Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

Michael Shellenberger

Jun 2020 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

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

A real eye-opener. It was a surprisingly easy book to read, and dispelled a lot of myths around power, climate and environment. The author is an environmentalist, but one who is pragmatic about energy use (strongly pro-nuclear, pragmatic about fossil fuel use in the case of developing countries), and skeptical of renewable energy technologies such as solar/wind, proving out why they aren't as good as we are told repeatedly. I was shocked to find out how damaging wind farms can be for bird/bat/insect populations in particular, with active repression on data around this. I will be alert to environmental alarmism after reading this book

For those with their heads in the sand who want reassurance that the rumbling they've been feeling is really nothing to worry about.

I wasn't a huge fan of Shellenberger's writing style, but the overall message of the need for a more practical and optimistic environmentalism makes this well worth the read.

About the author

Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, 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. Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for Journalism. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.