Since the Second World War, powerful movements have been predicting that overpopulation, climate change, and various environmental disasters would soon make the planet unlivable.
None of these predictions has come true, but that has seemingly only led these fanatical movements to redouble their efforts, convinced perhaps that when the collapse comes it will be all the worse for having been so long delayed.
The earliest wave of gloom and doom was generated by those who were warned about something they called “overpopulation.”
Leading the way was my former colleague at Stanford University, Paul Ehrlich, who in the mid-sixties began making increasingly wild claims about the coming Armageddon.
The population was outpacing the food supply, Ehrlich claimed, and there was simply no way to feed everyone. Hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death in the next decade.
There was a good possibility, he went on, that the world famines that would begin in the 1970s would lead to thermonuclear war and the extinction of the human species. (George Getze, “Salt Lake City Tribune, 17 November 1967, “Dire Famine Forecast by ’75.”).
He said that the population of the U.S. was already too big, and that its population might have to be controlled by force, perhaps by putting sterilizing agents into the drinking water and staple foods. He singled out Roman Catholics in particular and said that Rome should be pressured into going along with these and other methods of birth control.
This “repent, the end of is near” prophecy, like the ones that would follow, did not age well. But it accomplished its purpose. The media ran with it, and the public was terrified. The public turned to the politicians and demanded action, and the politicians were only too happy to comply.
Over the past half-century, governments have spent tens of billions of dollars in an effort to reduce the number of babies born. Even now, hundreds of thousands of people continue to be employed in the worldwide movement to combat something called “overpopulation.”
They can’t define overpopulation—even today there is still no workable demographic definition of what constitutes too many people—but they are just as certain today as they were in 1967 that it must be stopped.
The same scenario has played out many times since, in scam after scam.
You may not remember Global Cooling, but I do. I was at Stanford University in the seventies when it began, and the university’s President, Donald Kennedy, was all in. He even edited a book about it.
The theory—such that it was—was that man was putting so much fine dust in the air by using fossil fuels that they would screen out the sunlight, or at least enough so the average temperature would drop five or six degrees and trigger a new Ice Age.
But when the scientists noticed that the earth’s temperature was not falling but rising—ever so slightly—they pivoted on a dime and switched to Global Warming. In the decades since we have been hectored about using fossil fuels on the false grounds that this is causing the planet to warm.
When global temperatures stopped rising some 20 years ago, they reinvented themselves again as opponents of Climate Change. Every heat wave or cold front, blizzard or hurricane, flood or drought is now taken as further “proof” that human beings have somehow wrecked the weather.
The one constant in this cascade of faux crises is that the population controllers and their environmentalist allies always blame them on humanity and its use of fossil fuels.
So, for some time now, in addition to waging a war on population, the population controllers have been waging a war on energy as well. Both Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin are slowly shutting down oil production, albeit for different reasons.
Reducing the world’s supply of fossil fuels without having a ready replacement will push millions into starvation, sickness, death, and violence. The dreaded fertilizer shortage anticipated for 2023 will reduce life expectancies even further.
And then there is Covid. The population controllers, including some of the world’s wealthiest people, have long wanted to plague us to death, or vax us into infertility.
If the goal is to reduce the world’s population, the population controllers and their enviro-allies may finally be succeeding.
The only people in the West who will feel good about all this are those who have been duped into thinking there are too many people, or that Climate Change is real.
There is, of course, an added bonus for those who got in on the scam early, and invested in gov’t subsidized windmills, solar panels, or carbon credits.
Or, say, mRNA vaccines.
PRI’s New Year’s Resolution: We will continue to expose these fraudsters in 2023.
