Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger
The rhetoric of the environmentalist movement has become increasingly shrill and apocalyptic in recent years. Alarmism often ends up becoming detrimental to the environmentalists’ own cause.
Radical environmentalists often prioritize issues based on their emotional shock value rather than their actual impact. They portray environmentalism as being driven entirely by political willpower, ignoring the economic and technical forces at play. They reject pragmatic and proven solutions to environmental problems because they don’t feel ideal or pure enough. They portray technology and industrialization as wholly negative forces despite them often turning out to be forces for good. They nostalgize the agrarian past and don’t consider the abundance of environmental problems that existed back then too. They misrepresent situations with precedent as being unprecedented and areas of improvement as getting worse.
For all environmental issues, it is helpful to view them in historical context, recognize the stakes, consider the consequences, and be cognizant of all the work currently being done to address them. Today’s environmental issues are real but so is human ingenuity.
Stories of progress that go unacknowledged
The rise of protected areas. For most of human history, people encroached on wilderness with low restraint, seeing nature as something to be conquered rather than something to be preserved. Only with the rise of industrialization and urbanization did people start romanticizing wilderness and wanting to leave some of it in a pristine state. The world now has hundreds of thousands of protected areas collectively spanning 15% of its land and 8% of its oceans. Countless habitats have been preserved and the populations of many vulnerable species have stabilized. Whereas early conservation projects often involved forcefully booting poor local populations off their lands and walling off all economic activity in a preserve, modern conservation is done much more humanely and thoughtfully.
The reforestation of the developed world. Deforestation is often presented as an industrial-age problem, yet its origins are much older. Ancient hunter-gatherer humans regularly chopped or burned forests to collect firewood, to improve their line of sight, and to lure out prey animals. With the rise of agriculture, deforestation accelerated as people converted more wild land into farmland and increased their burning of firewood. However, once industrialization started, humanity’s need for farmland began decreasing rather than increasing. Industrial innovations such as fertilizer, pesticides, and machinery significantly increased the amount of food that could be produced in a fixed area of land with a fixed amount of human labor. A more productive agricultural sector allowed more people to move into cities and caused the average person’s land footprint to decline. In the developed world, extensive areas of low-quality farmland have been abandoned during the industrial era and have been reclaimed by nature. Nearly all of the world’s deforestation today is happening in developing economies where agricultural productivity is low. As agricultural productivity rises, it is expected that the developing world’s farmland needs will likewise fall and that the developing world will likewise end up reforested.
Positive trends often portrayed as negative
The rise of plastics and synthetic materials. Before the invention of plastics, people sought out animal by-products to get materials with the same properties. Elephants were overhunted for their ivory and tortoises were overhunted for their shells, but thanks to cheap synthetic alternatives, demand has plummeted. In a similar fashion, the rise of synthetic fibers reduced demand for fur and the rise of kerosene reduced demand for whale oil. Plastic dumping is an ugly modern-day problem but it is largely limited to poor areas of the world without modern waste management infrastructure. Plastics were initially believed to require thousands of years to degrade, though more recent observations suggest this figure may be lower.
The rise of natural gas. Coal represented a huge improvement over wood; coal is much more energy-dense, produces less carbon per unit of energy, and produces less air pollution. For similar reasons, natural gas is a huge improvement over coal. Of all fossil fuels, natural gas is the least environmentally damaging to extract and the cleanest to burn. The greatest energy victory of recent decades is not the rise of renewables at the expense of fossil fuels, but rather the rise of natural gas at the expense of coal.
Legitimate and scary-looking problems that turn out to be manageable
The overfishing of the oceans. Most of the world’s wild fisheries are being unsustainably overfished, yet demand for fish is forecasted to continue rising. Fishing is one of the few remaining sectors where people are not maintaining a clear separation between the agricultural world and the wild world. Most of the world’s meat is farmed rather than hunted and the same is increasingly happening for fish. Fish are increasingly being farmed in increasingly high-tech aquaponic facilities that offer a much more land-efficient and energy-efficient alternative to wild fishing. Fish farms will allow humanity to meet demand without needing to deplete wild habitats.
Overpopulation. Pessimists have been predicting an imminent overpopulation crisis for hundreds of years and have consistently been proven wrong. The people forecasting giant famines have repeatedly underestimated the Earth’s intrinsic carrying capacity and repeatedly underestimated humanity’s ability to improve its productivity. Poor agrarian people have long been portrayed as self-defeating hedonists who breed like rabbits. Under such a worldview, attempting to get poor populations out of poverty is a hopeless or even irresponsible project; the population would simply expand in proportion to increased output, output per person would remain at poverty level, and the population would be vulnerable to collapse in case output ever fell. However, history has repeatedly shown that industrial societies escape the Malthusian trap because industrial people voluntarily marry late and have few children. The world’s population growth rate peaked during the 1960s and is slowing down, with the world population likely to peak around 10 billion late in the 21st Century. The world is already comfortably able to produce enough food for its population (modern famines are almost always due to war or mismanagement) despite much of the world’s agriculture operating far below its potential. Humanity should easily succeed in expanding output in order to feed the expanding population, even at its forecasted peak.
The dangers of nuclear power. Nuclear energy has an undeserved poor reputation because of a few high-profile historical safety incidents. For illogical psychological reasons, people are less comfortable with a near-zero risk of radiation sickness then they are with the 4 million premature deaths currently caused every year by fossil fuel air pollution. Much as natural gas is superior to coal as a fuel because of a higher energy density, so too is uranium superior to natural gas. Nuclear power plants can produce enormous amounts of energy with a small amount of fuel, all without emitting any air pollution. Unlike the byproducts of other energy sources, nuclear waste is solid, small in volume, and easy to keep contained. Nuclear power remains the most practical pathway towards a future that is low-carbon without also being low-energy. Unlike solar and wind, nuclear power has a wholly predictable output, has a very low land footprint, and does not require enormous innovations in energy storage in order to be practical. While the upfront costs of nuclear power are high, the operating costs are low, and existing nuclear plants are proving to have longer operating lifetimes than initially forecasted.
Increases in the global temperature. Global warming is currently the favorite topic of environmental alarmists because of its nebulous and all-encompassing nature. Alarmists paint a future of crop failures, giant storms, widespread flooding, constant wildfires, mass desertification, mass famines, and rapid depopulation. In contrast, scientific authorities like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change currently view the problem as troubling but not apocalyptic. Crop yields can be increased and farmland degradation can be avoided by upgrading farms in the developing world with the technology of the developed world. The effects of storms and floods can be significantly reduced by upgrading the developing world with the construction quality and sewage systems of the developed world. The exodus of people from low-lying coastal lands is going to be small compared to the enormous global rural-to-urban economic migration of the past few decades. Under the expected 2-3C of warming, the IPCC expects world GDP in 2100 to be 4.5% lower compared to a no-warming baseline but still to end up 3-6x higher than world GDP in 2000. Humanity has already made the collective economic choice to adapt to warming rather than take the costlier path of preventing it. Just as air pollution and industrial filth weren’t enough to convince humanity to abandon industrialization and return to agrarian poverty, warming will not convince humanity either.