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‘Apocalypse Never’ Review: False Gods For Lost Souls

by John Tierney
June 26, 2020, 11:36 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
4

Apocalypse NeverThere is a recurring puzzle in the history of the environmental movement: Why do green activists keep promoting policies that are harmful not only to humans but also to the environment?

Michael Shellenberger is determined to solve this problem, and he is singularly well qualified.

He understands activists because he has been one himself since high school when he raised money for the Rainforest Action Network.

Early in his adult career, he campaigned to protect redwood trees, promote renewable energy, stop global warming, and improve the lives of farmers and factory workers in the Third World.

But the more he traveled, the more he questioned what Westerners’ activism was accomplishing for people or for nature.

He became a different kind of activist by helping start a movement called ecomodernism, the subject of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.”

He still wants to help the poor and preserve ecosystems, but through industrialization instead of “sustainable development.”

He’s still worried about climate change, but he doesn’t consider it the most important problem today, much less a threat to humanity’s survival—and he sees that greens’ favorite solutions are making the problem worse.

He chronicles environmental progress around the world and crisply debunks myth after gloomy myth.

No, we are not in the midst of the “sixth mass extinction,” because only 0.001% of the planet’s species go extinct annually.

No, whales were not saved by Greenpeace but rather by the capitalist entrepreneurs who discovered cheaper substitutes for whale oil (first petroleum, then vegetable oils) that decimated the whaling industry long before activists got involved.

No, plastics don’t linger for thousands of years in the ocean; they’re broken down by sunlight and other forces.

No, climate change has not caused an increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes.

In 2002, Mr. Shellenberger proposed the New Apollo Project, a precursor to the Green New Deal.

Many of its ideas for promoting renewable energy were adopted by the Obama administration and received more than $150 billion in federal funds, but Mr. Shellenberger was disillusioned with the results.

A disproportionate share of the money, as he documents, went to companies that enriched donors to the Obama campaign but failed to yield practical technologies.

He now considers most forms of renewable energy to be impractical for large-scale use.

Windmills and solar power are too expensive and unreliable as a primary source of power for people in poor countries, and they cause too much environmental damage because they require vast areas of land and harm flora and fauna.

He faults Western activists and governments for trying to force these technologies on Third World countries and prevent them from building hydroelectric and fossil-fuel power plants.

“Rich nations,” he writes, “should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize.” Instead “many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable rather than to make poverty history.”

While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in the long term it’s beneficial to the environment as people move to cities, allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy.

Carbon emissions decline as people move from wood to coal to natural gas, and then ultimately to what Mr. Shellenberger calls the safest and cleanest source: nuclear energy, the only practical technology for drastically curtailing carbon emissions—if only green activists would stop trying to shut down nuclear plants.

Mr. Shellenberger blames the anti-nuke movement partly on fearmongering by activists and journalists, partly on instinctive hostility to new technology, and partly on financial self-interest.

“Every major climate activist group in America,” he writes, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, “has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from or investing in natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.”

Mr. Shellenberger makes a persuasive case, lucidly blending research data and policy analysis with a history of the green movement and vignettes of people in poor countries suffering the consequences of “environmental colonialism.”

He realizes, though, that rational arguments alone won’t convince devout environmentalists.

“I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago,” he writes. “I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.”

For him and so many others, environmentalism offered emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving them a sense of purpose and transcendence.

It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths, as he explains in his concluding chapter, “False Gods for Lost Souls.”

Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one.

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating,” he writes.

“It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

Read more at WSJ

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Comments 4

  1. Jon Boone says:
    5 years ago

    Fair review of a reasonably important book, tandemed as it will be with the recent Jeff Gibbs documentary about the destructive dysfunction of renewables. Shellenberger’s belated but accurate mea culpa is informed by dispassionate empiricism as he connects wide ranging concepts with telling details. Unusually among born again environmental skeptics, he actually understands why wind technology is so ghastly: it is not just because it is a major killer of migrating birds and curious bats, or so destructive to sensitive ecosystems and heritage viewscapes, or so unhealthfully noisome (it is all of these and much more); rather, it’s continuous flux imposes such inefficiencies on the grid’s necessary fossil-fired generators that wind technology produces more CO2 emissions than would be the case without any wind at all.

    As Shellenberger continues to unpeel the apocalyptic environmental onion, he’ll eventually realize he need not “worry” or natter about “climate change” wreaking any kind of havoc beyond what it has done for millennia, for there is little empirical evidence for climate warming, given the questionable temperature measurements both in time and number (almost always biased to show “warming”) and the resumption of the earth’s slow natural inter glacial-warming after the brief interruption of the Little Ice Age (~1300-1850). Climate models are too infected by garbage-in bacteria to be used as intelligent epistemics. There is, however, substantial evidence that increased CO2, for whatever reasons (perhaps some related to human activity) is responsible for a general greening of parts of the northern hemisphere. This should be monitored. As it is, though, it’s cause for celebration.

    Reply
  2. Roger Payne says:
    5 years ago

    G.K.Chesterton said “When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing: they believe in anything”. The real irony, as evidently Shellenberger writes, is that the”Greens” are rapidly killing their own cause by making humanity and its use of resources provided by nature, nuclear included, into demons. Just as the Club of Rome, forerunner of the IPCC etc stated – the enemy is humanity, as is democracy (no longer suited to the purpose”. Hence the overkill of Greta Thunberg and her admirers, even though they, her included, are all products of the economic world and living standards they condemn. Thus the Green movements paradoxically wreck their own once valid case with “religious” fanaticism. Even the Pope and cleric are at it, siding with green fanatics whom they once would have condemned as pagan witches.

    Reply
  3. Spurwing Plover says:
    5 years ago

    Large acres of Solar Panels and Wind Turbines are a hazard to Birds like the ones in California and just forget this China Syndrome nonsense from Hanoi Jane’s putrid movie and i can still remember hearing about this bunch of idiots from some stupid Eco-Freak group THE CLAM SHELL ALLIANCE and the SEABROOK NUCLEAR POWER PLANT and in some place where some activists tried to storm a Nuclear Power Pant attempting to shut it down and i can understand when Patrick Moose left Greenpeace when they went radical

    Reply
    • Chris* says:
      5 years ago

      A voice of commonsense and reason, thank you.

      Reply

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