From Walter Williams: Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.
At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million.
In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992.
Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? Read more…
Here are my answers: In the 1970’s, government did not set up programs to spend billions of dollars on “climatologists” vested in the “global cooling theory”. In 1970, it was too absurd to start an industry whose sole purpose was to charge energy users (IE: all of us) for contributing to global cooling. Lacking these efforts, we survived just fine, thank you very much.
Also, unlike “global warming”, “global cooling” was not a religion, and dissent from “global cooling” was not met with job dismissal, social banishment, or possible legal action. The concept of “hate speech against the environment" was too ridiculous to ever be considered.
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