Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

A scientist and a professor had created Extinction Rebellion in spring 2018 and recruited environmentalists from across Britain to get arrested for the cause. In the fall of that year, more than six thousand Extinction Rebellion activists blocked the five main bridges that cross the River Thames, which flows through London, preventing people from getting to work or home.1 The organization’s main spokesperson made alarming claims on national television. “Billions of people are going to die.” “Life on Earth is dying.” And, “Governments aren’t addressing it.”2 By 2019, Extinction Rebellion had attracted the support of leading celebrities, including actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, pop stars Ellie Goulding and Thom Yorke, 2019 Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, Live Aid producer Bob Geldof, and Spice Girl Mel B.

While Extinction Rebellion may not have been representative of all environmentalists, nearly half of Britons surveyed told pollsters they supported the group.3 And the British were not alone. In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.4 But by the fall of that same year, public support for Extinction Rebellion, including the sympathy of journalists, rapidly declined after the organization shut down streets and public transit throughout London. “What about families?” the Sky News host asked the Extinction Rebellion spokespersons. “I remember back in July, someone saying that he missed being at his father’s bedside when he died in Bristol.”

A This Morning host said that 95 percent of people surveyed now said Extinction Rebellion was a hindrance to its cause. What was Extinction Rebellion thinking?

Many blamed climate change for wildfires that ravaged California. The death toll from fires skyrocketed from just one death from wildfires in 2013 to one hundred deaths in 2018. Of the twenty most destructive fires in California’s history, half have occurred since 2015.11 Today, California’s fire season stretches two to three months longer than it was fifty years ago.12 Climate change is increasing droughts and making trees vulnerable to disease and infestation. “The reason these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change,” said Leonardo DiCaprio.

In early 2019, newly elected twenty-nine-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for an interview with a correspondent for The Atlantic. AOC, as she is known, made the case for a Green New Deal, one that would address poverty and social inequality in addition to climate change. AOC pushed back against critics who claimed it would be too expensive. “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change,” she said, “and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”21 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.”

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.

An AOC spokesperson told Axios, “We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it’s existential or cataclysmic.” But, he added, “We’re seeing lots of [climate change–related] problems that are already impacting lives.”27 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. In fact, both rich and poor societies have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. In 2019, the journal Global Environmental Change published a major study that found death rates and economic damage dropped by 80 to 90 percent during the last four decades, from the 1980s to the present.

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.

Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one million requires in developed nations.

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.51 There are many reasons why the Congo is so dysfunctional. It is massive—it is the second largest African nation in area, behind only Algeria—and difficult to govern as a single country. It was colonized by the Belgians, who fled the country in the early 1960s without establishing strong government institutions, like an independent judiciary and a military.

There were free elections in 2006 and optimism around the new president, Joseph Kabila, but he proved as corrupt as past leaders. After being reelected in 2011, he stayed in power until 2018, when he installed a candidate who won just 19 percent of the vote as compared to the opposition candidate, who won 59 percent. As such, Kabila and his allies in the legislature appear to be governing behind the scenes.

Has anyone done a study of food production at four degrees? I asked. “That’s a good question. I must admit I have not seen a study,” said Rockström, who is an agronomist. “It seems like such an interesting and important question.”63 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.

While Florida experienced eighteen major hurricanes between 1900 and 1959, it experienced just eleven from 1960 to 2018.73 Is the United States unique? It’s not. “Scholars have done similar analyses of normalized tropical cyclone losses in Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia, China, and the Andhra Pradesh region in India,” Pielke notes. “In each case they have found no trend in normalized losses.”74 And it’s not just hurricanes. “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.”75 The IPCC says the same thing. “Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change,” notes a special IPCC report on extreme weather, “but a role for climate change has not been excluded.”

Would we be having such hot fires in the Sierra, I asked, had we not allowed wood fuel to build up over the last century? “That’s a very good question,” said Keeley. “Maybe you wouldn’t.” He said it was something he might look at. “We have some selected watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas where there have been regular fires. Maybe the next paper we’ll pull out the watersheds that have not had fuel accumulation and look at the climate fire relationship and see if it changes.”96 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.

The news media depicted the 2019–2020 fire season as the worst in Australia’s history but it wasn’t. It ranked fifth in terms of area burned, with about half of the burned acreage as 2002, the fourth place year, and about a sixth of the burned acreage of the worst season in 1974–1975. The 2019–2020 fires ranked sixth in fatalities, about half as many as the fifth place year, 1926, and a fifth as many fatalities as the worst fire on record in 2009. While the 2019–2020 fires are second in number of houses destroyed, they razed about 50 percent less than the worst year, the 1938–39 fire season. The only metric by which this fire season appears to be the worst ever is in the number of non-home buildings damaged.

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.

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 2018.114 Most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity. As a result, global temperatures today appear much more likely to peak at between two to three degrees centigrade over preindustrial levels, not four, where the risks, including from tipping points, are significantly lower. The International Energy Agency (IEA) now forecasts carbon emissions in 2040 to be lower than in almost all of the IPCC scenarios.115 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.

But 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.

Plastic waste can significantly increase sea turtles’ mortality rates. Half of all sea turtles have eaten plastic waste and in some parts of the world, 80 to 100 percent have consumed plastic waste. Ingested plastic can kill turtles by reducing their ability to digest food as well as by rupturing their stomachs.

The share of seabird species found to be ingesting plastic rose to an estimated 90 percent in 2015, with the scientists studying the issue predicting an increase to 99 percent of species found with ingested plastic by 2050.17 Part of the reason we worry about plastics is that it seems to take so long for them to degrade. In 2018, the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that Styrofoam takes thousands of years to disintegrate.

Many experts thus believe that rich nations seeking to reduce plastic waste in the oceans should improve trash collection in poor ones. “Improving waste management infrastructure in developing countries is paramount,” wrote the authors of a major study in 2015. Doing that would “require substantial infrastructure investment primarily in low- and middle-income countries.”

The scientists seemed shocked by what they discovered: “The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.”40 Even more astonishing, they found a hundred times less microplastic than they had been expecting to find.

Increased wealth from manufacturing is what allows nations to build the roads, power plants, electricity grids, flood control, sanitation, and waste management systems that distinguish poor nations like Congo from rich nations like the United States. Cities, meanwhile, concentrate human populations and leave more of the countryside to wildlife. Cities cover just more than half a percent of the ice-free surface of the earth.17 Less than half a percent of Earth is covered by pavement or buildings.

Before 1800, notes Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. “The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars),” he writes, “and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as ‘extreme poverty’ (less than $1.90 a day).” The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the “Great Escape” from poverty.36 The Great Escape continues today. From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent.

He pointed to the difference between South Korea, whose per capita GDP is $30,000, and Argentina, where it is $14,000. “Argentina in 1920 had a higher per capita income than Italy—and higher than Korea. While there are many factors involved, one cannot help but observe that Korea’s development path has been based on manufacturing and Argentina on other things, especially agriculture.”

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.

All of this happened without a vegetarian revolution. 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.

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. Those soaring subsidies, combined with the financial cost of accidents like Fukushima, estimated to be between 35 trillion yen and 81 trillion yen ($315 billion to $728 billion) by one private Japanese think tank, make nuclear one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.1 Meanwhile, from Finland and France to Britain and the United States, nuclear plants are way behind schedule and far over budget. Two new nuclear reactors at Britain’s Hinkley Point C were estimated to cost $26 billion but will now cost as much as $29 billion.2 Expansion of a nuclear plant near Augusta, Georgia, which was supposed to take four years and cost $14 billion for two new reactors, is now expected to take ten years and cost as much as $27.5 billion.3 All of this makes nuclear too slow and expensive to address climate change, many experts say.

Today, the developed world is abandoning nuclear. Germany is almost done phasing it out. France has reduced nuclear from 80 percent to 71 percent of its electricity and is committed to reduce it to 50 percent. In the United States, nuclear could decline from 20 percent to 10 percent of its electricity by 2030. Belgium, Spain, South Korea, and Taiwan are all phasing out their nuclear plants. While the nuclear industry promotes small new reactors, replacing a project like the four large reactors in one plant being built by Korea for the United Arab Emirates with the leading American design would require about one hundred small reactors, or eight power plants of twelve small reactors each. 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.

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). If there are additional cancer deaths they will be “about 0.6 percent of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.”

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.

Consider the case of climate activist Bill McKibben. Along with Vermont senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, he urged Vermont legislators in 2005 to commit to reducing emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency.32 Vermont’s main electric utility helped customers go “off-grid” with solar panels and batteries,33 and the state’s aggressive energy efficiency programs ranked fifth best in the nation for five years in a row.34 But instead of falling 25 percent, Vermont’s emissions actually rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015.

“There is no permanent method of exorcising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released,” concluded a 1952 report for President Eisenhower that Robert Oppenheimer oversaw. Said Oppenheimer, “It is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs.”130 Even advocates of disarmament agreed. “Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war,” acknowledged Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1955, “for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”131 Today, just 25 percent of Americans say they believe nuclear weapons can be eliminated.132 When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”133 After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”

Consider that in 2018, the Associated Press and University of Chicago conducted a survey and found that 57 percent of Americans were willing to pay $1 per month to combat climate change, 23 percent were willing to pay $40 per month, and just 16 percent were willing to pay $100 each month to combat climate change. The survey found 43 percent were unwilling to pay anything.

No nation has done more to support renewables than Germany. For the last twenty years it has been going through what it calls an Energiewende, or energy transition, from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. It will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure by 2025, according to energy analysts at Bloomberg.38 And yet, despite having invested nearly a half-trillion dollars, Germany generated just 42 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, and biomass, as compared to the 71 percent France generated from nuclear in 2019. Wind and solar were just 34 percent of German electricity, and relied upon natural gas as back-up.

Germany’s electricity grid came close to having blackouts for three days in July 2019. Germany had to import emergency power from neighboring nations to stabilize its grid. “The supply situation will become even more challenging in the future,” McKinsey wrote. The cost to consumers of renewables has been staggeringly high. Renewables contributed to electricity prices rising 50 percent in Germany since 2007.42 In 2019, German electricity

These calculations only consider electricity. If we move beyond electricity to include all energy, space requirements quickly get out of hand. For example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required.87 By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.

One pioneering study found that in the case of Germany, where nuclear and hydroelectric dams produce seventy-five and thirty-five times more in energy, respectively, than is required to make them, solar, wind, and biomass produce just 1.6, 3.9, and 3.5 times more.89 Coal, gas, and oil return about thirty times more energy than they require.

Gore personally accepted fossil fuel money in 2013. He and a co-owner sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, which is state-funded by Qatar, the oil-exporting nation whose citizens have the largest per capita carbon footprint in the world. One year earlier, Gore had said the goal of “reducing our dependence on expensive dirty oil” was “to save the future of civilization.”68 As part of the agreement, Gore reportedly received $100 million.69 Environmental activists weren’t particularly bothered by it. “I don’t think the community is too upset,” a politically active environmentalist told The Washington Post about Gore’s deal with Qatar. “My personal sense is he got a good deal.”70 The deal appears to have worked out better for Gore than Al Jazeera, which operated Al Jazeera America television from 2013 to 2016 before closing the operation down, apparently due to low ratings.71

At the end of July, Google brought together celebrities with climate activists in Italy to discuss what they could do to support the cause. Leonardo DiCaprio, Stella McCartney, Katy Perry, Harry Styles, Orlando Bloom, Bradley Cooper, Priyanka Chopra, Nick Jonas, and Diane von Furstenberg reportedly brainstormed ways they could leverage their fame to change behavior. Some were already taking action for the climate. Perry had made videos for UNICEF, while DiCaprio had narrated a documentary. Prince Harry, who described the climate emergency to the assembled guests, bare-footed, had recently written on Instagram, “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”1 The gathering in Sicily took place at the Verdura, a five-star resort larger than the entire nation of Monaco, and home to six tennis courts, three golf courses, four pools, and a football field. While the resort is world-class, many of the participants chose to stay instead on superyachts floating off the coast, from which they were ferried to the event on the island in Maseratis. By the first night of the event, forty private jets had landed at the resort, with another seventy or so expected to arrive before the weekend was over. “I’ve never seen such a pampered bunch,” someone present told the Sun, a British tabloid. “Everything is laid out for them. It’s so extravagant.”2 “They just don’t seem to be aware that they’re the ones burning huge amou...

Al Gore wouldn’t have been similarly embarrassed by Associated Press for living in a twenty-room home that used twelve times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee, had he not claimed, “We are going to have to change the way we live our lives” to solve climate change.

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.

There is nothing wrong with religions and often a great deal right about them. They have long provided people with the meaning and purpose they need, particularly in order to survive life’s many challenges. Religions can be a guide to positive, prosocial, and ethical behavior. “Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally doubt it),” noted psychologist Jonathan Haidt, “. . . religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people.”

“You know Becker’s book The Denial of Death?” Rhodes asked. “It won the Pulitzer Prize.” I said I did. According to the anthropologist Ernest Becker, all humans, not just religious people, need to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we are, in one way or another, immortal, that some part of us will never die. Humans are unique, Becker believed, in that we realize that we are going to die from a very young age. Our deaths rightly frighten us; we are all born with strong survival instincts. But since too much fear of death gets in the way of living, healthy individuals repress their fears, making them mostly unconscious.62 To defend ourselves psychologically against this low-level fear we create what Becker calls an “immortality project,” a way of feeling that some part of us will live on after our deaths. Many people feel immortal by having children and grandchildren. Others feel immortal creating art, businesses, writing, or communities that will last after they are gone.

Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both. For while some environmentalists claim their agenda will also deliver a greener prosperity, the evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and for the natural environment. While environmental alarmism may be a permanent feature of public life, it need not be so loud. The global system is changing. While that brings new risks, it also brings new opportunities. Confronting new challenges requires the opposite of panic. With care, persistence, and, I dare say, love, I believe we can moderate the extremes and deepen understanding and respect in the process. In so trying, I believe we will bring ourselves closer to the transcendent moral purpose most people, perhaps even some currently apocalyptic environmentalists, share: nature and prosperity for all.