71 Quotes by Paul R. Ehrlich

It turns out the population issue is an easier thing to deal with than the consumption issue. Some obvious extremes in consumption we can deal with. The standard cure for a stuttering economy is to go out and buy an SUV and three more refrigerators. That’s obviously not the way to go.

There are a lot of signs. One of the things that makes me most nervous is the disappearance of the frogs. They’re going downhill all over the planet. Frogs are susceptible to all kinds of problems, because they require water to breed and their skin is very porous. Their condition is nerve racking.

So, regarding the time frame, I’m only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else’s, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it.

The main thing is, and of course this is a pedant talking, we should start our education on these issues in kindergarten. Instead of saying, “See Spot run,” we ought to say, “See the plant grow in the sun.” We ought to explain what runs the weather in the third or fourth grade to start out with.

People have to decide, first of all, how they’d like to live, and how secure they want to be from disaster. After that, scientists can help determine what would be necessary to achieve that.

I thought if the climate was heating that CO2 was the only forcing, and it would be late in the century before we had trouble. Now that we know about the other half of the forcing, it’s obvious that the trouble is coming much sooner.

Most of the scientists I know think civilization is teetering on the brink of a global disaster. They just don’t know when it’s going to hit. I don’t have the answer to that either. I’m scared as hell.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, “It’s the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you’ve always got to remember that nature bats last.”

Chinese are already more on board than we are. China is the only country that actually discussed in formal government documents how important it is to control the size of your populations if you’re going to limit emissions.