EVERYBODY PANIC

Since the dawn if the Industrial Age, people have feared that the modern world is spiraling toward destruction. None of these doomsday scenarios has come true. Here’s a quick rundown.

Overpopulation. In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that the word’s population would grow faster than the food supply, leading to mass starvation and chaos. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich predicted it would happen in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, the Carter Administration predicted it by the year 2000. It never happened because people learned how to grow more food on less land. If advances in farming productivity continue, the world will be able to feed 10 billion people with half of today’s cropland.

The population is projected to grow from 6.6 billion people today to about 8 billion in 2050 and start declining to 5.5 billion in 2100. Global birthrates are falling because the world is getting wealthier. Rich people play golf; poor people screw.

Water. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has predicted that water shortages will trigger bloody conflicts in the 21st century. Not likely. The last “water war” was fought 4,500 years ago. As Alister Doyle notes, “International rivals sharing waters…have generally favoured cooperation over conflict.”

“The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over,” said Aaron Wolf, a professor at Oregon State University. “Nations often go to the brink of war over water and then resolve their differences.”

In the U.S., water withdrawals peaked in 1980 and have been flat since. Entreprenuers are developing innovative technologies like low-cost drip irrigation systems and seawater agriculture to stretch and develop freshwater supplies.

Biodiversity. In 1970, Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Instituiton, predicted that somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all animal species would be extinct by 1995. In 1980, Paul Ehrlich predicted that 15 to 20 percent of all species would be extinct by the year 2000.

In recent decades, a handful of known species extinctions have been vastly exceeded by the number of species that have been observed and described over time. Scientists have counted between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species, and up to 100 million might exist. In the last two decades, the number of known mammals has grown by 25 percent—and that doesn’t include Bigfoot! Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace: “In fact, to the best of our scientific knowledge, no species has become exctint in North America due to forestry.”

Even a worst-case scenario wouldn’t doom mankind. Martin Jenkins from the United Nations Environment Program: “In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of “intact” wild systems...”

Landfill Space. In the 1980s, we were supposedly running out of places to put our garbage. Today, there is an oversupply of disposal space.

Deforestation. The planet’s overall forest land area has hardly changed in the last 60 years, U.S. forest area is about the same as it was in 1990, and forests are expanding in much of the developed world.

Air Pollution. As Ronald Baily notes, “Air pollution in the U.S. has been declining for decades and even China’s notoriously bad air pollution may be decreasing.”

Economic Collapse. In 1848, Karl Marx predicted that capitalism’s internal contradictions would lead inevitably to worldwide communist revolution. In the 1930s, the “stagnation” theorists said that modern economies would mature to the point where there would no jobs. In the 1970s, a copper shortage was going to destroy all economies based on electricity. Also in the 1970s, the Arabs were going to own half the U.S. In the 1980s, Japan became new threat. In the 1990s, Microsoft was going to take over the information superhighway. Needless to say, none of this crap happened.

Technology. My favorite doomsday scenario is that machines will exterminate or enslave mankind, a theory expressed most eloquently by The Simpsons’ Professor Frink: "You’ve got to listen to me. Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving."

The Terminator predicted Judgment Day in 1997. Termintor 3 pushed it back to 2004. It’s now 2008, and a Japanese-built robot is getting attention for climbing stairs. Run for the hills! Computers will never become creative, autonomous, or self-aware, because anything built by humans is going to break. Spaceballs:

Colonel Sanders: Out of order?! Fuck!
Dark Helmet: Even in the future nothing works!

Besides, enslavement by robots might not be so bad. The cylons on Battlestar Gallactica can make me their slave any day. Rowr!

In an article for Wired magazine, “We’re All Gonna Die!” Gregg Easterbrook makes a good case that none of these scenarios measure up—chemical weapons, germ warfare, particle chain reactions, runaway nanobots, black holes, shifting magnetic poles, supervolcanos, sudden climate change, and asteroids. He quotes John Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature, who wrote in in 1972, “most apocalyptic claims are dubious, inflated, or have such a low likelihood that rational people need not think about them.”

Tainted Products. Most consumer scares turn out to be false alarms—power lines causing cancer, cranberrys causing cancer, the alar-in-apples hysteria of the 1980s, the dangers of nuclear power and DDT. Pretty much everything is both a cause and cure for some kind of illness. Cell phones don’t cause cancer, then they do, then they don’t, then they do again! Coffee is bad for you, then it’s good, then it’s sorta good and sorta bad. The bottom line is that Americans are living longer, healthier lives than at any time in the past. Most companies know that it’s bad for business to kill their own customers.

Oil. The Peak Oil theorists argue that civilization will collapse when the world begins running out of oil. Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes predicts “war, famine, pestilence and death.” Colin Cambell throws in “the extinction of homo sapiens.” However, similar predictions were made in 1855, 1919, 1928, and the 1970s. It’s now 2008, and we’ve only consumed 18 percent of the world’s oil and gas.

Another fear is that a “price shock” could destabilize the U.S. economy. In truth, the economy is highly adaptable to changes in the price of oil, and the price of oil is very resistant to political manipulation. Political turmoil in the Middle East would not threaten our way of life.

Epidemics. Oprah Winfrey once claimed that one in five heterosexuals would be dead of AIDS by the 1990s. It is now clear that AIDS is confined mostly to high-risk groups. Ebola, Sars, Bird Flu—none has lived up to the hype. The “obesity epidemic” was a total fraud. Severe obesity affects only about one in 12 overweight adults, and it it does not present a significant mortality risk. Furthermore, people in the overweight category have a lower risk of premature death than do “healthy” people.

Moral Decay. The media fuels an endless stream of moral panics with sensational stories that turn out to be bogus or exaggerated (pregnancy pacts, rainbow parties, Internet predators). In truth, rates of violent crime, divorce, abortion, and teen pregnancy have been dropping for years or decades. Social critics have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for 150 years, but we’re still here! Elvis, the Beatles, Black Sabbath, NWA, Jerry Springer, When Good Pets Go Bad (that was my favorite), Grand Theft Auto, Celebreality, Mixed Martial Arts—each supposedly represented a “new low.” No, no. We haven’t hit rock bottom yet—not if I have anything to say about it!