Michael Shellenberger debunks Malthusian claims – ‘Fear-monger about scarcity so they can create scarcity’

Peter Gleick is an admitted fraud. He lied to obtain documents & appears to have forged one of them, something he denies

The more one learns about this sordid affair the more it’s clear that Gleick is a fanatic who regularly engages in unethical behavior

Here’s the Malthusian environmental record

– 2 famines (Ireland & India)
– make energy & food more expensive everywhere, particularly in poor nations
– make energy less reliable, causing black-outs
– fear-monger about scarcity so they can create scarcity 

For decades the Malthusian pro-scarcity agenda is funded by Chinese solar industry, shadow banks, fossil interests

Started with Jerry Brown’s Dad and Gavin Newsom’s dad in the 1960s

Continues today:

The reason that Malthusian pro-scarcity activists & pseudoscientists like @PeterGleick have to lie, cheat, and steal is because their agenda hurts people and the environment and is bought and paid for by powerful interests

I document it all here:

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…

The reason @PeterGleick has to lie about honest scientists and journalists is because we have uncovered his dishonest and unethical behavior, and threaten his bad Malthusian ideology centered around making everybody poorer and harmonizing with nature. 

Gleick part, offers no reason to expect declining food production, much less famine. Food surpluses have been rising gradually for millennia and especially in the 220 years since Malthus wrote his famous tract claiming that humans are doomed to starve.

British elites used Malthus’ ideas to justify letting 1M people starve to death during the Great Irish Famine. When people think of the Great Famine they tend to focus on the fungus that killed potatoes and overlook the fact that, between 1845 and 1849, Ireland exported food. 

Thirty years later, the British governor-general of India argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.” Later he claimed the “limits of increase of production and of the population have been reached.” 

After World War II, American conservationists adopted the thinly-veiled Malthusian idea that making the world a better place involved letting poor people in poor nations starve to death. Top academic institutions helped make Malthusian ideas mainstream. 

In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth,” a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse, which The New York Times covered on its front page. 

“The most probable result,” the report declared, “will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” The collapse of civilization was “a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’” 

Humankind needed to play “triage” and let poor people in Bangladesh die, argued Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and Anne Ehrlich, allies of @PeterGleick 

In the “concept of triage,” they wrote, “those in the third groups are those who will die regardless of treatment. . . . The Paddocks [authors of 1967 book Famine 1975!] felt that India, among others, was probably in this category. Bangladesh is today a more clear-cut example.” 

But In 1981, Indian economist Amartya Sen published Poverty and Famines showing that famines are not caused by lack in food and occur in times of war, oppression, and the collapse of food distribution, not production, systems. Sen won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. 

In Apocalypse Never, I point to a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about a resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. 

Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack nuclear in order to warn of climate apocalypse. 

Gleick suggests that I am wrong that hydro-electric dams, flood control systems, and nuclear power plants will allow human societies to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. 

Malthusian pseudo-scientists like @PeterGleick are lost souls seeking false gods. They are individuals in the grip of religion without knowing it. It is a religion that leads them to justify lying, cheating, and stealing in the name of nature harmony.