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January 1 - February 6, 2021
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.24
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.
As for the Amazon, The New York Times reported, correctly, that “[the 2019] fires were not caused by climate change.”35
Humans today produce enough food for ten billion people, a 25 percent surplus, and experts believe we will produce even more despite climate change.38
In its fourth assessment report, the IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) just 4.5 percent.40
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.65
Technological change significantly outweighs climate change in every single one of FAO’s scenarios.
The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.
Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario.
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.
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.”11
According to an Oxford University ecologist who studies them, Amazon plants consume about 60 percent of the oxygen they produce in respiration, the biochemical process whereby they obtain energy. Microbes, which break down rainforest biomass, consume the other 40 percent. “So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero,” the ecologist writes. “The same is pretty much true of any ecosystem on Earth, at least on the timescales that are relevant to humans (less than millions of years).”12
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
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.18
By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon, particularly the most productive forms, many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse.
And yet developed nations, particularly European ones, which grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels, are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including the Congo, from developing the same way. Most of them, including Germans, produce more carbon emissions per capita, including by burning biomass, than do Brazilians even when taking into account Amazon deforestation.23
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.
For twenty-first-century environmentalists, the word wilderness has positive connotations, but in the past it was a frightful “place of wild beasts.”
The increase in deforestation in 2019 is to some extent Bolsonaro fulfilling a campaign promise to farmers who were “fatigued with violence, the recession, and this environmental agenda,” Nepstad said. “They were all saying, ‘You know, it’s this forest agenda that will get this guy [Bolsonaro] elected. We’re all going to vote for him.’ And farmers voted for him in droves. I see what’s happening now, and the election of Bolsonaro, as a reflection of major mistakes in [environmentalist] strategy.”58
After environmentalists encouraged such fragmentation in palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia as a measure supposedly friendly to wildlife, scientists found a 60 percent reduction in the abundance of important bird species.62
“The wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation,” said President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva in 2007, “but they already deforested everything.”68
“Germany still ‘recycles’ you know, in quotation marks, and we’re still one of those that export our recycling to countries in Asia and Africa. We only incinerate those things that don’t have a value anymore on the recycling market.”35
Meanwhile, NGO efforts to promote alternatives to charcoal, such as through wood pellets and special stoves, have failed. “The pellets haven’t been a great success anywhere,” said McNeilage. “I don’t know anywhere where they’ve cottoned on and become popular.”53
Madden believes that the personalities of many conservation scientists undermine their relationships with locals. Conservation scientists “are highly introverted and analytical,” she said. “They want to make big decisions by themselves in a corner with people who think like them, and then give it to people who experience it as an imposition. It’s not like they try to be assholes. They want to get it right. They don’t have the same values, and it looks disrespectful and blows up.”
Ultimately, for people to stop using wood and charcoal as fuel, they will need access to liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, which is made from oil, and cheap electricity. Researchers in India proved that subsidizing rural villagers in the Himalayas with LPG reduced deforestation and allowed the forest ecosystem to recover.68
interviewed people living around an old and dirty coal power plant in India. The plant provided them with free electricity, but also sometimes emitted toxic ash, which they said irritated and burned their skin. However much they hated the pollution, none said they would be willing to give up the free, dirty electricity for cleaner electricity at a cost.
only that it is, on most human and environmental measures, better than burning wood.
Understanding this process leads to an apparently counterintuitive conclusion. “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,”
And, as we will see, sometimes politics can move societies away from energy-dense fuels and back toward more energy-dilute ones.
And yet, on virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury.65 Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution.66 And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.67
Foer notes that PETA activists used the former head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri as a scientific authority on climate change because “he argues that vegetarianism is the diet that everyone in the developed world should consume, purely on environmental grounds.”67
“Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”70
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.
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.76
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.31
And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don’t need nuclear.
McKibben’s opposition to nuclear is the rule not the exception among environmentalists. While referring to the Green New Deal, the office of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in early 2019 that “the plan is to transition off of nuclear . . . as soon as possible.”39
“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.”41 All of which raises a question: if nuclear power is so good for the environment and necessary for replacing fossil fuels, why are so many of the people who say they most fear climate change so against it?
But energy efficiency did not obviate the need for power. And per capita U.S. electricity consumption in the 1970s ended up rising almost as much as it had in the 1960s, and the overall population grew 14 percent between 1970 and 1980. As a result, when an electric utility didn’t build a nuclear plant, it usually built one that burned coal, instead.90
All told, antinuclear groups killed six nuclear reactors in Ohio, including Zimmer, which was 97 percent complete before being converted into a coal plant. Environmental groups Sierra Club, NRDC, and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) accepted the conversion of Zimmer from nuclear to coal without complaint.97
The experience left Sierra Club board member and landscape photographer Ansel Adams bitter. “It shows how people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times,” he said.102
They claim nuclear is not necessary because of renewables. In reality, whenever nuclear plants aren’t in use, fossil fuels must be used and emissions rise. They claim that used nuclear fuel rods and the plants themselves attract terrorists, when in reality the only ones who have attacked nuclear plants have been antinuclear activists. And
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.7
million households in the United States. To back up all the homes, businesses, and factories on the U.S. electrical grid for four hours, we would need 15,900 storage centers the size of the one in Escondido at a cost of $894 billion.10
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.17
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.21
Musk misrepresented the amount of energy that would need to be stored. His square of solar desert would generate only two-fifths of its annual electricity in the autumn and winter months, but the United States consumes almost 50 percent of its total annual electricity during the colder portion of the year.83 What that means is that roughly 10 percent of yearly demand in the United States, around 400 terawatt-hours, would need to be stored from one half of the year for use in the other in batteries (which would only charge and discharge once per year). At current lithium battery prices, that
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