All Posts Tagged With: "prophets of doom"
Population Control Nonsense
According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]
30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | ContinuedWhat’s So Bad about Eco-Propaganda for Kids?
Although my own children have long outgrown picture books, I still have nephews and nieces young enough to enjoy them. So I buy them from time to time. I also buy books on energy. Perhaps it was that combination that prompted Amazon to recommend What’s So Bad About Gasoline? by Anne Rockwell, engagingly illustrated by [...]
22Sep2010 | Andrew P. Morriss | 23 comments | ContinuedThe Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World
Bjørn Lomborg has shaken up the world of environmentalists. Describing himself as “an old left-wing Greenpeace member,” the Danish statistician has produced a book that undermines most of the apocalyptic scares that keep Greenpeace afloat. The Skeptical Environmentalist makes a persuasive case that the environment is improving, not getting worse, and that most of the [...]
30Jun2010 | Jane S. Shaw | 0 comments | ContinuedGas Prices: The Latest Excuse to Reengineer Society
As someone who commutes 16 miles each way to work in a gas-guzzling sports car along the LA-area freeways, I’ve been less-than-amused by the nearly $5 a gallon I must pay for the premium fuel that keeps my mid-life-crisis-mobile running. Yet despite the misery of high prices, I’ve taken a certain joy in watching the [...]
1Nov2008 | Steven Greenhut | 0 comments | ContinuedIt’s Always Something
Our economy is in the middle of an extraordinary run of success. Unemployment is low.Personal wealth is near an all-time high. Real wage growth sometimes appears less robust, but when benefits are included, real compensation is healthy. And even with the cries from some that economic mobility
isnt what it once was, legal and illegal immigrants continue
to flock to the United States. Evidently being poor here beats being poor elsewhere by a long shot.
Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media
Climatologist Patrick Michaels gives us a nontechnical and readable exposé of the “myths and facts” surrounding global warming. For skeptics of the mainstream global-warming hypothesis, that is, that dramatic, human-induced warming is occurring and will have cataclysmic effects if not checked by lifestyle-altering public policies, this book is a great read and an indispensable reference. [...]
14Dec2005 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedWe’re Running Out of Oil?
The rise in gasoline prices in the United States has become a political issue. Each side panders to its own constituency with the most extreme arguments and factoids, leaving precious little in the middle ground of common sense. Take, for example, the March op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Paul Roberts, “Say Bye-Bye to [...]
1Sep2004 | John Jennrich | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894
We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, [...]
1Sep2004 | Stephen Davies | 78 comments | ContinuedPower to the People?
Michael Lynch is a research affiliate with the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his piece “The Power to Change the World: A Hydrogen-Based System Replacing Our Reliance on Oil Would Revolutionize Society” (Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2002), political activist Jeremy Rifkin lays out an argument for switching to [...]
1Jan2003 | Michael C. Lynch | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Economics of Ecology: Angry Planet or Beautiful World?
“The bright promise of a new millennium is now clouded by unprecedented threats to humanity’s future.” -WORLDWATCH INSTITUTE, 20001 “We know that the environment is not in good shape. . . . My claim is that things are improving.” -BJØRN LOMBORG2 Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish professor of statistics who was an environmental activist and [...]
1Sep2002 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Mugging of an Environmental Skeptic
When I read Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist I felt a sense of déjà vu. As excellent as it is, what Lomborg has to say—that the world is not going to hell—has been said before. But it was ignored because it was said by a brilliant man, the late Julian Simon, who was considered politically [...]
1Jul2002 | James Peron | 1 comment | ContinuedIt’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends in the Last 100 Years
It’s not for nothing that economics is tagged “the dismal science.” Part of that reputation traces to its realistic no-pie-in-the-sky nature, but another part goes to the ongoing influence of thinkers like Thomas Malthus, who saw population outracing food output; Karl Marx, who saw evil capital crushing the rising working class; and John Maynard Keynes, [...]
1Jan2002 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedSpencer’s Law: Another Reason Not to Worry
One of the constant themes of today’s media is crisis and panic. Everywhere we look we are told there is some dreadful social problem, a threat to all that is good and true. Moreover, it is getting worse and will bring disaster upon all of us—unless “we do something.” (The authors of these jeremiads always [...]
1Aug2001 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedIrrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller
Princeton University Press • 2000 • 296 pages • $27.95 It is nothing new for an author to scare his readers with predictions of economic calamity and financial collapse. During the 1970s it was Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years. In the 1980s it was Gary Shilling’s After the Crash, Recession [...]
1Jul2001 | David L. Littmann | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Luckiest Generation
W. Michael Cox, senior vice president and chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Richard Alm, a business writer, are co-authors of Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think. Meet the Luckiest Generation. When it comes to the material facts of life, the young men and women [...]
1Mar2001 | and W. Michael Cox | 1 comment | ContinuedFalse Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism
John Gray’s new book, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, is exasperating. Gray makes big predictions, such as: “There can no longer be much doubt that we are approaching a major upheaval in the international economic system. It is a pretty safe bet that, a few years hence, it will be difficult to find [...]
1Jun2000 | Aaron Steelman | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Green Scare
Roger Meiners teaches in the economics department at the University of Texas, Arlington, and is a senior associate at PERC. During the Cold War, anti-communist activists were accused of using Red Scare tactics. They were parodied along these lines: The communists were everywhere, maybe even under your bed, so support the politicians who would spend [...]
1May1999 | Roger E. Meiners | 1 comment | Continued-
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