Return of the Butterfly Prophet of Doom

Paul Ehrlich has made a career out of doomsday predictions. An entomologist by training, whose expertise is in butterflies—seriously—Ehrlich rose to prominence after the publication of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he confidently predicted that, due to overpopulation, "millions of people will starve to death" by the end of the 1970s. The book was a sensation, and though his prophesied apocalypse never occurred, it was so influential that to this day Boomers and their Millennial disciples confidently sound off on the dangers of overpopulation, even as the developed world is experiencing a notable population decline, which will likely cause all sorts of economic and political problems over the next several decades.

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But Ehrlich's work is too important to the environmentalists for anyone to admit that it has been debunked. While even Ehrlich himself will sometimes concede that many of his specific predictions have been wrong in the past, he and his followers are adamant that his underlying claims are right: Earth cannot support the enormous number of humans currently living.

Just recently, the 90-year-old fossil himself was exhumed and dusted off for an appearance on 60 Minutes, to make the case that humans are causing a "sixth mass extinction" on the planet, and that, in Ehrlich's words "you'd need five more Earths [to accommodate the people currently living]. It’s not clear where they're gonna come from.”

This is nonsense. And Michael Shellenberger—anti-Ehrlich, in that he has devoted his career to demonstrating that things aren't as bad as the environmental activists claim—has taken the time to check Ehrlich's work and show where he's blundered this time. Here's Shellenberger:

The assertion that “five more Earths” are needed to sustain humanity comes from something called the Ecological Footprint calculation. I debunked it 10 years ago... in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology. We broke down the six measures that comprise the Ecological Footprint and found that five of the six, including food and forestry, were either in balance or surplus. The only thing out of balance was humankind's carbon emissions. But reducing carbon emissions requires neither that rich nations become poor nor that poor nations remain poor. Rather, it simply requires that we move toward energy sources that produce fewer carbon emissions, namely natural gas and nuclear.

And as for the supposed “sixth mass extinction” that we are currently undergoing?

To cause a “mass extinction,” humans would need to be wiping out 75-90 percent of all species on Earth. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the main scientific body that tracks species, says just 6 percent of species are critically endangered, 9 percent are endangered, and 12 percent are vulnerable to becoming endangered. Further, the IUCN has estimated that just 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data set have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.

Meanwhile, the world's biodiversity has been increasing in surprising ways. Schellenberger quotes one biologist as saying, “More new plant species have come into existence in Europe over the past three centuries than have been documented as becoming extinct over the same period.” And on top of that, humans have gotten much more efficient in our use of land, which has enabled significant increases in conservation areas -- "The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020."

Now, it isn't all sunshine and roses; Shellenberger notes that there have been serious declines in wild animal populations, particularly in Latin America and Asia, which he believes should be addressed. But doing so would in no way require the kind of massive reduction in the human population which Ehrlich envisions. And good thing too, because despite what Ehrlich seems to believe, people aren't insects.

The Late, Great Planet Earth?

Jason Riley had a good piece recently in the Wall Street Journal reminding us of the environmentalist movement's continual predictions of impending doom over the past half century, catastrophes which never seem to come to pass.

The modern green movement dates to the 1960s and apocalyptic predictions have long been the coin of this realm. In 1967, brothers William and Paul Paddock wrote “Famine 1975!” In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” declared that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death despite any crash programs embarked upon now.”

These works shocked our ruling class on both sides of the aisle. Riley mentions in particular President Nixon's convocation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, chaired by John D. Rockefeller III, grandson of the founder of Standard Oil, father of the former Democratic senator. The commission found that as the U.S. population grew, "More droughts, famines and pollution were in store. Energy shortages, mineral depletion and deforestation were inevitable. Higher poverty rates and fewer job opportunities were unavoidable."

Of course, Riley goes on, the commission got it exactly wrong:

The U.S. population now numbers more than 330 million, up from around 200 million in 1970. Yet Americans breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water than they did 50 years ago. Poverty rates are lower, obesity is a bigger problem than hunger, and the current unemployment rate if anything reflects a labor shortage.

He goes on to point to the contemporary environmentalist movement's usage of language which is almost indistinguishable from their 1960's script, but deployed against their present-day enemies such as CO2 emissions. These include predictions of famines and droughts, despite the fact that, according to Riley,

Since the 1960s the global production of food calories has risen dramatically and can easily satisfy the nutritional needs of everyone on the planet. And since 1980 the world-wide number of annual deaths from famine has been 90 percent to 95 percent lower than the first half of the 20th century.

He might have mentioned the fact that this increase might not be in spite of, but because of, carbon emissions. Dr. Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Coalition has argued convincingly that increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere has significantly increased crop yields over the course the past century.

In any event, pointing out the unrealized predictions of their movement is unlikely to win over any actual environmental activists. That's because, says Riley, "ideological environmentalism isn’t about following the data and the science." What it is about is "frightening others into accepting [their] way of thinking," giving them the power of "curtailing the freedom of other people to make decisions for themselves and live their lives as they see fit." But hopefully pointing out their failures will be enough to make normal people wary of signing on to their program. After all, you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop believing you.

Billionaire Barbarian at the Gates, Part Two

As noted yesterday, Bill Gates is particularly dangerous as a vaccine pusher. It is pretty well common knowledge by this time—or should be—that the vaccines are “leaky,” that the vaccinated are no less prone to viral infection and transmission than the unvaccinated, causing a virtual war between shedders and skeptics, and that an indefinite number of booster shots will be deemed necessary to fight the proliferation of novel variants, or viral mutations. There seems to be no end in sight of these variants, which now include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Kappa, Lambda and Mu. Even the variants are spawning variants. Delta variant AY.4.2. has just appeared on the scene, 10 percent more infectious than its parent. Indeed, there are now 56 Delta offspring, one short of the Heinz number. Variants are coming thick and fast, outstripping the effort to keep up with them—in effect, making the pandemic permanent. Could that be the plan?

To put it bluntly, we are experiencing not a pandemic but a vandemic. Reputable virologists, like Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier and mRNA inventor Robert Malone, have argued that the vaccines may be responsible for the variants owing to a process called Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). The virus is clever; it recognizes the vaccine and mutates its way around it, thus causing viral replication. Yet Gates continues to laud the potency of the vaccines and to grubstake their production.

“One way the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation secures its conducive policy environment,” the Navdanya report continues, “is through its direct influence over international research institutions.” The Foundation “stands as… a product of recent, precarity-inducing history, and will only serve to continue to corrode life in the future.” Gates and his private business partners, the report concludes, create worse problems than the one they purport to solve, “while simultaneously working to concentrate ever more power into corporate hands [via] million-dollar grants to private corporations and private market interests.” Patent lock-ins may also be an issue.

Meet the new boss, same as the old Boss.

Gates is now, Forbes writes, “pouring money into synthetic biology,” a megatrend which “involves reconfiguring the DNA of an organism to create something entirely new.” Interfering with the human genome is by no means a fail-proof program, as the profusion of adverse reactions to the vaccines attests.

The International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research warns that “manipulation of the code of life could lead to completely unanticipated negative effects, potentially long term or even permanent, [and potentially] transgenerational.” This is tempting fate. Some people feel that the laws of nature should not be tampered with, forgetting that most medical cures do in fact tamper with nature. But changing the genetic structure of the human being is changing the human being into something else, a kind of bioengineered hybrid. It is doing God’s work, so to speak. And hubris always seems to come with too high a price, which the Greek tragedians called nemesis.

Of course, conducted in the proper sphere, there are benefits to synthetic biology as well, particularly in agricultural production that can improve and prolong the lives of millions of people, an outcome that clearly works against Gates’ project of reducing world population. Contradictions abound.

Gates’ latest venture involves partnering with the U.K. in a £400 million investment package to boost the development of Green technologies, cementing the deal with Boris Johnson at a Global Investment Summit at London’s Science Museum. Henry Deedes at The Daily Mail was not impressed. Johnson told his audience, he writes, “how much money they could make out of alternative energy. Wind power, for example, was a ‘licence to print money’.” Even if, Johnson joked, we have to sacrifice a goat to the wind god, success—and profit—are assured. Much festivity all around.

This new investment scheme is foreshadowed in Gates’ recent book How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, chock full of fantasy-laden initiatives and elysian imaginings. Gates admits that his “background is in software, not climate science,” and it shows. He champions climate modelling—as Michael Crichton observes in State of Fear, a very dodgy way of charting and predicting future climate events, most likely to be wrong. A cascade of constantly revised simulations does not inspire confidence. Gates believes in the validity of the U.N.’s discredited IPCC prognostications, and assumes that Green will provide “massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories and call centers.”

Call centers? Seriously? The book reads like a piece of stargazing divination and one wonders what Gates is really up to here. Does he really believe in his fantasia? Has he been seduced by his own rhetoric? Is he trapped in a state of cognitive dissonance? Or does he have other, clandestine intentions? Is he involved, as many fear, in the most significant extension of corporate and political power in historical memory? In his speeches and books, Gates sounds too good to be true—literally.

Put 'er there, partner.

Peter and Ginger Breggin arrive at the same conclusion. In their encyclopedic COVID-19 and the Global Predators, they present a summary of Gates’ ambitions, which reads like “a list of the essential elements of totalitarian globalism.” Gates’ investment in the pandemic, as they show in prodigious detail, “probably goes into the multibillions… Gates does not give money away to the people… He is making a market of them.” In fact, Gates was wargaming the pandemic in January 2017, announcing in “a series of filmed talks surrounding Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum” that he was “funding and implementing plans… to rush through vaccines for an anticipated pandemic.” Something is going on here, obviously.

Personally, I do not trust Bill Gates any further than I could throw Klaus Schwab. The goal of systematically reducing human population, even if well-intentioned, comes with disturbing historical baggage, a fact of which Gates should be aware. I cannot peer into his soul and say without any doubt what his drives, impulses, designs and objectives may actually be. But I do not trust anyone who promotes a vaccine that is really a gene-therapy drug developed without adequate safety trials, whose benefits are unknown and which may indeed be harmful, as the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research fears, “prim[ing] the immune system toward development of both auto-inflammatory and autoimmune disease.”

I do not trust environmental zealots. I do not trust a member of the Davos set, plutocrats who fly into that elite Alpine village on emission-belching private jets under the pretext of saving the world from carbon in the name of those who fly economy class—if they are permitted to fly. Can anyone who owns two Gulfstream G650s and promotes “jet zero” be taken at face value?

Bill Gates is an inordinate meddler with a Prometheus complex. His pixilated and imperial view of the world can lead to nothing good. Trust him at your peril.

Billionaire Barbarian at the Gates, Part One

In a 2020 Ted Talk, Bill Gates famously argued that world population is approaching an unsustainable level of 9 billion, a looming catastrophe that needed to be addressed by finding ways to significantly reduce population growth. The route to this end, apparently, is to make people healthier. The solution he proposed included a three-part plan, which he described as “doing a really great job on Vaccines, Health Care and Reproductive Health Services,” which could “lower [world population] by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.” Many have accused Gates of proposing genocide. In my estimation, that is plainly a bridge too far, but it usefully highlights the dark underbelly of much of his acclaimed philanthropy and his undoubted globalist intiatives.

Gates’ terms are troubling. Vaccines are the core issue, triggering a profound controversy that has polarized entire nations, yet he staunchly supports and has invested heavily in these experimental therapies. “Health care” is an abstract term that can mean anything one chooses it to mean; indeed, it has been used as a rationale for eugenics in its most criminal forms. And “reproductive health” is quite obviously code for abortion. It is clear why many people consider Gates a dangerous man. He is indescribably wealthy, influential and powerful, and also persuasively glib in furthering his various agendas. Obviously, no one can determine absolutely what his underlying motives might be. Is he philanthropist or exploiter, hero or villain, savior or eugenicist? But there is ample warrant to remain skeptical of his bona fides.

Mad scientists of Microsoft.

To be sure, his Ted Talk was framed in the context of global warming and the obligation to reduce CO2 emissions, a challenge that could be met by reducing the planetary census. According to his formula, CO2 = P x S x E x C, where P = People, S = Services per person, E = Energy per service, and C = CO2 per energy unit, fewer people in a congested world means less atmospheric carbon and the consequent decline in the rate of (ostensibly) rising global temperature.

The problem here is that a reduced population does not necessarily entail a reduction in manufacturing and industry. Major polluting countries like China and India give no indication of scaling down carbon-emitting coal plants. Moreover, Green technology—the wind farm/solar array nexus—is notoriously expensive, unreliable, landscape defiling, and fossil-fuel dependent with its inevitable and frequent outages. Similar drawbacks are true of the half-ton, non-disposable, toxic EV lithium batteries now all the rage in the plans of quantitative futurists. The Green solution is a neon green figment, largely unworkable in the long run. Energy extraction remains essential. Fracking and nuclear are the most feasible alternatives, but are ruled out by ecological enthusiasts.

Another discrepancy in Gates’ argument involves his claim that population can be reduced by making people healthier. In defending Gates, Maarten Schenk at Lead Stories points to arguments that wealthier and healthier people produce fewer children since they don’t have to adjust for massive child mortality. “So, what about the remarks about ‘new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services’?,” Schenk asks rhetorically, and answers:

That is just what specialists studying population growth are saying. As people get richer they get more access to better healthcare so they stop having lots of babies because the risk of their children dying at an early age takes a steep dive. This means the total population stabilizes and stops growing after a while.

On the surface, this looks like a strong argument, especially with respect to underdeveloped countries. The problem is that advantaged people may enjoy having more children—perhaps not in the decadent West at this time in history, but possibly in the future, and certainly as we see now in countries like Hungary and Poland, which are returning to their ancestral traditions, restoring the sanctity of marriage, re-establishing the vitality of the Christian faith and financially incentivising procreation. The result is rapidly growing families. In such countries, healthy people produce more, not fewer, children. The formula could be: H=V=C. Health equals Vitality equals Children. Gates’ X may conceivably turn out to be non-X.

Der Klaus: he's with Bill.

Apart from the question of his un-thought-through contradictions, Gates is deeply implicated in problematic enterprises. His preposterous plan to spray tons of dust into space to dim the sun’s rays would be a prelude to disaster, a telling instance of the ignorance and naiveté of the supposedly super-brilliant. And as is well known, Gates is an active proponent of Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset, which promises to transform the free-market democratic West into an oligarchic model of centralized social control, a sequel characterized by increased market and technological integration, corporate control of natural resources, the elimination of private property, the colossal transfer of wealth to the patrician class, and expanded state surveillance—Build Back Worse. Schwab in turn credits Gates for his input and vision. Reset or space dust, the upshot is not a welcoming blueprint for the future.

A comprehensive and damning report issue by Navdanya International spares no details about Gates’ “various initiatives, sub-organizations, development schemes and funding mechanisms… a complicated web of international power and influence.” For example, “central to the Gates Foundation’s agricultural strategy is the program to consolidate the 15 largest seed collections in the world… looking to copy all the genetic information of the seeds in storage. Effectively, this allows them to take out patents on the genetic information collected, resulting in biopiracy through seed patents.” Gates is also the largest private farmland owner in the U.S. One wonders why.

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The essay goes on to point out that Gates provides nearly 20 percent of the funds supporting the staff of the World Health Organization, “thus serving to merge the interests of the WHO with those of the Gates Foundation.” This is not encouraging news, especially as the WHO has released contradictory information and recommendations over the course of the pandemic, operates as an arm of the CCP, and has as its Director-General Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus, an ardent Marxist with no medical expertise.

Continued tomorrow.

Empty the Head that Forswears the Crown

Earlier this year Prince Harry, like so many frustrated young men before him, left home and ran off to California with a pretty girl in the hope of hitting it big and changing the world. Of course, being royalty, he didn't move to Haight-Ashbury to start a mediocre folk group and get stoned at anti-war protests. Instead, he and Meghan moved into a $14.7M mansion in Beverly Hills, signed a mega-deal with Netflix, endorsed Joe Biden, and became environmentalists.

Still, like the folkies, Harry has felt it necessary to inflict his faux-poetic thoughts on the rest of us. Here he is speaking at an event for WaterBear, a new subscription service for environmentalist documentaries:

Every single raindrop that falls from the sky relieves the parched ground. What if every single one of us was a raindrop, and if every single one of us cared?

Far out, man. You can almost hear this being sung by Scott McKenzie or the Mamas and the Papas. No word on whether he thinks the universe might be just a single atom in the finger nail of some enormous being. Of course, to change the world you have to tackle the tough issues of the day, and Harry didn't disappoint on that score. He made it a point to tie the ongoing pandemic to the environment, saying:

[I]t’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behavior to really take a moment and think about what we’ve done.... We take so much from her and we rarely give a lot back.

But, as Joanna Williams points out in the Spectator, we really shouldn't laugh. For all of his vapidity, Harry is clearly making a play for increased cultural cachet, and he's doing so by parroting the sentiments of our cultural elite. These are all common views among our beneficent rulers.

Consider another of the prince's insights: "But the moment you become a father, everything really does change... you start to realize, well, what is the point in bringing a new person into this world when they get to your age and it’s on fire?" This is a perfect encapsulation of elite climate hysteria, and it is becoming increasingly normalized.

Williams discusses the fact that this image of the world burning irresponsibly encourages eco-anxiety, a growing problem for both adults and children, many of whom have been psychologically harmed by the propaganda, as Greta Thunberg apparently was after watching a (now-debunked) David Attenborough film.

But there's also Harry and Meghan's longstanding vow to have no more than two children, for environmental reasons. Their public declaration is clearly meant to influence the choices of regular people, making them feel that it would be irresponsible to have more (or any) children, despite the fact that our country has below-replacement birthrates and Americans already have fewer children than we claim to want. Who are these people to say your dream of being a parent is irresponsible?

Talk about privilege.