Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Ultimately, for people to stop using wood and charcoal as fuel, they will need access to liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, which is made from oil, and cheap electricity. Researchers in India proved that subsidizing rural villagers in the Himalayas with LPG reduced deforestation and allowed the forest ecosystem to recover.68 Some conservationists, including the Wildlife Conservation Society’s McNeilage, believe it is inevitable that the Congolese government will one day drill for oil in Virunga National Park, and that the results could be positive. “I think the chances they’ll leave the oil underground indefinitely is pretty minimal. The oil price has gone way down and maybe that’s why they’re not moving as fast as they were in Uganda. The estimates were of two to three billion barrels. Not all of them would be recoverable. But there could be 30,000 to 60,000 barrels per day and even 250,000 barrels per day. It could make a big difference to regional fuel needs.”69

Cities, meanwhile, concentrate human populations and leave more of the countryside to wildlife. Cities cover just more than half a percent of the ice-free surface of the earth.17 Less than half a percent of Earth is covered by pavement or buildings.18 As farms become more productive, grasslands, forests, and wildlife are returning. Globally, the rate of reforestation is catching up to a slowing rate of deforestation.19

High-yield farming is also better for soils. Eighty percent of all degraded soils are in poor and developing nations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The rate of soil loss is twice as high in developing nations as in developed ones. Thanks to the use of fertilizer, wealthy European nations and the United States have adopted soil conservation and no-till methods, which prevent erosion. In the United States, soil erosion declined 40 percent in just fifteen years, between 1982 and 1997, while yields rose.32

During the last 200 years, poor nations found that they didn’t need to end corruption or educate everyone to develop. As long as factories were allowed to operate freely, and the politicians didn’t steal too much from their owners, manufacturing could drive economic development. And, over time, as nations became richer, many of them, including the U.S., became less corrupt. “You could start with very poor initial conditions, get a few things right to stimulate the domestic production of a narrow range of labor-intensive manufactures—and voilà! You had a growth engine going,” Rodrik says.48

Humans have been moving away from wood to fossil fuels for hundreds of years. Globally, wood went from providing nearly all primary energy in 1850 to 50 percent in 1920 to just 7 percent today.64 As we stop using wood for fuel, we allow grasslands and forests to grow back and wildlife to return. In the late 1700s, the use of wood as fuel for cooking and heating was a leading cause of deforestation in Britain. In the United States, per capita consumption of wood for fuel peaked in the 1840s. It was used at a per capita rate that was fourteen times higher than today. Fossil fuels were thus key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wood went from being 80 percent of all primary energy in the United States in the 1860s to 20 percent in 1900, before reaching 7.5 percent in 1920.65

Centralizing energy production has been essential to leaving more of planet Earth for natural landscapes with wild animals. Today, all hydroelectric dams, all fossil fuel production, and all nuclear plants require less than 0.2 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land. The earth’s food production takes 200 times more land than this.67

Despite this positive trend, the shift from biomass to fossil fuels is far from complete. Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy. Ending the use of wood for fuel should thus be one of the highest priorities for people and institutions seeking both universal prosperity and environmental progress.77

Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace

The discovery of the Drake Well led to widespread production of petroleum-based kerosene, which rapidly took over the market for lighting fluids in the United States, thus saving whales, which were no longer needed for their oil. At its peak, whaling produced 600,000 barrels of whale oil annually.18 The petroleum industry achieved that level less than three years after Drake’s oil strike.19 In a single day, one Pennsylvania well produced as much oil as it took a whaling voyage three or four years to obtain, a dramatic example of petrolem’s high power density.20

While whalers over-hunted whales, historians conclude that “there is no evidence that American whaling contracted because of a serious shortage of whales.” The creation of a substitute with a much higher power density was sufficient. This is an important lesson since it means we need not wait for inferior products, environmentally and otherwise, to run out before replacing them. 22

Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade. The United Nations called for a ten-year moratorium in 1972, and the United States banned whaling under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. By 1975, the year of Greenpeace’s celebrated Vancouver action, an international agreement between forty-six nations, which prohibited all hunting of the humpback, the blue whale, the gray whale, and some species of right, fin, and sei whales, was already in place.33

The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, “to some extent, economies can ‘outgrow’ severe environmental exploitation.”39

Happily, the war on fracking failed. When it came to fracking shale for natural gas, the United States interfered less than other countries and benefited enormously as a result. The United States allows property owners the mining and drilling rights to the Earth beneath them. In most other nations, those rights belong to the government, which is a major reason why fracking hasn’t taken off in other countries.

Politics even interfered with saving the whales. While environmentalists often blame capitalism for environmental problems, it was communism that made whaling worse than it needed to be. After the fall of communism, historians found records that the Soviet Union was whaling at far higher numbers than they had admitted. It did so even though it was no longer profitable to do so, thanks to Soviet central planning. “Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers,” wrote a historian, “as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed commercially between 1967 and 1978.”99

As such, were IPCC’s “most extreme” scenario of global veganism to be realized—in which, by 2050, humans completely cease to consume animal products and all livestock land is reforested—total carbon emissions would decline by just 10 percent.14

Another study found that if every American reduced her or his meat consumption by one-quarter, greenhouse emissions would be reduced by just 1 percent. If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would drop by just 5 percent.15

While meat production is a relatively modest contributor to climate change, it represents humankind’s single largest impact on natural landscapes. Today, humans use more than one-quarter of Earth’s land surface for meat production. And the spread of pasture for cattle and other domesticated animals continues to threaten many endangered species, including mountain gorillas and yellow-eyed penguins. During the last 300 years, an area of forests and grasslands almost as large as North America was converted into pasture, resulting in massive habitat loss and driving the significant declines in wild animal populations. Between 1961 and 2016, pastureland expanded by an area almost the size of Alaska.21 The good news is that the total amount of land humankind uses to produce meat peaked in the year 2000.

All of this happened without a vegetarian revolution. Today, just 2 to 4 percent of Americans are vegetarian or vegan. About 80 percent of those who try to become vegetarian or vegan eventually abandon their diet, and more than half do so within the first year.23

Cows raised at industrial farms are typically sent from pastures to feedlots at about nine months old, and then they are sent to slaughter at fourteen to eighteen months. Grass-fed cattle spend their entire lives at pasture and aren’t slaughtered until between eighteen to twenty-four months of age. Since grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly and live longer, they produce more manure and methane.33

For twenty years she had been eating a mostly vegetarian diet. “When the Mediterranean diet was introduced in the 1990s, I added olive oil and extra servings of fish while cutting back on red meat,” she says. “Avoiding the saturated fats found in animal foods, especially, seemed like the most obvious measure a person could take for good health.”37 Still, she had struggled to lose stubborn extra weight for two years, even while consuming a recommended diet loaded with vegetables, fruits, and grains and exercising daily. Then, after eating the high-fat meals chefs were serving her, something strange happened: she lost ten pounds over two months, despite eating animal products high in saturated fat. And Teicholz found she loved eating the high-fat dishes. “They were complex and remarkably satisfying,” compared to the high-carbohydrate Mediterranean diet she had been following.38

Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

Teicholz and Taubes believe that the conventional wisdom that “a calorie is a calorie,” which is known as the energy balance theory, is wrong because our bodies process fats radically differently from how they process carbohydrates. When we eat carbohydrates, they believe, the body works to keep the fat locked away in storage. Obesity and diabetes are a result of hormone imbalance caused by eating more carbohydrates than the body can handle, they say.

Our brains grew so big that prehumans began delivering their bigger-brained babies prematurely, at nine months instead of twelve months, like other primates. Mothers carried their “premature” babies by strapping them to their bodies with animal bladders and skins. Those technologies effectively allowed babies to finish what is sometimes called their “fourth trimester” outside the womb. The final outcome was the human brain. It demands two to three times as much energy by mass as the brains of other primates.40

Some studies find that vegans and vegetarians are more prone to fatigue, headaches, and dizziness because of the deficiency of vitamin B12 and iron in the absence of red meat.44

In 1999, McDonald’s hired the animal welfare expert Temple Grandin to audit the farms of its suppliers.

Grandin’s audits eventually made more than fifty farms more humane and more efficient.58 She didn’t eliminate all problems. In 2009, ten years after she began her audits, Grandin found that one-quarter of all beef and chicken slaughterhouses should not have passed inspection.59 Even so, she had made progress. “Compared to the bad old days, it’s drastically improved, and I mean drastically,” said Grandin.60

“Ninety percent of the climate scientists and environmentalists I’ve met are vegetarian,” Foer told Huffington Post in 2019. “And the ones that aren’t eat very little meat.

The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl claimed there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus.”12 That assertion is false: residents of those two countries were “exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO). If there are additional cancer deaths they will be “about 0.6 percent of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.”13

The WHO claims on its website that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of four thousand liquidators, but, says Gerry, that number is based on a disproven methodology. “That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the linear no-threshold method of extrapolating deaths from radiation. LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but people who live in places with higher background radiation, like my home state of Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer. In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher due to its altitude and its elevated soil concentration of uranium, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the United States.14

In Fukushima, Thomas says, nobody will die from radiation they were exposed to because of the nuclear accident. The Japanese government awarded a financial settlement to a Fukushima worker’s family, after he claimed the accident caused his cancer. But the worker’s cancer was highly unlikely to have come from Fukushima, Gerry...

One of the best features of nuclear waste is that there is so little of it. All the used nuclear fuel ever generated in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked less than seventy feet high.

I emailed McKibben in early 2019 to ask if he regretted advocating for Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station’s closure. He told me its demise “didn’t, I think, lead to big increases in emissions from Vermont electricity.” He pointed to a New York Times data tool, which he said showed “the state replaced the [nuclear] power by buying lots and lots more hydro from Quebec.”37 But that’s not what the data show. In reality, Vermont’s utilities couldn’t replace the lost electricity from Vermont Yankee with in-state generation, and turned to electricity imports from the New England power pool, which is primarily from natural gas.38 McKibben’s opposition to nuclear is the rule not the exception among environmentalists. While referring to the Green New Deal, the office of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in early 2019 that “the plan is to transition off of nuclear . . . as soon as possible.”39 A few weeks later, environmental activist Greta Thunberg wrote on Facebook that nuclear is “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming,”40 even though, as we have seen, the best-available science shows the opposite. “They can’t have it both ways,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “If they say this [climate change] is apocalyptic or it’s an unacceptable risk, and then they turn around and rule out one of the most obvious ways of avoiding it [nuclear power], they’re not only inconsistent, they’re insincere.”41

Book of Isaiah, “He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”60

The public’s fear of nuclear technology remains the main obstacle to its expansion. Surveys of people around the world find that nuclear is slightly less popular than coal, less popular than natural gas, and far less popular than solar and wind.106

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”134

It’s possible the solar panels and batteries system might pay for itself after that for a few years. But consider that the amount of electricity coming from panels declines every year, which is why most people say the lifetime of a system should be considered twenty or twenty-five years. Plus, if Helen and I decide to move to a different house before then we are unlikely to recoup our investment. Why would we put money into a speculative investment on solar panels and batteries rather than our retirement savings?

Panel's real lifespan is around 10 years, after that you need to replace them if you want actual power production.

But those numbers are misleading. While renewables in 2018 globally generated 11 percent of total primary energy, 64 percent of it (7 percent of total primary energy) came from hydroelectric dams.6 And dams are largely maxed out in developed nations, while their construction is opposed by environmentalists in poor and developing ones.

Consider Tesla’s most famous battery project, a 129 megawatt-hour lithium battery storage center in Australia. It provides enough backup power for 7,500 homes for four hours.8 But, there are nine million homes in Australia, and 8,760 hours in a year. One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for about twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours.9 There are about 134 million households in the United States. To back up all the homes, businesses, and factories on the U.S. electrical grid for four hours, we would need 15,900 storage centers the size of the one in Escondido at a cost of $894 billion.10

For example, in Germany, when wind is 20 percent of electricity, its cost to the grid rises 60 percent. And when wind is 40 percent, its cost rises 100 percent.11 This is because of all the power plants, often natural gas, that must be standing by and ready to fire up the moment wind dies down, the extra power lines that have to be built to remote renewable energy locations, and all of the other extra equipment and personnel required to support fundamentally unreliable and often unpredictable forms of energy.

a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.29

Germany’s electricity grid came close to having blackouts for three days in July 2019. Germany had to import emergency power from neighboring nations to stabilize its grid. “The supply situation will become even more challenging in the future,”

And building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of industrial facility. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife. In order to build Ivanpah, the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.68

Solar panels and wind turbines also require far more in the way of materials and produce more in the way of waste. 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 Solar panels often contain lead and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. “I’ve been working in solar since 1976 . . . and that’s part of my guilt,” a veteran solar developer told Solar Power World in 2017. “I’ve been involved with millions of solar panels going into the field, and now they’re getting old.”71

California is in the process of determining how to divert discarded solar panels from landfills, which is where they currently go, because solar panel disposal in landfills is “not recommended,” concluded a group of experts, “in ...

In 2019, the New York Times reported: “As solar energy booms in the region, so do expired lead-acid batteries for rooftop solar panels and lithium batteries for solar lamps. E-waste can damage the environment by leaking dangerous chemicals into groundwater and harm people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand.”

What about Elon Musk’s claim that an apparently tiny square of solar panels could power the United States? It was deeply misleading.

The fact that the energy density of fuels, and the power density of their extraction, determine their environmental impact should be taught in every environmental studies class. Unfortunately, it is not. There is a psychological and ideological reason: the romantic appeal-to-nature fallacy, where people imagine renewables are more natural than fossil fuels and uranium, and that what’s natural is better for the environment.

“Turns out there’s something called the Starbucks Rule when it comes to siting wind farms,” reported BusinessWeek in 2009. Wind developers “plot where Starbucks are in the general area and then make sure their project is at least thirty miles away. Any closer and there’d be too many NIMBYs who’d object to having their views spoiled by a cluster of 265-foot-tall wind towers.”138

By 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth won Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, renewables were becoming big business. That same year, the venture capitalist John Doerr, an early Google and Amazon investor, cried while giving a TED Talk about global warming. “I’m really scared,” Doerr said. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.” But the upside of crisis was opportunity. “Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,” Doerr said. “It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”84

In 2019, some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people started responding to demands that we act on climate change. At the end of July, Google brought together celebrities with climate activists in Italy to discuss what they could do to support the cause. Leonardo DiCaprio, Stella McCartney, Katy Perry, Harry Styles, Orlando Bloom, Bradley Cooper, Priyanka Chopra, Nick Jonas, and Diane von Furstenberg reportedly brainstormed ways they could leverage their fame to change behavior. Some were already taking action for the climate. Perry had made videos for UNICEF, while DiCaprio had narrated a documentary. Prince Harry, who described the climate emergency to the assembled guests, bare-footed, had recently written on Instagram, “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”1 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. “I’ve never seen such a pampered bunch,” someone present told the Sun, a British tabloid. “Eve...