Michael Shellenberger > Quotes

“negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today’s apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The more you play the victim, the more of a victim you’ll become.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.25 And the amount of forests in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home nation, has doubled during the last century.26”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.70”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Breakthroughs in information and communications technology are leading to forms of dematerialization unimaginable just a decade ago. Consider smartphones. They require more energy to manufacture and operate than older cell phones. But by obviating the need for separate, physical newspapers, books, magazines, cameras, watches, alarm clocks, GPS systems, maps, letters, calendars, address books, and stereos, they will likely significantly reduce humanity’s use of energy and materials over the next century. Such examples suggest that holding technological progress back could do far more environmental damage than accelerating it.”
― Michael Shellenberger

“The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“It is a formula that binds the victim to his victimization by linking his power to his status as a victim,”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“pathological altruism,” defined as “behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“For example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required.87 By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.88”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Contingency management harnesses well-established psychological principles, which is likely why it works for such a wide number of people and such a large spectrum of drugs, including both opioids and stimulants. Contingency management is based on the psychological theory of operant conditioning.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“In his memoir, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown writes, “I discovered factors—some bureaucratic, some political—working in a kind of evil synthesis with each other that really prevented the long-term homeless from entering the system. Backing this up was a collection of so-called activists with heavy political clout who absolutely believed (and still believe) that homeless people should have a right to live on the street. They believed that homeless people had an absolute right to do everything they were doing, no matter how harmful to themselves or to the rest of the citizenry.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There’s an important difference there.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Because addressing our personal lives is painful and difficult, suggests Becker, we often look for external demons to conquer. Doing so makes us feel heroic, and creates a feeling of immortality through the recognition, validation, and love we receive from others.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Similarly, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that food production will rise 30”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“We have good examples of successful adaptation to sea level rise. The Netherlands, for instance, became a wealthy nation despite having one-third of its landmass below sea level, including areas a full seven meters below sea level, as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.31 And”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“No state in America has taken more aggressive action to reduce the public’s exposure to chemicals, and to secondhand smoke, than California. California banned the sale of flavored tobacco, because it appeals to children, and the use of smokeless tobacco in the state’s five professional baseball stadiums. It prohibited the use of e-cigarettes in government and private workplaces, restaurants, bars, and casinos. San Francisco in late 2020 banned cigarette smoking in apartments.8 In the fall of 2020, California outlawed companies from using in cosmetics, shampoos, and other personal care products twenty-four chemicals it had deemed dangerous.9 And yet breathing secondhand smoke and being exposed to trace chemicals in your shampoo are hardly sufficient to kill. By contrast, hard drug use is both a necessary and sufficient cause to kill, as the 93,000 overdose and drug poisoning deaths of 2020 show. And yet, where the governments of San Francisco, California, and other progressive cities and states stress the remote dangers of cosmetics, pesticides, and secondhand smoke, they downplay the immediate dangers of hard drugs including fentanyl. In 2020, San Francisco even paid for two billboards promoting the safe use of heroin and fentanyl, which had been created by the Harm Reduction Coalition. The first had a picture of an older African American man smiling. The headline read, “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” The second billboard’s photograph was of a racially diverse group of people at a party smiling and laughing. The headline read, “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.”10 When I asked Kristen Marshall of the Harm Reduction Coalition, which oversees San Francisco’s overdose prevention strategy, about the threat posed by fentanyl, she said, “People use it safely all the time. This narrative that gets it labeled as an insane poison where you touch it and die—that’s not how drugs work. It’s not cyanide. It’s not uranium. It’s just a synthetic opioid, but one that’s on an unregulated market.”
― Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities

“And so some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced too much cheap and abundant energy.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“colonel Curtis LeMay,”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The gathering in Sicily took place at the Verdura, a five-star resort larger than the entire nation of Monaco, and home to six tennis courts, three golf courses, four pools, and a football field. While the resort is world-class, many of the participants chose to stay instead on superyachts floating off the coast, from which they were ferried to the event on the island in Maseratis. By the first night of the event, forty private jets had landed at the resort, with another seventy or so expected to arrive before the weekend was over.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development.34”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“the humanity of whales.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“new nuclear plants are behind schedule and above costs, but this is typical for large construction projects,”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“December 8, 1953, Eisenhower stood before the United Nations General Assembly”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes historian Robert Mayhew. “Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was three times the death toll of the Great Irish Famine.55”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All