Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Al Gore wouldn’t have been similarly embarrassed by Associated Press for living in a twenty-room home that used twelve times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee, had he not claimed, “We are going to have to change the way we live our lives” to solve climate change.10

In August 2019, Thunberg sailed from Europe to New York to set an example of how to live without emitting carbon. But Greta’s renewable-powered sailboat trip across the Atlantic produced four times more emissions than flying. The reason was that sailing required a sailboat crew, who flew back home afterward.12

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...

Toward the end of his life, Briscoe was deeply upset by the success of green NGOs in pressuring Western nations to divert funding away from basic infrastructure and agricultural modernization to various “sustainable development” experiments. “Time and time again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,” he wrote, “nor are willing to follow.”36 Why is that?

By contrast, socialists and leftists loathed Malthus. Marx and Engels called him a “stain on the human race.” Malthus, in their view, had made an avoidable situation look inevitable, or “natural.”59 In his 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, the progressive American thinker Henry George attacked Malthus as a defender of inequality. “What gave Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes,” George wrote, “was the fact that he furnished a plausible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to existence than others.”60 But then, after World War II, Malthusianism switched sides and became a left-wing political movement in the form of environmentalism, while anti-Malthusianism became a right-wing political movement in the form of libertarian, pro-business, free market conservatism.

Some opposition to ascendant Malthusianism came from the left. Bayard Rustin, a socialist civil rights leader, told Time in 1979 that environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth . . . and who would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.”61 But most resistance to Malthusianism came from the political right. The most prominent critic of Malthusian alarmists was Julian Simon, an economist who argued “natural resources are not finite,” and that children weren’t just mouths to feed but rather grow up to be producers, not just consumers.62 Simon was embraced by conservative and libertarian scholars, think tanks, and media, not left-wing and progressive ones.

“Before the imposition of Pax Britannica, India had an estimated population of less than 100 million people,” Vogt wrote. It was kept in check by disease, famine, and fighting. Within a remarkably short period the British checked the fighting and contributed considerably to making famines ineffectual by building irrigation works, providing means of food storage, and importing food during periods of starvation. . . . While economic and sanitary conditions were being “improved,” the Indians went to their accustomed way, breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish. . . . Sex play is the national sport.64

American leaders and elites embraced Malthusian ideas just as British elites had. In 1965, in the first televised State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson described the “explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources” as the most important issue in the world. He called for “population control.”69

Many conservation leaders embraced Malthusianism. In 1968, Sierra Club executive director David Brower conceived and edited a book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed the world was on the brink of mass starvation. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”72

“However humanitarian our intent,” said Hardin, “every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations.”75

Policymakers, journalists, conservationists, and other educated elites in the fifties and sixties knew that nuclear was unlimited energy, and that unlimited energy meant unlimited food and water. We could use desalination to convert ocean water into freshwater. We could create fertilizer without fossil fuels, by splitting off nitrogen from the air, and hydrogen from water, and combining them. We could create transportation fuels without fossil fuels, by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make an artificial hydrocarbon, or by using water to make pure hydrogen gas.

There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.

“Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems,” notes an environmental historian. “The concern was no longer centered on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse.”106

“Look at the food crisis last year,” said Briscoe in 2011. “There were many voices bemoaning the crisis, with press coverage dominated by NGOs, and aid agencies who immediately called for greater support for agriculture in the developing world. What they did not mention was what their roles had been in precipitating this crisis.112 “The NGOs did not reflect on the fact that many NGOs had stridently lobbied against many irrigation projects and other agricultural modernization projects because these ‘were not pro-poor and destroyed the environment,’ ” Briscoe said. “What the aid agencies did not say was that lending for agriculture had declined from 20 percent of official development assistance in 1980 to 3 percent in 2005 when the food crisis hit.”113

One of the groups opposing the construction of the Grand Inga Dam in the Congo is is a little-known but influential environmental NGO called International Rivers, based in Berkeley, California. While few people have heard of the organization, it has, since its founding in 1985, helped stop 217 dams from being built, mostly in poor nations. “If we think of forests as the lungs of the planet, then rivers most surely are the arteries of the planet,” the organization says on its website.114 But in 2003, Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist from The Washington Post, discovered International Rivers had severely misrepresented the situation on the ground in Uganda, where the group was trying to stop a dam. An International Rivers staff person told Mallaby that the Ugandan people near the proposed dam opposed it. But when he asked her whom he could interview to verify her assertion, she became evasive and told him that he would get in trouble with the government if he asked questions. Mallaby did so anyway, hiring a local sociologist to translate. “For the next three hours, we interviewed villager after villager, and found the same story,” Mallaby wrote. “The dam people had come and promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate. . . . The only people who objected to the dam were the ones living just outside its perimeter. They were angry because the project was not going to affect them. They had been offered no generous payout, and they wer...

Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.51 On the one hand, environmentalism and its sister religion, vegetarianism, appear to be a radical break from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. For starters, environmentalists themselves do not tend to be believers, or strong believers, in Judeo-Christianity. In particular, environmentalists reject the view that humans have, or should have, dominion, or control, over Earth.52 On the other hand, apocalyptic environmentalism is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to God. In the apocalyptic environmental tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to nature. In some Judeo-Christian traditions, priests play the role of interpreting God’s will or laws, including discerning right from wrong. In the apocalyptic environmentalist tradition, scientists play that role. “I want you to listen to the scientists,” Thunberg and others repeat.53

I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions.

Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.

The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.

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.

The mostly white, educated, upper-middle-class Extinction Rebellion activists were strikingly similar in socioeconomic status, ideology, and behavior to the Earth First! activists I’d met while working to save the last unprotected ancient redwood forest in northern California in the late 1990s. But Extinction Rebellion was far more death-obsessed than Earth First! At London Fashion Week, there were Extinction Rebellion activists carrying coffins; there were large banners with the word DEATH on them; there were women wearing black mourning veils; and there were dead-silent activists wearing blood-red gowns who had painted their faces ghost-white save for their red lips.

Now that I have, I can see that much of my sadness over environmental problems was a projection, and misplaced. There is more reason for optimism than pessimism. Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others. The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests in rich nations are growing back and wildlife are returning.

There is no reason poor nations can’t develop and adapt to climate change. Deaths from extreme events should keep declining. Cruelty to animals in meat production has declined and should continue to decline, and, if we embrace technology, habitats available for endangered species, including for gorillas, and penguins, should keep growing in size. None of that means there isn’t work to do. There is plenty. But much if not most of it has to do with accelerating those existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.

Scientists have long named self-interest as a reason for why humans should care about endangered species like the mountain gorilla. But if the mountain gorillas were ever to go extinct, humankind would become spiritually, not materially, poorer. Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them for a simpler reason: we love them.90

And so, between 2016 and 2020, I worked with environmental humanists around the world to save nuclear power plants. It’s had an impact. Where nuclear energy was viewed just a few years ago as optional, it is today increasingly viewed as essential for dealing with climate change.

Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both. For while some environmentalists claim their agenda will also deliver a greener prosperity, the evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and for the natural environment.