Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of 2009

By Editor on April 22, 2009 @ I Hate the Media
For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza. Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious,

spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of

Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”* Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”* George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”* Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”* New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”* Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“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.”* Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”* Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”* Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”* Life Magazine, January 1970

“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.”* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist



Stanford's Paul Ehrlich

 announces that the

sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” * Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”* Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'”* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”* Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
* Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

This Appeared Here

Earth Day has embraced hysteria and abandoned science

by Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier @ Foxnews.com April 20, 2018

Sunday is Earth Day, a celebration conceived by then-U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson and first held in 1970 as a "symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship." In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, however, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

Passion and zeal now trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility. The Earth Day Network, which organizes Earth Day events and advocacy, regularly distorts science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its Big Government agenda.

With a theme of "End Plastic Pollution," this year's event is no exception.

The Earth Day organizers have produced a "Plastic Pollution Primer and Action Toolkit," which enumerates all the scary warnings that activists should use to "empower journalists" to frighten the public and spur politicians to drastic regulatory action.

How dire is the plastics threat?

According to the Earth Day website, about as serious as you can possibly get: "From poisoning and injuring marine life to the ubiquitous presence of plastics in our food to disrupting human hormones and causing major life-threatening diseases and early puberty, the exponential growth of plastics is threatening our planet's survival."

Threatening our planet's survival? This isn't hyperbole – it's hysteria. Even Chicken Little didn't claim the falling sky would destroy Earth.

The Earth Day campaign forfeits a good opportunity by injecting a toxic mix of politics and junk science into "opposition to pollution" – that rare issue where we might have broad consensus. It turns genuine environmentalists (like us) into Earth Day skeptics.

The Earth Day campaign itself isn't about ending pollution; it's about ending plastics, foregoing their important applications – and stirring panic.

Consider Bisphenol-A, or BPA, the chemical component of many plastics that environmentalists love to demonize. One prominent environmental group claims BPA is "capable of interfering with the body's hormones, particularly estrogen, and scientists have linked BPA exposure to diseases, such as cancer and diabetes."

The above claim is not true. It is science fiction, not science.

Repeated independent studies have found that BPA poses no risk to humans at the levels at which we are exposed. The most recent analysis of a study conducted by the federal government and published in February by the Food and Drug Administration found "minimal effects" for the BPA-dosed groups of rodents. And the doses were far higher than humans are ever likely to encounter.

The various marches and demonstrations this Earth Day won't be limited to the supposed calamity of plastic pollution, of course; they'll feature many other causes as well.

But instead of a genuine concern for nature, many of those stumping for Earth Day on Sunday will more broadly oppose environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as fracking, nuclear power, and genetic engineering to produce new crop plants.

And if past is prologue, another recurrent theme will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the resources to expend on environmental protection and conservation.

This Sunday will likely also be heavy on vitriol toward the regulatory rationalization and reforms of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's new leadership has begun to correct the incompetence, disdain for science and corruption of recent decades.

The Earth Day Network has a "Greening Our Schools" initiative, so it's not surprising that kids holding signs they're too young to understand are a fixture of Earth Day events.

A frequent Earth Day assignment kids get in schools is to read Rachel Carson's best-selling 1962 book "Silent Spring," an emotionally charged but deeply flawed condemnation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects.

As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable 2012 analysis, "Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic," Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimize "positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts."

Carson's proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of the pesticide DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides, even though "Silent Spring" was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of misconduct.

Carson's observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State University. He was also a longtime member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
In his stunning 1992 essay, "The Lies of Rachel Carson," Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and called attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications in the book. Consider this from Edwards:

"This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that 'in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million (human) deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.' The World Health Organization stated that DDT had 'killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance.'"

One of the United Kingdom's great contemporary thinkers, Dick Taverne – also known as Lord Taverne of Pimlico – discusses in his book, "The March of Unreason," the New Age philosophy that underlies the organizers of Earth Day.

Taverne deplores the "new kind of fundamentalism" that has infiltrated many environmentalist campaigns – an undiscriminating back-to-nature movement that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious and reductionist attitude toward nature.

That eco-fundamentalism is out of step with current events. Congress, the Trump administration and many Americans are now firmly on the side of more sensible, more limited regulation. So it would behoove the Earth Day activists to collaborate in good faith and to support advances in environment-friendly technologies and business models.

Among these advances, we would include ridesharing services, Airbnb, modern genetic engineering applied to agriculture, and state-of-the art agricultural chemicals. All these things enable us to do more with less – but they have been vilified by activists.

Perhaps adding Lord Taverne's book to the Earth Day curriculum would allow students to consider the issues in a more thoughtful way. But we are not sufficiently naïve to expect that to happen.

Rather, we suspect that activists prefer that their eco-fundamentalism continue to go unchallenged. They don't want reason, science and respect for differing views to interfere with their agenda.

As far as Earth Day is concerned, a more egalitarian, evidence-based approach might advance civil society, alleviate human suffering and even help protect the planet.

Take back our environment for Earth Day!

by David Rothbard and Craig Rucker, April 19, 2018 @ CFACT

Earth Day is here again. I’m sure we can expect the same old green blarney that sets your teeth on edge. Yet, it would be a shame if we let tired propaganda distract us from some essential truths. We share a passion for America. Conservation is a natural for conservatives. Preserving the beauty of our land is a duty for those of us who love liberty. Passing our country and our planet down to our children, as good or better than we found it is hardwired into our bones. How did we let this sacred obligation be co-opted? How did we let the big government crowd make our environment their ruse de guerre?

Head outside (as we expect you already plan to do). Take to our mountains, forests, rivers, streams and lakes. Set sail on our oceans. You’ll find more than your fair share of people who share your values, reveling with their families in America’s beauty.

In recent years Americans and their allies in the free, developed world have enjoyed significant environmental progress. Our lands are cleaner and greener than they were not long ago. Government deserves part of the credit for our cleaner circumstances for addressing the economic problems of “externality” (transferring production burdens such as pollution to society as a whole) and “the tragedy of the commons” (depleting shared resources). Still more credit is due to the prosperity created through our free market system. Reliable power grids and energy supplies eliminated the need for large-scale dependence on firewood leading to verdant swaths of mature trees all around, populating areas that not long ago were completely bare. The incredible bounty derived from modern agriculture ensures enough food for all, requires less acreage, returns large areas to a wild state and makes hunting a matter of sport, rather than subsistence, permitting a tremendous rebound of wild species.

American conservation and environmentalism gave birth to our state and national parks and gave us the tools to clean up our rivers, air and rein in the litter that once lay all about us. We have much to celebrate.

Sadly, many once constructive environmental organizations later succumbed to radicalism. Joined by newcomers that were founded with radical expansion of government control over our economy and lives as their aim, they lost the guiding recognition that mankind is part of nature too. Robert Heinlein observed that, “in declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred.”

Today many environmental campaign organizations represent a dire threat to the basic freedoms and liberties that the United States was founded to secure. Ironically, they now pose an equally dire threat to the natural environments and human well-being the protection of which should be their aim. Their blinkered opposition to free market capitalism threatens to choke off the source of the prosperity that permits us to effectively steward our environment.

They thwart us from developing our domestic energy resources and leave us dependent on foreign nations that bear us no affection. They dogmatically block the use of nuclear power despite its excellent safety record, low cost and inherently clean impact. They advocate feel-good projects such as erecting giant wind turbines in unspoiled areas in a vain attempt to reign in CO2 emissions that were never a pollutant to begin with. That the wind turbines produce subsidies for their developers, but no meaningful power for our communities is a fact they choose not to grasp.

Since 1985, CFACT has debunked the false claims made in the name of our environment and exposed the hidden agendas behind them. We have been a patient and consistent advocate for real conservation and genuine stewardship of the earth. We have taken the side of developing peoples against those who would trap them in poverty.

This Earth Day we call on all people of good sense to retake our environment. We urge you to join us as guardians of the freedom, dignity and prosperity of all people. The future of humanity and the natural environment of which we are part, depend on it.

About the Author: David Rothbard

David Rothbard is co-founder and President of CFACT.

About the Author: Craig Rucker   

Craig Rucker is the executive director and co-founder of CFACT.

Earth Day has become polluted by ideology and ignorance

By Jeff Stier and Henry I. Miller April 20, 2017 @ Learn Liberty, A Project of IHS 

The first Earth Day celebration was conceived by then-US senator Gaylord Nelson and held in 1970 as a "symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship." In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, Earth Day has evolved into an occasion for environmental Cassandras to prophesy apocalypse, dish antitechnology dirt, and proselytize. Passion and zeal routinely trump science, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility.

nstead of a genuine concern for nature, many of those stumping for Earth Day this April 22 will share opposition to environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology, fracking, and nuclear power. Another pervasive sentiment will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the resources to expend on environmental protection and conservation. (It's no coincidence that poor countries tend to be the most polluted.)

Distortion of Science The Earth Day Network, which organizes Earth Day events and advocacy, regularly distorts science to advance its cynical agenda. This year's event, ironically enough, is dedicated to "Environmental and Climate Literacy," which is indeed sorely needed, given Earth Day's manipulation and misappropriation of our commitment to protecting the environment.

Consider, for example, the network's disingenuousness about fracking: "Fracking causes a lot of environmental harm and poses a threat to the health of a population near a fracking site due to contaminated water and the increased risk of asthma and other respiratory illnesses." In 2011, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson conceded that she was "not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water."

In 2013, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said he had "not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater." And just last year, the Obama EPA released the findings of its major report on fracking, which relied on 950 sources and was expected by activists to make the case against the technology.

The report was unable to cite any confirmed cases of water contamination. Under pressure from left-liberal members of Congress in the waning days of the Obama administration, the EPA changed the scientific conclusion of the draft report, which originally stated that there was "no systemic effect" on drinking water as a result of fracking.

Without any additional science or cases of contamination, EPA officials who sought to paint fracking in the worst possible light but who were confronted by the paucity of documented contamination wrote that, in "limited cases," such as in a rare fracking fluid spill, contamination could take place. In other words, not unlike riding your bike through New York's Central Park, fracking is not a zero-risk proposition.

Earth Day organizers and others pushing for across-the-board fracking bans rather than reasonable safeguards wish to "educate" us about the environment by suggesting that we should get our energy without any risk whatsoever.

Environmental Indoctrination of Children Even those who can forgive these activists for pressuring regulators and members of Congress to cook the books on scientific reports may be troubled by their campaign to indoctrinate students.

A few years ago, seventh graders at a tony private school near San Francisco were given an unusual Earth Day assignment: make a list of environmental projects that could be accomplished with Bill Gates's fortune. This approach to environmental awareness fits in well with the "progressive" worldview that the right to private property is subsidiary to undertakings that others think are worthwhile” the redistributive theory of society.

And how interesting that the resources made "available" for the students' thought experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of one of the nation's most successful, most innovative entrepreneurs.

Rachel Carson's Egregious Lies Another Earth Day assignment for those same students was to read Rachel Carson's best-selling 1962 book "Silent Spring, an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides for the control of insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable 2012 analysis, "Silent Spring" at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic," Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimatize "positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts."

Carson's proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides even though Silent Spring was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious misconduct. Carson's observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State University, a longtime member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.

If Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious misconduct.

In his stunning 1992 essay, "The Lies of Rachel Carson," Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and called attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications. Consider this from Edwards:
This implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse effects. Millions of people have lived with DDT intimately during the mosquito spray programs and nobody even got sick as a result. The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1965 that "in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million [human] deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable." The World Health Organization stated that DDT had "killed more insects and saved more people than any other substance."

Meiners and Morriss conclude correctly that the influence of  Silent Spring "encourages some of the most destructive strains within environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to consider the costs and benefits of alternatives, and the discounting of human well-being around the world." Sounds like the doctrine of the organizers of this year's Earth Day.

Ecofundamentalism One of the United Kingdom's great contemporary thinkers, Dick Taverne, aka Lord Taverne of Pimlico, discusses the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his perspicacious book, "The March of Unreason. Taverne deplores the "new kind of fundamentalism" that has infiltrated many environmentalist campaigns” an undiscriminating back-to-nature movement that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious, and reductionist attitude toward nature. It is no coincidence, he believes, that ecofundamentalists are strongly represented in antiglobalization and anticapitalism demonstrations worldwide.

In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his much-acclaimed novel "State of Fear"  that ecofundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and made a religion of environmentalism. This religion has its own Eden and paradise, where mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until mankind's fall, which came not after eating a forbidden fruit, but after partaking of the forbidden tree of knowledge” that is, science. This religion also has a judgment day to come for us in this polluted world ” all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by achieving "sustainability."

Environmental Alarmism One of Crichton's characters argues that since the end of the Cold War, environmental alarmism in Western nations has filled the void left by the disappearance of the terror of communism and nuclear holocaust, and that social control is now maintained by highly exaggerated fears about pollution, global warming, chemicals, genetic engineering, and the like. With the military-industrial complex no longer the primary driver of society, the politico-legal-media complex has replaced it.

This politico-legal-media complex peddles fear in the guise of promoting safety. French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner captured its tone nicely: "You'll get what you've got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy."

The tiny-minded misanthropes have enjoyed some dubious "successes." They have effectively banished agricultural biotechnology from Europe, put the chemical industry on the run, and placed the pharmaceutical industry in their crosshairs.

Lord Taverne believes these are ominous trends that are contrary to the principles of the Enlightenment, returning us to an era in which inherited dogma and superstition took precedence over experimental data. Not only do the practices of ecofundamentalism retard technologies and the availability of products which, used responsibly, could dramatically improve and extend many lives and protect the environment, but they strangle scientific creativity and technological innovation.

A Defense of Science, Reason, and Democracy With Congress, the administration, and many Americans now firmly on the side of more sensible, more limited regulation, it would behoove the Earth Day activists to collaborate in good faith and to support advances in environment-friendly technologies and business models. Among these, we would include ridesharing services, Airbnb, modern genetic engineering applied to agriculture, and state-of-the art agricultural chemicals, all of which enable us to do more with less but have been vilified by activists.

We are not sufficiently naive to expect that to happen. Rather, we suspect that activists' ecofundamentalism will continue to undermine the health of civilized society and of democracy.

Lord Taverne observed that when you defend science and reason, you defend democracy itself. Well said, Milord, and happy Earth Day to you.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology. Jeff Stier is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington, DC, and heads its Risk Analysis Division.