In our neighborhood, or on our way to grade school, we couldn’t miss the stars in so many windows. We were told the blue ones showed a family member serving in the war. The gold ones meant they had lost a family member. Even at our young age, we were no strangers to crisis and loss.

Even after WWII ended, the sense of crisis and fear didn’t end. The Russians had the atomic bomb, and the Cold War was on. We all had seen pictures and movies of mushroom clouds. Our school, like the rest, brought it home with “Duck and Cover” drills. It seemed we were likely doomed:

Fortunately, the Cuban Missile Crisis showed the Russians, like us, had no interest in mutual destruction. The bombs never dropped, but the memories stayed.

At summer camp, spraying areas and the cabins with DDT was a normal ritual. Mosquitoes were nasty and spread all sorts of bad things. The good news then was we had almost eradicated Malaria, one of the world’s major killers. Then came Rachael Carson’s book, “The Silent Spring,” which told us in no uncertain terms that DDT was deadly to birds and probably to humans. Exposed repeatedly, we were doomed.

Later, our fears proved overblown. DDT wasn’t going to kill us after all. The chemical that had Malaria, which cost millions of lives worldwide yearly, on the run wasn’t so bad after all. Unfortunately, millions DDT might’ve saved were lost when most of the world, including us, took Carson’s overblown warnings to heart and banned DDT. Children were at the forefront of the deaths.

It wasn’t long before we faced the distinct possibility that, because there were too many of us, we would face famine. Even those who survived would face shortages of everything. A “Population Bomb” awaited us because Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich showed in his 1968 book that the Earth couldn’t sustain the massive population growth since the Industrial Revolution. Ehrlich became a fixture on TV, and the fear spread worldwide. We were doomed.

Not everyone bought into Ehrlich’s theory. The Stanford biology professor echoed the 19th-century philosopher Thomas Malthus, who argued that because populations expanded geometrically and food only arithmetically, the bulk of mankind was destined to live at subsistence, if at all.

Seeing big flaws in Ehrlich’s theory, Economist Julian Simon bet Ehrlich that any commodities the biologist chose would be cheaper, meaning more plentiful, at the end of a decade. Simon humiliated Ehrlich by winning the bet, as all Ehrlich selected were cheaper. Ehrlich and Malthus underestimated human ingenuity and adaptability.

Unfortunately, many believed Ehrlich and acted on his theory. Countries sought to limit populations by abortion, sometimes forced, and incentives or coercion to limit births. China implemented its one-child policy, which will distort its population far into the future, with attendant economic woes. Our worry now is a worldwide baby bust.

While we worried about starving, Newsweek warned in 1975 of a coming Ice Age. Some scientists saw signs of a rapidly cooling world, and we were about to freeze. We were doomed.

While scientists sorted out conflicting climate data, the big screen showed us that our increasing number of nuclear power plants posed an existential threat by malfunctioning and burning all the way through the Earth to China with untold consequences. This was known as the “China Syndrome,” as in the title of the 1979 movie. We were all doomed.

A horrible malfunction at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a much less serious malfunction at our Three Mile Island plant gave credence to these fears. While Chernobyl caused deaths and radiation poisoning in the area, neither malfunction caused uncontrolled burning through the Earth. No one died at Three Mile Island, and harm was contained.

Chernobyl’s problem was a faulty design, very different from other Nuclear plants built worldwide. Nuclear power actually has a better safety record than other power sources.

The paranoia about nuclear power shows up in our opening: only two nuclear plants have been started and opened since Three Mile Island. They each took 15 years to build.

In contrast, France continued its nuclear program, and it now provides 70% of its electricity. That nation makes money by selling its excess power to its energy-poor neighbors, such as Germany. That nation inexplicably closed its well-performing nuclear plants and now suffers from high energy costs.

Meanwhile, we got a reversal; we weren’t going to freeze after all. Now we were going to fry instead. According to the first World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979, we had a ten-year window to cut carbon emissions, or global warming could make the Earth uninhabitable. We are doomed.

The drumbeat has kept building since. In 2006, Al Gore’s much-awarded “An Inconvenient Truth” appeared, reinforcing the short timeframe to save the Earth. Across the globe, especially in advanced countries, planned fossil fuel plants were scrapped, and many existing ones closed. Solar and wind will power the future. But they don’t work when the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow. They require backup.

Critics of this route, such as Bjorn Lundberg and Steven Konin, point out that even if we spent the fortune the Green New Deal proponents proposed, it would make little difference. Worse, Lundberg contrasts the expenditure with other, better uses of the money. As it is, wind and solar spending contributed to our greatest inflation in 40 years.

The fastest-growing use of power is data centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI), but they require absolutely stable sources, which precludes solar and wind. Nuclear fits the bill, but heavy regulation here and abroad makes new plants difficult and, even then, time-consuming. As a result, existing but decommissioned plants have become highly attractive. Ironically, Microsoft is planning to bring the other unharmed Three Mile Island reactor back online to power its centers.

Suddenly, an unknown plague escaped from Wuhan, China. It spread quickly across the globe, and governments struggled to decide what to do. Although both our CDC and the World Health Organization had plans for handling a pandemic like this, they warned that widespread lockdowns were counterproductive. Our government and others ignored them and led us to lock down as much as possible, including our schools. The reason was that if we didn’t lock down most everything, wear masks, and socially distance, our health system would be overwhelmed, and millions upon millions would die. We would be doomed.

Even as these draconian measures were put in place, many bright people looking at the same data strongly questioned these actions. Sweden had none of it, and placed their efforts toward the groups truly at risk: the elderly and infirm. It never closed its schools. Life went on as the original plans contemplated.

As a result of our lockdown, we added massively to our national debt, burdening us for years to come. Worse still, children held out of school for an extended period may never catch up. Sweden, with cooler heads, avoided these long-running effects.

Now you tell me if we don’t rein in AI and its attendant data centers, we’re doomed. Sorry, I’m not buying it. Not only do plenty of smart people see those proposing government-imposed pauses and control as modern Luddites, but the same groups backing these steps are the same ones that screamed the sky is falling before. Notice the Sierra Club and the New York Times, among others, at the forefront of most of the fearmongering I’ve lived through.

Like the boy who cried wolf too often when there was no wolf, don’t be surprised if people don’t believe you.