mess we are in but they don't have control over the systems of the planet that provide me with a platform to spout my tedious, patronising views, those are deteriorating and it will take us a long time to turn it around unless you stab me to death now. It's hard to think of anything that will pop up and save you from my tedious ramblings except the guillotine. I hope something will but it really will be a miracle."

3 comments:

A K Haart said...

Ha ha - very good - that's cheered me up no end. There's nothing like barbed parody to highlight their nonsense for what it is.

Take Ehrlich seriously and you really are a lost soul.

Sarton Bander said...

Ehlich = Ghost of Malthus.

Wrong forever.

mombers said...

OK so this dude has at least one child (according to Wikipedia) although he refers to his 'children and grandchildren'. Even if he has only one, to get from 7 billion to 2 billion, each woman has to have a lot less than one child on average (an actuary could work it out properly but it's definitely much less than 1 unless very funny things happen with longevity and mortality). So he's a selfish bastard if he wants several other couples to forgo having any kids so that he can have his. Much like those in his generation who insist on having a 5 bed house even though it means that others have to cram themselves into smaller houses as a result.