Why the ‘Precautionary Principle’ became a Globalist Ploy
The Precautionary Principle did not spring into existence fully formed, nor was it the product of a single malevolent mind.
Instead, it emerged from a confluence of German environmental law, neo-Malthusian population panic, and what can only be described as a philosophical revolution against human flourishing.
The principle’s formal origins trace to 1970s West Germany, where it appeared as the “Vorsorgeprinzip”—literally, the “foresight principle.” German lawmakers adopted clean air regulations banning substances suspected of causing environmental damage even without conclusive scientific proof. This represented a dramatic reversal of the traditional approach to regulation, which had required demonstrated harm before action.
Hans Jonas’s 1979 work, The Imperative of Responsibility, served as the inciting propaganda. He argued that technology had so amplified human impact that traditional ethics were obsolete. Jonas insisted that “the far distant effects of one’s actions should now be considered”—an illogical but reasonable-sounding proposition that did not consider risks versus benefits. It would metastasize into something far more sinister when wedded to environmental catastrophism.
From Germany, the principle was adopted into international law at the 1987 International Conference on the Protection of the North Sea, where German representatives championed it. But its real coronation came at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where it was enshrined as Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
Examining who orchestrated this event reveals the larger picture.
Maurice Strong and the Globalist Infrastructure
Maurice Strong was the central architect of the modern environmental governance structure. Born in 1929, Strong’s career is a case study in elite networking. At age 18, he met David Rockefeller, beginning a patronage relationship that would shape environmental policy for the next half-century. Under Rockefeller’s sponsorship, Strong built a career oscillating between the oil industry—running companies like Petro Canada and CalTex Africa—and international bureaucracy.
This apparent contradiction—an oil man leading the environmental movement—makes sense given the underlying dynamic. Strong wasn’t interested in dismantling industrial civilization; he was interested in controlling it. The environmental crisis narrative provided the perfect pretext for concentrating power in international institutions, particularly the United Nations.
Strong organized the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first major UN environmental summit. But his masterwork was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where he served as Secretary General. This conference produced not just the Rio Declaration with its Precautionary Principle, but also Agenda 21—a 700-page blueprint for “sustainable development” that has metastasized through national and local governments worldwide, despite never being ratified as a treaty by the U.S. Congress.
Strong’s connections ran deep into the network of globalist organizations. He was a member of the Club of Rome, the elite think tank that had published “The Limits to Growth” in 1972. He worked closely with Mikhail Gorbachev, another member of the Club of Rome, to found Green Cross International and to develop the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter explicitly calls for a “sustainable way of living” and a “new sense of global interdependence”—code for subordinating national sovereignty and individual liberty to international governance.
The Club of Rome and Manufactured Crisis
To understand the Precautionary Principle’s ideological foundations, one must understand the Club of Rome and its influential 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. Commissioned by the Club and prepared by MIT researchers, the report used computer modeling to claim that a catastrophic collapse would be driven by population growth and resource depletion.
It was GIGO—garbage in, garbage out. The report’s methodology was flawed. It assumed exponential growth in population and consumption while allowing only incremental improvements in technology and resource discovery. As critics like economist Julian Simon would later demonstrate, this approach guaranteed apocalyptic conclusions. The model treated human beings as mere consumers of resources rather than as creative problem-solvers who innovate their way past constraints.
Yet the report’s influence was enormous. It sold millions of copies and provided intellectual ammunition for the environmental movement’s increasingly anti-human agenda. The report called for “simultaneous constraints on population and capital growth” to achieve “global equilibrium.” It was a euphemism for a dramatic reduction in human numbers and prosperity. To put it succinctly, eliminating a lot of us, one way or the other.
The Club of Rome’s membership reads like a who’s who of global elites: industrialists, government officials, and academics. These were establishment figures who saw in environmental catastrophism an opportunity to take political control of the world. In their 1991 book The First Global Revolution, Club of Rome members Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider wrote: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill.”
They were searching for an enemy to unite humanity under centralized control, and they chose environmental threats—whether real or exaggerated—as that enemy.
Population Control
The Precautionary Principle cannot be understood apart from the population control movement, which has its roots in early 20th-century eugenics. When overt racism became unfashionable after World War II, eugenicists rebranded themselves as population controllers and environmentalists.
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb crystallized this transition. Ehrlich, a biologist influenced by earlier neo-Malthusians like William Vogt, predicted that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s. His proposed solutions included compulsory population control, drastically reduced consumption by wealthy nations, and allowing famines to run their course in countries like India.
Yoho comment: I read this pack of lies the year it was published, when I was 15. It scared the hell out of me.
Ehrlich’s mentor, John Holdren, who later became President Obama’s science advisor, co-authored Ecoscience in 1977, which discussed forced sterilization and abortion as potential population control measures. While Ehrlich and Holdren would later claim these were merely academic discussions, the book reveals the mindset: human population itself was the problem, and coercive measures were justified.
The environmental movement embraced population control with enthusiasm. Organizations with eugenic roots—the Population Council, Planned Parenthood—found common cause with environmental groups in promoting reduced birth rates, particularly in the developing world. The Sierra Club, whose executive director, David Brower, commissioned The Population Bomb, made population control a core issue.
Ehrlich’s ideas helped inspire India’s forced sterilization campaigns in the 1970s, which sterilized millions, often through coercion and denial of government benefits. China’s one-child policy, implemented in 1979, led to forced abortions, infanticide, and a demographic catastrophe that continues today.
The Precautionary Principle provided intellectual cover for this anti-human agenda. If population growth poses catastrophic environmental risks and we shouldn’t wait for complete scientific certainty, then aggressive population control measures could be justified as “precautionary.” The principle’s vague language—”serious or irreversible damage,” “lack of full scientific certainty”—gave an obscene amount of discretion to those implementing it.
The Philosophical Problem: Nature Over Humanity
At its core, the Precautionary Principle embodies what Alex Epstein calls the “anti-impact framework”—a worldview that treats human impact on nature as inherently evil and nature itself as a “delicate balance” that human activity threatens to disrupt.
This philosophy reached its most explicit form in the Deep Ecology movement, articulated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss in 1973. This holds that all elements of nature—humans, animals, plants, even ecosystems—possess equal intrinsic value. This devalues human life and prosperity. If a forest and a human have equal moral value, then cutting trees to build homes becomes morally equivalent to murder.
Deep ecologists like David Foreman of Earth First! made the implications explicit, characterizing humanity as “a pathological infestation on the Earth.” Some advocates openly called for reducing the human population to under one billion, which would require killing roughly 85-90% of current humanity. While mainstream environmentalists sometimes distance themselves from such extreme rhetoric, the underlying philosophy pervades environmental policy.
Social ecologist Murray Bookchin called out Deep Ecology’s misanthropy, arguing it could be used to justify genocide. He was right to worry. The anti-human implications are not theoretical; they manifest in real policies that sacrifice human welfare for environmental purity.
The Precautionary Principle inverts normal risk assessment. Traditional cost-benefit analysis weighs the risks and benefits of an action, with human welfare as the primary concern. The Precautionary Principle, particularly in its stronger formulations, forbids such balancing. As physicist Freeman Dyson observed, “The Precautionary Principle says that if some course of action carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then you shouldn’t do it, no matter how great the possible advantages of the action may be. You are not allowed to balance costs against benefits.”
This is not precaution; it is selective paralysis that always operates against human development while ignoring the costs of inaction.
The Abandonment of Cost-Benefit Analysis
The Precautionary Principle’s rejection of cost-benefit analysis is absurd. This analysis, for all its imperfections, at least attempts to weigh the full consequences of decisions, including human welfare impacts. The Precautionary Principle dispenses with this, replacing it with what legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls “fear-driven decision making.”
Consider the implications. Clinical drug trials might cause harm to participants; therefore, ban all trials, consigning millions to death from treatable diseases. Nuclear power plants pose some radiation risk; consequently, they prevent atomic development. Genetic modification of crops might have unknown ecological effects; therefore, ban GMOs, condemning millions to malnutrition and farmers to reduced productivity.
The principle suffers from fatal logical flaws that Sunstein identified. First, it is paralyzing: every action, including inaction, carries risks of serious or irreversible harm. Banning a pesticide might prevent environmental damage, but it might also lead to crop failures and famine. The principle does not guide how to choose between competing risks.
Second, the principle is infinitely malleable. Because it requires action based on mere threats without complete scientific certainty, it can justify virtually any regulation while providing no limiting principle. As critics note, it has been used selectively, almost always to oppose development and new technology, never to question the harms of regulatory excess.
Third, the principle ignores second-order effects and opportunity costs. When Japan shut down its nuclear reactors after Fukushima for “precautionary” reasons, it was forced to import fossil fuels, leading to higher energy costs, increased emissions, and economic harm. The principle focused on nuclear risks while ignoring these predictable consequences.
The Precautionary Principle magnifies potential harms from action while downplaying both the benefits of action and the harms of inaction. This systematic bias against human development is not a bug; it is a feature.
Planetary Greening and Human Flourishing
The relationship between carbon dioxide and planetary greening shows how the environmental movement has lied to us. Multiple studies using satellite data confirm that Earth has experienced significant greening over the past four decades, with increased plant growth corresponding to slightly rising atmospheric CO2 levels and the widespread use of fossil fuels.
Plants evolved to thrive at CO2 concentrations several times higher than current levels. Increasing CO2 levels act as a fertilizer, enhancing plant growth, improving water use efficiency, and extending growing seasons. The greening is most pronounced in arid regions and has increased agricultural productivity.
Yet the environmental movement treats rising CO2 as an unmitigated catastrophe, ignoring or dismissing the benefits. This is the anti-impact framework in action: human influence on atmospheric chemistry must be bad, evidence be damned.
The correlation between fossil fuel use and human flourishing is overwhelming. Since 1800, as fossil fuel use exploded, global life expectancy more than doubled, from about 30 years to over 70. Infant mortality plummeted. Hunger decreased dramatically. Literacy soared. Billions lifted themselves from grinding poverty.
This did not happen despite fossil fuels; it happened because of them. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy enabled mechanized agriculture, modern medicine, safe water systems, climate control, rapid transportation, and the entire industrial infrastructure that supports modern life. Fossil fuels didn’t ruin the planet; they made it vastly more habitable for humans and enabled the explosion of human knowledge and creativity of the modern era.
The Precautionary Principle, applied consistently, would have prevented this flourishing. Steam engines posed environmental risks—ban them. Coal mining caused pollution—forbid it. Oil drilling might contaminate—prohibit it. Chemical fertilizers could have unknown effects—ban them. At every step, precautionary thinking would have kept humanity in pre-industrial poverty.
Anti-Human Implications
The Precautionary Principle, taken seriously, forces billions of people to live in poverty and die preventable deaths, all justified by speculative environmental catastrophes that may never materialize.
Consider DDT. After environmentalist campaigns led to its ban in most countries—campaigns explicitly justified by precautionary reasoning—malaria resurged, particularly in Africa. Millions died, mostly children. The environmental movement considered this an acceptable trade-off to protect bird populations from eggshell thinning. Human children versus birds: the Precautionary Principle chose birds.
Consider energy poverty. Roughly one billion people lack access to electricity. The environmental movement, invoking precautionary concerns about climate change, actively opposes fossil fuel development in poor countries. They promote expensive renewable energy that cannot provide reliable power. The result: hundreds of millions condemned to continued poverty, unable to refrigerate food or medicine, unable to study after dark, unable to access modern economic opportunities. The Precautionary Principle chooses theoretical environmental protection over actual human welfare.
Consider agricultural productivity. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution—using fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanized irrigation—saved hundreds of millions from starvation. The environmental movement opposed these technologies based on precautionary concerns. Had they prevailed, famines would have killed countless millions. Ehrlich himself advocated letting India “slip down the drain” rather than providing food aid, preferring mass starvation to continued population growth.
These are the real human costs of anti-human environmental ideology, legitimized by the Precautionary Principle’s illogical rhetorical framework.
The Globalist Control
The question of whether the Precautionary Principle was developed by globalist eugenicists seeking population reduction is difficult to prove with certainty. However, the documented connections between environmental governance advocates, population control proponents, and institutions seeking supranational authority are extensive and disturbing.
The network operates through interlocking organizations: the United Nations and its various agencies (UNEP, UNFPA, WHO), the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum, major foundations (Rockefeller, Ford), and countless NGOs. These organizations share personnel, funding, and ideological commitments.
Maurice Strong exemplifies these connections. Oil executive. UN bureaucrat. Club of Rome member. Rockefeller protégé. He moved seamlessly between industry and international governance, using each position to advance the agenda of centralized control through this environmental propaganda.
The 1992 Rio Summit, where the Precautionary Principle achieved international recognition, also produced Agenda 21 and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. These instruments have been implemented through “soft law”—not formal treaties requiring ratification, but voluntary agreements and bureaucratic initiatives that achieve the same effect without democratic accountability.
Agenda 21, despite never being ratified as a treaty, has been systematically implemented through UN agencies, national governments, and local initiatives. Critics who point out that Agenda 21 discusses “sustainable population” and restrictions on resource use are dismissed as conspiracy theorists, yet the document itself is publicly available and says what critics claim it says.
The pattern is consistent: manufacture or exaggerate an environmental crisis, declare it too urgent for normal democratic processes, implement sweeping regulations through unelected international bodies and domestic administrative agencies, use the Precautionary Principle to justify action before full evidence is available, and dismiss critics as anti-science or worse.
Whether this represents conscious conspiracy or merely the alignment of ideological preferences and institutional interests is less important than recognizing the outcome: a massive transfer of power from individuals and democratic nation-states to unelected international bureaucrats and their allied NGOs, all justified by environmental catastrophism about disasters that have repeatedly failed to materialize.
Failed Predictions
If the Precautionary Principle really represented wise caution, one would expect its advocates to have been roughly correct in their predictions. Instead, they have been spectacularly, consistently wrong.
Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the 1970s. Instead, agricultural productivity soared, and hunger declined.
The Club of Rome predicted resource exhaustion by the end of the 20th century. Instead, proven reserves of most resources increased, and prices (adjusted for inflation) generally declined.
Environmentalists predicted an imminent ice age in the 1970s, then a global warming apocalypse in subsequent decades. The climate has warmed modestly, but catastrophic predictions (an ice-free Arctic by 2013, submerged coastal cities, mass climate refugee crises) have not materialized.
Predictions of peak oil exhaustion have been made repeatedly since the 1970s. Each time, discoveries and extraction technologies have pushed the date further into the future. (Yoho: THIS post about abiotic oil debunks oil scarcity.)
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring predicted widespread bird extinctions from DDT. Most bird populations have actually increased since DDT was banned, suggesting the relationship was more complex than claimed.
Ehrlich famously bet economist Julian Simon in 1980 that resource scarcity would drive up the prices of five metals by 1990. All five declined in price. Ehrlich lost, but learned nothing.
This is not a typical scientific error; it is systematic nonsense. The environmental movement consistently predicts catastrophe and consistently gets it wrong because its predictions are driven by ideology rather than careful analysis, and its mission is political control. Yet these failed predictions never diminish the movement’s influence or its never-ending invocation of the Precautionary Principle.
The Real Precautionary Question
Given that environmental catastrophists have been consistently wrong for fifty years, given that their proposed policies would condemn billions to poverty and premature death, given that human flourishing has dramatically increased precisely through the technologies they oppose, should we not exercise precaution against implementing their agenda?
The Precautionary Principle, properly applied, would counsel extreme skepticism toward proposals that would radically restrict human liberty and economic development based on speculative environmental harms promoted by activists whose predictions have failed repeatedly.
Yet the principle operates unidirectionally: always against human development, never against regulatory excess. Always magnifying environmental risks, never acknowledging human costs, and always demanding proof that proposed activities are safe, never requiring proof that restrictions won’t cause immense harm.
Alternatives
A pro-human approach would start by recognizing that human life and flourishing constitute the primary moral value. Nature has value—it provides resources and beauty that enhance human life—but it does not have equal standing with human welfare.
This is not a license for shortsighted resource destruction. Humans have long-term interests in environmental stewardship. Fouling our own nest makes us worse off. But stewardship means managing nature for human benefit over time, not treating nature as the only value.
A pro-human framework would embrace rigorous cost-benefit analysis that honestly weighs all consequences, including human welfare impacts. When considering a proposed regulation, it would ask: What are the benefits? What are the costs? Who benefits and who pays? What are the alternatives? What are the consequences of inaction?
This would demand high-quality evidence before imposing restrictions on human activity. The burden of proof would remain on those seeking to prohibit or restrict, not on those seeking to develop and innovate.
Most importantly, a pro-human framework would recognize that human creativity and technological innovation solve problems. The proper response to environmental challenges is not to restrict human activity but to unleash human ingenuity. We don’t conserve our way to prosperity; we innovate our way there.
Conclusion: Rejecting Anti-Human Ideology
The Precautionary Principle, as formulated and applied by the environmental movement, is anti-human. It prioritizes speculative environmental harms over demonstrated human benefits. It abandons rigorous analysis in favor of fear-driven decision-making. It has been promoted by a network of organizations and individuals whose track record includes support for coercive population control, opposition to technologies that have saved hundreds of millions of lives, and advocacy for totalitarian global governance structures.
The Precautionary Principle was designed as a tool for population control, and it systematically operates to restrict human activity, oppose beneficial technologies, and subordinate human welfare to environmental concerns. Its application would, if taken to its logical conclusion, prevent the development that has lifted billions from poverty and continue to condemn billions more to preventable suffering.
We are not the problem. We are the solution. Our growing numbers, rising prosperity, and technological capabilities do not threaten the planet; they represent the hope for addressing genuine environmental challenges while continuing to improve human life.
The Precautionary Principle is an anti-human doctrine—a tool not for wise stewardship but for imposing the preferences of global elites on billions of people who would be better served by liberty, prosperity, and the continued advance of human knowledge and capability.
Key Sources
- Meadows, Donella H., et al. “The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind.” Universe Books, 1972. The foundational Club of Rome report that used computer modeling to predict catastrophic collapse from population growth and resource depletion, profoundly influencing environmental policy.
- Ehrlich, Paul R. “The Population Bomb.” Ballantine Books, 1968. The seminal neo-Malthusian text predicting mass starvation and advocating for aggressive population control measures, demonstrating the anti-human roots of modern environmentalism.
- Epstein, Alex. “Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.” Portfolio, 2022. A comprehensive critique of the “anti-impact framework” in environmental thinking and defense of fossil fuels’ role in human flourishing.
- Sunstein, Cass R. “Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle.” Cambridge University Press, 2005. Legal scholar’s critique of the Precautionary Principle’s logical incoherence and tendency toward paralysis in decision-making.
- King, Alexander and Schneider, Bertrand. “The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome.” Pantheon Books, 1991. Contains the revealing admission that the Club of Rome deliberately chose environmental threats as a unifying “enemy” for global governance.
- United Nations. “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.” UN Conference on Environment and Development, 1992. The document that enshrined the Precautionary Principle (Principle 15) in international environmental law.
- Zubrin, Robert. “The Population Control Holocaust.” The New Atlantis, 2012. Documents the human costs of population control programs in India, China, and elsewhere, showing the deadly consequences of anti-human environmental ideology.
- Devall, Bill and Sessions, George. “Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered.” Gibbs Smith, 1985. Articulates the radical environmental philosophy of “biocentric egalitarianism” that treats human life as having no special moral status above other life forms.
- United Nations. “Agenda 21.” UN Conference on Environment and Development, 1992. The comprehensive 700-page action plan for “sustainable development” that has been implemented globally despite never being ratified as a formal treaty by many nations including the United States.
- Lomborg, Bjørn. “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World.” Cambridge University Press, 2001. Systematic analysis of environmental data showing that many apocalyptic predictions have failed to materialize and human welfare has dramatically improved alongside economic development.
source robertyoho.substack.com