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GLP podcast: What’s wrong with ‘doomsday’ environmentalism? It’s false.
Ever notice how the environmental movement’s doomsday predictions arrive like clockwork, each one as urgent as the last? Mass starvation, poisoned skies, civilization’s collapse: all imminent unless we repent and degrow right now. Yet here we are, decades later, and the apocalypse still hasn’t come.
From Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s population-bomb panic that promised billions would starve to the endless claims that we’d poison the air and run out of arable land, the track record is one long string of busted forecasts. But it’s not just that the predictions were wrong—they were falsified by major technological innovations and economic growth Ehrlich and his compatriots couldn’t have anticipated. This is the raw material for a very uplifting story.
Since 1970, combined emissions of the six major air pollutants have dropped nearly 80 percent. We’re feeding more people than ever while using relatively less land, thanks to yield explosions in maize (+196 percent), wheat (+218 percent), and rice (+147 percent) since 1961, gains that spared an area the size of India from the plow. Global hunger is ticking downward. And deaths from weather-related disasters have plunged more than 90 percent per capita since the 1920s.
None of this happened by heeding calls to turn back the clock. It happened because richer societies invest in better technology, cleaner chemistry and smarter stewardship. Oddly, these are the very developments alarmists reflexively demonize. And that prompts an important question: why does the modern environmental movement oppose the tools that enable sustainability?
Join Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies to examine why the green movement has been so spectacularly wrong about the disasters that never come.
Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish
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By Cameron English
4.2
2626 ratings
Ever notice how the environmental movement’s doomsday predictions arrive like clockwork, each one as urgent as the last? Mass starvation, poisoned skies, civilization’s collapse: all imminent unless we repent and degrow right now. Yet here we are, decades later, and the apocalypse still hasn’t come.
From Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s population-bomb panic that promised billions would starve to the endless claims that we’d poison the air and run out of arable land, the track record is one long string of busted forecasts. But it’s not just that the predictions were wrong—they were falsified by major technological innovations and economic growth Ehrlich and his compatriots couldn’t have anticipated. This is the raw material for a very uplifting story.
Since 1970, combined emissions of the six major air pollutants have dropped nearly 80 percent. We’re feeding more people than ever while using relatively less land, thanks to yield explosions in maize (+196 percent), wheat (+218 percent), and rice (+147 percent) since 1961, gains that spared an area the size of India from the plow. Global hunger is ticking downward. And deaths from weather-related disasters have plunged more than 90 percent per capita since the 1920s.
None of this happened by heeding calls to turn back the clock. It happened because richer societies invest in better technology, cleaner chemistry and smarter stewardship. Oddly, these are the very developments alarmists reflexively demonize. And that prompts an important question: why does the modern environmental movement oppose the tools that enable sustainability?
Join Cam English on this episode of Facts & Fallacies to examine why the green movement has been so spectacularly wrong about the disasters that never come.
Cameron J. English is the director of bio-sciences at the American Council on Science and Health. Follow him on X @camjenglish