Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

In 1976, a twenty-eight-year-old white South African named John Briscoe went to Bangladesh. Raised under apartheid, Briscoe had become radicalized against the country’s system of racial segregation. Briscoe had earned a PhD in environmental engineering at Harvard and went to Bangladesh seeking to use his skills to help lift people out of poverty. Briscoe ended up in a village that was flooded by several meters of water for one-third of the year. Locals suffered from disease and malnutrition. Life expectancy was less than fifty.18 But when Briscoe heard of plans to build an embankment around the village to protect it from the annual flooding and provide it with irrigation, he opposed it. Briscoe, a Marxist at the time, thought the embankment would simply concentrate wealth in the hands of the rich. Twenty-two years later, Briscoe returned to the village in Bangladesh and was surprised by what he found. The villagers were healthy, the kids were in school, and instead of rags they wore clothes. Life expectancy had increased to nearly seventy. Women were more independent, and there were vibrant markets for food. Briscoe asked people what had changed. “The embankment!” they said. It had been built in the 1980s, after Briscoe left. It prevented flooding and allowed for the controlled use of water for irrigation. He asked people what else had made a difference. The bridges, they said, had reduced how much time it took to get to the marketplace. The villagers credited the big infr...