by Robert L. Bradley Jr.
The American Institute for Economic Research
“Global Warming Has Begun” announced the New York Times in mid-1988, predicting a temperature and sea level rise by 2050 of as much as 9 degrees and 4 feet, respectively.
The majority of East Coast beaches could be gone by 2020, warned the Times in 1995. And just last week at the publication formerly known as the newspaper of record: “Shifts in Atlantic Hint at Danger.”
Don’t let this tsunami of climate-change alarm distract and fool you. Today’s push for government solutions to a global market failure is right out of the Malthusian playbook. Remember the “population bomb” of the 1960s? Resource exhaustion of the 1970s? Soil erosion, water famines, global cooling?
Back then, the consensus tried to demean, isolate, and cancel contrarian Julian Simon. The science was settled that more people equals more problems (the I=PAT equation), and “depletable” resources could not be replenished.