Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Serial failed futurist Paul Ehrlich has warned that Australia will become a third world country, if we Australians don’t abandon one of our main sources of national income.

According to The Guardian;

Q&A: mining will turn Australia into a third-world country, says ecologist Paul Ehrlich Ehrlich warns ‘you are destroying your life support systems here’ and says his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation will collapse in 50 years is based on ‘gut feeling’ Australia is “working to become a third-world country” through its economic dependence on mining natural resources for export and reliance on coalmining, according to doomsday ecologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich made the prediction on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night, after dismissing the views of other panellists on the question of whether Australia was overpopulated as “mostly nonsense, unfortunately,” and before praising the economic theories of electronics retailer Dick Smith. “Talk to your ecologist,” Ehrlich said. “You are destroying your life support systems here. You are working at it really hard. You are also working to become a third-world country, because your specialisation of course is to take your raw materials, like your coal, which will destroy the world of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and ship of as much of it unprocessed as you possibly can out to the rest of the world.” Ehrlich told host Tony Jones, who seemed to be struggling to manage the octogenarian academic, that his prediction of a 90% chance civilisation would collapse in 50 years was based on a “gut feeling”, and freely admitted that a number of his predictions, such as the prediction the United Kingdom would be a small group of impoverished islands occupied by 70 million hungry people by the year 2000, hadn’t quite borne out.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/03/qa-mining-will-turn-australia-into-a-third-world-country-says-ecologist-paul-ehrlich

Its good that Ehrlich is researching whether the rumbling of his digestive tract is a more reliable predictor of future events, than whatever he used to do. In fact, I must commend Ehrlich on choosing to study his own gut, rather than the entrails of slaughtered animals, to produce his forecasts – Ehrlich’s method seems a lot tidier and less wasteful than the ancient Roman method of fortune telling, and will in all likelihood produce predictions which are at least as reliable as an IPCC climate projection.

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