[MNDude]

Forgot to mention the Ozone Hole.

[sauropod]

.

[catbertz]

Great read of all the nonsense fear mongering in my lifetime.

[RayChuang88]

The great famines since the first Earth Day in 1970 were caused by war or deliberate political action--for example, the infamous famine in Ethiopia during the civil war there in the 1980's.

And at least in the Western world, we've made great strides in cleaning up the air, thanks to tighter controls on automobile and industrial emissions. (Indeed, it's very rare we get high-level smog alerts in the Los Angeles Basin anymore.)

[rockinqsranch]

I see much of the commentary at this point is telling us they did not read the entire article before posting.

[hecticskeptic]

Earth Day? I think he meant Lenin’s birthday, no?

[Nip]

My favorite prediction from the early Earth Day’s was Icebergs in the Gulf of Mexico by 2000. But, was when the big bugaboo was Global Cooling.

[Skepolitic]

Of course the bozos with PhD’s who made predictions back in the 1970s.

They were operating under the false premise that Marxism would prevail. If that premise had been correct, there would have been global crop failures, mass starvation, and utter resource depletion.

[Vendome]

They even predicted women would stop hitting on me and just yesterday I couldn’t get rid of another pest.

Damned attractive too but, I was in the middle of something amd needed her to leave.

Threw her back into the pond...

[Sherman Logan]

I’m so positively ancient that I remember when one of Jimmy Carter’s big answers to the impending shortage of oil was to increase federal funding for research on how to extract oil from shale. It ended the way you would expect: it went nowhere. But some decades later, private oil companies did find a way to more economically extract oil from shale—and environmentalists promptly made it public enemy #1.

Carter tried to develop oil shale, not shale oil.

Oil shale is a type of rock. Shale oil is more or less ordinary petroleum, just trapped in rock.

[BwanaNdege]

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken

[Pajamajan]

Bookmark

[lulu16]

Here’s the list:

1) Global Cooling (deforestation causes new glacial age)
2) Overpopulation (growth out paces production)
3) Mass Starvation (agricultural depletion)
4) Resource Depletion (peak oil)
5) Mass Extinction ( meteor crash)
6) Renewable Energy ( dealing with problem that does not exist)
7) Global Warming (If the current trend continues...)

[CyberAnt]

BTTT

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

The author of that old Reason article, by the way, was Ronald Bailey, who has since turned alarmist, in the style of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and who is the one asking what it would take for us to accept the reality of global warming.

style of Invasion of the Body Snatchers