Eco-pessimismo

Against Eco-pessimism: Half a Century of False Bad News

Yesterday's doomsayers were wrong because they didn't understand markets or human creativity

• Anything Peaceful

June 17, 2015

Pope Francis's new encyclical on the environment (Laudato Sii) warns of the coming environmental catastrophe ("unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us").  It's the latest entry in a long literary tradition of environmental doomsday warnings.
In contrast, Matt Ridley, bestselling author of Genome, The Agile Gene, and The Rational Optimist, who also received the 2012 Julian Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says this outlook has proven wrong time again. This is the full text of his acceptance speech. Video is embedded below.

It is now 32 years, nearly a third of a century, since Julian Simon nailed his theses to the door of the eco-pessimist church by publishing his famous article in Science magazine: “Resources, Population, Environment: An Oversupply of False Bad News.”
It is also 40 years since The Limits to Growth and 50 years since Silent Spring, plenty long enough to reflect on whether the world has conformed to Malthusian pessimism or Simonian optimism.
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