Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Shellenberger

Genre:  Non Fiction, Environmental, Public Policy

272 pages, published June 23, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger addresses the alarmism surrounding climate change and other environmentalist issues.  Responding to these claims and the rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided to a deep dive and separate science from fiction.  He reports that 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.  Shellenberger also discovered that people who are the most apocalyptic environmentalists also tend to oppose the most obvious solutions like nuclear power.   He believes this is due to the desire among secular people to use environmentalism as a substitute for religion.

Quotes 

“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.”

 

“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.”

 

 “Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too.”

 

“Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.”

 

“All of which raises a question: if nuclear power is so good for the environment and necessary for replacing fossil fuels, why are so many of the people who say they most fear climate change so against it?”

 

“Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.”

 

“unless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.”

 

“Oppenheimer explained that nuclear weapons had created a revolution in foreign policy. No defense against them was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.”

 

“environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth . . . and who would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.”

 

“350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.”

 

“It is hard to imagine a more “pay-to-play” relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media’s double standard.”

 

“What is inappropriate is accepting fossil fuel funding while attacking others for doing the same. Even less appropriate is lying about it.”

 

“IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.”

 

“Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.”

 

“Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them for a simpler reason: we love them.”

 

“Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences.”

 

“nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments”

 

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.”

 

“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. 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.”

 

“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.”

 

“Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal.”

My Take

In  Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger lays out in painstaking detail how destructive much of the current environmental alarmism is to humanity, especially those humans at the lower rungs who require abundant energy to improve their economic plight.  A bit slow and dense in parts, but still an informative read that challenges the conventional orthodoxy.