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Happy Earth Day!
Today is Earth Day and, as is my habit, I intend to celebrate it, as I have every year, by spending the entire day on Earth.
Other than that, it’s business as usual. I’ll continue consuming our abundant natural resources at my normal rate. My Yukon gets 16 miles per gallon on a good day, less in city driving. (I drove in town today.) I took #5 son out to lunch: we went to Five Guys and ate cow.
Locally and globally, the planet is doing well. The places that are really miserable, ecologically speaking, are generally places where collectivists (socialists and their ilk) hold sway. We’re fortunate here in America to have well-defined property rights and an economic system that produces enough surplus to allow us to do inherently dirty things in a clean, if somewhat more expensive, way. That could change: the Green New Deal, for example, would put an end to both property rights and surpluses, and give us the crippled economy of a third world country and the ecological deterioration to match. (If it’s any consolation, the GND would at least replace the Affordable Care Act as the most ironically misnamed bit of nanny-state overreach.)
Enjoy the day. Go outside and appreciate this beautiful environment that the wealth of our free-market economy affords us.
And eat a steak.
Published in General
I loved Pogo, but misanthropy really curdled the last few years.
Well, it’s not like the power plants shut down for a day. They still have to produce exactly the same amount of electricity to power the grid. Even wind and solar “produce” the same amount of power, whether you use it or not.
But hey! my town just banned plastic bags! Whoo-hoo! We’re saving the planet!
Meanwhile, China is still building coal plants, as is India. Keep it up!
18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Continued…
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
and my personal favorite…
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
But Kozak, don’t you see? If these alarmist predictions hadn’t been voiced, all this and more would have happened. They saved us, thank the Mother.
Don’t forget methane! Eat Mexican . . .
I don’t think that produces greening. It’s another color…
Then do it for the virtue signalling.
Actually, electric power is produced as you use it. This is because there aren’t any good ways to store bulk electricity. You typically have a base load, which can vary slowly over the year. However, the day & night cycle presents a variable load, chiefly based on heating and cooling, but also factories which only run during the day.
This is the dilemma for utilities, because the base load is perfect for large-scale power plants, nuclear in particular. Natural gas plants have become a boon because of their quick startup and load-following capabilities, perfectly suited for variable power demand.
The problem with renewables is they don’t follow the load. They follow the availability of their prime mover, be it the sun or wind. A higher demand won’t make the sun shine brighter or the wind blow harder.
I spent Earth Day (Lenin’s Birthday for you Bernie supporters) burning gas for 5 hours on god-rotting I=95. I could have made that trip 10 more times in even heavier traffic and still have had a weekend carbon footprint smaller than Emma Thompson’s.
Okay, wait. Now I’m completely confused. You mean to tell me I’ve had the cause-and-effect arrow pointed the wrong way all this time?
Man, that explains a lot.
I read this book in elementary school. At the time, this was the real prediction.
A photovoltaic cell produces electricity whenever light shines on it. One attached to the grid puts that electricity out into the grid as soon as it’s produced. If it doesn’t get used right then, you’re right, the problem is that we can’t really store it, so it gets wasted.
Same with coal plants. They didn’t slow down during Earth Day, because their start-up costs are immense. So, rather than simply virtue signalling, anyone who didn’t use electricity yesterday simply wasted it, and contributed to creating the same amount of CO2 as is created every other day.
Yeah.
Check out Fallen Angels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
“Set in an unspecified ‘near-future’ (one of the main characters has childhood memories of the Exxon Valdez disaster) in which a radical left-wing environmentalist movement has joined forces with the religious right through a shared distaste for modern technology. The resulting bipartisan conspiracy has gained control of the US government and imposed draconian luddite laws which, in attempts to curb global warming, have ironically brought about the greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history – an ice age which may eventually escalate into a Snowball Earth.”
Change “religious right” to ” Islam” and you have the Green/Red/Green alliance on the Left.
Yeah, I saw that bit of news. After visiting L.A. and walking out of a store with my arms full, like Steve Martin in The Jerk, I could console myself that I can avoid that back home. Not now. Guess I’ll do as others on here have and buy a gross or two of the plastic bags on Amazon to use as my bring your own bag.
I saw a news clip last year about some people trying to build a giant storage block for electricity. The reporter wasn’t competent technically, but it sounded like a giant capacitor, or capacitors wired in parallel, that could cover multiple football fields. Presumably, someone thought it could be “charged” and could hold that charge for cloudy days. Colour me skeptical.
Climate change predictions have been wrong 100% of the time. Hey leftists, those are bad odds. Maybe it’s time to listen to someone else.
There is this that Britain has.
I’ve heard of other plans to use solar or wind generated electricity to pump air or water into storage and recover some of that energy during higher demands. A lot of extra effort and space to try and make “green” energy viable.
I’d love to see the numbers on the actual efficiency of this scheme….
I suppose it’s easy to make fun of these folks, but a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity, and the best way to get good ideas is to get a lot of ideas and throw out the bad ones.” Maybe they’ll find a good one someday and we’ll be better off if they do.
I wanna know how they’re going to enforce it.
Like APD doesn’t have enough on its plate?
I have it on authority that Ma Lenin’s docs delayed the birth for that very reason.
People get so hung up on the value of a thing when it’s really the thought that counts.
No, All environmentalists are watermelons. Green on the outside, red on the inside.
According to Jonah’s podcast today with NR Editor Rich Lowry, Jonah was wearing pants that he had bought himself.
We had dinner with Jonah on the last NR Cruise. One of the other diners asked about the pants thing, and Jonah implied he got a kick out of it, because people everywhere who recognize him say, “Hey, I like your pants.”
Is that the cruise that Jonah talks about being in line, on shore, and people are calling out “Nice pants.”? He wonders what non NR people in line are thinking about people yelling nice pants to a seemingly random guy.