Earth Day 2026: “Our Power, Our PlanetTM, Our Propaganda” Redux

By Benjamin Zycher

Like a dying star imploding after running out of fuel for fusion, the promoters of Earth Day — the central religious holiday of the environmental left — find themselves so bereft of ideas that they have recycled (!) their theme from a year ago: “Our Power, Our PlanetTM.”

As I noted last year, the trademark touch is fatuous: Who would bother plagiarizing something so infantile? But never mind. I pointed out also that the addition of “Our Propaganda” would create a theme vastly more honest, in that every argument promoted last year was unadulterated leftist agitprop, and the direct connection to Soviet political strategy is obvious, as Earth Day falls on Lenin’s birthday, amusingly enough. The 2025 Earth Day exhortation was a tripling of global renewable electricity generation by 2030, a preposterous goal worthy of Soviet central planning (“The Five-Year Plan in Four Years!”), and as Pravda used to put it, the parallels ideological and idiotic between the Earth Day themes and the Soviet slogans — “2+2=5” — are no accident, Comrade.

Back to propaganda: The Earth Day production of it is cheap and reliable, unlike electricity from wind and solar facilities. Consider the Earth Day “50 Ways to Make a Difference,” a series of “small actions” ranging from the absurd to the zany for people with far too much time on their hands. We are supposed to “share climate facts on social media,” the first of which are the horrors of plastics; in various evil incarnations they are disposable, single-use, lurking in the oceans and drinking water, and threatening to human health. This too is an exercise in recycling, as the 2024 Earth Day theme was “Planet vs Plastics.”

Apart from the fact that none of this has anything to do with “climate facts,” one would think that this horror parade would have made life on earth ever more sickly, disease-ridden, and short. And one would be wrong: human life expectancy at birth now is 73.49 years, an increase of over 61% from the life expectancy of 45.51 years in 1950. For more on the absurdities of the crusade against plastics, see my 2024 Earth Day column.

And there is the assertion that there is an ongoing “global species decline,” a repetition of the 2019 Earth Day (“Protect Our Species”) screaming about a “sixth mass extinction.” The Earth Day proponents warned us that “Scientists estimate … 30 to 50% of all species [are] possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century.” Wow. Of course, “scientists” do not know even how many species exist, even within an order of magnitude. And so it is far from unclear as to precisely how “scientists” know how many are being lost annually, let alone the causes, notwithstanding the Pavlovian assertion from the environmental left that mankind is to blame. The actual evidence suggests that biodiversity now is vastly greater than at any previous historical period. That increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have yielded an important greening effect is a reality that the ideological opponents of fossil fuels prefer not to discuss.

Another of the “50 Ways to Make a Difference” is “support renewable energy initiatives,” the link to which is simply a cut-and-paste of the same exhortation from 2025. That it is being repeated suggests that it did not make a difference, and the growing realization that wind and solar power are driving costs up dramatically suggests that this reiteration too will fall on deaf ears.

None of the other assertions and arguments in the Earth Day 2026 materials is worth reviewing; they are uniformly dishonest. As is the deafening silence about the fundamental anti-human core of left-wing environmentalism, a stance that studiously ignores the relationship between fossil fuel use and human flourishing. Unlike the modern Earth Day ideologues, the earlier ones at least were honest about their hatred of people. In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of the use of DDT to control malaria: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” 

Tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s poor have died from malaria as a direct result of the multination ban on the use of DDT, driven by false assertions about its harmful effects on various bird species, promulgated from the very first Earth Day in 1970. Then there was the observation made in 1971 by Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine: “The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.”

For left-wing environmental ideologues, humans are nothing more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed without moral standing. (The Nazi term was “useless eaters.”) Nor, implicitly, do humans have the intelligence, inventiveness, and ingenuity to solve problems. As the late Julian Simon recognized: That is false. Simply because of the laws of large numbers, some substantial numbers of people are and will be geniuses. 

Back to “Our Power, Our PlanetTM”: One would think that after all these years since 1970 the Earth Day proponents would engage in some soul searching about the fact that their endless apocalyptic assertions about environmental conditions and planetary health are unsupported by rigorous analysis, by the historical record, and by the facts. And one would be wrong. And so I return, as I have so many times, to the wisdom of that noted philosopher and keen observer of the human condition, Dogbert: “You’d be surprised how little that matters.”

Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.