SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: The ‘Population Explosion’ Myth Blows Up.

The UK’s far-Left Guardian admitted Monday that “the long-feared ‘population bomb’ may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.” The Club of Rome study, which was “carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School,” predicts that “on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly.” This being the Guardian, it added: “The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.”

It’s jarring to read this. Population explosion hysteria has been a staple of education for decades, and there are no doubt millions of people who still take the idea that soon there will be many more people on earth than can possibly be fed as axiomatic fact. Americans have so internalized this belief that people with large families are guilt-tripped on a routine basis. I myself can remember being inundated with this propaganda in public school at all levels, although of course, no one recognized it as propaganda in those palmy days, as far back as the early 1970s. The population explosion myth became the basis for many of the Left’s other favored agendas, including the “climate crisis,” the bug-eating plan, and even the sexual revolution, which was in large part made possible by the contraception and abortion that we were told had to be readily available in order to try to bring the world’s population under control.

The ’70s was awash in doomsday conspiracy theories, when “Progressives” were suddenly against progress.

In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Back in the early 1970s, it was overpopulation that was about to destroy the Earth. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, who has been involved in all three waves, warned that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” on our crowded planet. He predicted mass starvation and called for compulsory sterilization to curb population growth, even comparing unplanned births with cancer: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.” An advocate of abortion on demand, Ehrlich wanted to ban photos of large, happy families from newspapers and magazines, and he called for new, heavy taxes on baby carriages and the like. He proposed a federal Department of Population and Environment that would regulate both procreation and the economy. But the population bomb, fear of which peaked during Richard Nixon’s presidency, never detonated. Population in much of the world actually declined in the 1970s, and the green revolution, based on biologically modified foods, produced a sharp increase in crop productivity.

“Progressivism” — where time stands still: