Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

After World War II, many leading scholars and universities in Europe and the United States rejected the teaching of morality and virtue as unscientific and thus without value. “Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning,” was the intellectual consensus, a historian notes. “Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect, but that leads inevitably to technology and, ultimately, to the bomb.59 “From humanists we learned that science threatened civilization,” the historian added. “From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope.” The result, he argued, was a “culture of despair.”60 Apocalyptic environmentalism emerged from this crisis of faith and, over the decades, became pronounced during moments of global change and crisis.