Earth Day 2025
What have we learned in the past half-century?
It’s been 55 years since the first Earth Day. So, what’s happened in the last half-century of dire predictions?
Just prior to the first Earth Day in 1970 were the calamitous warnings of Paul Ehrlich. He was the Al Gore of the day. Ehrlich’s 1969 book, The Population Bomb, was a smash best-seller. He warned world population would soon outstrip food production leading to global food riots.
The science was in, there was widespread consensus and the conclusion was no longer debatable, according to Ehrlich. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote in the prologue of his book. Civilization was likely doomed. Skeptics were called “uninformed,” “ignorant” and “irresponsible.” Society would hear this name-calling again and again decades later with skeptics of Al Gore’s man-made global warming claims, and those who questioned the 2016 Russian election hoax.
We would also hear “not open to debate,” “settled science,” and “widespread consensus” in response to anyone who questioned the government narrative that the coronavirus evolved in nature. Those who proposed it was developed at a nearby Chinese lab engaged in bioweapons research would be denounced.
Ehrlich argued that population sacrifices must first begin in the US. He dismissed the responsibility of the two most populous countries, China and India, from having to adopt the drastic steps he advocated the US must first take.
Would Americans “be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to the starving masses in Asia?” Ehrlich wrote. One proposal often mentioned, according to Ehrlich, was “the addition of temporary sterilants [sic] to water supplies or staple food” in order to achieve a zero population growth.
In his book, Ehrlich forecasted one of three scenarios would likely occur.
First, there would be global food riots owing to shortages and war could break out. He cast the US as the global villain because of this country’s insistence in using agricultural chemicals that would have been banned by the UN. Second, more than one billion people would die in one year alone because of disease and plague precipitated by overpopulation. Third, people would simply perish due to mass starvations. “Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, he wrote.
Most of the grim results would occur by the 1980s and the disastrous outcome would be well-known before the year 2000. After publication of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich made an updated pronouncement that the US population would dwindle to less than 23 million people by 1999.
Ehrlich was so popular with the liberal crowd they could not get enough of him. He made twenty appearances on NBC’s Tonight Show to hype his claims, according to author Jack Cashill.
As history has shown, Ehrlich was wildly wrong in his population and starvation prognostications. Yet, he is still revered by the left. Despite his failures, Ehrlich is not one to sit on his unearned laurels. He revised his global overpopulation warnings to include the dangerous impact it has in contributing to manmade global warming.
Forty years after being widely discredited, CBS News attempted to breathe new life into Ehrlich’s wild claims. The New Year’s Day 2023 edition of 60 Minutes included a story titled “The Vanishing Wild.”
Stories like this 60 Minutes segment are derisively referred to in the news industry as ‘click-bait material.’ The main goal of click-bait material is to not to inform, but to have the story shared on the internet and posted on social media. “The Vanishing Wild” was an alarmist story intended to get the audience riled up with predictions of a global demise of nearly all of mankind.
The story’s main point was simple. Food supplies are becoming scarce and soon starvation will set in and people will die off.
This we-cannot-feed-the-world trope conflicts with another sacred cow campaign being promoted by the political left. On the one hand, they insist people will starve because there is not enough food. On the other hand, they urge farms be shut-down due to manmade global warming concerns.
In the Netherlands, as many as 3,000 Dutch farms may fall under the government axe because they are contributing to a climate calamity. But don’t worry, we are told. People can survive by eating insects.
One of the end-is-nigh guests in the 60 Minutes story was Anthony Barnosky. He claimed there have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. And we are headed toward a sixth, he insisted. “And by mass extinctions, I mean at least 75%, three quarters of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth,” Barnosky told correspondent Steve Pelley.
Another guest interviewed was Paul Ehrlich, the longtime gadfly in the doomsday movement.
Ehrlich reminded a pliant Pelley that those people who did not subscribe to his the-end-is-near view were “uninformed Americans, ‘experts’ and non-experts alike,” and they were “ignorant,” and “irresponsible.”
The world’s population has doubled since The Population Bomb was published and there have been no reported food riots. Facts can be very, very inconvenient.
Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth gave similar predictions that never happened. He said there’d be no snow on Mount Kilimanjaro by 2016. It’s still snow-covered today. Gore also claimed global warming had become so critical it would cause both floods and drought. Wait, what? Both?
Gore’s film won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and the audio version received a Grammy. For his efforts to save the planet, Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a very good haul for a film that grossed a rather paltry $23 million in domestic box office receipts.
After the film was released, a number of strange bedfellows jumped onto the manmade global warming bandwagon. In one public service announcement, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, who sat together on a sofa like a pair of love-struck lab partners before they were to head off to the senior prom, demanded a solution to global warming.
A year later the always-evolving Gingrich would abandon his newfound fossil-fuels-are-evil buddies and publish a book titled Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less in which he advocated pumping as much oil from the ground as is humanly possible.
The use of the phrase “climate change” was a convenient after-thought when typical weather patterns blew-up Gore’s original global warming narrative. Gore used the phrase “global warming” 24 times in his film. However, he used the term “climate change” only twice.
Gore wasn’t alone in his dire forecasts. Likeminded cheerleaders warned the Arctic would be ice-free in 2013, if not earlier. Wrong again.
Shortly after his film debuted, Gore was joined by a chorus of voices who insisted Americans use less energy while not heeding their own advice. This band of hypocrites included then-Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who denounced low mileage vehicles at a press conference outside a Capitol Hill gas station before hopping into her staff-driven, 18-mpg Chrysler LHS luxury car for the two block ride back to her office.
Former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. (D-TN) appeared on MSNBC criticizing gas guzzling trucks and SUVs despite the fact he was driving a 15-mpg Chevy Tahoe. Also in 2006, then-Senator John Kerry (D-MA) co-signed a letter to the White House demanding a reduction of oil use in the US while jetting around in his wife’s $48-million Gulfstream G-V jet that burns 750 gallons of fuel an hour.
As for Gore, he arrived at a Berkeley speaking engagement to tout his manmade warming claims. He arrived in a Toyota hybrid, accompanied by a motorcade of three motorcycles, two limousines and Dodge Ram pick-up truck. Seven vehicles were used to transport one guy. Fuel conservation isn’t for them — just everyone else. Gore and his pals believed they have a lifetime exemption from practicing what they preach.
In all fairness to Gore, he justified his exorbitant energy use because he claimed he purchased “carbon offsets,” a scam in and of itself. What made the scam even more remarkable is that Gore purchased the “carbon offsets” from a company in which he has a financial interest. What a sacrifice.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be good stewards of our environment. But we shouldn’t enact absurd and even damaging policies based on irresponsible claims. Oftentimes, these policies enrich some people at the expense of the public. Gore made more than $300 million from his alarmist claims.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
Mark welcomes all news tips and story ideas in the strictest of confidence. You can reach him at markhyman.tv (at) gmail.com.