7 Enviro Predictions From Earth Day 1970 That Were Just Dead Wrong

Today being "Earth Day", it might be worth it to look back on some of the very first Earth Day statements made by accredited people in 1970.

Looks like they got a lot wrong.

I wonder if the amplifications and fear mongering were part of the long term plan even way back then.

What else has been wrong since then?

Never hurts to just try and verify anything said by academics and scholars.

There's always an agenda isn't there.

7 Enviro Predictions From Earth Day 1970 That Were Just Dead Wrong

Environmentalists truly believed and predicted during the first Earth Day in 1970 that the planet was doomed unless drastic actions were taken.

Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold m

1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years”

2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years”

3: “Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make”

4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World … Will Be In Famine”

5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution”

6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License”

7: “By The Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil”

But, but the scientists couldn't be wrong, it was all in the data,

I am half joking of course, because surely there couldn't have been any science behind this and they were no better than predictions you would find in the Dreams and predictions forum here on ATS?

Here's some Earth Day "Trivia".

Some real strange connections....

The Secret Bloody History of Earth Day!

a reply to: xuenchen

This a strawman attack on the environmental movement.

Find someone's over zealous predictions, then pretend that is what the expert consensus was.

a reply to: xuenchen

I was "taught" in the early 1990's, in high school, that there was only 5 years left of decayed dinosaurs (oil) left, and it would take hundreds of millions of years to replenish it if we stopped using it. Here it is 2016 and we're extracting more crude oil every year, with no reasonable end in sight.

I figured it was false then, as were most ridiculous and dire prognostications. Why can't we just make reasonable, true statements? Like, "our air quality will improve drastically if we use catalytic converters on vehicles" or "lead is toxic, so we should stop adding it to gasoline for our kids to inhale from exhaust fumes" or "we should work on developing cleaner sources of energy, because...there's a ridiculous number of good reasons to do so." People could believe that, and happily support it.

Overblowing, in the 1970's and today, is about as effective as people who used to say marjiunana will instantly turn you into a murderous rapist. As soon as someone tried it themselves and thoroughly debunked the lie, it resulted in a disbelief of anything else told by the lying authority figure.

Lesson for those who blow anything out of proportion which is easily proven to be not-true: people will figure it out, and the valid portions of your argument will be considered to be trash along with the offending obvious lies.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: xuenchen

This a strawman attack on the environmental movement.

Find someone's over zealous predictions, then pretend that is what the expert consensus was.

Well yeah, there's that too...but the arguments were made by "accredited people." Accredited in what? I don't know. Probably just people with any form of accreditation, related to the field or not.

a reply to: jrod



One brainy scholar even got a Nobel Prize.

What should we "assume" from that boondoggle.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: xuenchen

This a strawman attack on the environmental movement.

Find someone's over zealous predictions, then pretend that is what the expert consensus was.

What *did* they get right anyway?

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: xuenchen

This a strawman attack on the environmental movement.

Find someone's over zealous predictions, then pretend that is what the expert consensus was.

No it's not. Those were mainstream predictions that were well publicized. It was the consensus and was spread by the MSM and the Club of Rome. It was an over-zealous scare tactic then just as "Climate Change" is today. Except now we have very precise spreadsheets very accurately to the eight decimal point that help us make more precise wrong predictions.

a reply to: xuenchen

They made these predictions from what the state of the economy, society, etc were at the time.
If we kept on that same 'war path' to destruction without change, yes some of those predictions could have come true.
Guess what. I bet the president predicts all out war within the next month, every month, but takes preemptive and proactive measures so that won't happen.

Aye, and they were also predicting we would be living on the seafloor and on Mars, whilst using personal jetpacs to commute to work before eating kelp-steaks for dinner.


(btw I have never heard of any of the predictions made in the OP and would be interested in knowing where they were made. But worth noting that today 330 million impacted by India heat wave that has killed at least 160 so maybe not so far off the marks on some predictions after all

a reply to: xuenchen
I was there, aged 16 years, and first of all, we were not calling ourselves environmentalists but conservationists. Now granted, I was in a small town, at a small university but there was no "environmentalists" that day. All that claptrap developed much later in the movement---after the big money hit the movement.
Our particular group wasn't saying the things published by this article. We were concerned about the effects of pollution on the waterways of our area. If memory serves me, our main concerns that day centered on efforts to prohibit "straight-pipe" sewer systems that were dumping raw sewage into rivers and creeks. Also of concern to us was the deforestation of the Land Between the Lakes by the Tennessee Valley Authority after promises had been made that no commercial lumbering would be conducted.
This first day wasn't about spreading fear and doom, at least in our area, it was about letting people know how to conserve our resources and encouraging them to do so. There were tree saplings available for planting and leaflets encouraging people to use recyclable glass soda bottles instead of plastic. The entire gathering was sponsored by small student groups, no corporate or government money involved.
I remember well when, twenty years later I attended an "Earth Day Celebration" held on the government dime at Land Between the Lakes---and above the entrance to the event was a huge banner "Welcome to Earth Day, sponsored by Westvaco!" That was my epiphany. That in a short 20 years, Westvaco, one of the biggest polluters and users of the trees, had co-opted the movement. The rhetoric that day was of the doom porn variety. That was the last time I attended an Earth Day celebration. Controlled opposition---the best kind.

I remember as a kid (I'm in my 40s) hearing that a new ice age was on it's way...
I think if a scenario is useful for raising taxes, it is promoted, if not it's dropped.

a reply to: xuenchen

Settled science.

hahahahahahaha

We had a sit in on earth day . The students of Robert Moses Jr. High school in North Babylon N.Y. held a peaceful demonstration asking our parents and community leaders to do something to help. We organised a litter pick up day for several parks in our town. I even wrote a song my girlfriends and I sang at the sit in.
I remember concern but not those dire consequences. I guess they kept stuff like that out of our hearing.

Since then, the Super Fund has been used to clean up toxic waste in some of the worst hit areas. Car emissions were reduced by better technology. Factories cleaned up their act of polluting the air with toxic smoke and dumping waste in our waterways

Food production and plant yield have improved even the way we grow food has changed.
Improved transportation allows us to distribute food faster and more efficiently resulting in less waste.

In essence,
We did do something in the last 46 years so maybe that's why these things didn't happen.

a reply to: schuyler

No it's not. Those were mainstream predictions that were well publicized.

Rubbish.

I was there and still have the T-Shirt!

Sure there was a lot of hyperbole spouted by a lot of speakers at a lot of rallies all around the world. The purpose of Earth Day was to energize people and focus public opinion of the severe problems of the day.

And all of that hyperbole was based on the speakers vision of the consequences of the world continuing on the conditions of the day. A lot has happened since then to mediate many of those predictions. We've taken lead out of gasoline (petrol for Euro's and Aussies that are reading), so people can breathe. We've cleaned up a lot of waterways that used to be sludge (the Ohio River used to catch on fire regularly for instance). We've banned poisonous chemicals. We've placed environmental controls on many industrial processes, cleaning up smokestacks, banning asbestos, etc.

Unfortunately, some of those predictions that are quoted above have come true though, millions do starve due to famine every year, famines that get worse every year and will continue to get worse for centuries.

But 'accredited' environmental researchers weren't saying those things because there wasn't enough of them yet, and they certainly didn't have enough data to make those claims. What predictions they were able to make were based on 1970 conditions, attitudes, and technology.

Remember hindsight is 20/20. So those predictions were made, why were they made? They were made to inspire action that would make those prediction NOT come true. To the extent that they have not come true is a BRILLIANT RESULT and exactly the reason that those folks made the prediction.

We have heeded the warnings of 1970. Taking lead out of gasoline solved one problem - smog - very quickly, but it didn't do anything what-so-ever to solve the next problem - the one we need to refocus on now.

Look back at predictions in any field after 45 years or more. George Orwell made a prediction that we would have a tyrannical 'Big Brother' government running a perpetual war by 1984. His prediction was off by 30 years or so. Other well founded predictions don't come true because we heed the warnings and take action to avoid them.

I can make a prediction:

If we don't start funding infrastructure properly again, bridges are going to start failing due to lack of maintenance and people are going to die because of it within the next couple of decades.

I would like nothing better than to look back in 45 years (partly because I will be dead by then, but...) and find that prediction is wrong, but based on the conditions of today's political classes I am afraid that it is 100% correct and probably will be happening in less than a decade.

Bump this thread in 45 years and laugh at me and my hyperbolic prediction. That's fine by me.

originally posted by: jrod
a reply to: xuenchen

This a strawman attack on the environmental movement.

Find someone's over zealous predictions, then pretend that is what the expert consensus was.

It's extremely strawman.
What those attacking these opinions miss out on is the fact that:

1. They were dealing with the science of the time, science changes on a daily basis as new methods are developed and new data incorporated. It's the same as weather, something you might think looks like a little storm on Monday becomes a Hurricane on Friday as you learn more about it - and vice-versa.

2. What would the results have been WITHOUT ANY ACTION TAKEN? It's impossible to prove a negative. What if Earth Day 1970 never happened and no nation took any steps to change anything? What would have happened if billions of people didn't start recycling? What would have happened without genetically modified foods? What would have happened without water conservation efforts? What would have happened without the protection of various endangered species? What would have happened without greater control on the use of CFC's? What would have happened without agreements to reign in pollution by states and nations? What would have happened without concerted effort to eradicate or simply prevent animal diseases? They can't tell you, because we did plenty since Earth Day 1970 and much of it has improved the lives and environments of billions of people.

3. The people who attack the entire notion of taking responsibility for our environment seem to think only they exist, only their society is real. F**k the people dying of curable diseases, f**k the people living on islands about to be submerged in the next ten years. F**k the people only surviving through a drought thanks to constant aid - as long as they are safe from environmental risks and can stuff their faces with $1 swill nothing else is happening to anyone else on the planet, only they matter.

Lastly, I would take all of their statements with a massive pinch of salt. There were a hell of a lot of statements made at the first Earth Day, and this propaganda team has carefully curated the most bombastic claims and the most radical opinions to support a concerted effort attacking the very notion of environmentalism.

Go and do a little search on this and you'll see a full page of results all basically saying the same thing, in typically biased fashion, from the same usual suspects.

This seems to be concerted effort to somehow influence opinion by cherry-picking what they want to present through various (usually right-wing) sources.