Stolen from a forum:

Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth
Day predictions of 2009.
April 22, 2009, 4:00 am

Earth Day is past now, but this article is so popular we’re pinning it
at the top of the home page today so everyone looking for it can find
it.

Luckily, we haven't run out of oil, but we have exhausted our supply
of 70s fashion.
For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of
imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom &
Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because
they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong
predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action
is taken against problems facing mankind.” • George Wald, Harvard
Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of
this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human
habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to
enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration
and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small
increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until
at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death
during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated
the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of
unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the
ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of
the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim
timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will
spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near
East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and
Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000,
thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western
Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”• Peter
Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to
support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will
have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution
will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one
half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time
before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our
land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.
“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of
lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up
the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new
ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up
crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil.
You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll
say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute,
believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all
the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If
present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder
for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in
the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into
an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made
today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And
they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.