Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

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.

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.

Globally, the history of human evolution and development is one of converting ever-larger amounts of energy into wealth and power in ways that allow human societies to grow more complex.

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.

Even coal-burning has become dramatically cleaner over the last 200 years. A simple technical fix added to coal plants in developed nations after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99 percent. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions. Natural gas is still, as a rule, superior to coal, for inherently physical reasons. But on the question of air pollution, the extent to which coal plants have become far cleaner is remarkable.74 None of this is to say that burning coal is “good,” only that it is, on most human and environmental measures, better than burning wood. As we will see, natural gas is similarly better than coal on most measures. People burn wood not coal, and coal not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because those are the fuels they would prefer.

On one hand, Africa has made real progress during the last half century. Agricultural productivity has risen, but manufacturing was a higher percentage of the economy in the mid-1970s than it is today. “Most countries of Africa are too poor to be experiencing de-industrialisation,” writes Rodrik, “but that is precisely what seems to be taking place.”78 One exception is Ethiopia, which has attracted Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and fast-fashion leader H&M,79 both because of its low wages compared to places like China and Indonesia, where they have risen, as well as to its investments in hydroelectric dams, the electricity grid, and roads.80 “Ethiopia has experienced GDP growth of more than 10 percent per annum over the last decade,” notes Rodrik, “due in large part to the increase in public investment, from 5 percent to 19 percent of GDP.”

If Congo ever got its act together, I asked Dinh, what should it do? “I was asked to advise Osun State [in Nigeria],” he said. “I advised them to open up to foreign direct investment and try to get as many jobs created as possible. For now, forget about who owns them. Just bring them over. Get in touch with the Chinese or Vietnamese or Malaysians and ask them to bring factories over.” There is no shortcut to success, Dinh emphasizes. “I gave a lecture at the Harvard Africa [Business] Club and someone said, ‘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. “The goal in Ethiopia is to have as many jobs as possible, and have the education system turning out the factory workers that you need. That’s why I push for light manufacturing. It’s not just the skills but also the discipline instilled in people.

Contrary to what I and others have long believed, the positive impacts of manufacturing outweigh the negative ones. We should thus feel pride, not guilt, when buying products made by people like Suparti. And environmentalists and the news media should stop suggesting that fast-fashion brands like H&M are behaving unethically for contracting with factories in poor nations. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want companies like Mattel, Nike, and H&M to improve factory conditions. Consumers can play a positive role in pressuring companies to do the right thing. But that depends on them continuing to buy cheap products produced in developing nations in the first place.

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.

If anything qualifies as a miracle of nature, it’s the blue whale. As a baby, it gains ten pounds an hour drinking its mother’s milk. It takes one ten years to achieve maturity. Full-grown, the blue whale is the largest known creature to have graced Earth—nearly three times bigger than the biggest dinosaur.

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.

While whalers over-hunted whales, historians conclude that “there is no evidence that American whaling contracted because of a serious shortage of whales.” The creation of a substitute with a much higher power density was sufficient. This is an important lesson since it means we need not wait for inferior products, environmentally and otherwise, to run out before replacing them.

As fate would have it, capitalism would save the whales not once, but twice.

Journalists realized what was going on. In 1959, The New York Times reported that “the growing output of vegetable oils . . . has forced down the market value of whale oil and may, in the end, save the whales.”

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.”

Rising prosperity and wealth created the demand for the substitutes that saved the 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.”

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. Before anyone realizes it, nuclear energy could be just a distant memory, or a collective bad dream about a time when humankind tried to redeem its invention of atomic weapons when what it should have done was scrap the technology entirely. At least that’s how the story goes. While all of the above is technically accurate, I carefully excluded key facts in order to be misleading in the same ways that antinuclear campaigners have been for fifty years.

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.”

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.10 In earlier studies, the U.N. estimated there could be up to sixteen thousand cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation by 2065, while to date there have been five thousand. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of only 1 percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be just 50 to 160 over an eighty-year lifespan.

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.”

Similar to Fukushima, a meltdown occurred in 1979 at Unit Two of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The incident created a national panic that contributed to the halting of nuclear energy’s expansion, despite neither killing anyone nor elevating anyone’s risk of cancer. It is difficult to find other major industrial accidents that kill nobody.

The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.

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.

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.

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 pollution emitted by the coal-fired power plants operating in place of the shutdown nuclear plants.”

Had Germany invested $580 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, it would be generating 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources and have sufficient zero-carbon electricity to power all of its cars and light trucks, as well.

One of the best features of nuclear waste is that there is so little of it. All the used nuclear fuel ever generated in the United States can fit on a single football field stacked less than seventy feet high.

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.

A few weeks later, environmental activist Greta Thunberg wrote on Facebook that nuclear is “extremely dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming,”40 even though, as we have seen, the best-available science shows the opposite.

“They can’t have it both ways,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “If they say this [climate change] is apocalyptic or it’s an unacceptable risk, and then they turn around and rule out one of the most obvious ways of avoiding it [nuclear power], they’re not only inconsistent, they’re insincere.”

In the 1960s, most conservationists favored nuclear plants as a clean energy alternative to coal plants and hydroelectric dams. So, too, did most Democrats and liberals. Indeed, there was widespread popular support for nuclear energy among Americans, Europeans, and others around the world, who viewed it as a clean, energy-dense form of effectively limitless energy.

Humankind could only redeem itself from the scourge of nuclear weapons by realizing the dream of universal prosperity—and that required cheap and abundant energy. “Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities,” Eisenhower said.

After Eisenhower finished, there was a brief silence in the Assembly Hall, and then something extraordinary happened: representatives from every nation—communist and capitalist, Muslim and Christian, black and white, rich and poor—rose to their feet and applauded as a single chorus for ten minutes. “Atoms for peace,” as the speech, and the big, humanistic idea at the heart of it, was born.

But the atomic hope wouldn’t last. Within ten years, the war on nuclear power would begin.

In the 1970s, groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists went from seeking nuclear disarmament to blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, eventually joining forces with other anti-nuclear groups, Friends of the Earth (FOE), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. All of those groups were as focused and perhaps more focused on stopping the construction of nuclear power plants as they were on any other cause in the 1970s, including and especially stopping coal power plants, which were the main alternative to nuclear at the time.

Opposition to nuclear power started rising in the mid-1960s. From 1962 to 1966, only 12 percent of applications by electric utilities to build nuclear plants were challenged. By the beginning of the 1970s, 73 percent of applications to build nuclear plants would be challenged.

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.”

Nader, the Sierra Club, and others insisted that nuclear wasn’t needed because electricity consumption could be reduced, at a profit, through energy efficiency and conservation. “[Conservation] is all we need to do,” claimed the Sierra Club’s Brower in 1974, “plus doing a little bit better with the alternative technologies we have. If you then take what solar could do, solar and wind, by the end of the century you’re in pretty good shape.”

Antinuclear environmentalists openly favored coal and other fossil fuels over nuclear. “We do not need nuclear power,” said Nader. “We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we’re owning up to . . . the tar sands . . . oil out of shale . . . methane in coal beds

It’s not that nobody knew of coal’s dangers. In 1979, The New York Times published a front-page article noting that coal’s death toll would rise to fixty-six thousand if coal instead of nuclear plants were built.

In response to Fukushima, the Japanese government shut down its nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels. As a result, the cost of electricity went up, resulting in the deaths of a minimum of 1,280 people from the cold between 2011 and 2014.110 In addition, scientists estimate that there were about 1,600 (unnecessary) evacuation deaths and more than four thousand (avoidable) air pollution deaths per year.

The Colorado plateau is more naturally radioactive than most of Fukushima was after the accident.114 “There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer,” said Gerry.

As we have seen, fears of nuclear weapons have long contributed to fears of nuclear energy. In the climactic scene of HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl series, the lead character claims, “Chernobyl reactor number four is now a nuclear bomb.”120 The claim was egregiously false, but many viewers undoubtedly believed it was true.

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.”

The U.S. government estimates renewables will be a larger source of electricity than natural gas in the United States by 2050. Globally, it estimates renewables will rise from being 28 percent of the world’s electricity in 2018 to nearly 50 percent in 2050.5 But those numbers are misleading. While renewables in 2018 globally generated 11 percent of total primary energy, 64 percent of it (7 percent of total primary energy) came from hydroelectric dams.6 And dams are largely maxed out in developed nations, while their construction is opposed by environmentalists in poor and developing ones. Despite the hype, the shares of global primary energy from solar and wind in 2018 was just 3 percent, the share coming from geothermal was 0.1 percent, and tidal was too small to measure.

Without large-scale ways to back up solar energy, California has had to block electricity coming from solar farms when it’s extremely sunny, or even pay neighboring states to take it in order to avoid blowing out the Californian grid.

The big oil and gas companies know perfectly well that batteries can’t back up the grid. The places integrating large amounts of solar and wind onto electricity grids are relying more and more on natural gas plants, which can be ramped up and down quickly to cope with the vagaries of the weather. France is a perfect example. After investing $33 billion during the last decade to add more solar and wind to the grid,20 France now uses less nuclear and more natural gas than before, leading to higher electricity prices and more carbon-intensive electricity.

By 2006, when An Inconvenient Truth won Al Gore an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, renewables were becoming big business. That same year, the venture capitalist John Doerr, an early Google and Amazon investor, cried while giving a TED Talk about global warming. “I’m really scared,” Doerr said. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

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.