The history of climatism, Part 6
The paralyzing principle and environmental anti-humanism
“As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.”
—Václav Klaus (b. 1941), Czech economist, politician, and PM [i]
Part 5 of this timeline ended the environmental Kuznets curve from the 1950s, a hypothesized relationship between environmental quality and GDP growth.
1953
Gilbert Plass (1920-2004), the Canada-born American physicist and avid philatelist, told Time magazine of his work on the effects of CO2 from industrial sources as a greenhouse gas and the potential implications of an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for global warming: "At its present rate of increase, the CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the earth's average temperature 1.5° Fahrenheit every 100 years. ... for centuries to come, if man's industrial growth continues, the earth's climate will continue to grow warmer.”[1]
1956
M. King Hubbert (1903-89), the American geologist, formulated a theory that led to the peak oil concept and predicted peak oil for the US around 1970. The forecast was quite accurate. In 1969, he predicted that the world's peak oil level would be around 2000. Current estimates for world peak oil range from 2019 to 2040, i.e., some argue that pre-COVID oil production was the peak.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) distinguishes between reserves and resources. Reserves are the oil that can be produced economically in today’s conditions, while resources are the oil that is ultimately produced. As of the latest estimates, the IEA estimated reserves to be at 1.7 trillion barrels and resources to be at 9 trillion barrels.[2] Assuming a consumption of 100 million barrels per day, reserves should last 46 years, and resources should last another 246 years. Natural gas will last even longer. Recoverable natural gas resources are estimated to be over 800 trillion cubic meters, including significant quantities of unconventional gas like shale gas and coalbed methane.
One error with nearly all Malthusian doom-like predictions is that they are conducted by experts, i.e., book-smart people who lack what Albert Einstein thought was more important than knowledge: imagination.
“Oil experts, economists, and government officials who have attempted in recent years to predict the future demand and prices of oil have had only marginally better success than those who foretell the advent of earthquakes or the second coming of the Messiah.”
—James Akins (1926-2010), American diplomat in 1973 [3]
Today, many environmentalists acknowledge that fossil fuels will last exceedingly long. To them, waiting until fossil fuels run out is not an option. Something needs to be done beforehand.
1957
Roger Revelle (1909-1991), the American scientist and Al Gore’s mentor, and Hans Suess (1909-1993), the Austria-born American physical chemist, wrote that “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment” in a paper examining CO2 uptake by the oceans.[4]
1960
Charles David Keeling (1928-2005), the American scientist, began to track atmospheric CO2 concentrations. He confirmed the findings of Svante Arrhenius from 1898 and is known for the Keeling curve that shows rising CO2 levels.
The measurements collected at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii started at 313 ppm in March 1958. This compares to around 423 ppm today and 277, 283, 296, and 370 ppm in 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2000, respectively. In the Jurassic era, it was around 1,800 ppm. Below around 150 ppm, plants don’t grow. What people sometimes forget is that CO2 is the food of food.
If you are at a cocktail party and feel bored, you could—just for fun—tease an environmentalist by arguing that rising CO2 levels are a good thing as they cause extreme poverty in the world to fall, as the second insert “proves.” (The Keeling curve above is almost a mirror image of the insert below.) That said, if you want your popularity at the party to look like the rising Keeling curve, you’d better abstain.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992), the Austrian-British economist, published The Constitution of Liberty, making the case that liberty is a prerequisite to growth and prosperity. One aspect of progress is the trial-and-error approach to science and economy: “Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.”[5]
If liberty is a prerequisite to “growth,” then the opposite of liberty, oppression or tyranny, is a prerequisite for “degrowth”.
Liberty promotes experimentation and risk-taking and demotes centralised planning and the precautionary principle (discussed below). The practical relevance today is that watermelon-green environmentalists (green on the outside, politically red on the inside) hinder progress and climate problem-solving by being, ironically, conservative in the sense of cherishing the old, e.g., windmills (a 1500-year-old technology), ox-driven ploughing, smoke signal communication, etc, while stifling innovation and modernity, i.e., third-generation nuclear powerplants, Golden Rice, 5G, etc, and thereby hamper progress.
Today’s prosperity and human development are a function of economic, political, and scientific risk-taking. (The anti-progress stance is probably also the reason why many greens are involved in death cults, nature romanticisation, and idealisation of pre-civilisation lifestyles, like paganism and/or nomadic or hunter-gatherer societies.) The watermelons want to roll back the Industrial Revolution and Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution. Being anti-liberty and pre-civilisation idealising makes them, in the eyes of some contemporaries, anti-humanist.
“To a conservationist interested mainly in biodiversity, we have degraded nature, but to an agronomist, we have altered wild land to make it better serve humans.”
—Peter Kareiva et al.[6]
Excursion: The precautionary principle
The precautionary principle is a fundamental approach to risk management that advocates for preventive action in the face of uncertainty. Rooted in the idea that "it is better to be safe than sorry," the principle asserts that when an activity poses potential threats to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. This principle emphasizes foresight and the proactive prevention of harm rather than waiting for scientific certainty, which might come too late to avert significant damage.
Historically, the precautionary principle emerged prominently in environmental policy and public health contexts. Its most cited iteration comes from the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which states, "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." This principle advocates for anticipatory action, shifting the burden of proof to those who advocate for potentially harmful activities to demonstrate their safety.
Critics of the precautionary principle argue that it can be overly restrictive, stifling innovation and economic development by imposing unnecessary regulations. They claim that the principle's reliance on uncertainty can lead to decisions based more on fear than on a rational assessment of risks and benefits. Science writer Ronald Bailey wrote the following critique:
“The precautionary principle empowers a self-selected elite of the timorous to obstruct progress for the majority. In a sense, the precautionary principle is a return to the era when clerics and nobles (environmentalist ideologues and bureaucrats today) had the power to halt innovations on the grounds that they were bad for the common folk. The precautionary principle is the opposite of the scientific process of trial and error that is the modern engine of knowledge and prosperity. The precautionary principle impossibly demands trials without errors, successes without failures.”[11]
The precautionary principle, therefore, is also a political tool. European governments, for example, protect their own farmers by applying the principle to meat from hormone-treated cows or genetically enhanced grains from the United States. The precautionary principle is an ideal tool to protect an economy from nearly anything foreign or new, including vaccines for deadly viruses.
In 2021, I wrote:
The precautionary principle can also kill people and is sometimes dubbed the “paralyzing principle.” Unnecessary delays in drug approval have the potential to do more harm than good. An uber-zealous bureaucracy or extreme risk aversion can cause harm. This means action and non-action can cause harm. The precautionary principle favours inertia and the status quo, which could mean a higher degree of risk. In the end, risk management is about the intelligent assessment of trade-offs.
1961
The WWF was founded. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization that works in wilderness preservation and reducing human impact on the environment. It used the Panda Bear logo to minimise printing costs (it needed just black and white).
“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”
—Prince Philip (1921-2021), Duke of Edinburgh and co-founder of WWF [11]
1962
Rachel Carson (1907-64), the American marine biologist and conservationist, published the best-selling Silent Spring, which included an attack on the use of DDT. The book was broadly supported by environmental groups. By 1972, a broad ban on the use of DDT had resulted. It was the first meaningful example of environmental activists being able to drum up enough hype for legislation to change.
To cut a sad story short, it turned out that DDT was not poisonous to humans but was an effective weapon against one of the most potent killers on this planet: malaria. It’s a macabre example of the proverb: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The death toll from the ban was in the millions. Furthermore, the Silent Spring case set a precedent that is still relevant today, namely the misuse of science to create panic for political gain.
“One of the sad patterns of history is the evolution of idealistic movements into corrupt or tyrannical institutions. With all the horrors and bloodshed inflicted on many countries around the world by Communism, it began as a movement with humanitarian aims.”
—Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), American economist [10]
In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) reinstated the use of DDT after millions of unnecessary deaths from the bans. The WHO's reinstatement of DDT use was driven by the urgent need to combat malaria effectively, the limited alternatives available, and a reassessment of the risks and benefits associated with its controlled indoor use.
1963
The US enacted the Clean Air Act, a law to limit air pollution. While environmental policies caused millions of human deaths, environmentalists also had successes. Cleaning up the air and water in the 1960s and 1970s is a success attributable to conservationists and environmentalists. Rising awareness of climate risk and some of capitalism's shortcomings, mainly negative externalities, contribute positively to civilisation and wellbeing.
1965
Hubert Lamb (1913-97), the English climatologist and founder of the Climatic Research Unit, examined historical documents and temperature records of central England and defined the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.
1966
Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-93), the English-born American economist and peace activist, wrote The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, in which he makes the distinction between the “cowboy economy” and the “spaceman economy”. The former is wide-open spaces and seemingly endless opportunities for resource consumption. The latter is a recognition that planet Earth is more like a closed spaceship on which we must carefully manage our resources.[7]
“[A] society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.”
—Kenneth E. Boulding
1968
Paul Ehrlich (b. 1932), the American biologist, published the best-selling The Population Bomb, essentially renewing Thomas Malthus's (1766-1834) claim that the population is growing too fast and the end is nigh. Ehrlich warned of famine, resource shortages, and disease and advocated coercive remedies, including compulsory population control. The book became a fearmongering, four-horsemen of the environmental apocalypse classic.
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people ... We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer... We must have population control ... by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
—Paul Ehrlich [8]
Paul Ehrlich, who, thanks to his showmanship, was on the Johnny Carson Show 25 times, is special in that he sticks to his forecasts even after being proven wrong. Today, postponing the day of reckoning is almost standard practice among fearmongering types if the apocalypse didn’t occur in the original time frame.
“With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.”
—Michael Crichton (1942-2008), American author [12]
The Population Bomb was popular with environmental groups and intellectuals and indirectly caused mass sterilisations (in 1970s India mainly) and, thereby, enormous human suffering. China’s one-child policy and the socio-economic malaise that goes with it, i.e., a lot of guys in China feeling lonely, is also an indirect result of The Population Bomb.
“When I left Greenpeace it was partly because I realized its members didn’t really care about people.”
—Patrick Moore (b. 1947), Canadian author and co-founder of Greenpeace [9]
The publication of The Population Bomb is where environmentalism started to drift towards totalitarianism and anti-humanism, a drift that the movement still has today.
One extreme form of anti-humanism is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. In the group's view, it would prevent environmental degradation.
“The true battle is:
Extinctionists who want a holocaust for all of humanity.
—Versus —
Expansionists who want to reach the stars and Understand the Universe.”
—Elon Musk, X, 15 May 2024
The first part of this quote is a bit extreme. However, it is consistent with the extreme end of environmentalists, i.e., the Paul Ehrlich fans, death cultists, ecocidists and deep-ecologists, who sometimes get at a platform at (east-coast) US universities or in Davos during January.
To be continued…
[i] Václav Klaus, “Freedom, not climate, is at risk,” Opinion Climate Change, Financial Times, 13 June 2007.
[1] “Science: Invisible Blanket,” Time, 25 May 1953. Watch a seven-minute film on the topic: Invisible Blanket.
[2] IEA and Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom – Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 43.
[3] James Akins, “The Oil Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, April 1973.
[4] https://www.britannica.com/study/timeline-effects-of-climate-change
[5] F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960), The Common Sense of Progress (Ch. 3).
[6] Peter Kareiva et al., “Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare,” Science, 316.5833 (29 June 2007), 1866-1869.
[7] Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” 1966.
[8] Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 166.
[9] Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (Vancouver: Beatty Street Publishing, 2010).
[10] Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? And other Essays (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1993), 179.
[11] Reported by Deutsche Press Agentur (DPA), August, 1988. Prince Philip, in his Foreward to If I Were an Animal; United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd., 1986: “I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers that it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist.... I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.” In an address on receiving Honorary Degree from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, July 1, 1983, he was quoted saying: “The industrial revolution sparked the scientific revolution and brought in its wake better public hygiene, better medical care and yet more efficient agriculture. The consequence was a population explosion which still continues today. The sad fact is that, instead of the same number of people being very much better off, more than twice as many people are just as badly off as they were before. Unfortunately all this well-intentioned development has resulted in an ecological disaster of immense proportions.”
Prince Philip represented the “spirit” of Ehrlich’s Population Bomb well.
[12] Michael Crichton, Environmentalism is a religion, Remarks to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, 15 September 2003.