List of Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes

There's All Of This Stuff Where We Have So Much Debate Over Nonsense; It Could Be Cured If We Had A Better Educational System, If We Trained People To Really Try And Look Into Things On Their Own. That's A Tough Thing To Do, Particularly With The Educational System Staggering.

We've All Got To Get Together And Demand Something Better Out Of Our Government And Out Of Each Other. We've Got A System That's Making Us Working Harder, And Isn't Giving Us Satisfaction. We've Got To Sit Down And Decide What The Hell We Really Want To Be As Human Beings.

You Take The Huge Income That Comes With A Big Gas Tax, And You Use It To Pay Off Regressive Taxes Like The Fica [federal Insurance Contributions Act] Tax. You Can Help The Poor In Other Ways Besides Giving Them Cheap Gas. You Want To Send The Message That People Want To Be As Efficient As Possible Using Gasoline Until We Can Transition Away From That Need Entirely.

I See Harm Reduction As A Way Of Engaging People As Part Of That Path To Recovery.

The Drilling Idea Is Spherically Senseless - It's Senseless From Whatever Point Of View You Look At It. It'd Take 10 Years To Bring Any Oil Online, And It Would Probably Go To Japan. It Sure Wouldn't Help Gasoline Prices Here. All The Economists Say Gasoline Is Still Too Cheap In The United States Anyway. So Here We're Having This Huge Debate Over Offshore Drilling That Is Just Straightforward Nonsense, Which Won't Surprise You.

Historically, Things Were Moving In A Pretty Good Direction Until The Reagan Presidency. And Then It All Got Reversed. The Mexico City Policy Was Instituted - The Idea Of Wrecking The Environment For This Generation's Profit And Forgetting About Our Gets Got Firmly Embedded. I'm Sad To Say The Clinton Administration Didn't Turn It Around And The Bush Administration, Well, I Think They're The Worst Administration We've Ever Had, And I Used To Be A Republican.

Sometimes I Think The Congress Feels That If You Only Decided Tomorrow To Switch To Wind Power That In Two Years We'd Be Getting 80 Percent Of Our Electricity From Wind Power. It's Nonsense. Normally It Takes 20 To 30 Years After A New Technology Is Demonstrated And Deployed Before It Powers Even 15 Or 20 Percent Of The Grid. There's This Long Lag Time, And We Haven't Even Decided Which Directions To Go.

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.

After The Bomb We Developed A Fairly Good System For Moving Food Around And Have Avoided The Kind Of Massive Famines That Attract The Media. Although Of Course We've Had A Fair Number Of Them, Particularly In Africa, Since The Bomb Was Written. But We Have Had A Steady Level Of Attrition Of Malnutrition And Malnutrition-related Disease. Probably Something On The Order Of 5 To 10 Million People Starve To Death Each Year, But They're Spread Out; They're Not Dramatic News Events.

We're One Of The Most Highly Regulated Industries, And We Have To Pay Attention To What Government Is Doing.

Here's The Scientific Community Saying, Fundamentally, "if We Don't Change Our Ways, We're Screwed." And They Got No Attention At All. Even Though The Union Of Concerned Scientists Put Out This Statement Which Was Signed By More Than Half Of All The Nobel Laureates In Science And Another 1,500 Distinguished Scientists.

There Are Lots Of Excellent Analysts Out There. John Holdren At The Harvard Kennedy School, Who Was Just President Of The American Association For The Advancement Of Science, Has Been Talking About This Stuff For Years. There Are Lots Of People Out There Who Understand What’s Going On. The Problem Is, They Aren’t Much Picked Up On Fox News.