We have now celebrated our 39th Earth Day, and we’re still waiting for the environmental disaster. What happened? Most of us were supposed to have starved to death by now, died from air pollution, or frozen in the Ice Age. As predicted, the population has increased, and industrial output has increased. But instead of starvaton, we’re worried about obesity. Air pollution is still a problem in the Third World, but only due to rapid economic growth and rising standards of living. And instead of an Ice Age, we now obsess about global warming.
Most people alive today weren’t even born for the first Earth Day. For those of us who were, hopefully we’ve matured enough to take claims of impending disaster with a grain of salt. After all, we’ve survived two nuclear disasters, at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, which together killed fewer people (about 50) than die in traffic accidents every day in America. (Michael Crichton has some interesting observations here.)
For those who are younger and smarter than we are, perhaps a history lesson would be helpful. The Washington Policy Center has compiled an interesting list of predictions made around the first Earth Day. With only minor wording changes, many of them could be mistaken for predictions being made today about the supposed impact of global warming. Reflecting on those, hopefully we’ll all think twice before blindly demanding that governments around the world “do something”. Especially if those actions will likely have minimal impact on the climate, but do major damage to the economy.
Here is a sample of some of the items compiled.
• “…civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.
Okay, how about 40 years?
• By 1995, “…somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.
But by 2008, the polar bear population will have increased five-fold.
• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.
Obviously obesity should never be a problem.
So next time you read a terrifying headline, remain calm. Such terrifying predictions have been around for hundreds of years, and hundreds of years from now, our gullible offspring will still be around to worry needlessly about them.