“The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.”
—Paul Ehrlich [1]
Part 6 ended with Paul Ehrlich publishing The Population Bomb in 1968.
1968 cont.
The Club of Rome was founded consisting of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe. Some, therefore, perceive the club as a predecessor to the WEF. The Club of Rome was very influential in the 1970s.
One of the club's latest entries on Wikipedia references an official statement from 2019 in support of Greta Thunberg and the school strikes for the climate.
Excursion: expert failure
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It allows us to ridicule forecasts that went wrong. Some one hundred years ago, it was the automobile that changed everything. One of the all-time greatest forecasts is:
“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.”
—A banker
Many “experts” say pretty much the same thing about Bitcoin today. The car became the most important product of industrialisation, changing industry, business practice, and society by revolutionising mobility. Peter Drucker was on to something when he said:
“[F]orecasting is not a respectable human activity, and not worthwhile beyond the shortest of periods.” [2]
—Peter Drucker (1909-2005), Austrian-born American management consultant
Professor Tetlock of Superforecasting fame said pretty much the same thing, making reference to chaotic systems:
“In a world where a butterfly in Brazil can make the difference between just another sunny day in Texas and a tornado tearing through a town, it’s misguided to think anyone can see very far into the future.” [3]
—Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, authors of Superforecasting
An associate of David Sarnoff (RCA) said in the 1920s that “the wireless music box [the radio] has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” In 1940, Theodore van Karman, of the National Academy of Science, said jet engines and rockets would be of no future use because there was no material tough enough to stand up under their high combustion temperatures. Karman changed his mind five years later. In 1955, he said of his 1940 prediction, "What I did wrong was to write it down."
In 1943, IBM President Thomas Watson believed that “there is a world market for maybe five computers.” The same year, Admiral William Leahy of the Manhattan Project said, “The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.” So much for expert opinions. Peter Ustinov comes to mind:
“If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.”
—Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), English actor
A case in point from 1938:
“A Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is a strategic impossibility.” [4]
—George Fielding Eliot (1894-1971), Brooklyn-born Australian military science writer
"In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct" was Paul Ehrlich’s expert opinion in 1970. “We will bury you,” said Nikita Khrushchev, who US Army Brigadier General Frank L. Howley (1903-1993) called "a pig-eyed bag of wind," to Western ambassadors during a diplomatic reception in Moscow in 1956. "Castro will last a year. No longer." Those were quite literally the famous last words by Fulgencio Batista, who was deposed by Fidel Castro in 1959. “Victory is in sight” was the assessment by General Paul D. Harkins, Commander of US forces in South Vietnam, in 1963. Paul von Hindenburg, who was central in “allowing” Hitler’s ascent, in 1931: “Hitler is a queer fellow who will never become Chancellor; the best he can hope for is to head the Postal Department.”
“We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on the way out.” Decca, rejecting the Beatles in 1962. “The singer has to go” was the assessment of Rolling Stones’ new manager Eric Easton in 1963. "Children just aren't interested in witches and wizards anymore" was the assessment of a book publishing executive writing to J.K. Rowling in 1996, rejecting Harry Potter. She got lucky with her 13th publisher.
Harry Warner of Warner Brothers movie studio, when asked about sound in films around 1927 was confident: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Charlie Chaplin on the prospects of cinema in 1916: “The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama.” Marilyn Monroe was told early in her career to better learn secretarial work, or else get married. “Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look” was the argument of a United Artists Executive rejecting Ronald Reagan as the lead in the film ‘The Best Man’ in 1964. Margaret Thatcher, quoted in 1974, thought that “it will be years—not in my time—before a woman will become Prime Minister." She became Prime Minister five years later. Sometimes, even inside information doesn't help in making accurate forecasts:
“Nothing will ever separate us. We will probably be married another ten years.”
—Elizabeth Taylor, 1974, five days before she and Richard Burton announced their divorce
One somewhat comical aspect of these predictions is that many of them were not entirely unreasonable at the time. All the ridicule draws heavily on the concept of hindsight.
1968 cont.
Garrett Hardin (1915-2003), the American biologist, published his essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which was the neo-kickstart on the discussions on the governance of public goods. [5] The paper is a seminal work in environmental science and economics. The essay addresses the problem of how individuals use and deplete shared resources. The "tragedy" occurs when individuals, acting in their own self-interest, overuse and deplete these shared resources, leading to long-term collective loss. Each individual gains personal benefit from exploiting the resource but shares the cost of depletion with the entire community. If the commons are divided and owned privately, each owner has an incentive to manage their portion sustainably.
Hardin, too, warned of overpopulation. Hardin blamed the welfare state for allowing the tragedy of the commons, where the state provides for children and supports over-breeding as a fundamental human right. Malthusian catastrophe is inevitable. Today, Hardin’s logic from The Tragedy of the Commons justifies government intervention in free markets to correct the externalities that Hardin described.
In 2021, I wrote:
1968 was also the first time environmental issues received serious attention from any major UN organ.[6]
1969
The Don’t Make a Wave Committee met weekly in the basement of the Unitarian church in Vancouver, Canada. Their early mission was to protest underground nuclear testing by the US military at Amchitka, a tiny volcanic island off western Alaska. The activists created Greenpeace in 1971, believing that individual, non-violent action can create positive change. The motto of Greenpeace is "Act for Change." This encapsulates their mission of advocating for environmental protection through direct action, lobbying, and education to bring about positive environmental changes globally. Greenpeace is known for its active campaigns against environmental degradation, promoting sustainable practices, and raising awareness about critical issues such as climate change, deforestation, and pollution.
Today, Patrick Moore (b. 1947), the Canadian industry consultant, a Greenpeace co-founder and a famous Greenpeace dropout, calls the organisation “antiscience, antibusiness, and downright antihuman.”[7]
MIT faculty members and students founded the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in Cambridge, MA. UCS was formed to "initiate a critical and continuing examination of governmental policy in areas where science and technology are of actual or potential significance" and to "devise means for turning research applications away from the present emphasis on military technology toward the solution of pressing environmental and social problems." Over the years, the UCS has grown significantly, expanding its membership to include scientists, engineers, and concerned citizens across the United States. The organization remains dedicated to its mission of using rigorous, independent science to solve the planet’s most pressing problems. UCS conducts research, develops policy recommendations, and engages in advocacy and public education efforts to promote evidence-based solutions. The UCS is particularly well-known for its work on climate change. It produces reports on the impacts of global warming, advocates for renewable energy solutions, and pressures policymakers to take meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A man walked on the moon for the first time. Photos from the moon had a profound effect on mankind. Earth looks nice; and fragile. This is what happens when you go to the moon:
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
—Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016), Apollo 14 astronaut
1970
Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005), the American politician and environmentalist, and John McConnell (1915-2012), the American peace activist, initiated Earth Day, motivated by the nice photograph from Apollo 8 showing the earth from the moon and the Book of Psalms. The first Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970, and there was doom: [8]
22 April was chosen partly because it fell between colleges' spring break and final exams. This date makes sense, as teenagers and young people are the main audiences for the doom. The organisers of the first Earth Day repeatedly argued that the science was irrefutable and anyone questioning the scientific predictions was a “flat earther”.
On Earth Day, the battle cries helped create environmental awareness, resulting in “environment-improving” legislation.
Norman Borlaug (1914-2009), the American agronomist, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Green Revolution that saved over a billion people worldwide from starvation, according to one estimate.
I do not know why Ehrlich is better known today than Borlaug. Ehrlich and others were openly contemptuous of the Green Revolution, underway in countries such as India and Pakistan, which had already nearly doubled crop yields in developing nations between 1965 and 1970. Ehrlich sniffed that such developments meant nothing, predicting that "the Green Revolution…is going to turn brown."[9]
In 1970, the government got involved in earnest: It created the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the world's leading funder of climate research.
The switch from fearmongering with global cooling to fearmongering with global warming occurred in the early 1980s.
1971
Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (b. 1944), the American scientist who served as the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues, formulated the I=PAT formula where the environmental impact (I) is a product of the size of the population (P), the affluence of the society (A), and technology (T). This is why many “greens” are urban-woke-queer singles with no sense for family (which reduces P), who support big government and degrowth (which reduces A) and support tech regulation and limits to nuclear energy, modern agriculture and 5G antennas (which reduces T).
“The ideal Earth for environmentalists is the Moon.”
—Drieu Godefridi (b. 1972), Belgian essayist and author [10]
1972
The Club of Rome commissioned and published Limits to Growth, which became a four-horsemen of environmental apocalypse classic and was cheered by environmentalists. The Global 2000 Report from the Carter administration endorsed the report in 1980.
Limits to Growth is like a prologue to the IPCC assessment reports, which will commence in 1990. The 1972 report, too, predicted doom, had a holier-than-thou moral undertone, and was marred by scientising claims on the Malthusian theme of one or more of the four horsemen of the environmental apocalypse, i.e., overpopulation, rising pollution, climate destruction, and natural resource exhaustion.
The Club of Rome, like the IPCC today, spoke in the name of science and had little tolerance for opposing views, thus acting unscientific.
The first Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, occurred in Stockholm. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was created there, established by Maurice Strong (1929-2015), the Canadian businessman and diplomat. The UNEP worked with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to later become the IPCC. The objective was to produce the science that human CO2 was causing global warming.[11] This made the human impact the primary purpose of the research, a moot point man-made climate change sceptics like to point out as unscientific. The research has come to a foregone conclusion, with all the funding only going to one side of any debate.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
—Maurice Strong [12]
Olof Palme (1927-86), the Swedish then-PM, popularised the term “ecocide,” a pun on genocide, in a speech at the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In it, he said: “The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention.” The word "ecocide" was first used in 1970. The concept arose from concerns about environmental damage during the Vietnam War.
In 2021, a panel of criminal and environmental lawyers from around the world created a legal definition for "ecocide" as the basis of a push to criminalize mass damage and destruction of ecosystems. The definition was made available for states to consider and is part of an ongoing effort by the NGO Stop Ecocide to add environmental damage to the list of international crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC). This would create an arrestable offence for anyone committing ecocide and make individuals responsible for acts or decisions that cause severe damage to the environment liable for criminal prosecution.
Stop press: The ICC was in the news in May 2024 when issuing an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister in the midst of a war.
1973
James Gustave Speth (b. 1942), the American environmental lawyer, filed a key and successful lawsuit against a government plan to commercialize fast breeders. This put back climate risk management by decades. Nuclear breeders have multiple advantages: efficiency, no CO2 emissions, electricity from nuclear waste, and no uranium mining is required, as uranium from current nuclear weapons could last for thousands of years.[13] Whereas a conventional nuclear reactor can use only the readily fissionable but more scarce isotope uranium-235 for fuel, a breeder reactor employs either uranium-238 or thorium, of which sizable quantities are available. Fast breeder reactors are capable of destroying the longest-lived nuclear waste, transforming it to waste that decays to harmlessness in centuries rather than hundreds of millennia.
Currently, only China, Japan, India and Russia operate fast-breeder nuclear reactors.
Bill Gates supported TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company in the US, developing a fast reactor called traveling-wave reactor (TWR), which is fuelled by U-238. TerraPower estimates that burning global stored U-238 could supply 80% of the world’s population with the amount of electricity Americans use per capita today for the next thousand years.[14]
If it is true that electricity generation by coal kills 4,000 times more lives than nuclear energy per unit of power, millions of people have lost their lives due to the environmentalist’s successful fight against nuclear energy.
To be continued…
[1] Life, 17 April 1970.
[2] Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973).
[3] Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner (2015) “Superforecasting – The Art and Science of Prediction,” New York: Crown Publishers, p. 6.
[4] As quoted in Cerf (1998), p. 125, making reference to “The Impossible War with Japan,” The American Mercury, September 1938.
[5] Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 162 (3859), 1968, 1243–1248.
[6] Peter Jackson, “From Stockholm to Kyoto: A Brief History of Climate Change,” un.org.
[7] Patrick Moore, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (Vancouver: Beatty Street Publishing, 2010), Introduction, Kindle.
[8] Various sources, including Ronald Bailey, Earth Day, Then and Now, Reason, May 2000.
[9] Ronald Bailey, Earth Day, Then and Now, Reason, May 2000.
[10] Drieu Godefridi, The Green Reich (Texquis, 2019), 66.
[11] Tim Ball, The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science (Mount Vernon, WA: Stairway Press, 2014), 45.
[12] In 1992 interview, as quoted in Donald Gibson, Environmentalism: Ideology and Power (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 95.
[13] Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom – Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 222.
[14] Ibid., 224.