Mark, perhaps I’m particularly keen on this subject because I’m still getting scores of emails from lefty types insisting that because my prediction about Iraq’s future was wrong, I should be pelted from the public square. Regardless, your post should remind us that bad predictions of environmental doom have been made by many folks not only un-pelted but actually generously funded and even revered on the left today. A few excerpts from my friend Ronald Bailey’s testimony before Congress a few years ago:

The Limits to Growth report includes a table listing all the resources that were supposedly going to run out. The report’s authors projected that, at the exponential growth rates they expected to occur, known world supplies of zinc, gold, tin, copper, oil, and natural gas would be completely exhausted in 1992.
Harrison Brown, a respected member of the National Academy of Sciences, published predictions in Scientific American in 1970 which estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper by 2000, and that lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would all be gone by 1990.
In 1976, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Heinz Award in Environment laureate Paul Ehrlich chimed in with his book, The End of Affluence. He stated that “before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” In 1980, the Carter administration issued its gloomy Global 2000 report, which projected that the price of oil in 1995 would be $40 per barrel in 1979 dollars.
In the 1990s, textbooks like The United States and Its People told impressionable schoolchildren that “some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminum will be used up within your lifetime.” Another textbook, Concepts and Challenges in Earth Science, asserts that once “nonrenewable resources are used up, their supplies are gone” (just try arguing with logic like that!). A science text, Biology, An Everyday Experience, connects the dots to draw the obvious conclusion: “Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use.” ….
[Snip]
Now onto population growth. Let’s begin with a little walk down memory lane. In 1968 Stanford University biologist, the aforementioned Paul Ehrlich, famously predicted in his best-selling book The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines; hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
For the first Earth Day in 1970, Ehrlich, in an article entitled “Eco-Catastrophe” in The Progressive magazine, offered a scenario in which four billion people would starve to death between 1980 and 1989, 65 million of whom would be Americans.
Ehrlich is not alone in making dire predictions of imminent global famine. Lester Brown, the founder of the Worldwatch Institute, declared in 1981 that “the period of global food security is over. As the demand for food continues to press against supply, inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise, but how much.” In 1994, Brown wrote in his annual State of the World report: “The world’s farmers can no longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to the world’s population.” And Brown warned in his 1997 report: “Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding, much as ideological conflict was the defining issue of the historical era that recently ended.” He continues: “rising food prices will be the first major economic indicator to show that the world economy is on an environmentally unsustainable path.”
Well, what happened? First, let’s review a few things. Why did global population increase so dramatically in the 20th century, rising from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to a bit over six billion today? As Harvard University demographer Nicholas Eberstadt puts it: “Global population increased not because people started breeding like rabbits, but because they stopped dying like flies.”