Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

One of the best pieces of good news to emerge from the study was that certain additives used to shape the flexibility, color, and other qualities of polystyrene can speed up or slow down its disintegration by sunlight in water. That discovery opens up the possibility of modifying how we make plastics to allow for a more rapid disintegration.47

Scientists estimate that since 1844, humans have killed nine million hawksbill turtles, or about sixty thousand each year. Humans killed so many hawksbill that the dramatic reduction in the species altered the function of coral reef and seagrass ecosystems around the globe.48

So we are responsible for the reefs.. Juzt not in tbeway we thought

For example, overfishing, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “is one of the most important non-climatic drivers affecting the sustainability of fisheries.”

pollution. In California, banning plastic bags resulted in more paper bags and other thicker bags being used, which increased carbon emissions due to the greater amount of energy needed to produce them.77 Paper bags would need to be reused forty-three times to have a smaller impact on the environment.78 And plastic bags constitute just 0.8 percent of plastic waste in the oceans.

the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.81

Another reaso n why we should be nuclear

bioplastics made from sugar found higher negative respiratory health impacts, smog, acidification, carcinogens, and ozone depletion than from fossil plastics. When sugar-based bioplastics decompose, they emit more methane, a potent greenhouse gas, than fossil plastics. As a result, decomposing bioplastics often produce more air pollution

Ok but fossil fuels are goingto runout at some stage

prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural.

Never looked ar it that way

according to a 2019 report from something called the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Sounds dodgy

eponymously

Conservation refugees can suffer from very high stress and poor health. Scientists took saliva samples from eight thousand indigenous people in India who had been evicted from their villages by the government to create a lion sanctuary. The scientists discovered that the people suffered

premature aging from stress, despite having been compensated and given new homes.43

C ould this be a similar link to the aboriginies

This reminded me of what I had read in grad school about conservation as neocolonialism.”

the U.S., became less corrupt.

Thizis poszibly open to interpretation

still is, it has been able to attract enough manufacturing to drive development; per capita annual incomes rose from $54 to $3,800 between 1967 and 2017.51

Good point

Rising prosperity and wealth created the demand for the substitutes that saved the whales. People saved the whales by no longer needing them, and they no longer needed them because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.

So palm oil now highly contentious is the reason!

But Marchetti found that “the market regularly moved away from a certain primary energy

long before it was exhausted, at least at world level.”

Ingenuity Breeds this

What explains the lower environmental impact of natural gas fracking as compared to coal mining is power density. A natural gas field in the Netherlands is three times more power-dense than the world’s most productive coal mines.

But, isn't this a best case scenario? Isn't They a lot more cowboys inthiz space?

generating 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources and have sufficient zero-carbon electricity to power all of its cars and light trucks, as well.

A casefor nuclear

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.

How can this be true

“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.”

Good point

Potëmkin

NIMBYs

effusive

During forty years, revenues could easily be $32 billion. If the plant closes, those billions will flow to natural gas and renewables

Ufb

And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.25

The pr issue of nuclear is complete

NRDC helped create and put $66 million in a Black Rock “Ex-Fossil Fuels Index Fund” stock fund that—in fact—invests heavily in natural gas companies. And in a 2014 financial report, NRDC disclosed that it had nearly $8 million invested in four separate renewable energy private equity funds.

Money vs ideology?

taking money from oil and gas investors and promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants.

Lesser of 2 evils

It is an easy thing to check, given that the government requires nonprofits to disclose their revenues publicly.

I wonder hoow true that actually is

But one cannot have it both ways. Bloomberg has no fewer conflicts of interest than Aubrey McClendon, Tom Steyer, and Exxon. For groups like 350.org and Sierra Club to accept money from two of them while denouncing their opponents for accepting money from the other two is audacious in its hypocrisy.

A fair question to ask

1979, Brown and his allies killed so many nuclear power plants that, had they been built, California would today be generating almost all of its electricity from zero-pollution power plants.

Zero Pollution ? Am not sure about that

gubernatorial

Gore personally accepted fossil fuel money in 2013. He and a co-owner sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, which is state-funded by Qatar, the oil-exporting nation whose citizens have the largest per capita carbon footprint in the world. One year earlier, Gore had said the goal of “reducing our dependence on expensive dirty oil” was “to save the future of civilization.”68

So there is moretoit thanthe pr image of this climate crusader

Steyer and Bloomberg may be motivated to do good in the world, but so may be the Koch brothers. Financial conflicts of interest are no less conflicts of interest just because a person is ideologically committed.

It is difficult to separate the man from the issues

As we have seen, there is no energy leapfrogging. Per capita income remains tightly coupled with per capita energy consumption. There is no rich low-energy nation just as there is no poor high-energy one. While Europeans consume less energy than Americans, on average, this is due less to environmental virtue and more to the fact that they rely more on trains and less on cars, due to higher population densities.13 And overall, energy consumption has steadily risen in developed nations.

“Of course, infrastructure is not a sufficient condition for poverty reduction,” he told an interviewer in 2011, “but it most certainly is a necessary condition!”

And not just poor countries

technocrats

“If Senator Leahy is so adamantly against hydropower,” said Briscoe, “let him show his commitment by first turning out the lights of Vermont.”30

environmentalists in developed nations believe it is unethical for rich nations to deprive poor ones of the technologies responsible for our prosperity.

More hypocrisy from the rich

debunked leapfrogging.

“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.”

Good point

anthropogenic

for his work on the economics of climate change.7 In other words, there was nothing right-wing or climate denialist at all about Changing Climate. The New York Times thought so highly of the report that it reprinted its entire four-page summary.

Might Be worth checking out

The answer is, in part, that while the IPCC’s science is broadly sound, its Summary for Policymakers, press releases, and authors’ statements betray ideological motivations, a tendency toward exaggeration, and an absence of important context.

You know it is a complex issue when thr summary ofnearly50 pgs is then editied !

The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context. Leading media companies have been exaggerating climate change at least since the 1980s. And, as we have seen, elite publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker have frequently and uncritically repeated debunked Malthusian dogma for well more than a half century.

But “nature” doesn’t operate like a self-regulating system. In reality, different natural environments change constantly. Species come and go. There is no whole or “system” to collapse. There’s just a changing mix of plants, animals, and other organisms over time. We might prefer one version of that mixture, like the Amazon rainforest, but there is nothing in the mixture telling us that it is better or worse than some other combination, like a farm or desert.48 The same is true for what we call “the climate.”

Good point

Neoplatonism,

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.

Succint

secular

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.

Claws are out