Sixty Years of Environmental Scare Tactics

Sixty Years of Environmental Scare Tactics

– By Howard Sierer –

Environmentalist activists have been crying wolf for 60 years, scaring the public with over-the-top predictions of widespread disaster and hundreds of millions of deaths. It’s getting old.

In the 1960s, the so-called “population bomb” gave rise to the environmental movement that continues to this day. At the time we were bombarded with books and studies that claimed to show that the world’s population was growing far faster than the planet’s ability to grow food.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The threat of worldwide starvation made excellent fodder for peddling gloom-and-doom media headlines that attract readers and viewers. As English essayist Samuel Johnson famously said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

With the media-generated rise in public concern, Pres. Nixon formed the “Rockefeller Commission of Population Growth and the American Future” which published its report in 1972. The commission predicted more droughts, famines and pollution, accompanied by energy shortages, mineral depletion and deforestation. All this would lead to fewer jobs and higher poverty rates.

The report’s conclusion: “In short, we find no convincing economic argument for continued national population growth. Recognizing that our population cannot grow indefinitely . . . the Commission recommends that the nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population.” How stabilizing the nation’s population was to be achieved was left to the report’s readers.

China gave “population stabilization” a shot with its 1979 “one child per family” policy. An immediate and unforeseen result was widespread discrimination against female babies who were aborted or abandoned. A longer-term consequence: China today has a disproportionate number of the elderly and a corresponding shortage of workers in their 30s and 40s to support them.

Ehrlich’s so-called “population bomb” was defused by the “green revolution” that resulted in dramatic improvements in food production worldwide and earned its “father,” American agronomist Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

Today’s world population is almost double 1975’s 4 billion people. Yet we have more than enough food to feed everyone although distribution shortcomings result in local malnourishment in some poorer countries.

Pollution? Americans today enjoy cleaner air and water than we did 50 years ago thanks to well-targeted environmental laws. Poverty has lessened and its very definition – no mobile phone or cable TV – would astound those in the 1970s. Obesity overshadows hunger as a national health problem.

The International Monetary Fund reports that over the last decade 178 of 180 countries have experienced improved air, water, fishery and natural habitats. The amount of land worldwide set aside for wildlife reserves and national parks grew by 80% from 1990 and 2014. Maritime conservation areas doubled. Deforestation? U.S forest area has remained stable since 1900.

Mineral depletion? Paul Ehrlich lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon who proposed that they wager on what would happen to the price of five metals — copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten — from 1980 to 1990. Simon won handily: their prices had dropped an average 50%.

These and other environmental alarmist claims have been debunked time and again but usually with little media attention and only after environmental doomsayers have moved on to new scare stories.

Remember the 1989 Alar scare? Apple growers were devastated when the widely-used chemical Alar was falsely called a carcinogen on the CBS muckraking program “60 Minutes.” The case remains to this day one of the best examples of how a combination of environmentalists, “public interest” lawyers, publicists, and the news media can foist a bogus health scare on an unwitting public.

In the 1990s, the media whipped the public into another environmental frenzy when we were told to expect attacks by deadly swarms of killer bees. Heard much about them lately?

Fast forward to climate change. In 2018, climate activist Bill McKibben claimed, “What we’re playing for now is to see if we can limit climate change to the point where we don’t wipe out civilizations.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounded the same theme, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

Al Gore’s highly-touted film “An Inconvenient Truth” was little more than propaganda attempting to scare the public. Two of the film’s failed predictions: Wall Street would be underwater in 2015 and Mt. Kilimanjaro would be snow-free.

Another of Gore’s alarmist claims, one that activists repeated until this year, has been debunked. Yes, arctic ice has been receding but that process started in response to the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1870, not in recent decades. As reported by University of Cambridge scientists, “The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century — decades earlier than records suggest — due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.”

For an interesting perspective into environmental scare tactics, substitute the words “climate change” for “population bomb” in 1970s environmental handwringing. The lyrics have changed but the tune is the same.

Climate change gloom-and-doom predictions use worst-case assumptions and assume that no attempt is made to adapt to the planet’s emergence from the Little Ice Age. Adapting is far more cost-effective than impossibly-expensive decarbonization and far more palatable to a public unwilling to spend even $10 per month mitigating climate change.

When King Canute’s flattering advisers urged him to command the tide to stop rising, he obliged but only to demonstrate that far more powerful forces were at play than could be undone by mere mortals. When will today’s environmental alarmists stop commanding the tide and show comparable humility?

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