As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Progressive Elites have been shouting about Doomsday for at least 60 years. Doomsday is always about 30 years (one generation) away and there is always a critical 10 year window to save humanity.
Here are two of the classics:
- Global scarcity (aka Scary Scarcity)
- Climate Hysteria (Next Ice Age -> Global Warming -> Climate Change)
In addition we have some new, more immediate boogeymen.
- The Biden Border Crisis
- Spiraling Crime
- Pandemics
In every case, the 'solution' is that we must sacrifice our liberty, give the wise and benevolent government more control, and reduce our standard of living. It's funny how every problem seems to have the same solution.
So let's talk about Scary Scarcity.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which predicted depletion of resources, environmental/agricultural collapse and social upheaval by the 1990's. The book is no longer in print but you can downloaded the original version as a PDF by clicking on the image below
In 2004, the authors wrote the Limits to Growth 30 Year Update. In this book they moved the goalposts but still predicted impending doom. They acknowledge that food production (the brown line) was better than they predicted even though population growth was greater (the black line). They also acknowledged that resources were not being depleted as fast and the pollution was less than expected.
Nevertheless, they predicted that food production and Global GDP would collapse by 2015. Well, it is now 2022 and global prosperity is continuing to increase.
In 2012, the 40th anniversary of The Limits To Growth, Jorgen Randers broke ranks and published 2052. While this book is still pessimistic and gloomy, he acknowledges that the world will not suffer resource depletion and humanity will continue to be able to feed its ever growing population. You can read the summary here:
http://www.2052.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/p120801-2052-A-global-forecast-15p-illustrated-CPSL.pdf
Of course the UN will continue to come up with new versions of Scary Scarcity and our current, self inflicted supply chain issues will make Scarcity seem real.
More next time.