Raining in their hearts: nuclear winter, population explosion, non-renewable resources, vanishing species - some of them are genuine problems, others are made up out of whole cloth - includes related article on cancer and pollution - Cover Story

National Review, Dec 3, 1990 by Ronald Bailey, Bruce N. Ames

ear winter, population explosion, non-renewable resources, vanishing species-some of them are genuine problems, others are made up out of whole cloth; all are easily exploited for fun and left-wing profit.

DOOM HAUNTS the end of the twentieth century. Cocktail parties in Georgetown, Santa Monica, and Manhattan are suffused with a finde-millennium air. The unwary party-goer will encounter fanatics determined to avert the apocalypse through the proper rituals. If only Americans will use cloth diapers, nonphosphate detergents, cosmetics not tested on animals, and eat environmentally sound ice cream (Rainforest Crunch) from Ben and Jerry's, then maybe a few righteous souls will survive the coming holocaust.

If anyone suggests that the end is not nigh, he is treated as though he had told a Southern Baptist convention that promiscuous homosexuality is not a sin. To remind people that most commodities are cheaper than ever before in history, that worldwide the human life-span grows ever longer, and that supplies of food grow ever more abundant is, well, impolite.

This atmosphere of catastrophe has been sustained by a cadre of professional doomsters. They have peddled their apocalypses in millions of books and scores of appearances on Donahue, Oprah, and Geraldo. They predict imminent nuclear, population, resource-depletion, environmental, biotechnological, and economic crises. Yet the planet still spins in its orbit and for the most part mankind continues to prosper.

These apocalypse boosters are intellectuals and policy-makers whose apocalyptic predictions are meant to frighten the public into adopting their leftist policy prescriptions. The pioneers of the genre, Doom and Gloom respectively, are Paul Ehrlich and Jay Forrester. In 1968, Ehrlich's The Population Bomb detonated into a best-seller. Four years later, the Club of Rome published the infamous Limits to Growth, based on Forrester's computer models. How do they look today?

End of the World Blues

LET'S TAKE a stroll down memory lane. In 1968 Ehrlich wrote: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Of course, massive famines involving hundreds of millions of people simply didn't happen. Sadly, far too many people, especially children, did die of starvation, but on nothing like the scale predicted by Ehrlich.

A neo-Malthusian, Ehrlich is enthralled by the eighteenth-century doctrines of the Reverend Thomas Malthus. In An Essay on Population, published in 1798, Malthus dolefully wrote that population grows at a geometric rate while food supplies increase only at an arithmetic rate. Thus population growth would always outstrip the food supply, ensuring that some portion of mankind would starve.

Yet in the two centuries since, Malthus's predictions have proved to be spectacularly off the mark. For example: Since World War II, world grain production tripled while the world's population doubled. The leftish World Resources Institute noted: "Over the past two decades, total world food output expanded, outpacing demand. As a result, in recent years, prices of major food staples in international markets declined in real terms." Between 1972 and 1986, the prices of rice, corn, sugar, beef, and soybeans all declined in real terms by about half; world prices for cereal grains dropped by more than half. When asked how this predictive failure came about, Ehrlich ruefully acknowledges, "I seriously underestimated the speed with which the Green Revolution would transform Third World agriculture and boost food supplies." Well, yes.

Economist Julian Simon, who has tangled with Ehrlich more than once, acerbically comments, "Every prediction that Ehrlich made has proved wrong." Simon asserts that "all trends relevant to human population are moving in a positive direction." There is more and cheaper food, more and generally cheaper mineral resources; and life expectancy has been increasing worldwide, indicating better health.

Even the trends in population growth that so alarmed Ehrlich have turned positive in the past two decades. Demographer Carl Haub of the non-profit Population Reference Bureau says the world's population will probably level off at 10 to 11 billion in the next century. "Most countries, including those in the Third World," Haub notes, "are evidencing demographic transitions to slower population growth." Indeed, industrialized countries in Europe and the U.S. are well on the way to zero population growth. The U.S. population will level off at around three hundred million. In the 1960s, just as Ehrlich was making his dire predictions, the world population growth rate peaked at 2 per cent; it has since fallen to 1.8 per cent-and continues to drop.

Twenty-two years after The Population Bomb, the fact that none of Ehrlich's predictions have come true has in no way harmed his career or his credibility. He was recently awarded the prestigious Crafoord Prize by the Swedish Academy and received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Ehrlich has repackaged his baleful predictions in a new book, The Population Explosion, published just in time for Earth Day.