Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

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 The Commission’s moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to the economists who did the most careful study, was a “rubber stamp” on a “situation that had already emerged. . . . Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.”

For nearly a decade, climate activists led by Bill McKibben of 350.org have claimed that natural gas is worse for the climate than coal.64 And yet, on virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury.65 Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution.66 And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.67

McKibben makes his claim that coal is better than natural gas by using an inappropriately short timeframe for global warming of just twenty years. The United States government and most experts agree that the appropriate timeframe to use is one hundred years. His timeframe thus exaggerates the impact of natural gas as a heat-trapping gas.

Where fracking for natural gas cracks shale below the Earth’s surface, imposing very small impacts aboveground, coal mining devastates mountain ecosystems. More than 500 mountains, covering more than one million acres, have been destroyed in central and southern Appalachia by mountaintop removal.

No energy transition occurs without human and environmental impacts. Fracking brings pipelines, rigs, and trucks, which can disrupt peaceful landscapes that people rightly care about. Frackers have created small earthquakes and improperly disposed of fracking wastewater. These problems are serious and should be addressed, but they are nowhere as bad as coal mining, which has in many ways become worse throughout the decades, not better, culminating in mountaintop removal and the destruction of river ecosystems.74 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.75

Today, 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks are either overfished or at capacity, meaning they are close to or just barely above the maximum they can be harvested before seeing their populations collapse entirely.80 Where 15 percent of Earth’s land surface is protected, just less than 8 percent of the world’s oceans are.81 Since 1974, humankind has tripled the share of fish stocks being harvested at unsustainable levels.82 And the pressure on wild fish continues to rise: between now and 2050, thanks to rising wealth and a growing number of people, global demand for fish is expected to double.83 The good news is that fish farming, or aquaculture, is developing rapidly. Aquaculture output doubled between 2000 and 2014, and today it produces half of all fish for human consumption.84 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported in 2018 that aquaculture “continues to grow faster than other major food production sector,” and that by 2030, “the world will eat 20 percent more fish than in 2016.”85

Fish farming is not without its problems. Early fish farms, such as shrimp farms, were quite destructive, involving the clearing of mangrove forests and the pollution of waterways by chemicals and nutrients.91 But, over time, their negative environmental impact has significantly declined through better siting of fish and shrimp farms and the cofarming of species such as scallops and mussels with seaweed and microalgae.

Opposition to the new fuel usually comes from the wealthy. In Britain, elites called coal the “devil’s excrement,” something that many people believed to be literally true, given its sulfuric smell.96 Coal smoke smelled bad against the sweet smell of wood-burning. The upper-class of Victorian England resisted the transition from wood to coal as long as they could.97 It was educated elites who similarly waged the war on fracking. The key antagonists were The New York Times, Bill McKibben, and well-financed environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

The moral of the story is that economic growth and the rising demand for food, lighting, and energy drive product and energy transitions, but politics can constrain them. Energy transitions depend on people wanting them. When it comes to protecting the environment by moving to superior alternatives, public attitudes and political action matter.

Attempting to move from factory farming to organic, free-range farming would require vastly more land, and thus destroy the habitat needed by mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and other endangered species. Foer unwittingly advocates nineteenth-century farming methods that, if adopted, would require turning wildlife-rich protected areas like Virunga Park into gigantic cattle ranches.

“I have to say there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian,” writes University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan, in a passage from his 2007 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”70 The trouble with dogmatic vegetarianism is the same as with dogmatic environmentalism. It ends up alienating the very people needed for improving conditions for animals and reducing the environmental impact of farming. “In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups and we got burned real bad,” a farmer told Foer. “So the turkey community decided there would be no more of it. We put up a wall and that was the end. We don’t talk, don’t let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA doesn’t want to talk about farming. They want to end farming. They have absolutely no idea how the world actually works.”71 Taubes

The pro-carb, anti-fat crusade turned out to be as bad for the environment as it was for people. By making pigs less fatty, breeders made them less efficient in converting feed into body mass. More grain and thus more land was required under the low-fat regime than would have been required under a normal-fat one.

It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.19 Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel. A single Coke can of uranium can provide enough energy for an entire high-energy life.20 As a result, when the worst occurs with nuclear—and the fuel melts—the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in comparison to the particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which killed eight million people in 2016.21 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 that reason, replacing nuclear energy with fossil fuels costs lives. A study published in late 2019 found that Germany’s nuclear phase-out is costing its citizens $12 billion per year, with more than 70 percent of the cost resulting from 1,100 excess deaths from “local air pollut...

When most people refer to nuclear waste, they are referring to the used nuclear fuel rods. After they cool for two to three years in spent fuel pools in nuclear plants, they are put in steel and concrete canisters and stored on land in a manner known as dry cask storage. This makes nuclear the only form of electricity that internalizes its waste product. All other forms externalize their waste onto the natural environment.

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 And electricity is just one-third of total energy use, globally. The remaining two-thirds of primary energy consumption is dominated by fossil fuels, which are used for things like heating, cooking, and transportation. Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat. Thus, only nuclear can affordably create the hydrogen gas and electricity that will provide services such as heating, cooking, and transportation, which are currently provided by fossil fuels. And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment.

The Sierra Club was joined by a charismatic and aggressive young attorney named Ralph Nader, who had won the public’s trust in the mid-1960s, and become a household name, after criticizing the safety of American cars. It is hard to overstate his influence in turning the public against nuclear energy. “A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland,” Nader told an Ohio newspaper in 1974, “and the survivors would envy the dead.”85 Antinuclear groups publicized a report written by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, which claimed 400,000 infants had died from radioactive fallout from weapons testing.86 Nader and other antinuclear activists claimed that nuclear was far worse for the environment than fossil fuels. While the water that comes out of nuclear plants is clean, it is also warm, which could change the environment and impact animals. While nuclear plants produce no air pollution, they could overheat and melt, killing as many people as a bomb, they said. And while nuclear waste is the only waste from energy safely stored at the site of production, Nader and other campaigners constantly implied that it could somehow poison waterways or be used as a bomb.

Few individuals did more to frighten the public about nuclear energy than the actress Jane Fonda. She starred in the anti-nuclear disaster film, The China Syndrome, and provided the leadership to get it made. In the film, a scientist famously claims that an accident at a nuclear plant “could render an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.” The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania had an accident twelve days after the film’s premier.87 It would be difficult to exaggerate Hollywood’s role in turning the public against nuclear energy. Nuclear is the go-to scary technology for makers of films and television, and not just the bombs, nor even just the power plants, but even the largely harmless used fuel rods. By the early 1990s, the television show The Simpsons depicted nuclear waste as a green sludge leaking from drums. In a 1990 episode, Lisa and Bart catch a three-eyed fish from the river near the nuclear plant.

The public’s fear of nuclear technology remains the main obstacle to its expansion. Surveys of people around the world find that nuclear is slightly less popular than coal, less popular than natural gas, and far less popular than solar and wind.106 People and nature have paid a high price for the war on nuclear and for our continuing fears of the technology. Air pollution from coal power shortened millions of lives that could have been saved with nuclear energy.

Fear of nuclear led to panic and negative mental health consequences in the former Soviet Union and Japan. The notion that people exposed to radiation are contagious was first used to stigmatize people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.107 History repeated itself in Chernobyl. Women as far away from the accident as Western Europe were misled to believe that Chernobyl radiation had contaminated them, which led them to terminate 100,000 to 200,000 pregnancies in a panic.108

The intensity and scale of major wars had risen in fits and starts for 500 years from the wide-scale introduction of firearms and artillery in the 1400s, until the death toll from battles and wars peaked in World War II at tens of millions of military and civilian deaths. And then from a post-war peak of more than 500,000 deaths in 1950, battle deaths in 2016 were 84 percent lower despite a tripling in the world population.124

Consider Tesla’s most famous battery project, a 129 megawatt-hour lithium battery storage center in Australia. It provides enough backup power for 7,500 homes for four hours.8 But, there are nine million homes in Australia, and 8,760 hours in a year. One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for about twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours.9 There are about 134 million households in the United States. To back up all the homes, businesses, and factories on the U.S. electrical grid for four hours, we would need 15,900 storage centers the size of the one in Escondido at a cost of $894 billion.10 Various studies have shown that the cost of integrating unreliable wind energy is high and rises as more wind is added to the system.

For example, in Germany, when wind is 20 percent of electricity, its cost to the grid rises 60 percent. And when wind is 40 percent, its cost rises 100 percent.11 This is because of all the power plants, often natural gas, that must be standing by and ready to fire up the moment wind dies down, the extra power lines that have to be built to remote renewable energy locations, and all of the other extra equipment and personnel required to support fundamentally unreliable and often unpredictable forms of energy.

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 trillio...

In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent backup, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining.

Solar panels and wind turbines just don’t return enough energy for the energy invested to create them, especially when the need to store energy is considered.

The fact that the energy density of fuels, and the power density of their extraction, determine their environmental impact should be taught in every environmental studies class. Unfortunately, it is not. There is a psychological and ideological reason: the romantic appeal-to-nature fallacy, where people imagine renewables are more natural than fossil fuels and uranium, and that what’s natural is better for the environment. Just as people imagined “natural” products from tortoiseshell and ivory to wild salmon and pasture beef are better than “artificial” alternatives, people imagine that “natural” energy from renewables like solar, wood, and wind is better than fossil fuels and nuclear.

“Turns out there’s something called the Starbucks Rule when it comes to siting wind farms,” reported BusinessWeek in 2009. Wind developers “plot where Starbucks are in the general area and then make sure their project is at least thirty miles away. Any closer and there’d be too many NIMBYs who’d object to having their views spoiled by a cluster of 265-foot-tall wind towers.”138

Wrong. Not only are 350.org, Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF all funded by fossil fuel billionaires, they are also all trying to kill America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, nuclear power.23

“If an environmentalist were to take a gander at [NRDC’s] holdings,” a reporter for an environmental website wrote in 2015, “she might raise a quizzical eyebrow: 1,200 shares of Halliburton, 500 of Transocean, 700 of Valero. Marathon, Phillips 66, Diamond Offshore Drilling—they’re in there, too.”29 The founding donor of Friends of the Earth was oilman Robert Anderson, the owner of Atlantic Richfield. He gave Friends of the Earth the equivalent of $500,000 in 2019 dollars. “What was David Brower doing accepting money from an oilman?” his biographer wondered.30 The answer is that he was pioneering the environmental movement’s strategy of taking money from oil and gas investors and promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants.

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. It also raises a question: how long, exactly, have oil and gas interests been funding environmental groups to shut down nuclear plants?

As I mentioned, I cofounded a progressive Democratic, labor-environment push for a New Apollo Project, the predecessor to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. We sought $300 billion for efficiency, renewables, electric cars, and other technologies.85 In 2007 our efforts paid off when then-U.S. presidential candidate Obama picked up our proposal and ran with it. Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on our Green New Deal, $90 billion of it in stimulus money.86

Stimulus money wasn’t evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party. At least ten members of Obama’s finance committee and more than twelve of his fundraising bundlers, who raised a minimum of $100,000 for Obama, benefited from $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans.

But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $573 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser.

During the very same years they were denouncing fossil fuel interests, particularly Exxon and the Koch brothers, for funding their political opponents, and demanding universities stop investing in fossil fuels, 350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.99

McKibben and Sierra Club chief Brune bent over backward to praise Steyer after he announced he would spend $100 million running for office, and effectively buy his way onto the Democratic presidential election debate stage through TV and Facebook advertising.100 Steyer and Bloomberg ended up spending $750 million total on their 2020 presidential campaigns. It is hard to imagine a more “pay-to-play” relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media’s double standard. If Steyer and other fossil fuel and renewable energy investors get their way and kill some or all of the remaining ninety-nine U.S. nuclear reactors, which provide nearly 20 percent of America’s electricity, they will not only make a fortune, they will spike emissions and eliminate the only real hope for phasing out fossil fuels before 2050.

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

As climate change emerged as an elite concern in the 1990s, efforts within developed nations to cut off financing for cheap energy, industrial agriculture, and modern infrastructure to poor and developed nations grew stronger. By 2014, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Appropriations, sought to cut off U.S. development funding to poor nations seeking to build hydroelectric dams, on the basis that such dams have a “negative impact” on river ecosystems.

British elites justified letting the Irish starve by blaming them for their fate. The real reason the Irish were starving, held good opinion in Britain during the famine, was the Irish people’s lack of moral restraint. Increasing the wages of Irish workers, the The Economist warned, “would stimulate every man to marry and populate as fast as he could, like rabbits in a warren.”49

The Great Famine wouldn’t be the last time British rulers used Malthus’s ideas to justify starvation in other nations. The British governor general of India between 1876 and 1880 argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.”52 Later he claimed the “limits of increase of production and of population have been reached.”53

In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes historian Robert Mayhew. “Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was three times the death toll of the Great Irish Famine.

Adolf Hitler, too, was inspired by Malthus. “The productivity of the soil can only be increased within defined limits and up to a certain point,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. But, in contrast to Malthus, Hitler believed that those limits could be overcome through invasion of foreign territories. “Strong and direct connections can be drawn between [Malthus’s] work,” historian Mayhew concludes, “and some of the most abhorrent moments in twentieth-century history.”56

Ransom, Malthus, and the Malthusians who came after him were socially and politically conservative. Malthus was against birth control, viewing it as against God’s plan for humans. He was against social welfare programs for the poor, viewing them as self-defeating. British leaders who justified their policies based on Malthus’s thinking were conservatives. 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.

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. Why was that?

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 Like Vogt and Malthus before him, Ehrlich was particularly concerned with breeding by poor people in developing nations.

Malthusianism grew an even harder edge in the 1970s. Hardin, the University of California biologist, published an essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he argued that “we must recognize the limited capacity of any lifeboat.” The picture Hardin painted was of keeping people out of the lifeboat. Otherwise, the people trying to get in would doom the people in the lifeboat, in addition to themselves. “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

The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.

Behind advocacy ostensibly motivated by concerns for the environment lay a very dark view of human beings. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,” said Lovins, “because of what we would do with it.”83 Ehrlich agreed. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”84

So much death and suffering was coming, Ehrlich and Holdren believed, humankind needed to play “triage,” and leave some people to die. In the “concept of triage,” they wrote, “those in the third groups are those who will die regardless of treatment. . . . The Paddocks [the authors of the 1967 book Famine 1975!] felt that India, among others, was probably in this category. Bangladesh is today a more clear-cut example.”85

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.

McKibben has done more to popularize Malthusian ideas than any other writer. The first book about global warming written for a popular audience was his 1989 book, The End of Nature. In it, McKibben argued that humankind’s impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion.108