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Deciding that man’s emissions of carbon dioxide are bad, with no science to support it, has a lot in common with eugenics, which disregards all science it does not agree with. Eugenics was a very fashionable belief many decades ago. Two American presidents, both self-professed progressives, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were in the thick of eugenics. Then along came a failed artist who managed to get himself to the head of Germany. He made eugenics, or a version of it, the central organizing principle of the Third Reich.
By 1968 Paul Ehrlich had come up with the book Population Bomb. The book stated, among other things, that the planet was becoming too crowded and that we were moving beyond its carrying capacity. He said it was the biggest threat facing mankind. Five years later, the Club of Rome came out with a report titled Limits to Growth, accepting Ehrlich’s premise that there were too many people on the planet.
The book went beyond that premise to say that we were putting a strain on resources and that, ultimately, there would not be enough resources to take care of the rest of us on Earth. Between the two documents, a narrative was developed that coincided with the rise of the environmental movement ignited by Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring. It promoted the false premise which said that trace elements of chemicals and other substances pose a threat to humanity.
By the late 1980s, we were told that we were living beyond our limits. Humans, through their use of fossil fuels, were contributing to a potentially catastrophic warming of the planet. It was presented with no scientific support.
