Apocalypse Never Quotes

“negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today’s apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.70”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015.25 And the amount of forests in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s home nation, has doubled during the last century.26”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, and species extinction are not, fundamentally, consequences of greed and hubris but rather side effects of economic development motivated by a humanistic desire to improve people’s lives.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Because addressing our personal lives is painful and difficult, suggests Becker, we often look for external demons to conquer. Doing so makes us feel heroic, and creates a feeling of immortality through the recognition, validation, and love we receive from others.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people in the West no longer had an external enemy against which to direct their negative energy and define themselves.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“During the Enlightenment, philosophers tried to apply the same rational approach to morality and politics in the form of “secular humanism.” It borrowed from Judeo-Christianity the idea that humans were special, but it emphasized the use of science and reason in the pursuit of virtue and did not require belief in God, the afterlife, or other core aspects of religion.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“At the same time, apocalyptic environmentalism does all of this while retaining the illusion among its adherents that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Having first experienced and then studied the phenomenon for fifteen years, I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The underlying problem, said McKibben, was spiritual. Through capitalist industrialization, humankind had lost its connection to nature.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Nuclear reactors cannot detonate like bombs. The fuel is not sufficiently “enriched” to do so. But mixing up reactors and bombs was, as we saw, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“And so some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced too much cheap and abundant energy.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Behind advocacy ostensibly motivated by concerns for the environment lay a very dark view of human beings. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,” said Lovins, “because of what we would do with it.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Ehrlich and Lovins said they opposed nuclear energy because it was abundant. “Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign,” Lovins said, “it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Like the Southern Agrarians, ecologist Barry Commoner and physicist Amory Lovins argued that industrialization was harmful, and that we needed to protect poor nations from economic development.77”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”72”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“Time and time again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,” he wrote, “nor are willing to follow.”36”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“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.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“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 amounts of fossil fuels. They turn up with unnecessary entourages in helicopters or fast cars and then preach about saving the world.”3”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“In November 2014, state and federal agents raided the CPUC’s offices in a joint investigation of potential criminal activities related to the permanent closure and settlement proceedings of SONGS. Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general at the time, either killed or stalled the investigation.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

“It was a brazen use of government resources for personal gain, but California’s newspaper reporters and editorial writers made little of the incident.”
― Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All