Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Much of what people are being told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.

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. We have good examples of successful adaptation to sea level rise. The Netherlands, for instance, became a wealthy nation despite having one-third of its landmass below sea level, including areas a full seven meters below sea level, as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.31

In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development.34

In early 2020, scientists challenged the notion that rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean were making coral reef fish species oblivious to predators. The seven scientists who published their study in the journal Nature had, three years earlier, raised questions about the marine biologist who had made such claims in the journal Science in 2016. After an investigation, James Cook University in Australia concluded that the biologist had fabricated her data.36

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

In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) just 4.5 percent.40 Does any of that really sound like the end of the world?

In fact, scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels.64 And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change.

The 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

Technological change significantly outweighs climate change in every single one of FAO’s scenarios.

The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.

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.

As such, it’s misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine her standard of living, and the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes.

Keeley published a paper in 2018 finding that all ignition sources of fires had declined in California except for electric power lines.91 “Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous twenty years,” he said. “Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.”92 What then is driving the increase in fires? “If you recognize that 100 percent of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add six million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.93

The main reason is that the government of Australia, as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia’s climate not warmed.97

The bottom line is that other human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases. And that’s great news, because it gives Australia, California, and Brazil far greater control over their future than the apocalyptic news media suggested.

In November and December 2019, I published two long articles criticizing climate alarmism and covering material similar to what I’ve written above. I did so in part because I wanted to give scientists and activists, including those whom I criticized, a chance to respond or correct any errors I might have made in my reporting before publishing this book. Both articles were widely read, and I made sure the scientists and activists I mentioned saw my article. Not a single person requested a correction. Instead, I received many emails from scientists and activists alike, thanking me for clarifying the science.

Governments “have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,” said the U.N. official. Did the Associated Press publish that apocalyptic warning from the United Nations in June 2019? No, June 1989. And, the cataclysmic events the U.N. official predicted were for the year 2000, not 2030.107

What about so-called tipping points, like the rapid, accelerating, and simultaneous loss of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, the drying out of and die-back of the Amazon, and a change of the Atlantic Ocean circulation? The high level of uncertainty on each, and a complexity that is greater than the sum of its parts, make many tipping point scenarios unscientific. That’s not to say that a catastrophic tipping point scenario is impossible, only that there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including an asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, or an unusually deadly influenza virus.

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 U.S. and Britain have seen their carbon emissions from electricity, specifically, decline by an astonishing 27 percent in the U.S. and 63 percent in the U.K., between 2007 and 2018.114 Most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity. As a result, global temperatures today appear much more likely to peak at between two to three degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels, not four, where the risks, including from tipping points, are significantly lower. The International Energy Agency (IEA) now forecasts carbon emissions in 2040 to be lower than in almost all of the IPCC scenarios.115 Can we credit thirty years of climate alarmism for these reductions in emissions? We can’t. Total emissions from energy in Europe’s largest countries, Germany, Britain, and France, peaked in the 1970s, thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear — technologies that McKibben, Thunberg, AOC, and many climate activists adamantly oppose.

We use twice as much land for beef and dairy production as for our second largest use of Earth, which is growing crops. Nearly half of Earth’s total agricultural land area is required for ruminant livestock, which includes cows, sheep, goats, and buffalo.

I continued to write about the Amazon throughout the years and so, when the firestorm of publicity over the Amazon raged in the late summer of 2019, I decided to call Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon. I asked him whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth’s oxygen supply. “It’s bullshit,” he told me. “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration, so it’s a wash.”11 According to an Oxford University ecologist who studies them, Amazon plants consume about 60 percent of the oxygen they produce in respiration, the biochemical process whereby they obtain energy. Microbes, which break down rainforest biomass, consume the other 40 percent. “So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero,” the ecologist writes. “The same is pretty much true of any ecosystem on Earth, at least on the timescales that are relevant to humans (less than millions of years).”

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. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.25 And the amount of forests in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home nation, has doubled during the last century.

For twenty-first-century environmentalists, the word wilderness has positive connotations, but in the past it was a frightful “place of wild beasts.” European farmers viewed forests as places of danger, which they often were, home to both dangerous animals like wolves and menacing humans like outlaw gangs. In the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” two children get lost in the forest and fall into the hands of a witch. In “Little Red Riding Hood,” a little girl traveling through the forest is terrorized by a wolf.46 Thus, for early European Christians, removing the forest was good, not bad. Early Christian fathers, including Saint Augustine, taught that it was humankind’s role to finalize God’s creation on Earth and grow closer to Him. Forests and wilderness areas were places of sin; clearing them to make farms and ranches was the Lord’s work. Europeans believed humans were blessed and distinct for their transformative powers. Monks tasked with the work of creating a clearing in the woods literally imagined themselves expelling the devil from Earth. They weren’t trying to create Eden but rather a New Jerusalem: a civilization that mixed town and country, sacred and profane, commerce and faith. It was only after humans started living in cities, and growing wealthier, that they started to worry about nature for nature’s sake.47 Europeans who, in the nineteenth century had viewed the Amazon as “jungle,” a place of danger and disorder, came to see it in the late twentieth century ...

As for the myth that the Amazon provides “20 percent of the world’s oxygen,” it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the journal Science why there was nothing to be frightened of. “In almost all grocery lists of man’s environmental problems is found an item regarding oxygen supply. Fortunately for mankind, the supply is not vanishing as some have predicted.”74 Unfortunately, neither is the supply of environmental alarmism.

The scientists seemed shocked by what they discovered: “The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.”40 Even more astonishing, they found a hundred times less microplastic than they had been expecting to find. So where are all the microplastics going? The scientists named several possibilities.

Therefore, even though polystyrene represents a small percentage of global plastic, its long life in nature was considered an environmental threat, one easily visualized as chunks of Styrofoam bobbing on waves and beaches. In a lab, the scientists exposed five samples of polystyrene in seawater to light from a special lamp matching the sun’s rays. What they discovered was that sunlight breaks down the polystyrene into organic carbon and carbon dioxide. The organic carbon dissolves in seawater, and the carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. At the end of the process, the plastic is gone. “We used multiple methods, and they all pointed to the same outcome,” said one of the researchers. The same molecular property that made polystyrene molecules hard for microbes to eat was just the feature that made them vulnerable to having their bonds broken by sunlight. The scientists said their study was the first to provide direct proof of how, and how fast, sunlight breaks down polystyrene first into microplastics, then into individual molecules, and then into its elemental building blocks.46

In our conversation, after I told Figgener the history of how plastic helped save the hawksbill turtle, she laughed. “Plastic is a miracle product, you know? I mean, the advances in technology that also you know, help to develop. It wouldn’t be possible without plastic. I mean, I don’t want to lie about it. I’m not that hardline on it.”

But are the alternatives to fossil-based plastics really better for the environment? Certainly not in terms of air 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.79

Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process.

A study of the life cycle of 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 than sending ordinary plastics to the landfill.85

The plastics parable teaches us that we save nature by not using it, and we avoid using it by switching to artificial substitutes. This model of nature-saving is the opposite of the one promoted by most environmentalists, who focus on either using natural resources more sustainably, or moving toward biofuels and bioplastics. We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants. Consider how dangerous that instinct was in the case of tortoiseshell.

The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.14 The huge increase in biodiversity during the last 100 million years massively outweighs the species lost in past mass extinctions. The number of genera, a measure of biodiversity more powerful than species count alone, has nearly tripled over the course of this time period.15 After each of these past five mass extinctions, the biodiversity in the fossil record dips between 15 to 20 percent, but each extinction is followed by much larger growth.16 Some say the erroneous claims of a sixth mass extinction undermine conservation efforts. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action when in fact, if it’s actually true that we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology,” noted one scientist. “People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument.”17

Madden believes that the personalities of many conservation scientists undermine their relationships with locals. Conservation scientists “are highly introverted and analytical,” she said. “They want to make big decisions by themselves in a corner with people who think like them, and then give it to people who experience it as an imposition. It’s not like they try to be assholes. They want to get it right. They don’t have the same values, and it looks disrespectful and blows up.”

Anyone exposed to books like The Sixth Extinction, reports like IPBES’s 2019 Platform, and films like Virunga, along with the publicity they generate, might reasonably think that protecting wildlife requires restricting economic growth, strictly enforcing park boundaries, and fighting oil companies. Worse, they might give developed-world audiences the impression that African wildlife parks are best run by Europeans. “When Virunga Park was run by the Congolese,” said Plumptre, “there were more large mammals, less political problems, and fewer people invading the park, even though they didn’t have anywhere near the money coming in. Today, there’s infrastructure, but the mammal numbers have crashed and there is a lot of cultivation in the park that wasn’t there five or six years ago.”

Experts agree that the easiest and cheapest way for Congo to produce abundant supplies of cheap electricity is by building the long-planned Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River. “You have 100,000-megawatt potential through Inga,” Kavanagh said. “You can provide all of Africa with that power.” The Inga would be fifty times larger than the Hoover Dam, which serves eight million people in California, Arizona, and Nevada.80 But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists, the Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind that has lifted so many nations out of poverty in the past.

The truth about clothing and other consumer items made in factories in poor and developing countries is actually the opposite of what Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace claim. Rather than being the main culprit in the destruction of forests, factories have been, and remain, an engine for saving them.

While a few oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia have achieved very high standards of living without ever having embraced manufacturing, almost every other developed country in the world, from Britain and the United States to Japan to South Korea and China, has transformed its economy with factories. Increased wealth from manufacturing is what allows nations to build the roads, power plants, electricity grids, flood control, sanitation, and waste management systems that distinguish poor nations like Congo from rich nations like the United States. 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

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 All of this is wonderful news for everyone who cares about achieving universal prosperity and environmental protection.

The key is producing more food on less land. While the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by 8 percent since 1961, the amount of food produced has grown by an astonishing 300 percent.22 Though pastureland and cropland expanded 5 and 16 percent, between 1961 and 2017, the maximum extent of total agriculture land occurred in the 1990s, and declined significantly since then, led by a 4.5 percent drop in pastureland since 2000.23 Between 2000 and 2017, the production of beef and cow’s milk increased by 19 and 38 percent, respectively, even as total land used globally for pasture shrank.24 The replacement of farm animals with machines massively reduced land required for food production. By moving from horses and mules to tractors and combine harvesters, the United State...

High-yield farming produces far less nitrogen pollution run-off than low-yield farming. While rich nations produce 70 percent higher yields than poor nations, they use just 54 percent more nitrogen.30 Nations get better at using nitrogen fertilizer over time. Since the early 1960s, the Netherlands has doubled its yields while using the same amount of fertilizer.31 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.

As such, buying cheap clothing, and thus increasing agricultural productivity, is one of the most important things we can do to help people like Suparti in Indonesia and Bernadette in Congo, while also creating the conditions for the return and protection of natural environments, including rainforests.

Urbanization, industrialization, and energy consumption have been overwhelmingly positive for human beings as a whole. From preindustrial times to today, life expectancy extended from thirty to seventy-three years.34 Infant mortality declined from 43 to 4 percent.35

The Great Escape continues today. From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent.37

How wealthy we are is thus reflected in the amount of energy we consume. The average Congolese person consumes the energy equivalent of 1.1 kilograms of oil per day (kg/day). The average Indonesian consumes the energy equivalent of 2.5 kg/day. The average U.S. citizen consumes 19 kg/day.60 But these numbers obscure huge differences in the quality of energy. Almost all of the average Congolese person’s energy consumption is in the form of burning wood and other biomass, where just 24 percent of the average Indonesian’s is, and nearly none of the average American’s is.

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

Electricity is, technically, an “energy carrier,” not a fuel or primary energy. Nevertheless, the increase shows the power of humankind’s evolution away from matter-dense fuels to energy-dense ones.

Even coal-burning has become dramatically cleaner over the last 200 years. A simple technical fix added to coal plants in developed nations after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99 percent. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions. Natural gas is still, as a rule, superior to coal, for inherently physical reasons. But on the question of air pollution, the extent to which coal plants have become far cleaner is remarkable.

As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, cleaner vehicles, and other technological changes, developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality. Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent. While death rates from air pollution can rise with industrialization, they decline with higher incomes, better access to health care, and reductions in air pollution.76 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

Understanding this process leads to an apparently counterintuitive conclusion. “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have less children. The population doesn’t grow, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon. You might be better off in 2070.”

Late economic developers like the Congo have a much harder time competing in international markets than did early economic developers like the United States and Europe. That means early developers, today’s rich nations, should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize. Instead, as we will see, many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable rather than to make poverty history.