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September 14 - September 14, 2022
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.
we will understand how humans save nature, not just destroy it. Through the stories of people around the world, and the species and environments they’ve saved, we will see how environmental, energetic, and economic progress constitute, in the real world, a single process.
Apocalypse Never offers a defense of what one might call mainstream ethics. It makes the moral case for humanism, of both secular and religious variants, against the anti-humanism of apocalyptic environmentalism.
The next day, a reporter for the news website Axios called several climate scientists to get their reactions to AOC’s claim that the world was going to end in twelve years. “All the time-limited frames are bullshit,” said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climate scientist. “Nothing special happens when the ‘carbon budget’ runs out or we pass whatever temperature target you care about, instead the costs of emissions steadily rise.”
Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said, “For some reason the media latched onto the twelve years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.”
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.
Stanford University atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, one of the first scientists to raise the alarm about ocean acidification, stressed that “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.”
But if that’s the case, the impact is dwarfed by the 92 percent decline in the decadal death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did.28 Moreover, that decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled.
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.
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 As for the Amazon, The New York Times reported, correctly, that “[the 2019] fires were not caused by climate change.”
fabricated her data.36 When it comes to food production, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concludes that crop yields will increase significantly, under a wide range of climate change scenarios.37 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 Food production, the FAO finds, will depend more on access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, just as it did in the last century. The FAO projects that even farmers in the poorest regions
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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?
If resources determined a nation’s fate, then resource-scarce Japan would be poor and at war while the Congo would be rich and at peace. Congo is astonishingly rich when it comes to its lands, minerals, forests, oil, and gas.
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.
Similarly, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization concludes that food production will rise 30 percent by 2050 except if a scenario it calls Sustainable Practices is adopted, in which case it would rise 20 percent.66 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.
“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.”
What most determines how vulnerable various nations are to flooding depends centrally on whether they have modern water and flood control systems, like my home city of Berkeley, California, or not, like the Congo.
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.
Many people we interviewed were upset about baboons and elephants from nearby Virunga National Park, a protected area for wildlife, raiding their crops. Given the widespread hunger and poverty, losing your crops to wild animals is devastating. I was told that one woman was so upset about losing her crops to an elephant that she died of a heart attack the next day. And I was told that a chimpanzee had recently killed a two-year-old boy.
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.
Fires in Australia are similar. Greater fire damage in Australia is, as in California, due in part to greater development in fire-prone areas, and in part to the accumulation of wood fuel. One scientist estimates that there is ten times more wood fuel in Australia’s forests today than when Europeans arrived. 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.
Studies find that climate alarmism is contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children.100 In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety and called it “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”101 In September 2019, British psychologists warned of the impact on children of apocalyptic discussions of climate change. In 2020, a large national survey found that one out of five British children was having nightmares about climate change.
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.
“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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
Part of the reason the planet is greening stems from greater carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and greater planetary warming.29 Scientists find that plants grow faster as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations. From 1981 to 2016, four times more carbon was captured by plants due to carbon-boosted growth than from biomass covering a larger surface of Earth.
Higher temperatures reduce labor productivity, which helps explain why nations in tropical climates are less developed than nations in temperate ones. It is simply too hot to work for much of the day.
Most of the small farmers I interviewed wanted to work their own plot of land. They might be great friends with their neighbors and even be related to them by birth or marriage, but they didn’t want to farm with them. They didn’t want to be taken advantage of by somebody who didn’t work as hard as them, they told me.
There are 690 indigenous reserves covering an astonishing 13 percent of Brazil’s landmass, almost all of them in the Amazon. Just nineteen thousand Yanomami Indians effectively own an area slightly larger than the size of Hungary.37 Some engage in logging.
Anyone looking to understand why Brazil cuts down its rainforests to produce soy and meat for export must start with the reality that it is trying to lift the last one-quarter of its population out of a poverty comparable to that of Bernadette in the Congo, of which environmentalists in Europe and North America are oblivious or, worse, unconcerned.
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.”
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.
In truth, nobody needed to know the model’s fine workings to know it was wrong. If the species area model were true, then half of the world’s species should have gone extinct during the last two hundred years, notes an environmental scholar.
But Virunga was misleading. “The areas where the gorillas are have never had prospects of oil,” primatologist Alastair McNeilage, of Wildlife Conservation Society, told me. McNeilage first went to Uganda in 1987 to study butterflies. “The gorillas are on an escarpment so there is no danger or desire of drilling or disturbing the area where the gorillas live,” he said.
The real threat to the gorillas and other wildlife isn’t economic growth and fossil fuels, I learned during my visit in December 2014, but rather poverty and wood fuels. In the Congo, wood and charcoal constitute more than 90 percent of residential primary energy. “The place where gorillas are located,” noted Caleb on our phone call, “is near villages that need charcoal for cooking.”
American conservationists including Sierra Club founder John Muir successfully advocated for governments to evict indigenous people from Yellowstone and Yosemite parks in the 1860s and 1890s. King Albert of Belgium brought that same model to the eponymously named Albertine Rift, where many people already lived and, indeed, humankind had been born, 200,000 years ago.
Scientists estimate that between five and “tens of millions” of people have been displaced from their homes by conservationists since the creation of Yosemite National Park in California in 1864. A Cornell University sociologist estimated that Europeans created at least fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone.
Scholars including Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman and Steven Pinker find that rising prosperity is strongly correlated with rising freedom among, reduced violence against, and greater tolerance for, women, racial and religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. Such was the case in Indonesia.42
In the opening chapter of his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith explains that an individual worker is fifty times more productive when he is focused on a single task in making a pin than if he made the entire pin himself.
Van Benthem’s finding wasn’t particularly new. The fact that energy efficiency, a form of resource productivity, lowers prices, which increases demand, is basic economics. And economists demonstrated that cheaper lighting led to greater consumption in 1996 and again in 2006.
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.
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.
“There is nothing wrong with growing through agriculture,” said Dinh. “But historically, nations did not do it that way because the scope for innovations is fairly limited. We’re better at producing a bushel of wheat today than we were fifty years ago. But the wheat is pretty much the same. By contrast, a TV today and a TV thirty years ago are two completely different products.”
“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.”
The discovery of the Drake Well led to widespread production of petroleum-based kerosene, which rapidly took over the market for lighting fluids in the United States, thus saving whales, which were no longer needed for their oil. At its peak, whaling produced 600,000 barrels of whale oil annually.18 The petroleum industry achieved that level less than three years after Drake’s oil strike.19 In a single day, one Pennsylvania well produced as much oil as it took a whaling voyage three or four years to obtain, a dramatic example of petrolem’s high power density.
