Before you dismiss what follows as the ranting of an alarmist, consider the long and inglorious history of alarmists themselves.
The sky, they have always assured us, is falling. It never does.
Yet each generation produces a fresh chorus of Chicken Littles, and each generation produces a fresh audience of the genuinely terrified.
The tragedy is not that these prophets of doom are wrong.
The tragedy is the immense human suffering their wrongness produces before the rest of us summon the courage to say they are wrong plainly.
Thomas Malthus launched the modern tradition in 1798, predicting with great mathematical confidence that human population would outstrip the food supply and condemn mankind to mass starvation.
He was wrong.
Then came Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb opened with the declaration that the battle to feed humanity was already over, and that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s regardless of any program launched to prevent it.
In 1971, Ehrlich announced that he would take even money that England would not exist in the year 2000. He predicted the United States would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980.
He was spectacularly, embarrassingly, catastrophically wrong on every count.
Bloomberg Opinion noted as recently as 2026 that Ehrlich's predictions were not merely mistimed — they were plainly wrong from their very inception.
America has more forests today than a century ago. No predicted raw materials have been depleted. England still exists.
The famines that did scar the modern era were not the product of too many people. They were the product of too much cruelty.
The Bengal famine of 1943, which killed 3 million Indians, was not a failure of nature.
It was a failure of British colonial policy, a man-made catastrophe engineered by the deliberate diversion of food supplies during wartime.
Mahatma Gandhi understood this with perfect clarity, insisting that Indian poverty and Indian hunger were not the inevitable consequences of Indian population, but the deliberate consequences of imperial exploitation.
The Ethiopian famines of the 1980s were not caused by too many Ethiopians. They were caused by the Derg regime's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war and attempted genocide against its own people.
Every honest historian of that catastrophe reaches the same conclusion.
Famine, in the modern world, is almost always man-made. It is the instrument of tyrants, not the verdict of nature.
The earth is not overcrowded. This planet possesses sufficient arable land, sufficient fresh water, and sufficient agricultural technology to feed every human being alive and billions more.
The Green Revolution that Ehrlich's followers dismissed fed billions and produced a global food surplus that persists to this day.
The real problem was never too many people.
It has always been too little liberty, too little property rights, and too much government standing between a farmer and his market.
Yet the Chicken Littles did not retire in shame. They simply changed their costume.
Having failed to frighten us with overpopulation, they rebranded.
The new terror is climate change, and the prescribed remedy is the elimination of fossil fuels.
Let us examine this remedy with the cold, unsentimental logic it deserves.
Over the past 25 years, approximately 2.5 billion people in the developing world gained access to electricity, and the number living in extreme poverty dropped from 1.85 billion to 770 million.
That staggering reduction in human misery was powered overwhelmingly by fossil fuels.
Coal, oil, and natural gas built the power plants, fueled the factories, and lit the hospitals that lifted billions out of destitution.
The correlation between energy access and poverty reduction is not a theory. It is one of the most thoroughly documented facts in the history of economic development.
Now the Western climate establishment, headquartered in the conference rooms of Davos and the United Nations, proposes to deny that same ladder of development to the 1 billion people who still lack electricity access today, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
The Breakthrough Institute concluded that banning fossil fuel projects in the developing world may actually cost lives, because for low-income countries, economic development requires more energy, not less, in the near term.
Banning fossil fuels in the developing world does not save the planet.
It saves the comfortable from having to share it. It is imperialism dressed in the language of environmentalism.
Scalia would have called it exactly what it is: a policy whose practical effect, whatever its stated intention, is to permanently consign the poorest people on earth to poverty, while the Western nations that already industrialized on 2 centuries of fossil fuels lecture them about carbon footprints from the comfort of heated homes and air-conditioned offices.
The same ideology that terrified generations of young Western women and men out of having children with warnings of overpopulation now tells them that having a baby is an act of ecological destruction.
The United States birth rate has fallen 23% since 2007. Our median age has hit a record high of 39.4 years.
Social Security faces insolvency by 2032.
The Chicken Littles were wrong about everything except this: if we keep listening to them, the consequences will indeed be catastrophic.
The only question is whether we will find the courage to say so before it is too late.
Fred Harrison can be reached at : Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com
