The dismal quackery of eco-economics:
Environmentalism can be seen as a counterattack against a key premise of the Enlightenment: that a central part of progress consists of increasing human control over nature. Instead, environmentalists argue that humans should accept their place as a mere subsidiary of the natural world. In practice this means reconciling humanity to poverty, disease and natural disasters.There is environmentalist confusion between the mastery over nature and the destruction of nature. Control over nature means reshaping the natural world to meet human needs — for example, developing medicines to fight against disease or building dams to prevent flooding or generate electricity. This is not the same as destroying rain forests or making animal species extinct.
It’s great fun to revisit old Malthusian predictions:
The Limits To Growth report of 1972 estimated that the world’s gold would run out in nine years, mercury in 13, natural gas in 22, petroleum in 20, silver 13 and zinc 18 years.Paul Ehrlich, still a highly respected environmentalist and biology professor at Stanford University, predicted in The Population Bomb in 1968 that: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.’
My new favorite quote:
As Sheikh Yamani, the Saudi oil minister in the 1970s, has argued: ‘The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.’