Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Ehrlich and Holdren argued that a nuclear energy accident could be worse than a bomb. “A large reactor’s inventory of long-lived radioactivity is more than one thousand times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,”101 they wrote, implying that it would have done one thousand times the damage. The implication was wrong. Nuclear reactors cannot detonate like bombs. The fuel is not sufficiently “enriched” to do so. But mixing up reactors and bombs was, as we saw, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists. And, as would become routine in U.N. reports, including those published by the IPCC for the next three decades, the United Nations’ 1987 report “Our Common Future” attacked nuclear energy as unsafe and strongly recommended against its expansion.102 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.