Population Reductionists have been wrong over and over

Here's a great article from a few years back on the history of the absurd claims of the environmental movement, published in Reason. Those who instinctively doubt the alarmist claims they hear about global warming have good reason to do so. As catalogued in the Reason article, around 1970 the top environmentalists predicted:

-4 billion people would die off from mass starvation due to a "population bomb"

-Worldwide famine (at a time when technological advancement was doubling crop yields; since 1976 the amount of food per person has increased by 26%)

-By 1980, city dwellers would have to wear gas masks to survive, and air pollution would reduce the sunlight by 50%, leaving "none of our land...usable" (in reality, as incomes rise, pollution falls irrespective of government policy)

-We were using up the last of our "non-renewable resources" in 1970; oil would completely run out by the year 2000 in addition to copper, zinc, lead, tin, gold and silver.

-75-80% of animal species would go extinct

-90% of the rain forests would be cut down (76% still remains, and forests are growing in developed parts of the world)

-Either we'd enter a new ice age or we'd have global warming that melted the polar ice caps--environmentalists debated which radical direction the climate would take, but they were sure that one of them would occur! (In reality, warming between 1970 and 1998 was negligible, and since '98 there has been no warming)

Here's a great excerpt from the article:

Where did the doomsters go wrong? They assumed that overpopulation drives world hunger. To the extent that such conditions exist in certain places, the real culprit as–and is–poverty. “The images evoked by the term overpopulation–hungry families, squalid, overcrowded living conditions, early death–are real enough in the modern world, but these are properly described as problems of poverty,” explains Harvard population researcher Nicholas Eberstadt. “Poverty, like all other possible human attributes, is represented in individual members of a population. It is an elementary lapse in logic to conclude that poverty is a 'population problem’ simply because it exists.” [...]

How did the doomsters get so many predictions so wrong on the first Earth Day? Their mistake can be handily summed up in Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren’s infamous I=PAT equation. Impact (always negative) equals Population x Affluence x Technology, they declared. More people were always worse, by definition. Affluence meant that rich people were consuming more of the earth’s resources, a concept that was regularly illustrated by claiming that the birth of each additional baby in America was worse for the environment than 25, 50, or even 60 babies born on the Indian subcontinent. And technology was bad because it meant that humans were pouring more poisons into the biosphere, drawing down more nonrenewable resources and destroying more of the remaining wilderness.

We now know that Ehrlich and his fellow travelers got it backwards. If population were necessarily bad, then Brazil, with less than three-quarters the population density of the U.S., should be the wealthier society. As far as affluence goes, it is clearly the case that the richer the country, the cleaner the water, the clearer the air, and the more protected the forests. Additionally, richer countries also boast less hunger, longer lifespans, lower fertility rates, and more land set aside for nature. Relatively poor people can’t afford to care overmuch for the state of the natural world.

With regards to technology, Ehrlich and other activists often claim that economists simply don’t understand the simple facts of ecology. But it’s the doomsters who need to update their economics–things have changed since the appearance of Thomas Malthus’ 200-year-old An Essay on the Principle of Population, the basic text that continues to underwrite much apocalyptic rhetoric. Malthus hypothesized that while population increases geometrically, food and other resources increased arithmetically, leading to a world in which food was always in short supply. Nowadays, we understand that wealth is not created simply by combining land and labor. Rather, technological innovations greatly raise positive outputs in all sorts of ways while minimizing pollution and other negative outputs.

Indeed, if Ehrlich wants to improve his sorry record of predictions and his understanding of how to protect the natural world, he should walk across campus to talk with his Stanford University colleague, economist Paul Romer. “New Growth Theory,” devised by Romer and others, shows that wealth springs from new ideas and new recipes. Romer sums it up this way: “Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.” In other words, new ideas and technological recipes grow exponentially at a rate much faster than population does.

“I’m scared,” confessed Paul Ehrlich in the 1970 Earth Day issue of Look. “I have a 14 year old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.” Ehrlich didn’t die in a holocaust, and the world is far more pleasant than he thought it would be. It is probably too much to hope that abashed humility will strike him and he’ll desist in bedeviling the world with his dire and consistently wrong predictions. He’s like a reverse Cassandra –Cassandra made true prophecies but no one would listen to her. Ehrlich makes false prophecies and everyone listens to him.