Over the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Their extreme predictions were typically wrong, their 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.
This summer, headlines about the Great Barrier Reef painted a dire picture of climate-driven devastation, with environmental journalists claiming the reef was on the brink of collapse.
In reality, data shows the reef has its fourth-highest coral cover since records began in 1986, revealing these alarmist narratives to be vastly misleading.
Truth and scares
Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution 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 a hundred environmental doomsday predictions that environmentalists have made over 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 environmental scare story was the 1968 book “Population Bomb.” which warned that the global population was out of control, and argued for widespread, forced sterilization. Given the inevitability of hundreds of millions of hunger deaths, the book also argued we should just stop food aid to basket-cases like India.
Thankfully, the world mostly ignored this misanthropic and amoral advice. Instead, scientists spearheaded the first Green Revolution that led to much higher crop yields and more than a billion more people being well fed. Today, India is the world’s leading rice exporter.
In 1972, “Limits to Growth” projected that food scarcity and pollution would cause global collapse. Time magazine predicted a future with a few, gaunt survivors desperately tilling freeway center strips in what used to be Los Angeles. The world would run out of everything from aluminum 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 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.
Hardly a calamity
Instead, persistent economic growth means more than 3 billion people — 41% 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 dramatically increase supply while lowering cost. In 1980, the world had enough oil for 30 years of 1980-consumption. Since then we have used all the oil we thought was left and 80% more, yet because of better technology we now have about 50 years left at our new, much higher annual consumption.
The simplistic, alarmist predictions of the 1970s set the tone for decades, and 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 definitely a real challenge, but just like before, 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% more calories produced in 2050 than in 2010. Even with vastly worse climate change than expected, food would instead “only” increase by 49%. A problem, not a calamity.
And despite fearmongering about weather disasters, the hard data shows that the death toll from floods, droughts, storms and wildfire has declined dramatically over the past century from half a million each year in the 1920s to less than 9,000 annually over the past decade — a 98% reduction. Global climate-related damages, measured in percent of GDP as the UN insists, have been declining, not increasing since 1990.
Same old alarmism
It is striking to note that the fearmongers’ proposed solutions today are much the same as they were in past decades: repent and turn away from progress. Ivory tower, rich world academics advocate degrowth even as the vast majority 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 now 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 7 to 1, with policies to achieve this goal costing an unaffordable $27 trillion annually.
Climate economics clearly tells us that the most effective and cost-efficient approach to climate change is to invest significantly in research and development for low-CO₂ energy. By boosting innovation, we can achieve technological breakthroughs that will eventually 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 eventually 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 recognize that the resurrected climate doomsterism is not only mostly untrue but 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.”