Apocalypse Never
Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
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4.3 • 30 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Disagreeable climate
Author
American. Writer and contrarian thinker on environmental matters. Named one of Time magazine's Heroes of the Environment in 2008 but little known in the antipodes before an op-ed appeared on the front page of The Australian the week starting 6 July 2020. Conservative columnists at the Oz and Sky News enthused, the Guardian pooh-poohed. Business as usual.
Summary
Things aren't as bad as the environmental terrorists try to make out. Extinction Rebellion is a pain in the bum (No argument there). Nuclear has a lot more going for it than against it, and is a whole heap better than renewables. Here's why. The antinuclear movement is about a political agenda that has nothing to do with environmentalism, and is part funded by the fossil fuel industry. (Bill McKibben, I'm looking at you). Food security and disease are more important than a slight rise in the mercury yada, yada. Impressive list of references.
Comment
Mr S highlights the ways in which the mainstream environmental movement (IPCC etc) spins the available data to support its case, and the propensity for self styled "eco-warriors" to parrot lines like "this is what science tells us" and when they haven't read any of the science and probably couldn't understand it even if they had. (Kudos to Greta Thunberg for her enthusiasm, but I have trouble accepting 16-year-old high school drop outs as experts on anything apart from online gaming and social media.) However, while Mr S makes some good points, he cites data selectively himself, more than once as far as I could tell, and I'm no expert. Worth reading as an update of Bjorn Lomberg's The Skeptical Environmentalist 20 years on, but unlikely to change the world, or many people's opinions, I suspect.
Dangerously misleading
There’s cherry-picked evidence littered through this book and drives the narrative of distrust in experts and scientific consensus. A book that solidifies the average Joe Blow’s misunderstanding of climatology.
Not For Climate Alarmists
Excellent book with sensible conclusions, putting climate change into perspective. This book would not be popular with climate change cultists who have been predicting an apocalypse for decades, but are increasingly frustrated and angry because it is not happening.