Does global warming make young people lose their minds? Climate activists say despair over climate and environmental issues is producing a pandemic of “eco-anxiety.” More than 70% of people aged 15 to 25 “experience a feeling of hopelessness” when they think about climate change, according to the London-based organization Force of Nature. A majority of young people believe “humanity is doomed,” the British Natural History Museum reports. In a 2021 survey of 10,000 16-to-25-year-olds in ten countries, The Lancet found that more than half experienced climate-related sadness, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, helplessness, and guilt. Nearly half reported that “their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning.”

Where did today’s young people get these dire ideas? Maybe from climate activists themselves. You can barely exhale (which increases your carbon footprint) without being threatened by impending environmental apocalypse. A recent international study of 127 legacy media outlets by the Media and Climate Change Observatory indicated that the number of climate news stories was increasing by double-digit percentages year by year, and that the language used to describe climate issues was becoming more fervid and fantastical — with specific and falsifiable phrases such as “global warming” and “greenhouse effect” being replaced by nebulously dramatic jargon such as “climate catastrophe” and “climate emergency.” Meanwhile, impressive achievements in climate adaptation, such as the decrease in climate-related deaths, get short shrift from media in the United States and abroad.

Young people might feel better about the future if they knew more about the past. History offers a different perspective, reminding us that threats of oncoming calamity have so far failed to come true.

Fear of the end times can be found through much of human history, but one of the first people to give it a scientific patina was the economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that living conditions in 18th- and 19th-century England demonstrated that there was insufficient land available to grow food for expanding human populations.

Malthus believed that human beings were instinctively driven to increase their numbers. He posited that the only check on this unfettered growth was the misery caused by starvation and deprivation. He developed a formula forecasting exponential population growth and compared that to his predictions of linear growth of the food supply. Based on these predictions, Malthus envisioned inevitable famine, disease, and widespread death.

The explosion in material abundance during the Industrial Revolution caused Malthus' ideas to lose their initial support. They were revived by William Vogt in the mid-20th century. Vogt replaced Malthus’ focus on food supply with the concept of limited natural resources. This shift laid the groundwork for the overpopulation hysteria of the 1960s.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich went on to energize overpopulation hysteria with even bolder apocalyptic environmental predictions.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” predicted Ehrlich in his 1967 book, “The Population Bomb.” In 1969, Ehrlich ominously forecast that “by 1985, enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” Instead, by 1985, the world population had reached 4.8 billion, and it continued its upward trajectory to 8 billion in 2022.

In 1970, Denis Hayes, one of the main organizers of the first Earth Day, claimed it was too late to stop mass starvation. This claim did not come true. According to humanprogress.org, between 1968 and 2017, the average global food supply per person per day “rose from 2,334 calories to 2,962 – a 27 percent increase.”

Unfortunately, these catastrophic predictions often produce profoundly negative policies. Following the insights of doomsayers, the United Nations Population Fund was created in 1969 with the goal of curbing population growth. Grotesque population control policies like coerced sterilization in India and the one-child policy in China arose under the influence of the overpopulation consensus.

Pierre Desrochers explains why the doomsayers remain undeterred by their chronic errors in his book Population Bombed! Desrochers notes that Paul Ehrlich responded to critics in a 2023 tweet by arguing that if his detractors were correct and he was wrong, “so is science.” Ehrlich pointed to peer reviews of this research and noted that, while he may have made some mistakes, he had made “no basic ones.”

Population ecologists often predict overpopulation crises because of a deterministic view of humans and natural resources. This view is grounded in the concept of carrying capacity, the idea that resources are finite and that humans, inextricably bound to the same biological urges as wild animals, are incapable of controlling or mitigating reproduction or consumption before environmental degradation occurs.

In his book The Ultimate Resource, Julian Simon explained that natural resources are effectively limitless. This claim may seem odd at first. After all, there are a specific number of trees or tons of coal, iron, and gold on the planet. If resources are understood as merely the material of the universe, they must be finite.

However, if resources are properly understood as the many ways the human mind can reconfigure the material world, they can be seen as effectively infinite. Coal was nothing more than a black rock until human ingenuity discovered ways to use it to generate heat and energy. Deterministic green theories like carrying capacity fail because they do not account for the boundless potential of human creativity and innovation.

Today’s climate hysteria suffers from the same flaws, as anxious activists and guilt-ridden Gen Zers overlook how technological advances and novel solutions continue to push past resource constraints. The ultimate resource is the human mind, which turns limitations into opportunities for growth and prosperity.

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.