Hard to imagine a film with a more deceptive title, or a more disastrous legacy than this one. An Inconvenient Truth scared the hell out of millions of people. It predicted all kinds of climate-related catastrophes and polluted the minds of concerned citizens in countries all over the world with apocalyptic levels of fear and misunderstanding. It led to countless policies and regulations that wasted trillions of dollars, vilified the fossil fuel industry, and in the process, doomed millions of poor countries to another generation of “energy-poverty,” which is of course, no different than “poverty-poverty.” It gave us Greta Thunberg, and countless other misinformed activists who chained themselves to bridges, glued themselves to roads, and threw paint on priceless works of art in their misguided attempts to save the planet. It also won two Academy Awards and made Al Gore a very rich man.
It seems obvious today that climate change is real, but that its impact on the planet has been wildly and irresponsibly overstated, primarily by people who have prospered from scaring us. It’s an old grift, but it always works, and I’m happy to share the attached article – an unsparing but very fair analysis of Al Gore’s movie 20 years after it became the most profitable and influential environmental documentary ever produced.
I thought the same thing last month when Paul Ehrlich died, and people finally began to acknowledge the false catastrophism that made him famous, thanks his bestselling horror story, The Population Bomb. It too, scared the hell out millions of people and caused a level of economic and psychological damage that’s simply incalculable. It also made Paul Ehrlich a rich man.
Among other things, Ehrlich predicted that, by 1980, the average American lifespan would decline to just 42 years. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” Ehrlich wrote in 1969. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he declared the following year. By 1971, Ehrlich was willing to “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Roughly 100 to 200 million people, he assumed, would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 in what he deemed “the Great Die-Off.”
Paul Ehrlich was a distinguished evolutionary biologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. He was also a highly respected environmentalist with all the proper credentials, and a media darling. (Johnny Carson alone had him on over a dozen times.) The Population Bomb was read by millions of people and reprinted no less than 20 times, making it one of the most consequential environmental books of the 20th century. And, just like An Inconvenient Truth, it was complete and total fiction.
Opportunists like Gore and Ehrlich have always been with us and always will be. The most charitable thing we can say about them today is that they were wrong, but I’m not feeling charitable these days. I’m looking instead, for the next grifter who wants to prosper by scaring me about the coming apocalypse, in whatever form it might take. And I’m asking myself a simple question, famously posed by Cicero a long time ago. “Cui bono?”
Who benefits?
It’s well and fine to caution America about the odds of another pandemic, or the impact of AI, or the effect of processed foods, or the addictive qualities of social media, or in my case, the consequences of failing to close our ever-widening skills gap. (It won’t be the end of the world, simply the end of America.) But if those warnings come with Oscars and bestsellers and large piles of money, remember Cicero’s question. And heed the answer…
PS. Here’s the article…
National Review: Al Gore’s False Prophecy
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