By Vijay Jayaraj

Paul Ehrlich, who spent a lifetime telling the world that more people meant less life, died last week. He built a lucrative career terrifying the public with fabricated scenarios of global starvation. He convinced billions that humanity stood on the edge of extinction due to overpopulation.

You have likely heard echoes of his warnings, even if you have never read his work. They appear in sermons, youth programs, environmental campaigns, and policy discussions. They sound urgent, moral, and responsible. Yet they rest on claims that collapsed under the weight of real-world data.

The prophet of a famine that never came

In 1968, Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb announced that humanity stood on the brink of catastrophic hunger because there were simply “too many people.” He soon moved from page to pulpit, promising crowds that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s and 1980s no matter what governments did. He told audiences that England might not survive to see the year 2000, that Americans born after World War II would not reach age 50, and that the United States would soon ration water and food.

Chinese scientist Song Jian drew on Ehrlich’s ideas to persuade party leaders that harsh birth limits were necessary to avoid demographic catastrophe, giving rise to one‑child policy. It intruded into the most intimate decisions of families, and officials enforced it through forced abortions, sterilizations, and coercive tactics that scarred generations.

Ehrlich also approved of India’s campaign of mass coercive sterilization in the 1980s. In 1965, facing a severe famine in India, President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to send food assistance to India unless Prime Minister Indira Gandhi agreed to incentivize sterilization and adopt stringent family planning measures.

Medical vans would abruptly stop near fields, pick up farmers working in the field, and sterilize them right there, and dump them back into the fields. As late as the 1990s, U.S. taxpayer dollars were paying for the Peruvian government to forcibly sterilize their own people.

But a realization that this was all a blunder did not come until the 2000s. From 1961 to 2020, global agricultural output almost quadrupled, while world population grew about 2.6 times. Per person, food production rose by more than 50 percent, and inflation‑adjusted food prices fell, making diets more affordable and diverse. Far from starving, billions ate better and lived longer. Energy abundance gave rise to innovation in all field, essentially making us witness an unprecedent survival success like never before in recent centuries.

Ehrlich’s memoir, published when he was around ninety, shows how he has not retreated from his earlier claims. He again warned that humanity had only a few decades left to change its ways and again blamed population growth for a growing list of “biophysical and social existential threats” and alleged impending food shortfalls. The failure of his 1970s predictions did not move him toward humility; it pushed him to double down.

Population Doom to Climate Doom: The Baton gets Passed on

Ehrlich also folds the modern climate panic into his recent warnings. This is not a coincidence. It is only reasonable to state that climate doom serves as the direct ideological succession to the population scare and the ozone layer panic.

The baton of panic simply passed from Ehrlich to a new generation of climate activists. You see it carried today by figures like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. They use the exact same rhetorical tactics to spread the exact same fear. Population doom is outdated, and climate crisis is the new fad. Climate activists declare that rising temperatures will unleash the actual apocalypse.

One of the most prominent voices of modern climate catastrophe, Michael Mann, calls Ehrlich a friend and a hero. Mann is known for the “hockey stick” temperature graph that became a central icon in global climate campaigns. He and others play the same role Ehrlich once did: prophets of looming disaster whose message is that your way of life is a threat.

Christian climate scientists like Katherine Hayhoe ignore this profound truth. They trade biblical orthodoxy for the fleeting approval of secular environmentalists. Some church leaders read secular reports and adopt them with little scrutiny, assuming that environmental alarmism must be an expression of care for creation.

In doing so, they often absorb hidden assumptions: that there are too many people, that economic growth is a moral problem by itself, and that fossil fuels are inherently sinful. They feed unguarded Christian minds a steady diet of disproven population-driven resource-crunch ideology. Young Christians today grow up paralyzed by eco-anxiety.

Alarmism-inclined church documents or statements hardly mention the actual data: They rarely acknowledge that food production has risen faster than population, that we use less cropland and water per unit of food, or that global life expectancy has doubled. They speak as though Ehrlich’s famine is still just around the corner.

As Christians, when a Sunday school curriculum promotes population limits or climate hysteria, challenge it with hard data. Show your fellow church members the massive agricultural success of the past fifty years. Explain how modern energy access directly doubles life expectancies. Demand that your pastors preach the full counsel of God regarding humanity’s dominion over the earth.

Do not let false guilt — informed by false data masquerading as state-of-art science — dictate your life choices. Have children. Build businesses. Cultivate the land. Extract the minerals. Use the energy. Lift your neighbors out of poverty. Do all these things to the glory of God.

Vijay Jayaraj is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition. He holds a M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, postgraduate degree in Energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a B.S. in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research assistant at University of British Columbia’s Changing Oceans Research Unit in Canada.