In the New Year, We Will Hear Even More Environmental Doom Because the Doomsday Industry Never Rests

In the new year, we will hear even more environmental doom

because the doom's day industry never rests

by William L. Anderson.

You must buy this book, my high school chemistry teacher told me.

The book was Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb

and it predicted doom for the earth and its populations.

The battle to feed humanity is over, it declared.

And mass starvation was both inevitable

and imminent.

I bought the book, but I confess I never read it until years later

long after the doom's day scenarios had failed to pan out.

But during the school year of 1969 to 70,

when I was a high school junior, the doom's day industry

was alive and well as we celebrated the first earth day

on April the 22nd, 1970.

With the following predictions,

Harvard biologist George Wall estimated

that civilization will end within 15 or 30 years by 1985 or 2000,

unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.

We are in an environmental crisis that threatens

the survival of this nation and of the world

as a suitable place of human habitation.

Wrote Washington University biologist,

Barry commoner in the earth day issue

of the scholarly journal environment.

Population will inevitably and completely outstrip

whatever small increases in food supplies we make.

Paul Erlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue

of man wasl.

The death rate will increase until at least 100

to 200 million people per year will be starving to death

during the next 10 years by 1980.

Most of the people who are going to die

in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man

have already been born.

Wrote Paul Erlich in a 1969 essay titled Eco Catastrophe

by 1975.

Some experts feel that food shortages

will have escalated the present level of world hunger

and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions.

Other experts more optimistic think

the ultimate food population collision

will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.

Erlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario

for the 1970 earth day issue of the progressive.

Assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989,

some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans,

would perish in the great die-off.

Ecologists Kenneth Wat told time that,

at the present rate of nitrogen buildup,

it's only a matter of time before light

will be filtered out of the atmosphere

and none of our land will be usable.

Paul Erlich chimed in, predicting in 1970

that air pollution is certainly going to take hundreds

of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.

Erlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans

would die in 1973 during smog disasters in New York

and Los Angeles.

Senator Gaylord Nelson wrote in, look,

Dr. S. Dylan Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian

Institute, believes that in 25 years,

somewhere between 75 and 80% of all the species

of living animals will be extinct.

Kenneth Wat warned about a pending ice age and a speech.

The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years,

he declared.

If present trends continue,

the world will be about four degrees colder

for the global mean temperature in 1990,

but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000.

This is about twice what it would take

to put us into an ice age.

When I was in college, the two best known doomsday books

were The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome,

and an inquiry into the human prospect

by Robert Halebrunner, a book required

in one of my religion classes.

Suffice it to say none of the scenarios

in the statements or the two books played out.

Unfortunately, these false prophets

have never had to pay for their outrageous predictions

through a loss of reputation.

In fact, Erlich still is sought out by mainstream media

as being an expert on of all things over population.

The Doomsday Brigade moves on to other crises.

Of course, overpopulation or running out of resources

are not the only faux crises that the Doomsday crowd has created.

In the 1980s, our forests, lakes, and rivers,

supposedly were going to be lost to acid rain

while the early 1990s had the ozone hole.

Oom, the threat of acid rain supposedly ended

with a 1990 passage of the Clean Air Act amendments

while the Montreal Protocol of 1990 and 1992

supposedly took care of the ozone problems.

Since then, of course, the newest and most apocalyptic threat

has been global warming, which later was changed

to climate change with the main voice being former

vice president Al Gore, whose finances

have benefited greatly from his activism.

Not surprisingly, Gore has made a number of dire predictions

none of which have come true.

In his 2005 documentary, Gore declared,

the snow caps on Mount Kilimanjaro would disappear by 2016.

Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005,

hurricanes in the future would become larger and more powerful.

To the contrary, hurricanes have not increased

in intensity or number.

Loosely claimed that the sea would be rising up

to 20 feet in the century because of ice melting.

The seas are rising, but have been doing so

at the same pace as they rose in the last century.

In 2007, a British judge ruled that Gore's documentary

had nine errors by making claims

that were not backed up by current science.

The judge said that, for instance,

Gore's script implies that Greenland or West Antarctica

might melt soon, creating a sea level rise of up to 20 feet

that would cause devastation from San Francisco

to the Netherlands to Bangladesh.

The judge called this distinctly alarmist

and said the consensus view is that if Greenland melted,

it would release this amount of water,

but only after and over millennia.

Burton also said Gore contends that,

inhabitants of low-lying Pacific atolls

have evacuated to New Zealand because of global warming,

but there is no such evidence of any such evacuation.

But what would a new year be without even more dire predictions?

This time, we have UCLA professor Glenn McDonald predicting

that 2026 will finally be the year that we pass

the climate tipping point.

He, McDonald worries that 2026 could be the year

when global temperatures hit a breaking point

known as the 1.5 degrees Celsius rise.

I don't know if we are quite there, he says,

but we are very close and 2026 is most likely

to be hotter than last year.

So, why haven't the so-called experts recognized

that environmentalists have been crying wolf

for more than 60 years,

beginning with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,

published in 1962?

Part of the reason is that Americans have been propagandized

for years that capitalism is destructive and bad

for the environment,

despite much evidence to the contrary.

The flip side of that argument is that socialism

protects the environment even though the actual record

of socialism reveals one environmental disaster

after another.

As the New Year 2026 entered its first day,

the New York Times published a piece on the fires

and floods that hit the Los Angeles in 2025,

linking them, of course, to climate change.

However, the article also pointed out that wildfires

and devastating floods are hardly new to LA,

as the article pointed out.

Los Angeles has always been subject

to unnerving weather extremes.

In February 1938, heavy rains flooded the Los Angeles River

and killed 87 people.

On Thanksgiving Day, that same year,

dry conditions fueled a fire in Topanga Canyon

that destroyed 350 buildings.

In an essay first published in 1965, Joan Didian wrote,

Easterners commonly complained that there is no weather

at all in Southern California,

that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly,

numbingly bland.

That is quite misleading.

In fact, the climate is characterized by infrequent,

but violent extremes.

But then modern academia and modern journalism

are both about managing the narratives,

and especially the narrative that capitalism

is responsible for climate change,

and that violent extremes and weather are something new.

Nothing, and especially the truth,

is permitted to challenge these world views.

Ludwig von Meises in the anti-capitalist mentality

understood that even though the capitalist system

has vastly increased the wealth of most individuals

in our economy.

That doesn't mean that people always will appreciate

what they have.

Under capitalism, the common man enjoys amenities,

which in ages gone by were unknown

and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people.

But of course, these motor cars, television sets

and refrigerators do not make a man happy.

In the instant in which he acquires them,

he may feel happier than he did before.

But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied,

new wishes spring up.

Such is human nature.

He also pointed out that both European and American intellectuals

have hated capitalism almost since the beginning

of the modern industrial era and targeted the factories

as being especially harmful to the social order

they prized, as well as a purveyor of air and water pollution.

One is reminded of the line in the William Blake's Jerusalem

written in 1810 and was Jerusalem-builded here

among these dark, satanic mills.

In modern times, the American left, including those

in academia and journalism, have turned their hatred

toward the automobile.

Murray Rothbard wrote in 1974, it is becoming increasingly

apparent to me that we are facing not

a mere abhorrence of the Rococo or a desire to conserve energy,

but a deep-seated and even pathological hatred

of everything that the automobile represents.

Perhaps we can see the motivation more plainly

if we consider what the left wishes to put in the place

of the despised automobile.

What a boils down to is bicycles,

like they rode in the good old days of pre-affluent Europe,

and mass transit.

Mass transit?

You mean they want more of the filthy subways of New York City

where people are hurted in like cattle?

Yes, I think that is exactly the sort of transportation system

that the left wants to impose on America and the world.

Today, that hatred is geared toward the gasoline slash diesel-powered automobiles,

while driving an electric car, EV,

has become the symbol of all things virtuous.

That is, until Elon Musk had his short-lived appearance

as a government cost-cutter, which then led leftists to vandalize Teslas,

even though the majority of Tesla owners were Democrats.

The notion that electric cars ever would save the planet

has always been far-fetched,

and with the great unwashed, still preferring their gasoline-powered Ford F-150s

to the electric version,

causing Ford Motor Company to lose an unthinkable $20 billion in the process

of trying to switch to making EVs.

By politicizing the automobile and tying it to supposed climate disasters,

American political, intellectual, and media elites have demonstrated

their contempt for how capitalism has made modern life possible.

The guilty billionaire.

One of the developments of our present age

has been the presence of the billionaire environmentalist

who has sought to limit choices of ordinary people

in the name of saving the planet.

We've become too familiar with people like Bill Gates calling for

depopulation for places like Africa and Asia.

In the past, it was the foundation set up by wealthy industrialists

that had been at the forefront of the Doomsday industry.

But today, the billionaires themselves, like Gates,

have been spending much of their own money to push the view of environmental disaster

and how socialist measures can halt the inevitable slide toward oblivion.

One of the worst offenders has been Tom Steyer of California,

who used his money to convince the state's voters to chain themselves

in their economy to policies that have helped make California unaffordable.

The great irony is that Steyer now is running for governor

in the Democratic Party primary on a platform of making California affordable.

In his ubiquitous political advertisements,

he claims that by breaking up Pacific gas and electric and other utilities

and energy firms into smaller companies,

the results will be vastly lower electricity prices up to 25 percent lower.

Any competent economist can see through that nonsense.

In truth, like the industrial titans that came before them,

many of today's billionaires became wealthy by creating goods and services

that made life better for most people,

including making things more affordable.

Unfortunately, like the industrial titans that came before them,

these billionaires acting partly out of guilt

that came because they had become rich,

joined forces with the government to push harmful policies

favored by the political, intellectual, and media elites

all accompanied by the siren song of environmental doom.

Conclusion.

The save the planet mantra of American elites is not going to end

just because the loud and apocalyptic predictions

they made so publicly a failed to materialize

as we have seen time and again

when the doomsday predictions such as overpopulation or acid rain destruction

do not turn out as advertised,

the elites simply move to something else.

The beauty of climate change as a doomsday fixture

is that environmentalists can roll just about everything into it.

As we have seen recently, the rise of artificial intelligence data centers

are now the target of the doomsday elites

as they supposedly are environmental disasters on the horizon.

As noted earlier, climate change has been the disaster of choice

that has been the driving force for implementation

of disastrous policies that have made life more difficult

for people around the world.

Even with Bill Gates himself having recently backed off the claim

that climate change is going to destroy the planet,

we can still expect the loudest voices to call for even more drastic

and self-defeating measures that won't affect our climate,

but will make people poorer.

American elites have long wedded themselves

to the environmental disaster industry

and few are willing to jump off the bandwagon now.

From silent spring to the first Earth Day

to the latest proclamations that our planet is getting hotter,

we will have to deal with the annual New Year's predictions

that this year is the year to do something.

For now, the rest of us must just live with it

and hope the elites don't destroy everything good and decent

about modern life and take what is left of our liberties

with them.

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