Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

If “Life on Earth is dying,” why did anybody care that somebody got splashed with a little beet juice?

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.

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.

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 today, like sub-Saharan Africa, may see 40 percent crop yield increases from technological improvements alone.

When it rained, both the paved and unpaved roads and the surrounding homes were flooded because there was no flood control system. I was reminded of how much we take for granted in developed nations. We practically forget that the gutters, canals, and culverts, which capture and divert water away from our homes, even exist.

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.

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.

What then is driving the increase in fires? “If you recognize that 100 percent of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add six million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.

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 bottom line is that other human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases.

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.”

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.

“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.”

As for the photos that celebrities shared on social media, they weren’t actually of the Amazon on fire. Many weren’t even of the Amazon.14 The photo Ronaldo shared was taken in southern Brazil, far from the Amazon—and it was taken in 2013, not 2019.15 The photo Madonna shared was more than thirty years old.16 In reality, almost everything the news media reported in summer 2019 about the Amazon was either wrong or deeply misleading.

Deforestation had risen, but the increase had started in 2013, a full six years before President Bolsonaro took office. In 2019, the area of Amazon land deforested was just one-quarter of the amount of land that was deforested in 2004.17 And while the number of fires in Brazil in 2019 was indeed 50 percent higher than the year before, it was just 2 percent higher than the average during the previous ten years.

In Brazil, as in Nicaragua, my enthusiasm for socialist cooperatives was often greater than of that the small farmers who were supposed to benefit from them. 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. I can count on a single hand the number of young people who told me they wanted to remain on their family’s farm and work their parents’ land. The large majority of young people wanted to go to the city, get an education, and get a job. They wanted a better life than what low-yield peasant farming could provide. They wanted a life more like mine. And I knew, of course, that I didn’t want to be a small farmer. Why did I ever think anyone else wanted to? The reality I lived, up close and in person, made it impossible for me to hold on to my romantic views.

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 short, fire and deforestation for meat production are major parts of what made us humans.45 The only way Adario, Bündchen, and other environmentalists could find meat production in the Amazon so shocking is by knowing none of that history.

Greenpeace wasn’t the first organization that tried to prevent Brazil from modernizing and intensifying agriculture. In 2008, the World Bank published a report that “basically said that small is beautiful, that modern, technologically sophisticated agriculture (and especially the use of GMOs) was bad,” wrote the World Bank’s representative at the time to Brazil. The report said that “the path that should be followed was small and organic and local agriculture.”52 The World Bank report enraged Brazil’s agriculture minister, who called the Bank’s representative and asked, “How can the World Bank produce such an absurd report. Following the ‘wrong path’ Brazil has become an agricultural superpower, producing three times the output we produced thirty years ago, with 90 percent of this coming from productivity gains!”53 The report added insult to injury. The World Bank had already cut 90 percent of its development aid for Brazil’s agricultural research efforts as punishment because Brazil sought to grow food in the same ways that wealthy nations do.54 Brazil was able to make up for the aid that World Bank had denied it with its own resources. After it did so, Greenpeace pressured food companies in Europe to stop buying soy from Brazil.55 “There’s this exaggerated confidence, this hubris,” said Nepstad, “that regulation upon regulation, without really thinking of the farmer’s perspective.”

Greenpeace’s agenda fit neatly into the agenda of European farmers to exclude low-cost Brazilian food from the European Union. The two European nations that were the most critical of deforestation and fires in the Amazon also happened to be the two countries whose farmers most resisted the Mercosur free trade agreement with Brazil: France and Ireland. “Brazilian farmers want to extend [the free trade agreement] EU-Mercosur,” noted Nepstad, “but [French president Emmanuel] Macron is inclined to shut it down because the French farm sector doesn’t want more Brazilian food products coming into the country.”63 Indeed, it was President Macron who started the global news media fervor about Amazon deforestation just a few days before France hosted the G7 meeting. Macron said France would not ratify a major trade deal between Europe and Brazil so long as Brazil’s president did nothing to reduce deforestation. In Brussels, the capital of the European Commission, the attacks on Brazil by France and Ireland “raised eyebrows,” noted Forbes business reporter Dave Keating. “These also happen to be the two countries who have been most vocally opposed to the Mercosur deal on protectionist grounds.”

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.

Plastics are made from a waste by-product of oil and gas production and thus require no additional land to be used. By contrast, switching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. To replace fossil plastic with corn-based bioplastic would require thirty to forty-five million acres of corn, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the entire U.S. corn harvest, or thirty million acres of switchgrass.

“The idea of conservation that local people [in Cameroon] held was that you get kicked off your land and you get no money. While I got used to being called ‘white man,’ both in Cameroon and other countries, at my field site we were called ‘conservation,’ instead, in a very derogatory way. And it hurt. ‘We don’t want conservation here,’ they would say.47

But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists, the Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind that has lifted so many nations out of poverty in the past.

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.

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.

The Great Escape continues today. From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent.

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.

“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.

It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales.

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.

Marchetti did not ordinarily think much of economic modeling. “As an old-time physicist,” he wrote, “I always had the tendency to tease my economist friends for their supreme ability to construct beautifully structured models that will never be used in practice, and will never be splattered with the mud of this low world.”

Wars, big changes in energy prices, and even depressions, Marchetti found, had no effect on the rate of energy transition. “It is as though the system had a schedule, a will, and a clock,” he wrote.

While scarcity helps incentivize entrepreneurs like Drake’s investors to create alternatives, it is often rising economic growth and rising demand for a specific energy service, like lighting, transportation, heat, or industry, that allows fossil fuels to replace renewables, and oil and gas to replace coal.

What determines the rate of those transitions is politics. And, as we will see, sometimes politics can move societies away from energy-dense fuels and back toward more energy-dilute ones.

Happily, the war on fracking failed. When it came to fracking shale for natural gas, the United States interfered less than other countries and benefited enormously as a result. The United States allows property owners the mining and drilling rights to the Earth beneath them. In most other nations, those rights belong to the government, which is a major reason why fracking hasn’t taken off in other countries.

Between 1961 and 2016, pastureland expanded by an area almost the size of Alaska.21 The good news is that the total amount of land humankind uses to produce meat peaked in the year 2000. Since then, the land dedicated to livestock pasture around the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., has decreased by more than 540 million square miles, an area 80 percent as large as Alaska.

But Grandin didn’t find that cattle needed to be raised on grass-fed pastures in order to be calm. Rather, she found that what cattle most wanted was cleanliness and predictability. “Keeping the pens dry and keeping cattle clean—that’s really important,” she said.

Sometimes Foer condemns animal farming for reasons that appear to have more to do with anti-capitalist ideology than the environment. The “economics of the market inevitably leads toward instability,” he writes.68 Such a logic leads Foer to attack farmed salmon as worse for the environment than wild salmon, even though, as we saw, not only are farmed salmon of equal nutritional value as wild salmon, they substitute for wild salmon, and open up the potential of reducing overfishing, one of humankind’s largest, and least-discussed, impacts on wild animals.

The trouble with dogmatic vegetarianism is the same as with dogmatic environmentalism. It ends up alienating the very people needed for improving conditions for animals and reducing the environmental impact of farming. “In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups and we got burned real bad,” a farmer told Foer. “So the turkey community decided there would be no more of it. We put up a wall and that was the end. We don’t talk, don’t let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA doesn’t want to talk about farming. They want to end farming. They have absolutely no idea how the world actually works.”

The pro-carb, anti-fat crusade turned out to be as bad for the environment as it was for people. By making pigs less fatty, breeders made them less efficient in converting feed into body mass. More grain and thus more land was required under the low-fat regime than would have been required under a normal-fat one.

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.

In northern Argentina, farmers were able to reduce the amount of land used for cattle ranching by 99.7 percent by replacing grass-fed beef with modern industrial production.83 We must change our thinking, too. Just as we overcame our preference for authentic furs, ivory, and tortoiseshell, we must retrain our preferences toward domesticated meats and away from wild meats, including fish, for wild animals once again to flourish.

Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel.

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.

Displacement is a psychological concept very similar to scapegoating. The idea is that we take our negative emotions out on weaker objects because we fear the more powerful object.

Were the antinuclear activists themselves really so afraid of nuclear? There are reasons to doubt it. A Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon confessed, “I really didn’t care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway. . . . I think that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.”

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. And whereas radiation levels at Fukushima declined rapidly, “those [other] areas stay high over a lifetime, since the radiation is not the result of contamination but of natural background radiation.”