Ehrlich is a famous scientific scare-monger from the past. He's been preaching doom since the 1960's and has helped popularize every green craze since.
He's a colleague of John Holdren, Obama's chief science advisor. He's famous for making extreme predictions that fail to come about .... which does nothing to prevent his lionization:
Awards and honors - The John Muir Award of the Sierra Club
- The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
- A MacArthur Prize Fellowship
- The Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and considered the highest award given in the field of ecology
- ECI Prize winner in terrestrial ecology, 1993
- A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri, 1993
- The Volvo Environmental Prize, 1993
- The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize, 1994
- The 1st Annual Heinz Award in the Environment (with Anne Ehrlich), 1995 [34]
- The Albert Einstein Club Commemorative Plaque, 1997
- The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 1998
- The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, 1998
- The Blue Planet Prize, 1999
- The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America, 2001
- The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2001
- Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Generalitat of Catalonia, 2009.
en.wikipedia.org
His most important titles:
The Population Bomb (1968)
The End of Affluence (1975)
The Population Explosion (1990, co-authored with Anne Ehrlich) Healing the Planet: Strategies for Resolving the Environmental Crisis (1991, co-authored with Anne Ehrlich)
He was the loser in a public bet with Julian Simon:
en.wikipedia.org
....
In 1968, Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which argued that mankind was facing a demographic catastrophe with the rate of population growth quickly outstripping growth in the supply of food and resources. Simon was highly skeptical of such claims, so proposed a wager, telling Ehrlich to select any raw material he wanted and select "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
Ehrlich and his colleagues (including John Holdren, later an advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology) picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price increases: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference. If the prices fell, Ehrlich et al. would pay Simon.
Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped significantly. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later. [1]
As a result, in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.
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