Environmental doomsters get it wrong again

Across the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Extreme predictions typically were wrong, draconian countermeasures turned out to be mostly misguided, and we should be grateful we didn’t follow their harmful advice.

We need to keep this history in mind as we are inundated with stories of climate Armageddon.

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies in recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have reduced air and water pollution dramatically through technological advances and then through regulation. Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world. This isn’t the scary future we were promised by environmentalists.

A recent peer-reviewed study counts almost 100 environmental doomsday predictions that environmentalists have made across the past half-century. Two-thirds of them predicted doom before August 2025, and all of these have turned out to be false.

The first well-known scare story was the 1968 book The Population Bomb, which warned that the global population was out of control and argued for widespread, forced sterilisation. Given the inevitability of hundreds of millions of hunger deaths, the book also argued we should just stop food aid to basket-cases such as India. Thankfully, the world mostly ignored this misanthropic and amoral advice. Instead, scientists spearheaded the first Green Revolution, which led to much higher crop yields and more than a billion more people well fed.

Today, India is the world’s leading rice exporter.

In 1972, Limits to Growth famously projected that food scarcity and pollution would cause global collapse. Time magazine predicted a future with a few gaunt survivors desperately tilling freeway centre strips in what used to be Los Angeles. The world would run out of everything from aluminium and iron to oil and food.

This was the mood that shaped the first UN environmental summit in 1972, when chairman Maurice Strong declared the world had 10 years to avoid environmental catastrophe. He became the first director of the UN Environment Program and argued that doomsday was “very probable” unless we ended destructive economic growth. Thankfully, we didn’t heed his advice. Instead, persistent economic growth means more than three billion people – 41 per cent of the world’s population – don’t live in extreme poverty.

Predictions that we would run out of resources were astonishingly wrong. Instead of rationing the last resources, humanity chose innovation that allowed us to increase supply dramatically while lowering cost. In 1980, the world had enough oil for 30 years of 1980-level consumption. Since then we have used all the oil we thought was left and 80 per cent more, yet because of better technology we have about 50 years left at higher annual consumption.

The simplistic, alarmist predictions of the 1970s is still seen in the climate alarmism that argues for expensive, inefficient policies by recycling many of the old worries of not enough food and more weather catastrophes. Climate change is a real challenge but the scares are exaggerated. For food, this is clearly shown by one of the most quoted meta-studies published in Nature. If there was no climate change the world would see 51 per cent more calories produced in 2050 than in 2010. Even with vastly worse climate change than expected, food instead would increase by “only” 49 per cent. A problem, not a calamity.

And despite fearmongering about weather disasters, hard data shows the death toll from floods, droughts, storms and wildfire has declined dramatically across the past century from half a million each year in the 1920s to less than 9000 annually during the past decade – a 98 per cent reduction.

Global climate-related damages, measured in per cent of GDP as the UN insists, have been declining, not increasing since 1990.

It is striking to note the fearmongers’ proposed solutions are much the same as they were in past decades: repent and turn away from progress. Ivory tower, richworld academics advocate degrowth even as most of the world is dependent on economic growth to get out of grinding poverty.

Alarmist climate concern has become enshrined in policy, with nearly every rich country endorsing the idea of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The best academic estimates show that the costs outweigh the benefits in the 21st century by seven to one, with policies to achieve this goal costing an unaffordable $US27 trillion ($41.4 trillion) annually.

Climate economics clearly tells us the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest significantly in research and development for low-carbon dioxide energy. By boosting innovation we can achieve technological breakthroughs that eventually will make green energy more affordable than fossil fuels. Instead of just rich countries buying expensive green energy to feel virtuous, that can help the whole world to switch because green is cheaper.

Just as we should give thanks that we didn’t follow the failed jeremiads of the past, today we need to recognise that climate doomsterism is not only mostly untrue but also utterly unhelpful.

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of False Alarm and Best Things First.