Doom List

Silent Spring: DDT and Malaria

Global Cooling

In the 1970’s, certain scientists claimed global temperatures were dangerously cooling.  Time and the Washington Post reported that world temperatures had fallen for 20-30 years.  A notorious 1975 Newsweek story claimed average ground temperatures dropped half a degree between 1945 and 1968. Since then alarmism about “global cooling” has since given way to alarmism about “global warming.” But some global cooling doomsayers like Stephen Schneider have managed to turn themselves into advocates for the global warming theory. What’s constant is their advocacy for climate change alarmism.

The Population Bomb

In 1798 Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population concluded that human population was growing geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), outstripping an arithmetic rise in food production (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.).  In 1968, Paul Ehrlich restated Malthus in his book The Population Bomb. Its famous first words, “The battle to feed all humanity is over.  In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death…,” were widely repeated by advocates for population control. In 1968 Ehrlich started his own organization Zero Population Growth (which in 2002 changed its name to the less draconian Population Connection).  Other prominent Malthusians include the group Population Action International, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, David Pimentel of Cornell University, and Russell Hopfenberg of Duke University.

Resource Depletion

In 1972 the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies in over 30 languages.  It predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability and depletion of natural resources.  The Club’s predictions were based on estimates of known reserves of natural resources divided by their current annual usage. The Club’s assumption: As world population increases so will world resource demand, and hence the expectation of looming resources depletion. But the supply of natural resources is never a fixed amount subject to depletion. Resource economists explain that as demand increases, prices rise. That has two consequences: Either less accessible resource reserves will become economically viable to explore and develop or users will seek out and develop resource substitutes.

Peak Oil

In 1956, Marion King Hubbert, a Shell Oil geoscientist, predicted that US domestic oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970 and then begin a sudden decline. The claim fed off estimates that world resources were near exhaustion. Hubbert and other alarmists have issued repeated predictions that world oil production will peak in the year 2000 or in 2003, or 2007, or 2018. That will lead to bank failures and the collapse of economies. Hubbert’s prophecies echo earlier doomsaying predictions about the exhaustion of timber supplies, whale oil, fresh water and food. In all these examples doomsayers ignore the basic economic principle that shortages generate incentives.

"Timber"

In 1908, forester Gifford Pinchot issued a dire warning that American forest supplies would be depleted by the 1930’s.  Comparable predictions have since been made about the Amazon rainforest.  In the 1980s Nature Magazine reported that some analysts believed the rainforest would be destroyed by 1990.  In the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund claimed the rainforest would be destroyed by 2000.  The latest doomsayer predictions are that it could take up to 300 years for the deforestation of the Amazon basin and other parts of the earth.  Neo-Pinchotians ignore research showing that forests can recover biomass density in 20 years and total growth recovery in 80-100 years.

Dumb Growth

Advocates claim high-density ”smart growth” land development will make homeownership more affordable and allow people to live nearer to their work.  Smart growth policies will keep housing prices down, expand choice, and make American homeownership dreams come true. Not so, warns the Heritage Foundation. Smart growth policies put limits on development causing increases in median single family home prices. Capital Research Center studies show smart growth inflates home prices and lowers homeownership rates.  When prices in the Washington, D.C. smart-growth suburb of Arlington, Virginia, more than doubled to $746,000 between 2000 and 2006 low to moderate income families were priced out of the housing market.

Nuclear Power's China Syndrome

The horrors of nuclear power depicted in the 1979 film The China Syndrome seemed to come true twelve days after the film’s release when an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant ignited a nationwide panic. Although there were no injuries and no short or long term health consequences, anti-nuclear activists combined fact and fiction to frustrate the development of nuclear power. Since then, the success of modern design “passive safety” systems has meant that, compared to other power sources, nuclear power produces the least number of injuries per million megawatts of electricity produced annually: Coal (342), Natural Gas (85), Hydro (883), and Nuclear (8).  Natural gas, the next safest mode of electricity production, is 10 times more dangerous than nuclear power.  Environmentalists, such as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore conclude that nuclear power offers a safe, clean, carbon dioxide-free sustainable energy source that can help America avoid long term energy crises. 

Too Much Trash

Al Gore was once a garbage alarmist.  In the 1980s he worried that America would run out of space to handle its garbage. Gore claimed the U.S. was “running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind.”  The actual problem was skewed data: In the 1980s the waste disposal industry did close many small landfills, but it began to open large high capacity landfills as well as explore new methods of incineration and recycling.  Environmental alarmists ignored this development.  Recent data indicates that with fewer but larger landfills, the United States can accommodate at least 25% more trash with no danger of running out of future waste storage space.

The Well Dries Up

Alarmists fear poor countries and people will run out of fresh water because Western nations are consuming more water than ever. This false prophecy fails to recognize that lack of infrastructure, not supply, is responsible for inadequate fresh water supplies in the less-developed world. Alarmists also oppose well-drilling, irrigation, and dam-building to tap into existing water supplies.  Another technique, desalinization of ocean water, has provided the arid Middle East with potable water for more than 40 years. Water-saving markets and technologies can address this problem: In drought-stricken regions market-driven volume pricing cuts the subsidy of flat rate below-market pricing to heavy users of water.

Biofuel Salvation

Biofuels are renewable, create jobs, reduce foreign oil dependency and produce cleaner burning fuel supplies, say Sierra Club environmentalists and the agricultural supporters of ethanol who have seized the banners of “global warming” and “energy independence” for their cause. But current biofuels production requires so much coal and natural gas that it creates more pollution than the gasoline it replaces.  In addition, biofuels like ethanol, drive up food prices. The World Bank president and the President of Mexico have argued this point in the last year.  As food prices go up, people in poor nations will starve.