[TomGuy]

End is near?

Nah!

They might shelve it for a while, only to renew it at a later time.

For example, Gore is now on population reduction. That was the greenie rave of 40 years ago, only it was called Population Zero. It was highly popular, then went into obscurity. Now, Gore is reopening it.

These issues don’t die. They just shelve them until they fade from memory for a while, only to be resurrected later.

[Steely Tom]

Your post kind of reminds me of a theory I've been playing with, on and off, for years. The theory concerns popular music; at any given point in time, there are certain musical "niches" in the market, each of which gets filled by one or (at most) two songs. Never more. The different song styles can be classified -- and I lack the expertise to do this well -- as, say a fast blues, a slow blues, a very young singer doing a song about love, an outcast song, a song about a dirty girl/boy who wants to be loved, a song about a dangerous boy/girl who don't need no love, a disco number with a female lead, etc. Once or twice a year there's an opportunity for a "specialty" or "novelty" song that doesn't fit any category.

Over the years, each of these categories is always filled. There is rotation between them, obviously, but they rotate asynchronously. As the "holder" of a particular niche gets old, a "niche vacuum" is produced, and record producers go looking for something to fill the niche. Whoever gets there first with a decent offering will fill the niche, and then the producers shift their focus toward another niche.

Of course, there are producers that specialize in one or two niches, but the really successful producers have projects in the wings for every niche.

In the same way, the left -- and maybe the right, too, depending on how you look at it -- rotates a set of issues across the public stage. As you correctly point out, the "population explosion" issue gets trotted out from time to time, and has for at least a hundred years; more, if you go back to the original thesis of Thomas Malthus. At other times it's global warming, or global cooling, or environmentally-induced cancer, or the effects of insecticides, or the over-use of antibiotics.

Once in a while, some innovator tries to come up with a new one, or a hybrid of two old ones; I'm thinking here of the "environmental racisim" trial balloon that got run up the flagpole a few years ago.

What's that line of Menckens?

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

Smart guy, old H. L.