Halloween, scares galore, can be considered Neo-Malthusian Day. Maybe April Fools’ Day, too, if you count the half-century-old errant predictions of doomsday, including climate change, which President Biden’s teleprompter said was an “existential threat to all of us.”
Anti-humanistic agendas, power-seeking, money-making, and speculative modeling are responsible for the exaggeration, the alarm, that trumps sober reality. Despite the vast statistics on human betterment — both in the growing number of lives and the quality of life — the Monsters of Doom are not dissuaded.
In “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future” (2021), for example, Paul Ehrlich et al. doubled down, claiming that negative environmental trends “will be much more dangerous than currently believed,” so much so that “it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” Experts? How about Expert Failure?
With a wounded climate movement meeting in two weeks in Brazil for the UN Conference of Parties (COP 30), expect ever more shrill statements about Climate Armageddon. Fear not. A simple review of quotations from climate leading voices then and now is just a trick-or-treat moment.
More than a half-century ago, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (Obama’s two-term science advisor) stated:
We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)
Thomas Friedman (New York Times: 2009):
We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children. It has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, “This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate.”
These quotations are a small sampling. But are free-market optimists the bozos who jump off tall buildings and report that everything is nice and breezy on the way down? Or are those who fear and rant bungee-jumping with reality?
If science is prediction, decades of spectacular failure should answer that question. But optimism of a thriving future is reversed when public policies sabotage freedom and the problems-to-improvement market process. Witness oil-rich Venezuela, mired in poverty and stuck in the gasoline lines. Even remember the U.S. during the 1970s, when price and allocation controls put millions of us in the gasoline lines. Little wonder why the U.S. has reversed course with Net Zero climate policies — hence the angst just ahead at COP20.
The last word belongs to doomslayer Julian Simon, who wrote a quarter-century ago:
The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom…. The extent to which the political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from government coercion is a crucial element in the economics of resources and population…. The key elements of such a framework are economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all.
Halloween is for fear mongers. Let every other day be for economic and political freedom from an intellectual/political elite that aims to control the rest of us. May the future belong to human ingenuity for human betterment in freedom, not to haunted thoughts of a soulless march on the road to serfdom.
