Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.
Instead, Simon thought that more births are a good thing and was sure that resources would not disappear. His upbeat views were widely disparaged.
Ecologist Garrett Hardin called him “Dr. Pangloss,” compared him to a “fast change artist at a county fair,” and said he persuaded people with “sleight of hand.” [1] Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, and a leading alarmist wrote (along with his wife, Anne), that Simon was “the leader of a space-age age cargo cult” of economists and a “fringe character.” [2] They also called his qualifications those of a “specialist in mail-order marketing.”[3]
You may remember the extremely cold winter of 2021. In Texas, the system of electricity collapsed; 4.5 million homes lost power—for days. More than 200 people died, half of them of hypothermia (cold). This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. Texas’s electric utilities are regulated and the regulation had been modernized beginning in 1999.
Why wasn’t the public interest served?
The issue is so complicated that I can’t answer that question. But the ongoing debate over the Texas tragedy has plunged me into a new project: trying to understand why electric utilities are regulated in the first place. Why do state commissions control the activities of companies like Duke and PNG that produce and send electricity to our homes?
That effort sends us back to colonial days in America. [1]
Did the “Vietnam syndrome” affect how historians viewed the U.S. Civil War? Here’s an argument that it did.
But first, recognize that historians have mixed feelings about the present. On the one hand, today’s issues can shed light on the past because “each generation asks a different set of questions.”[1] On the other, they can lead to presentism—reshaping the past by imposing today’s viewpoints.
I’m always on the lookout for such interplays. And that may have happened with the post-Vietnam era. I just learned that in 2002 the prominent Civil War historian Brian Holden Reid argued that the Vietnam War reshaped historians’ understanding of the American Civil War. [2] Reid’s article appeared in the journal of a British military-security think tank.
Of course, thousands of pages—thousands of books, perhaps—have been written trying to explain why the North won and the South lost. A major trope used to be that the North initially failed to win because it lacked bold generals willing to take their troops into battle—until Ulysses S. Grant was appointed commanding general.
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so.
I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.
I will look at two disastrous periods that have some resemblance to today’s craze: witchcraft fears in the Middle Ages and the eugenics movement of the 1930s. I am not alone in making these comparisons to climate change alarm , as you will see. [1]
But first, bear with me as I report on some of the efforts to ignore or squelch criticism of the prevailing apocalyptic approach. These efforts are inappropriate, even unethical. Then I will discuss the two previous outsized eras. Continue reading “Climate Change and the “Madness of Crowds””
I’m skeptical. Not that they won’t find out what happened—they may well do that—but whether it makes any difference depends on politics. If the politics are with them they will have an impact; if not, they won’t.
I’m going to illustrate my point by sharing the history of a massive congressional investigation that took place 78 years ago. It was a whopper. The investigation went on for six and a half months and the testimony took up 39 volumes. So what happened? The majority party signed the report; the minority party dissented. Nothing much changed, except for the lives of some who were barred or discouraged from testifying and the cryptologist who bore the mental scars of trying to get the facts out for the rest of his life—and undoubtedly some others I don’t know about.
