Happy “Earth Day.” The left loves today almost as much as Tax Day a week ago.
The first Earth Day took place April 22, 1970, not coincidentally the centennial of Vladimir Lenin’s birth.
Back then, even Time Magazine said it was “a secular, almost pagan holiday — a sense of propitiating an earth increasingly incapable of forgiving what man has inflicted upon it.”
Much like the Chinese today, the Soviets did not give an iota about the environment. The most horrid pollution on earth, historically, emanates from socialist and communist nations.
If you want a clean environment, capitalism is essential, since free market countries can afford it, and most feel it a moral obligation. When you’re a communist citizen, your concern is survival, not plastic bags or whether to reuse a hotel towel.
These pseudo-religious zealots have been waxing apocalyptic for a half-century.
- “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years. By 1975 some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions.” — Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich
- “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East, and Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions, and the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — Prof. Pete Gunter
- “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution and will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life Magazine
- “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
All the above, of course, were proven false, like recent hysterical Al Gore conspiracies — which made him millions and famous with gullible people — that never came close to the truth.
As David French reported when the former vice president’s “point of no return” came to pass, “Gore’s prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement. There’s a veritable online cottage industry cataloguing hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe.”
In 2008, ABC News reported major cities would be underwater by 2015, with gasoline at $9 per gallon and milk hitting $13 per gallon. Even with inflation caused by the Biden administration, this is yet to occur. So now the current environmental eschatology projects our demise 30 additional years out.
In reality, the U.S. has little control over the world’s climactic trajectory. To our credit, America’s carbon emissions have steadily declined the past 15 years, while an increasing proportion originates from so-called emerging economies in Brazil, China, India and Russia. While President Biden holds a trifling “summit” and other Democrats re-introduce their socialist pet project, Republicans introduced sensible, market-oriented solutions this week.
A former teaching colleague — and avowed socialist — commended my relocation from California to the Midwest many years ago, saying, “We on the coast will be submerged, so I should join you.” He did not; he’s retired now, with a massive pension and oceanfront property. Like the Obama family, he doesn’t believe his own rhetoric either.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
