Michael Shellenberger

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

Michael Shellenberger

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for

the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is
happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious
environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate
activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert

testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an
obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the
public.

Here are some facts few people know:

o Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

o The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
o Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
o Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
o The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land —
has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
o The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, notclimate change,
explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and
California
o Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain,
Germany and France since the mid-seventies
o Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
o We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue
to rise as the world gets hotter
o Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species
than climate change
o Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
o Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people.
But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies,
including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for
the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-
environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the
Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s
cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with
small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at
Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest

Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in
California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade
the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years
I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to
prevent a sharp increase in emissions

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly
that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any
other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential”
threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation
campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I
summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who
misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did
next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried
to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and
friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and
environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do
that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we

don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental
group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate
change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would
“wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of
the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they
thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out
of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate
change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may
be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the
science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus,
understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be
enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new
book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental

activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers
climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction,
industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:

o Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and
environmental progress
o The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food,
particularly meat, on less land
o The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is
moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
o 100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from
today’s 0.5% to 50%
o We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower,
power densities
o Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
o Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum
and palm oil did
o “Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300%
more emissions
o Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
o The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a
backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political,
and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of
millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist
beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make
poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern
civilization are behind much of the alarmism

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people
with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to
doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about

climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been

repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not
come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into
perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly
500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility
through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and
relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and
independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy
publications.

Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from
Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for
renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for

people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would
return us to.

And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I
published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing
openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.

Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists,

and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important
book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the
Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever
written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant

of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The
Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the
same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies
and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally
stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help
develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a
hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll
agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong
environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out
against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green
Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental
Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor
to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American,
and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.

NEW BOOK
“Apocalypse Never”

Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most
serious environmental problem.
Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He
helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the
predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by
climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a
spike of emissions.
But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing
to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a
lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage
daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.
Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts.
Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations
for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations,
declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to
very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population
growth and abundant natural gas.
Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to
oppose the obvious solutions.
What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are
powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all
there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This
spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love,
and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest
psychological and existential needs.

Wikipedia
Michael Shellenberger (born 1971) is an American author, environmental
policy writer, cofounder of Breakthrough Institute and founder of Environmental
Progress. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment
(2008),[2] winner of the 2008 Green Book Award,[3] co-editor of Love Your
Monsters (2011) and co-author of Break Through (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and The
Death of Environmentalism (2004).[4] He and his co-author Ted Nordhaus have
been described as "ecological modernists"[5] and "eco-pragmatists."[6] In 2015,
Shellenberger joined with 18 other self-described ecomodernists to coauthor An
Ecomodernist Manifesto.[7] On November 30, 2017, he announced during a New
York Times conference that he would run for Governor of
California in 2018.[8][9]. Shellenberger is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why
Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (2020). [10]
Early career
Shellenberger's early writing and activism focused on Latin America and he was
introduced to activism and political direct action due to being raised
a Mennonite.[11] That work included the founding of an Amnesty International
chapter in high school in Greeley, Colorado, and debating Latin American
policy, for which he attended the National Forensic League Championships. He
traveled and worked in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s.[12]
In 1993 he moved to the San Francisco to work with progressive
organization, Global Exchange, authoring articles on
Haiti,[13] Brazil,[14][15] Mexico,[16] Gulf War syndrome,[17] and affirmative
action.[18] At UC Santa Cruz he helped organize a graduate students union and
defend affirmative action.[19] Later he co-founded Communication Works, an
allied progressive public relations organization.[20] which worked on a wide
range of campaigns, from challenging Nike over its labor practices in Asia, to
saving the Headwaters Redwood forest. In 2002 Shellenberger co-founded
the consulting firm Lumina Strategies.[21] Its clients included Global
Exchange, Americans United for Affirmative Action, the Ford Foundation,
the Sierra Club, and the Venezuelan Information Center.[22][23] In 2005
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus co-founded American Environics,[24] whose
clients include AARP, Earthjustice, the Ford Foundation, and the Nathan
Cummings Foundation.[citation needed]
Breakthrough Institute
Shellenberger was president and a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute,
which he co-founded with Ted Nordhaus in 2003.[4] Today, Breakthrough
Institute consists of a policy staff, an annual conference, a policy journal, and a
network of affiliated fellows.[25][26][27] Breakthrough Institute's analyses of
energy, climate and innovation policy have been cited by National Public
Radio[28] the Wall Street Journal[29] and C-SPAN.[30]
As part of his role at Breakthrough, Shellenberger has co-authored analyses of
cap and trade climate legislation,[31] of the "planetary boundaries"
hypothesis,[32][33] energy rebound from energy efficiency
measures,[34] carbon pricing,[35] renewable energy subsidies,[36][37] nuclear
energy,[38] and shale gas.[37][39][40]
The Institute has conducted research showing that shale gas and other major
technological innovations were created by American government institutions
and public financing. The Institute advocates higher levels of public spending on
technology innovation, which they argue will lead to higher environmental
quality, economic growth, and quality of life.[37][39][40] The Institute argues that
climate policy should be focused on higher levels of public funding on
technology innovation to "make clean energy cheap," and has been critical of
climate policies like cap and trade and carbon pricing that are focused
primarily on raising energy prices.[41][42][43][44]