[tokenadult]

Yes it can be avoided. The predicted collapse has been avoided during the forty years that Ehrlich has been making predictions like this. (I'm old enough to remember his early career, and how different the predicted future years of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s looked from what he predicted in my youth.)

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/03/howlin-wolf-paul-ehrli...

Ehrlich counts on people not remembering anything that happened before they were in high school, and being young enough not to remember what he has said time and time again, and been wrong about every time.

[jerf]

Every once in a while, it's worth reminding people that ad hominem is only a fallacy when the ad hominem is not relevant to the argument being made. In this case, ad hominem is not a fallacy; this source has a history of being repeatedly wrong about this exact topic without changing. At this point, even if he's correct about some particular point, the information content of the correct statement coming from him is still 0. Get it from other sources.

[Tichy]

Haven't read the article, just wanted to point out that 40 years is nothing. In Jared Diamond's Collapse he tells about civilizations that collapsed after 4000 years.

I don't think we can assume that our current society exists in an equilibrium. We launched into the industrial age like a cannonball and we don't know yet where we will land.

Didn't some agricultural revolution in the last century safe our ass for the time being (I'm too lazy to google, basically one guy saved billions of lives). I don't know if that kind of agriculture is sustainable, though. Perhaps it requires a lot of energy, or it destroy the soil in the long run. (Maybe not - I don't know, just saying).

[jk4930]

This guy is Norman Borlaug. Yes, the Green Revolution showed some negative side-effects (like all innovations).