“You must buy this book,” my high school chemistry teacher told me. The book was Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and it predicted doom for the earth and its populations. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” it declared, and mass starvation was both inevitable and imminent.
I bought the book, but I confess I never read it until years later—long after the doomsday scenarios had failed to pan out. But during the school year of 1969-70, when I was a high school junior, the Doomsday Industry was alive and well as we “celebrated” the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, with the following predictions:
Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”“We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”
When I was in college, the two best-known doomsday books were The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, and An Inquiry into the Human Prospect by Robert Heilbroner, a book required in one of my religion classes. Suffice it to say, none of the scenarios in the statements or the two books played out. Unfortunately, these false prophets have never had to pay for their outrageous predictions through a loss of reputation. In fact, Ehrlich still is sought out by mainstream media as being an expert on—of all things—“overpopulation.”
The Doomsday Brigade Moves on to Other “Crises”
Of course, overpopulation or “running out of resources” are not the only faux crises that the doomsday crowd has created. In the 1980s, our forests, lakes, and rivers supposedly were going to be lost to “acid rain,” while the early 1990s had the ozone hole. The “threat” of acid rain supposedly ended with the 1990 passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments, while the Montreal Protocol of 1990 and 1992 supposedly took care of the ozone problems.
Since then, of course, the newest and most apocalyptic “threat” has been global warming, which later was changed to climate change, with the main voice being former Vice-President Al Gore, whose finances have benefited greatly from his activism. Not surprisingly, Gore has made a number of dire predictions, none of which have come true. In his 2005 documentary, Gore declared:
The snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro would disappear by 2016.Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes in the future would become larger and more powerful. (To the contrary, hurricanes have not increased in intensity or number.)Loosely claimed that the sea would be rising up to 20 feet in this century because of ice melting. (The seas are rising, but have been doing so at the same pace as they rose in the last century.)
In 2007, a British judge ruled that Gore’s documentary had nine errors by making claims that were not backed up by current science:
The judge said that, for instance, Gore’s script implies that Greenland or West Antarctica might melt soon, creating a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet that would cause devastation from San Francisco to the Netherlands to Bangladesh. The judge called this “distinctly alarmist” and said the consensus view is that, if Greenland melted, it would release this amount of water, “but only after, and over, millennia.” Burton also said Gore contends that inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls have evacuated to New Zealand because of global warming “but there is no such evidence of any such evacuation.”
But what would a New Year be without even more dire predictions? This time, we have UCLA professor Glen MacDonald predicting that 2026 will finally be the year that we pass the climate “tipping point”:
He (MacDonald) worries that 2026 could be the year when global temperatures hit a breaking point known as the 1.5 C rise. “I don’t know if we are quite there,” he says, “but we are very close, and 2026 is most likely to be hotter than last year.”
So, why haven’t the so-called experts recognized that environmentalists have been crying wolf for more than 60 years, beginning with Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962? Part of the reason is that Americans have been propagandized for years that capitalism is destructive and bad for the environment, despite much evidence to the contrary. The flip side of that argument is that socialism protects the environment, even though the actual record of socialism reveals one environmental disaster after another.
Modern academe and modern journalism are both about managing the narratives, and especially the anti-capitalist narratives. Nothing—and especially the truth—is permitted to challenge these worldviews. Ludwig von Mises in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality understood that even though the capitalist system has vastly increased the wealth of most individuals in our economy, that doesn’t mean that people always will appreciate what they have:
Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.
He also pointed out that both European and American intellectuals have hated capitalism almost since the beginning of the modern industrial era and targeted the factories as being especially harmful to the social order they prized, as well as a purveyor of air and water pollution. (One is reminded of the line in William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” written in 1810):
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
In modern times, the American left—including those in academe and journalism—have turned their hatred toward the automobile. Murray Rothbard wrote in 1974:
It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that we are facing not a mere abhorrence of the rococo, or a desire to conserve energy, but a deep-seated and even pathological hatred of everything that the automobile represents. Perhaps we can see the motivation more plainly if we consider what the Left wishes to put in the place of the despised automobile: what it boils down to is bicycles (like they rode in the good old days of pre-affluent Europe), and mass transit. Mass transit? You mean they want more of the filthy subways of New York City, where people are herded in like cattle? Yes, I think that is exactly the sort of transportation system that the Left wants to impose on America and the world.
Today, that hatred is geared toward the gasoline/diesel-powered automobiles, while driving an electric car (EV) has become the symbol of all things virtuous. (That is, until Elon Musk had his short-lived appearance as a government cost-cutter, which then led leftists to vandalize Teslas, even though the majority of Tesla owners were Democrats).
The notion that electric cars ever would “save the planet” has always been far-fetched, and with the “great unwashed” still preferring their gasoline-powered Ford F-150s to the electric version, causing Ford Motor Company to lose an unthinkable $20 billion in the process. By politicizing the automobile and tying it to supposed climate disasters, American political, intellectual, and media elites have demonstrated their contempt for how capitalism has made modern life possible.
The Guilty Billionaire
One of the developments of our present age has been the presence of the billionaire environmentalist who has sought to limit choices of ordinary people in the name of “saving the planet.” We have become too familiar with people like Bill Gates calling for “depopulation” for places like Africa and Asia.
In the past, it was the foundations set up by wealthy industrialists that have been at the forefront of the Doomsday Industry, but today, the billionaires themselves (like Gates) have been spending much of their own money to push the view of environmental disaster and how socialist measures can halt the inevitable slide toward oblivion. One of the worst offenders has been Tom Steyer of California, who used his money to convince the state’s voters to chain themselves and their economy to policies that have helped make California unaffordable.
The great irony is that Steyer now is running for governor in the Democratic Party primary on a platform of…making California “affordable.” (In his ubiquitous political advertisements, he claims that by breaking up Pacific Gas & Electric and other utilities and energy firms into smaller companies, the results will be vastly lower electricity prices, up to 25 percent lower. Any competent economist can see through that nonsense).
In truth, like the industrial titans that came before them, many of today’s billionaires became wealthy by creating goods and services that made life better for most people—including making things more “affordable.” Unfortunately, like the industrial titans that came before them, these billionaires—acting partly out of guilt that came because they had become rich—joined forces with the government to push harmful policies favored by the political, intellectual, and media elites, all accompanied by the siren song of environmental doom.
Conclusion
The “save the planet” mantra of American elites is not going to end just because the loud and apocalyptic predictions they made so publicly have failed to materialize. As we have seen time and again, when the doomsday predictions such as overpopulation or acid rain destruction do not turn out as advertised, the elites simply move to something else.
(The beauty of “climate change” as a doomsday fixture is that environmentalists can roll just about everything into it. As we have seen recently, the rise of artificial intelligence data centers are now the target of the doomsday elites, as they supposedly are “environmental disasters” on the horizon.)
As noted earlier, “climate change” has been the disaster of choice that has been the driving force for implementation of disastrous policies that have made life more difficult for people around the world. Even with Bill Gates himself having recently backed off the claim that climate change is going to destroy the planet, we can still expect the loudest voices to call for even more drastic and self-defeating measures that won’t affect our climate but will make people poorer.
American elites have long wedded themselves to the environmental disaster industry, and few are willing to jump off the bandwagon now. From Silent Spring to the first Earth Day to the latest proclamations that “our planet is getting hotter,” we will have to deal with the annual New Year’s predictions that “this year” is the year to “do something.” For now, the rest of us must just live with it and hope the elites don’t destroy everything good and decent about modern life and take what is left of our liberties with them.
