Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

“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.

Congo River Dam potential.

But Mattel is hardly a major agent of deforestation. Compared to daily newspapers, Mattel’s consumption of paper is minimal. The reason Greenpeace targeted Mattel wasn’t because it was a major paper user, but because Barbie is such a recognized brand.

Protests aim at famous brands to get clicks.

Rather than being the main culprit in the destruction of forests, factories have been, and remain, an engine for saving them.

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.

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.

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.

Before: benefits of rich countries farming for soil and production.

Around the world, for hundreds of years, young women have been voting with their feet. They have moved to cities from the countryside not because the urban areas are utopian but because they offer many more opportunities for a better life. 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.

Urbanization benfits for society.

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 Our prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy, and consumer products, and more and more of us can do work that requires greater use of our minds and that even offers meaning and purpose to our lives.

Poverty reduction and countries development.

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.

Today, economists point to three reasons why manufacturing, as opposed to other sectors of the economy, has allowed poor nations to develop into rich ones.

Manufacturing enriches poor countries.

First, poor nations can become as efficient as rich nations in making things, and even surpass them.

Second, goods made in factories are easy to sell to other countries.

Finally, factories are labor-intensive, which allows them to absorb large numbers of unskilled, small farmers.

How wealthy we are is thus reflected in the amount of energy we consume.

Humans have been moving away from wood to fossil fuels for hundreds of years. Globally, wood went from providing nearly all primary energy in 1850 to 50 percent in 1920 to just 7 percent today.

As we stop using wood for fuel, we allow grasslands and forests to grow back and wildlife to return.

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.

Energy density saves land use for crops and forests.

‘We don’t want to produce clothing and start with cheap products like China. We want to go right to the higher value added.’ But you can’t go directly from making bicycles to making a satellite. First you make bicycles and that allows you to make motorcycles. From there you can go to automobiles. From automobiles you can start thinking about satellites.

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.

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.

Kerosene saved whales.

People saved the whales by no longer needing them, and they no longer needed them because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.

The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, “to some extent, economies can ‘outgrow’ severe environmental exploitation.”

the total population of ocean fish that humans hunt and eat for food has declined by nearly 40 percent since 1970. Overfishing has resulted in many local extinctions, including of sharks. 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.

Fish overhunt and decline.

Aquaculture output doubled between 2000 and 2014, and today it produces half of all fish for human consumption.

Opposition to the new fuel usually comes from the wealthy.

Politics even interfered with saving the whales. While environmentalists often blame capitalism for environmental problems, it was communism that made whaling worse than it needed to be. After the fall of communism, historians found records that the Soviet Union was whaling at far higher numbers than they had admitted. It did so even though it was no longer profitable to do so, thanks to Soviet central planning. “Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers,” wrote a historian, “as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed commercially between 1967 and 1978.”

Communism and whalers.

As such, were IPCC’s “most extreme” scenario of global veganism to be realized—in which, by 2050, humans completely cease to consume animal products and all livestock land is reforested—total carbon emissions would decline by just 10 percent.14 Another study found that if every American reduced her or his meat consumption by one-quarter, greenhouse emissions would be reduced by just 1 percent. If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would drop by just 5 percent.15 Study after study comes to the same conclusion. One found that, for individuals in developed nations, going vegetarian would reduce emissions by just 4.3 percent, on average.16 And yet another found that, if every American went vegan, emissions would decline by just 2.6 percent.17

Going vegetarian doesn't reduce emissions.

This phenomenon is known as the rebound effect. If consumers respent their saved income on consumer goods, which require energy, the net energy savings would only be .07 percent, and the net carbon reduction just 2 percent.18 It is for that reason that reducing carbon emissions in energy, not food or use of land more broadly, matters most. And energy includes electricity, transportation, cooking, and heating, nearly 90 percent of which globally are fossil fuels.

Today, humans use more than one-quarter of Earth’s land surface for meat production.

Today, just 2 to 4 percent of Americans are vegetarian or vegan. About 80 percent of those who try to become vegetarian or vegan eventually abandon their diet, and more than half do so within the first year.

Vegetarians are rare and usually return to meat.

Part of this is due to the shift from beef to chicken. A gram of protein from beef requires two times the energy input in the form of feed as a gram from pork, and eight times a gram from chicken.25 But mostly it is due to efficiency.

Meat production roughly doubled in the United States since the early 1960s, and yet greenhouse gas emissions from livestock declined by 11 percent during the same period.

Consider that pasture beef requires fourteen to nineteen times more land per kilogram than industrial beef, according to a review of fifteen studies.30 The same is true for other inputs, including water.

Highly efficient industrial agriculture in rich nations requires less water per output than small farmer agriculture in poor ones.

Rich countries efficiency on beef production.

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.

“There are now at least seventeen systematic reviews looking at the clinical trials and nearly all conclude that saturated fats have no impact on mortality,” she explained.

Around the world, hunter-gatherers as far back as two million years ago valued animal fat more than protein or carbohydrates. The reason is obvious: animal fats contain two to five times as much energy by mass as protein and ten to forty times as much as fruits and vegetables. Those higher densities allowed early humans to gain more energy with less work than carbohydrates.

Some studies find that vegans and vegetarians are more prone to fatigue, headaches, and dizziness because of the deficiency of vitamin B12 and iron in the absence of red meat.

Much of the public’s concerns about meat have thus been misplaced. Consumers continue to express anxiety over things like the use of growth-promoting hormones in beef, even though the Food and Drug Administration, World Health Organization, and Food and Agriculture Organization have all concluded that meat produced with them is safe for human consumption. The evidence suggests we should have been more concerned by the absence of fat in our meat than by the use of hormones in its production.

The hunting and consumption of wild game remains one of the primary causes of the decline of wild animals in poor and developing nations. Recall that the number of wild animals in the world declined by half in the fifty years between 1960 and 2010.

Creating cheap and easily obtainable substitutes in the form of domesticated meat should thus be a high priority for conservationists. Reducing the amount of land required for meat production will allow for more land for people and wildlife.

Every effort to make nuclear plants safer makes them more expensive, according to experts, and higher subsidies from governments are required to make them cost-effective.

Nuclear has what energy experts call a “negative learning curve,” meaning we get worse at building it the more we do it. Most technologies have a positive learning curve.

Future generations may very well look back to 1996, when nuclear generated 18 percent of global electricity, as the peak of the technology. In 2018 it was at just 10 percent. Within a few years, it could be at 5 percent.

According to the United Nations, twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire, and nineteen first responders died in the next twenty-five years because of “various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma.8 The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”

Relative to other accidents few people died due to Chernobyl directly.

Gerry points out that the only public health impact from Chernobyl beyond the deaths of the first responders were twenty thousand documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under eighteen at the time of the accident. In 2017, the U.N. concluded that only 25 percent, five thousand, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation.

What about non-thyroid cancers? The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl claimed there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus.”12 That assertion is false: residents of those two countries were “exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

“That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the linear no-threshold method of extrapolating deaths from radiation. LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but people who live in places with higher background radiation, like my home state of Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer.

In Fukushima, Thomas says, nobody will die from radiation they were exposed to because of the nuclear accident.

Fukushima's radiation was very small.