Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent backup, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

But Solar Impulse underscored the inherent limits of energy-dilute fuels. Solar Impulse’s wingspan was the same length as a Boeing 747, which carries 500 people at close to 1,000 kilometers an hour.64 Solar Impulse could only carry one person, the pilot, and fly less than 100 kilometers an hour, which is why it took two months to complete the trip.

Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have hard physical limits. The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years.66 The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.

The main problem with biofuels—the land required—stems from their low power density. If the United States were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.95 Even the most efficient biofuels, like those made from soybeans, require 450 to 750 times more land than petroleum. The best performing biofuel, sugarcane ethanol, widely used in Brazil, requires 400 times more land to produce the same amount of energy as petroleum.

While much of the media coverage has blamed industrial agriculture, it is notable that the biggest insect population declines are being reported in Europe and the United States, where the land area dedicated to agriculture has declined, over the last two decades. What have spread are wind turbines.

Vermont not only failed to reduce emissions by 25 percent, its emissions rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015, in part due to the closure of the state’s nuclear plant, and in part due to the inadequacy of renewables.

Per capita income remains tightly coupled with per capita energy consumption. There is no rich low-energy nation just as there is no poor high-energy one. While Europeans consume less energy than Americans, on average, this is due less to environmental virtue and more to the fact that they rely more on trains and less on cars, due to higher population densities.

While environmentalists have not had the political power to restrict energy consumption and thus economic growth in rich nations, they have, for fifty years, had enough to restrict it in poorer and weaker ones. Today, the World Bank is diverting funding from cheap and reliable energy sources like hydroelectricity, fossil fuels, and nuclear, to expensive and unreliable ones like solar and wind. And in October 2019, the European Investment Bank announced it would halt all financing of fossil fuels in poor nations by 2021.17 While rich-world environmentalists are not the underlying cause of poverty in places like the Congo, they are, at a minimum, making things more difficult for nations already disadvantaged from being the last nations on Earth to industrialize and develop.

heard of you,” he wrote.81 The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.

Nuclear energy not only meant infinite fertilizer, freshwater, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint. Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce. And so some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced too much cheap and abundant energy.

The proposed Inga Dam would have power densities three times that of dams in Switzerland.120 And yet International Rivers is not seeking to remove dams in Switzerland nor in California, where for one hundred years they have provided the state with cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity, freshwater for drinking and agriculture, and flood control.

Whereas in January 2019, Thunberg had paid lip service to the need for poor nations to develop, in September she said, “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”124 But economic growth was what lifted Suparti out of poverty, saved the whales, and is the hope for Bernadette, once Congo achieves security and peace. Economic growth is necessary for creating the infrastructure required for protecting people from natural disasters, climate-related or not. And economic growth created Sweden’s wealth, including that of Thunberg’s own family. It is fair to say that without economic growth, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist.

Joyashree took me to a poor neighborhood where there was an ongoing experiment in daylighting, which is a way to provide light to people living in dark homes. It is done by cutting a hole in the roof and sticking into it a plastic bottle that refracts sunlight into the home. Daylighting has received widespread positive publicity in Western nations. Joyashree asked me what I thought of it and I told her I found it offensive that Western NGOs viewed sticking a plastic bottle in the roof of a shack as something to celebrate. She seemed to agree.

Apocalyptic scientists and activists list various changes, such as melting ice sheets, changing ocean circulations, and deforestation, and suggest that they will add up to an apocalyptic sum greater than their parts. But they cannot offer a clear mechanism, amid so much complexity and uncertainty, for how such an apocalyptic scenario could occur.

Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.

We subconsciously cast ourselves as the heroes of our immortality projects. “It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero is magical, religious, and primitive, or secular, scientific, and civilized,” Becker wrote. “It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.”

The problem, Scruton argued, is when “resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,” Scruton concludes. At that point resentment becomes “an existential posture” adopted not “to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. . . . That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.” Another word for what Scruton is describing is nihilism.

Power density determines environmental impact. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium. Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint. Power-dense farming, including of fish, creates the prospect of shrinking humankind’s largest environmental impact.