Month: October 2025

Over the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities that did not occur. They have pitched draconian countermeasures that turned out to be mostly misguided. We should be grateful we did not follow their harmful advice. And we need to keep this history in mind as we are flooded with stories of climate Armageddon.

A few of the many sensible and life-improving environmental policies adopted in recent decades were sold by fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and, then, 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, most obviously in rich countries but also increasingly across the world, not the scary future environmentalists promised.

A recent peer-reviewed study counts almost a hundred doomsday predictions made by environmentalists over the past half-century. Two-thirds predicted doom before today. All turned out to be wrong.

The first well-known environmental scare was in the 1968 book “Population Bomb,” which warned that the world 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 halt food aid to basket-case countries like India. Thankfully, the world mostly ignored this misanthropic, amoral advice while the scientist-led Green Revolution led to much higher crop yields and the improved nourishment of a billion more people.

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

In 1972, “Limits to Growth” famously warned that food scarcity and pollution would cause global collapse. Time magazine predicted a future in which bands of gaunt survivors would desperately till the centre strips of freeways 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 world’s first UN Environmental Summit in 1972, when chairman Maurice Strong declared that the world had only 10 years left to avoid environmental catastrophe. As the first director of the UN Environment Program, he argued Doomsday was “very probable” unless we ended destructive economic growth. Thankfully, we did not heed his advice. Instead, persistent economic growth has enabled more than three billion people, 41pc of the world’s population, to escape extreme poverty.

Predictions that we would run out of resources have been astonishingly wrong. Instead of rationing its remaining resources, humanity chose innovation, which has allowed us to increase supply while lowering costs dramatically. In 1980, the world had just 30 years of oil left at that year’s consumption rates. Since then, we have used all the oil we thought was left and 80pc more, yet because of better technology, we now have about 50 years left at our new and much higher rate of annual consumption.

The simplistic and alarmist predictions of the 1970s set the tone for decades, however, and still echo in the climate alarmism that argues for expensive, inefficient policies by recycling many of the old scare stories about not enough food and ever more weather catastrophes.

Climate change is a real challenge, but, as before, its scariness is greatly exaggerated.

One of the most quoted meta-studies published in Nature magazine shows how exaggerated it is. Without climate change, the world would see 51pc more calories produced in 2050 than in 2010. But even with vastly worse climate change than is actually expected, food supply “only” increases by 49pc, a problem, yes, but not a calamity.

And despite widespread fearmongering about weather disasters, the hard data show that the death toll from floods, droughts, storms and wildfires has declined dramatically over the past century from half a million a year in the 1920s to fewer than 9,000 a year over the past decade, a 98pc reduction. Since 1990, global climate-related damages, measured in percent of GDP, as the UN correctly insists on, have been falling, not rising.

Yet, the fearmongers’ proposed solutions remain much the same as in past decades. Their urge is to repent and turn away from progress. Ivory-tower, rich-world academics advocate de-growth even though, for the vast majority of humans, it is the only escape route from grinding poverty.

Alarmist climate concerns have become enshrined in policy, with nearly every rich country now endorsing the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The best academic estimates show that over this century, its costs outweigh its benefits by seven to one, with policies to achieve it costing an unaffordable 27 trillion dollars annually.

Climate economics tells us that the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest heavily in research and development for low-CO energy technologies. Innovation can produce technological breakthroughs that eventually make green energy more affordable than fossil fuels. Instead of only rich countries buying expensive green energy to feel virtuous, the whole world can eventually switch because green energy is cheaper.

Just as we should be grateful not to have followed the failed jeremiads of the past, today we need to recognise that resurrected climate doomsaying is not only mostly untrue but also utterly unhelpful.