The Bet

By Paul Sabin (2013)

The book profiles the lives of ‘celebrity biologist’ Paul Ehrlich and ‘iconoclast economist’ Julian Simon. Two men who rose to prominence in the 1970s with two immoveable and diametrically opposed visions of the world. Their loathing for one another culminated in a decade long bet over the future of the planet.

Ehrlich is the author of the international best seller ‘The Population Bomb’, published in 1968, which gave humanity a stark choice: “population control or the race to oblivion”. But with growing distaste for the doomster movement, Julian Simon responded with his book ‘The Resourceful Earth’; setting out a case for an ever booming and prosperous world where humanity can “find new lodes, invent better production methods, and discover new substitutes”.

I found ‘The Bet’ a really enlightening book which uses Ehrlich and Simon as a lens into the conflicting worlds of neo-Malthusian doom and cornucopian boom. The book shows how these ideas influenced public perception and politics, and how the singular, grandiose visions of all actors, have likely played a big part in the divide on environment policy. If you are interested in understanding more about the origins of the divided opinions on climate this is a good place to start. In the book, net-zero, I show how tweaking three fundamental values in the science, economics, and technology of climate change can paint a vision aligned with either Ehrlich or Simon - I call these values the dials of doom and boom.

*Book cover credit: Getty Images

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