Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

Apocalypse Never explores how and why so many of us came to see important but manageable environmental problems as the end of the world, and why the people who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.

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.

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.

When a hurricane hits Florida, it might kill no one, but when that same storm hits Haiti, thousands can die instantly through drowning and subsequently in disease epidemics like cholera. The difference is that Florida is in a wealthy nation with hardened buildings and roads, advanced weather forecasting, and emergency management. Haiti, by contrast, is a poor nation that lacks modern infrastructure and systems.

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.97

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.

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).”12

Between 500 and 1350, forests went from covering 80 percent of western and central Europe to covering half of that. Historians estimate that the forests of France were reduced from being thirty million hectares (about seventy-four million acres) to thirteen million (about thirty-two million acres) between 800 and 1300. Forests covered 70 percent of Germany in the year 900 but just 25 percent by 1900.22 And yet developed nations, particularly European ones, which grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels, are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including the Congo, from developing the same way. Most of them, including Germans, produce more carbon emissions per capita, including by burning biomass, than do Brazilians even when taking into account Amazon deforestation.

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.

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.30

climate change bring no risks. They do. But we have to understand that not all of their impacts will be bad for the natural environment and human societies. Nor does any of this mean we shouldn’t be concerned about the loss of primary old-growth forests in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world. We should be. Old-growth forests offer unique habitats to species. While the total amount of forest cover in Sweden has doubled during the last century, many of the new forests have been in the form of monocultural tree farms.33 But if we are to protect the world’s remaining old-growth forests, we’re going to need to reject environmental colonialism and support nations in their aspirations to develop.

In August 2019, the news media’s portrayal of the burning rainforest as a result of greedy corporations, nature-hating farmers, and corrupt politicians annoyed me. I had understood for a quarter century that rising deforestation and fires are primarily the result of politicians responding to popular economic demands, not lack of concern for the natural environment.

The meadows of the North American eastern forests would have disappeared had they not been burned annually by Indians for five thousand years. And in the Amazon, hunter-gatherers burned forests and introduced new species.

Creating parks and protected areas goes hand-in-hand with agricultural intensification. Simply making farming and ranching more productive and profitable without protecting natural areas is insufficient. By protecting some areas and intensifying on already-existing farms and ranches, Brazilian farmers and ranches could grow more food on less land and protect the natural environment.

when you consider that just 0.03 percent of the nine million tons of plastic waste that ends up in oceans every year is composed of straws, banning them seems like a profoundly small thing, indeed.