Comment on earth day

Walter Williams recently wrote about environmental doomsayers. He quoted a number of them as follows:

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." ... In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

It's not just that these predictors have been so bad, it's that they continue to be taken seriously. Now that "global warming" is considered to be the latest crisis, idiotic schemes are presented for us to help "save the planet". Closely examined, it will be seen that most, if not all of the proposed solutions will greatly enrich a handful of people while imposing crushing economic burdens on the rest of us.

Those on the left continue to demagogue about how much they care about the people, but the people they really care about are themselves and their friends. After all, as Thomas Sowell points out in his brilliant article, "People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty-- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting ... work ethic ...,dogged determination ..., or self-reliance ...?