How Climate Change Reversal Efforts Could Destroy Our Planet

The Y2K situation was a breaking point for all of humanity.  Or so it seemed.

But what actually happened? Essentially nothing. And the UN was pleased:

Now, there’s only one problem. The governments didn’t really have anything to do with it. Now you may think, well, wait a minute. Y2K was a real problem, and the concerns, even if they were exaggerated, nevertheless mobilized people and led them to success. This is a common but entirely erroneous view.

It’s easily demonstrated here. The United States government on Y2K spent $6 billion. Citibank alone spend nearly $1 billion, and total U.S. expenditures were in the region of $100 billion, which means the government spent six percent of the total. Globally, as you can see, there were $200 billion in expenditures, so you see something like this.

So, here’s the United States government, and we are asked to imagine that it is responsible for saving us from this crisis. Would Citibank have spent the money to fix its Y2K problem without government urging? Of course, because not to do so would have put them out of business, and the same with other banks and businesses around the world. Yet, government takes credit.

To encourage what is happening anyway is a common strategy in many areas of advocacy. For example, it now seems clear that despite the warnings of Paul Ehrlich and others, we are not going to have a population explosion of 14 billion people and accompanying mass starvation.

How did we avoid this explosion? Because, the head of Planned Parenthood once explained to me, everybody in the world listened to Ehrlich and got busy stopping population growth. I could see in my mind Yemeni tribesmen, you know, finding a copy of the book.

But the more significant point is that I was really astonished that she was so ill-informed about her subject area, because Ehrlich may be a celebrity in the West, but his advocacy had little to do with solving the problem of population, because that problem was already being solved by itself at the time he wrote the book.

Here is a graph from the World Bank. It’s not very easy to understand, but it’s the World Bank.

If we look here at where Ehrlich’s book appeared, you see that the—it’s hard for me to follow. Anyway, the birth rate in developed countries was falling for about 100 years at that point, and in the developing nations, it had been falling for close to a decade. Ehrlich was thus urging people to do what they had already been doing for some time, and it’s not clear to me whether he knew that or not. But certainly when he said, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over; at this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he’s simply wrong. You can see the death rate here for the developed countries and the death rate here for the developing countries, and as you can see, it never went up.

Ehrlich’s message, crying out in desperation to urge what’s already happening, is not unique. We have a contemporary example of the call by politicians and activists to end our dependence on fossil fuels and move to a carbon-neutral lifestyle. Their call to action is, however, a little bit late.

Turn to the following page to see how these soothsayers who are showing us the end of the world in another decade or two are actually trumpeting situations that are already on the decline and, therefore, the catastrophes will never actually occur!  Let’s take a look at fossil fuels!

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