Monday, April 22, 2002

So where's all the gasoline coming from?
I mean, they told us back in 1970 that we were less than ten years from exhausting the world's petroleum reserves, so we must have run out some time ago. And did global warming overcome the new ice age? I must have slept through it.

Ron sent me this:

A selection of quotes from the first Earth Day, 1970, to celebrate the farsightedness, clear vision, and predictive ability of environmentalists then -- and today.

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation."
Dennis Hayes, chief organizer--Earth Day 1

"[A]t least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
Paul Ehrlich

"By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine."
Prof. Peter Gunter, North Texas State University

"In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution... by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half..."
`Life' Magazine, January 1970

"[A]ir pollution... is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
Paul Ehrlich

"By the year 2000... there won't be any more crude oil."
Ecologist Kenneth Watt

"[I]n 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."
Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary, Smithsonian Institute

"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years... the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
Kenneth Watt

"In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked upon now."
Paul Ehrlich, "The Population Bomb" (1968)

Happy Urf Day.

Further reading: All the Trouble in the World, by P J O'Rourke.

LATER: You mean, all this time that the President and Congress have been 'rasslin about ANWR, they could'a been drilling on the other side of the North Slope without Congressional approval?

Cool. Interesting timing, too, letting this cat out of the bag on Urf Day Weekend.

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