An environmentalist’s apology: ‘I was guilty of alarmism’

This article was originally published on Forbes website, but subsequently taken down. 

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening, it’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, so I may seem like a strange person to be saying this.

But as an energy expert asked by the US Congress to provide objective expert testimony and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as an Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’
• The Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’
• Climate change is not definitively making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have declined in Britain, Germany, and France from the mid-1970s
• Netherlands is becoming richer, not poorer while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25 per cent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are potentially larger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less ‘industrial’ agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like ‘climate denialism’ to many, but that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

When some people read this, they will imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23, I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s, I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26, I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27, I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s, I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilisation and called it a ‘crisis.’

Most popular

Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

But mostly, I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favour of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiralled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, ‘The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.’ While Britain’s most high-profile environmental group, Extinction Rebellion, claimed, ‘Climate Change Kills Children.’

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the ‘greatest challenge humans have ever faced’ and said it would ‘wipe out civilizations.’

Mainstream journalists were repeatedly reporting the Amazon as ‘the lungs of the world,’ and that deforestation was akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children, you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter – after we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough; I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialisation, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

• Factories and modern farming are key to human liberation and environmental progress
• The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
• The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
• 100 per cent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 pc to 50 pc
• We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
• Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 pc
• Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
• ‘Free-range’ beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 pc more emissions
• Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
• The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty ‘sustainable.’ While status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilisation are behind much of the alarmism.

Once you realise just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavoury or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

Apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change have been made in the news since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

The ideology behind environmental alarmism — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever. But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis which puts the climate ‘crisis’ into perspective. Even if you think we overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicisation of science – their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalism at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilsation is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilisation that climate alarmists would return us to.

My invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. ‘Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,’ writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. ‘This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,’ says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

‘We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,’ wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. ‘But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.’

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not so strange for a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.