WaPo and Overpopulation

by Edd Doerr

On Nov 6 the Washington Post ran an opinion piece on "Myths about global population" by Nicholas Eberstadt, a flack at the American Enterprise Institute. Following is the comment I posted on the WaPo blog:

"Nicholas Everstadt's opinion piece on global population has got to be the dumbest thing ever to appear in the Post. Eberstadt has made a career as a fanatic denier of the overpopulation problem. His uninformed screed does not contain a word about resource depletion, deforestation, desertification, pollution, climate change, global warming, overdependence on fossil fuels. He comes across as a hopeless ignoramus regarding history and economics, and makes Know-Nothings look like geniuses.

"Though surely aware of the existence of the Republican Ford administration's 1975 (when world population was a mere four billion) National Security Study Memorandum 200 report, which spelled out in great detail the whole panoply of negative economic and political consequences of unchecked population growth. Ederhardt surely knows that as soon as President Ford endorsed the NSSM 200 report it was mysteriously 'classified' and buried until shortly before the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo. I was present at a Johns Hopkins University conference in Washington shortly after the UN conference and personally witnessed Eberstadt exhibit his indedensible nonsense about population.

"The Post owes it to its readers to present a real expert to counter the astonishing blather exuded in the Post's opinion pages."

"Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty, arlinc.org"

It would be helpful if others would also contact the Post Also, I just emailed the Post a short letter to the editor saying some of the above.