Clean Energy for Whom?

Ehrlich’s “idiot children” all seemed to live south of the equator.

In April 1989, when Pons and Fleischmann announced cold fusion, most scientists were skeptical of the physics. Reasonable. Science requires replication.

But Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich had a different objection. Even if it worked, he said, cheap abundant clean energy would be like “giving a machine gun to an idiot child.”

Sit with that for a second.

The environmentalist position, stated plainly by one of its most celebrated figures, is that cheap clean energy is dangerous. Not because of technical risk. Because of us. Because humans, given access to abundant power, will just destroy more stuff faster.

It contains a real insight. Energy is a multiplier. More energy means more of everything, including the destructive things we already do badly. Jevons Paradox is empirically solid: efficiency gains historically increase total consumption, not decrease it.

But follow where the logic leads.

If humans can’t be trusted with power, the solution isn’t better governance or better institutions. It’s less human activity. Fewer people. Managed, concentrated, constrained.

Ehrlich spent his career saying exactly that. Coercive sterilization. Withdrawal of food aid from populations he deemed unsaveable. Additives in water supplies. He wasn’t a fringe figure who got disavowed -- he won a MacArthur genius grant after these proposals and remained a celebrated authority for decades despite being empirically wrong about essentially every specific prediction he made. He lost a famous public bet about resource scarcity so thoroughly it should have ended careers. It didn’t.

So here’s the question nobody in that tradition wants to answer in 2026.

Fewer humans means fewer of which humans?

Because the demographic reality right now is that the populations actually declining are European, East Asian, urban, educated. The populations Ehrlich’s movement historically targeted for reduction -- through NGO-funded sterilization programs, through food aid conditionality, through population control infrastructure built into development assistance -- were India, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America.

The overpopulation panic was never really a panic about Vermont.

And the movement that inherited Ehrlich’s framework now contains two wings that cannot both answer this question honestly. The green Malthusian wing, if it follows its own logic, has to say the remaining population growth (which is happening in the global south) is the problem. The anti-colonial wing has documented exactly what Western population control programs did to those same populations and correctly calls it what it is.

These two positions are irreconcilable. They coexist inside the same coalition only because the question never gets asked directly.

Cheap clean energy was supposed to be the goal. When it almost arrived in 1989, the response from a celebrated environmentalist was: not like this. Not if it means people get to keep living the way they want to live.

Just ask yourself which people he had in mind.