Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

Michael Shellenberger

Jun 2020 · HarperAudio · Narrated by Stephen Graybill

About this audiobook

Now a National Bestseller! 

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.

Ratings and reviews

In claiming that Australia's disastrous east coast fires in 2019/20 would have occurred even without any warming, partly because of a supposed lack of fuel reduction burns, Schellenberger, relying on an Andrew Bolt interview with David Packham, takes no account of the extreme heat, nor of those areas where the fires raged despite hazard reduction burns. He minimises their severity by referencing the extensive 1974/75 fires despite the fact these were largely grass fires in the Northern Territory that resulted from heavy rains the previous year, and which caused much less ecological damage. And in referencing a study showing that the area burned by wildfire globally has fallen, he fails to point out that the same study showed that fires in closed canopy forests were increasing, and that where reductions in savannah and grasslands were driven largely by agricultural expansion.

Liked it very much.I never viewed that 'Climate Change' could be 'Apocalypse'. The Environment is important, but to change the climate with co2, or garbage can not happen. Co2 makes plants grow. Yes the garbage dumping should be stopped. how to clean it up I don't know. To say co2 is higher than ever before cannot be confirmed by the 'Experts' their testing is not {100%} accurate, can not be 100% accurate! Experts were not here when the world did change and animals could live here.The 'Experts' only have guesses!

In his sections on agriculture, Shellenberger notes the potential for higher CO2 levels to increase yields, but ignores evidence that the nutritional value of many crops is adversely affected. He tries to argue that the development of Brazil’s Cerrado helps take pressure off other areas, a claim he does not substantiate, and which does not address the fact that much of the Cerrado’s output of soy is for animal fodder, not human consumption. Of course, this is consistent with his defence of intensive agriculture to support meat consumption, which follows some slightly peculiar philosophical and nutritional musings about diet and health. He highlights a study showing that climate change mitigation could decrease land availability for farming and raise prices, but omits subsequent work by the same author showing how these mitigation costs can be avoided.

About the author

Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings, and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.