After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn't Collapsed

Reason ^ | 22 Apr 2023 | Ronald Bailey

[Rummyfan]

Cassandra in Greek mythology was the Trojan priestess who was cursed to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. Ideological environmentalism features a cohort of reverse Cassandras: They make false prophecies that are widely believed. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 classic, The Population Bomb, prophesied, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich continues to predict imminent overpopulation doom.

Another reverse Cassandra was Rachel Carson who warned in her 1962 Silent Spring of impending cancer epidemics sparked by humanity's heedless use of synthetic pesticides. In fact, even as pesticide use has risen, rates of cancer incidence and mortality have been falling for 30 years.

On the occasion of the 53rd Earth Day, let's take a look at the prophecies of another reverse Cassandra, the Club of Rome's 1972 The Limits to Growth report by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens. The book and its dire forecasts were introduced to the world at a March 1972 conference at the Smithsonian Institution. Let's focus primarily on the report's nonrenewable resource depletion calculations. The 1973 oil crisis was widely taken as confirming the book's dire scenarios projecting imminent nonrenewable resource depletion.

[Rummyfan]

Rachel Carson, whose campaign to ban DDT was successful with the EPA unilaterally outlawing it, has led to millions of Third World deaths due to malaria. Environmentalists love the earth; it's people they hate.

[gitmo]

After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn’t Collapsed

But they’re still working on collapsing it.

[BenLurkin]

Society has collapsed.

Don’t think it had anything to do with so-called “earth day”

[rktman]

All lights on, all burners on the stove, both ovens. Still need to burn some tires. 😳👍

[laplata]

“After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn’t Collapsed”

It is collapsing but hasn’t finished collapsing.

[Hot Tabasco]

Google “who is the founder of earth day” and there will be no mention of Ira Einhorn. Instead it’s Senator Gaylord Nelson.....

[Rummyfan]

Google “who is the founder of earth day” and there will be no mention of Ira Einhorn.

Ira Einhorn who murdered his girlfriend, kept her body hidden in the closet for over a year, then fled to France to avoid arrest and prosecution. May he burn in hell.

[Anti-Bubba182]

"....Environmentalists love the earth; it's people they hate...."

Very true!

[Stosh]

The article points out how the sustainability loons predicted in the late ‘70’s that we’d have run out of just about everything of value by now - and then when that didn’t happen, repredicted that scenario another few decades down the road.

But those enviro-loonies are even worse than that - they simply adjust their expectations to whatever anti-industrial scenario they happen to favor at the moment. If they’re bothered by our current prosperity, they jiggle the facts to predict we’ll run out resources soon. But if they’re proposing a non-hydrocarbon future running on electricity from renewables by 2030, they don’t worry one bit about where all the copper, all the lithium and all the cobalt is going to come from.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I read "The Limits to Growth" when it was published in 1972. I was in mechanical engineering school at the time and studying control systems with positive and negative feedback, so it was very timely reading.

I recall the authors making very clear statements that they were not making specific forecasts about the date when resources would run out. The were talking about trends and consequences that could come true somewhere in the future, whether it be 50 years, 100 years, or 500 years from then.

I have to admit I agree with the authors' conclusions. The earth is a finite resource and we have eight billion people living on it today. The industrial revolution and the mastery of metallurgy, electricity, thermodynamics, calculus and many other disciplines led us to create wealth and lifestyles beyond the wildest imagination 200 years ago. Those breakthroughs enabled the rapid growth of the human population (see chart below).

But were those one-time breakthroughs? Are there other breakthroughs on the horizon that could enable the earth to support 50 billion or 100 billion people?

I came away from reading the book wondering WHEN should mankind take actions? What actions should be taken? Should we stabilize population at 8 or 10 billion? Should we invest in new energy sources? (yes, of course) Do we need to worry about running out of petroleum that is ultimately the source of our huge increase in food production and agricultural efficiency (urea fertilizer from natural gas)?

The catastrophists believe we should drastically reduce our lifestyles and reduce earth population NOW. They simply do not understand you cannot change out a highly optimized energy infrastructure that took 150 years to build and was built gradually. They think you can change it all out in a decade or two which is utterly insane. They also have no ability to make a case for what it should be changed TO.

These really are profound questions that will need to be answered. We can answer them in a methodical, systematic way. Or we can wait until disaster is upon us. But, does anybody today really worry about life on earth 100, 500 or 1,000 years from now? Certainly the green kooks profess that they do, but NONE of them walk the talk.

[mountainlion]

Strange how the seas are boiling in this ice age?

[jmacusa]

April 22. 1870. Lenin is born. April 22. Earth Day.

No coincidences.

[Rummyfan]

But were those one-time breakthroughs? Are there other breakthroughs on the horizon that could enable the earth to support 50 billion or 100 billion people?

That is the question is it not? The doomsayers never seem to account for human resources and human nature. I feel we are on the cusp of fantastic breakthroughs... but we are also on the cusp of terrible conflict(s), mainly of a political bent. The left is mainly made up of Luddites though they claim to be the party of science (pseudo-science is a more accurate a description of their beliefs).

[MattMusson]

In 2014 Team Obama asked banks to shift lending from oil drilling to Green Energy. In 3 years O&G lending fell by 44%. Most of the contraction came from projects taking 7 years or longer.

7 years later we began seeing a shortage of fossil fuels.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I think learning basic metallurgy, combustion, physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, calculus, differential equations, etc are one-time breakthroughs over 500 to 1,000 years. You cannot repeat the basics again. Those were revolutionary breakthroughs that enabled huge leaps.

But what’s coming, as you say, is new, evolutionary ways to apply those basic sciences. Can the leaps be as great as they once were? Perhaps, but I have my doubts.

Of course, if we reduce the earth’s population from 8 billion to 4 billion and then to 2 billion, all that lost brainpower means that innovation will drastically slow down.

I agree that leftists are largely untrained, unschooled Luddites who cannot think critically about these things.

[Organic Panic]

AND the liars who lied about R12 refrigerant.

[Organic Panic]

“Ira Einhorn “

Every hero of the progressives was a degenerate of one sort or another. Child molesters (Dalai Lama, Ghandi), rapists (nearly every civil rights icon) child predator (Joe Biden), cop killers (Mumiah Abu Jamal) and just flat out mass murderers (Stalin, Mao, Margaret Sanger). I can’t think of a single hero of the progressives that isn’t morally repugnant.

[Fzob]

Just last night I told my son in law about ira. He had heard lots about earth day but somehow never heard about ira.

[Chode]

POS died in prison, FTG...

[M Kehoe]

Bttt.

5.56mm