Andrew Bolt: Time to ignore green alarmists and doomsters

Let’s learn the lesson from the population panic before we let global warmists scare us for a day longer.

Paul Ehrlich.

It’s taken 55 years, but the big green scare about us being wiped out by our greedy ways is finally over.

No, no, not the ludicrous global warming scare. Not yet.

No, I mean the population one that the same sort of green alarmists flogged before that.

It started in 1968, when butterfly expert Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, and sold two million copies around the world.

It started a panic by declaring: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968.

Yes, it sounded just like Greta “people are dying” Thunberg today, and conned just as many people.

It was catnip for the media, which feeds on doom, and Ehrlich gave it to them by the truckload. In 1970, for instance, he said 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve to death in the 1980s.

Except they didn’t, of course. There was a green revolution – plant technology – which gave us better crops, and we now grow more food than ever, helped by the global warming that’s given us a little more warmth, rain and carbon dioxide.

This week the Club of Rome, a think tank which amped Ehrlich’s scare by warning we’d also run out of oil and other resources, ran up the white flag.

Research it funded predicted the world’s population would actually peak sooner and lower than long thought, as people got richer.

It would top out at 8.6 billion people in 2050, not the 11.2 billion after 2100 that was predicted by the United Nations six years ago. It would then fall to 7 billion by the end of the century on current trends.

In fact, China has already just recorded a fall in population, joining a long list of shrinking countries which includes Japan, Italy, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bosnia, Albania, Romania, Portugal, Poland, Greece, Venezuela, Syria and Puerto Rico.

China has just recorded a fall in population. Picture: iStock

Russia, Germany, South Korea and Spain are set to join them, with parts of North Africa to follow.

In fact, the problem now for China and poor countries is underpopulation. A poor country with an ageing workforce will struggle not to get poorer.

But let’s not be gloomy. Let’s learn the lesson before we let global warmists scare us for a day longer: green end-of-the-world scares are usually bunkum. Humans adapt better than doomsters reckon.