Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius.24

“while many species are threatened with extinction, climate change does not threaten human extinction.”25 MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel told me, “I don’t have much patience for the apocalypse criers. I don’t think it’s helpful to describe it as an apocalypse.”26

both rich and poor societies have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. In 2019, the journal Global Environmental Change published a major study that found death rates and economic damage dropped by 80 to 90 percent during the last four decades, from the 1980s to the present.29

While global sea levels rose 7.5 inches (0.19 meters) between 1901 and 2010,30 the IPCC estimates sea levels will rise as much as 2.2 feet (0.66 meters) by 2100 in its medium scenario, and by 2.7 feet (0.83 meters) in its high-end scenario. Even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation.

Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change.38

report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself. The “climate policies” the authors refer to are ones that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use (the burning of biofuels and biomass), which in turn would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs. The IPCC comes to the same conclusion.65

“There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally,” he wrote later. “In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather.”75

Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere does the IPCC describe developed nations like the United States becoming a “climate hell” resembling the Congo. Our flood-control, electricity, and road systems will keep working even under the most dire potential levels of warming.

“The scientific community produces carefully caveated scenarios of the future, ranging from the unrealistically optimistic to the highly pessimistic,” Pielke wrote. By contrast, “Media coverage tends to emphasize the most pessimistic scenarios and in the process somehow converts them from worst-case scenarios to our most likely futures.”

“Richer countries are more resilient,” climate scientist Emanuel said, “so let’s focus on making people richer and more resilient.”

The new good news is that carbon emissions have been declining in developed nations for more than a decade. In Europe, emissions in 2018 were 23 percent below 1990 levels. In the U.S., emissions fell 15 percent from 2005 to 2016.113 The

The International Energy Agency (IEA) now forecasts carbon emissions in 2040 to be lower than in almost all of the IPCC scenarios.115

The good news is that, globally, forests are returning, and fires are declining. There was a whopping 25 percent decrease in the annual area burned globally from 1998 to 2015, thanks mainly to economic growth. That growth created jobs in cities for people, allowing them to move away from slash-and-burn farming. And economic growth allowed farmers to clear forests for agriculture using machines, instead of fire.24

Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined.

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

Humankind’s use of wood has peaked and could soon decline significantly.20 And humankind’s use of land for agriculture is likely near its peak and capable of declining soon.21

Today, hundreds of millions of horses, cattle, oxen, and other animals are still being used as draft animals for farming in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Not having to grow food to feed them could free up significant amounts of land for endangered species, just as it did in Europe and North America. As

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.

The environmental and economic benefits of fossil fuels are that they are more energy-dense and abundant. A kilogram of coal has almost twice as much energy as a kilogram of wood,

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

you can’t go directly from making bicycles to making a satellite. First you make bicycles and that allows you to make motorcycles. From there you can go to automobiles. From automobiles you can start thinking about satellites.

Contrary to what I and others have long believed, the positive impacts of manufacturing outweigh the negative ones. We should thus feel pride, not guilt, when buying products made by people like Suparti. And environmentalists and the news media should stop suggesting that fast-fashion brands like H&M are behaving unethically for contracting with factories in poor nations.

demographers believe that how quickly the human population peaks and starts to decline, globally, depends on how quickly sub-Saharan nations like the Congo industrialize and people like Bernadette move to the city, get jobs in factories, earn money, and choose to have fewer kids.

It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982.34

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.

The technological revolution allowing for firms to extract far more natural gas from shale and the ocean floor is the main reason that U.S. carbon emissions from energy declined 13 percent between 2005 and 2018, and a big part of the reason why global temperatures are unlikely to rise more than 3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.68

I suspect many others similarly thought the number was referring to all emissions.12 One study found that converting to vegetarianism might reduce diet-related personal energy use by 16 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent but total personal energy use by just 2 percent, and total greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent.13 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

If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would drop by just 5 percent.15

vegetarian would reduce emissions by just 4.3 percent, on average.16 And yet another found that, if every American went vegan, emissions would decline by just 2.6 percent.17 Plant-based diets, researchers find, are cheaper than those that include meat. As a result, people often end up spending their money on things that use energy, like consumer products. This phenomenon is known as the rebound effect. If consumers respent their saved income on consumer goods, which require energy, the net energy savings would only be .07 percent, and the net carbon reduction just 2 percent.18 It is for that reason that reducing carbon emissions in energy, not food or use of land more broadly, matters most. And energy includes electricity, transportation, cooking, and heating, nearly 90 percent of which globally are fossil fuels.

The good news is that the total amount of land humankind uses to produce meat peaked in the year 2000. Since then, the land dedicated to livestock pasture around the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., has decreased by more than 540 million square miles, an area 80 percent as large as Alaska.22

“There are now at least seventeen systematic reviews looking at the clinical trials and nearly all conclude that saturated fats have no impact on mortality,”

the prestigious U.S. scientific journal Annals of Internal Medicine published two of the largest and more rigorous studies of meat consumption to date. They found that any negative health impacts of eating red meat, to the extent they exist at all, would be too small to matter.73

Nuclear is thus the safest way to make reliable electricity.22 In fact, nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.23 For

France spends a little more than half as much for electricity that produces one-tenth of the carbon emissions of German electricity.26 The difference is that Germany is phasing out nuclear and phasing in renewables, while France is keeping most of its nuclear plants online.

Had Germany invested $580 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, it would be 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.27 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.30 If

Between 1995 and 2018, a period of large and unprecedented subsidies for solar and wind, the share of energy globally coming from zero-emission energy sources grew just two percentage points, from 13 percent to 15 percent. The reason is that the increase in energy from solar and wind barely made up for the decline in nuclear.31

Another study by a group of climate and energy scientists found that when taking into account continent-wide weather and seasonal variation, for the United States to be powered by solar and wind, while using batteries to ensure reliable power, the battery storage required would raise the cost to more than $23 trillion.12 That number is $1 trillion higher than U.S. gross domestic product was in 2019.

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

Now we must address the question of how so many people, myself included, came to believe that climate change threatened not only the end of polar bears but the end of humanity.

Throughout this book we have seen environmental support for various behaviors, technologies, and policies motivated not by what the science tells us but by intuitive views of nature. These intuitive views rest on the appeal-to-nature fallacy.

The appeal-to-nature fallacy holds that “natural” things, e.g., tortoiseshell, ivory, wild fish, organic fertilizer, wood fuel, and solar farms, are better for people and the environment than “artificial” things, e.g., plastics from fossil fuels, farmed fish, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear plants. It is fallacious for two reasons. First, the artificial things are as natural as the natural things. They are simply newer. Second, the older, “natural” things are “bad,” not good, if “good” is defined as protecting sea turtles, elephants, and wild fish. This

Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences. In the 1940s, scientists attempted to create a science of nature, ecology, which was based on cybernetics, the science of self-regulating systems, which had been usefully applied in World War II for guiding antiaircraft missiles. Cybernetics also applies to systems like thermostats, which turn on the furnace when it gets too cold and turn it off when it gets too hot.

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.

Some ecological scientists recognized that they had inadvertently and unconsciously imposed a fundamentally religious idea onto science. “I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man’s interference with it,” admitted one, “owes its origin to the [Judeo-Christian intelligent] design argument. The wisdom of the creator is self-evident. . . . no living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other.”50

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.

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.

It is hypocritical and unethical to demand that poor nations follow a more expensive and thus slower path to prosperity than the West followed. As the last nations to develop, it is already going to be harder for them to industrialize.

Improving environmental journalism requires coming to grips with some fundamentals. Power density determines environmental impact. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium. Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint. Power-dense farming, including of fish, creates the prospect of shrinking humankind’s largest environmental impact. We

For more than twenty years, I noted, the national conversation about climate change has been polarized between those who deny it and those who exaggerate it. Happily, it appeared that some scientists, journalists, and activists were finally pushing back against the extremes on both sides.