Environmental end of days

Art Carden at Division of Labor has a great post today on the widespread acceptance of inevitable environmental catastrophe.

a public school teacher in our congregation had been encouraged by the School Board to highlight the "fact" that overpopulation is our #1 environmental problem as part of the Earth Day curriculum. That this is demonstrably false doesn't seem to trouble anyone. In the face of compelling evidence, people cling nonetheless to environmentalist mythology.

Behavioral economists are always so worried that we under-estimate the likelihood of catastrophe's because of cognitive biases and inabilities to deal with very big and very small numbers. But the political sphere seems to have force fitted this issue so that the bias runs the other way.