Nicholas Stern: 'I got it wrong on climate change – it's far, far worse'

[Nederland]

23. He certainly deserved it

His innovations obviously helped transform the world. My point was simply that the transformations that occurred did not happen all over the globe all at once, so using the 'Green Revolution' as an excuse for why Ehrlich's predictions failed to come true simply does not fit reality. If Ehrlich had bothered to do some research before publishing The Population Bomb he would have found that the innovations that Borlaug introduced were still unused in many parts of the world, and as a result we could expect global yields to continue to rise for many years to come. Instead, he just flat out assumed that grain production had reached its peak and that global starvation was imminent. If he had bothered to ask any agricultural economist of the day what we could expect in the coming decades he would have learned that there we many proven advances already in use in certain places and just waiting to be leveraged elsewhere.