Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

I continued to write about the Amazon throughout the years and so, when the firestorm of publicity over the Amazon raged in the late summer of 2019, I decided to call Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon. I asked him whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth’s oxygen supply. “It’s bullshit,” he told me. “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration, so it’s a wash.”11 According to an Oxford University ecologist who studies them, Amazon plants consume about 60 percent of the oxygen they produce in respiration, the biochemical process whereby they obtain energy. Microbes, which break down rainforest biomass, consume the other 40 percent. “So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero,” the ecologist writes. “The same is pretty much true of any ecosystem on Earth, at least on the timescales that are relevant to humans (less than millions of years).”12 As for lungs, they absorb oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. By contrast, the Amazon, and all plant life, store carbon, though not 25 percent, as the student climate activists who sued Brazil claimed, but rather 5 percent.13 As for the photos that celebrities shared on social media, they weren’t actually of the Amazon on fire. Many weren’t even of the Amazon.14 The photo Ronaldo shared was taken in southern...