Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Michael Shellenberger, 2020:

Introduction

"A scientist and a professor...created Extinction Rebellion in spring 2018[.]

"[Its] main spokesperson made alarming claims[:] 'Billions of people are going to die....Life on Earth is dying....Governments aren't addressing it.'

"By 2019, Extinction Rebellion had attracted the support of leading celebrities, including actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, pop stars Ellie Goulding and Thom Yorke, 2019 Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, Live Aid producer Bob Geldof, and Spice Girl Mel B....

"In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.

"[B]y the fall of that same year[,] the organization shut down streets and public transit throughout London....

"Extinction Rebellion's Sarah Lunnon...appeared on This Morning, one of Britain's most popular [television] news shows....

"In a...video[,] we see [a]ngry commuters at [a] Tube station descend[ing] into violence.

"[Although they objected to the tactics,] the cohosts...odd[ly] appeared to agree with...Lunnon....

"I couldn't understand[.] If the television hosts agreed that climate change was an enormous crisis, one in which 'billions of people are going to die,' how could they possibly be upset about commuters being late for work?...

"Even if climate change were 'only' going to kill millions of people, rather than billions, then the only reasonable conclusion to draw from Extinction Rebellion's tactics is that they weren't radical enough.

"[So] what kind of a crisis is it, exactly?

"[Now, I']ve been an environmental activist for thirty years[.] I care deeply about my mission to not only protect the natural environment but also to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people.

"I also care about getting the facts and science right. I believe environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear [that] doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.

"Much of what people are being told about the environment, including...climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write [this book] after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.

"[This book] makes the moral case for humanism, of both secular and religious variants, against the anti-humanism of apocalyptic environmentalism." – pp. ix–xiii

Chapter 1: It's Not the End of the World

The End Is Nigh

"[T]he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...is a United Nations body of 195 scientists and other members...responsible for assessing science related to climate change." – p. 1

Resilience Rising

"In its fourth assessment report [(2007),] IPCC projected that by 2100, the global economy would be three to six times larger than it is today, and that the costs of adapting to a high (4 degrees Celsius) temperature rise would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) [by] just 4.5 percent." – p. 6

Billions Won't Die

"On BBC Two's Newsnight, in October 2019[,] journalist Emma Barnett asked Extinction Rebellion's sympathetic and empathic spokesperson, [former county council Green Party politician] Sarah Lunnon, how her organization could justify disrupting life in London the way it had.

"[S]aid Lunnon, '[I]t makes me really cross and angry that the lack of action over thirty years has meant that the only way I can get the climate on the agenda is to take actions such as this; if we don't act and protest in this way nobody takes any notice.' " – pp. 9–10

"In...November 2019, I interviewed Lunnon....

" 'It's not [me],' Lunnon told me....'The science is saying we're headed to 4 degrees warming and people like...Johan Rockström...are saying that such a temperature rise is incompatible with civilized life. Johan said he could not see how an Earth at 4 degrees (Celsius) warming could support a billion or even half-billion people.'

"Lunnon was referring to an article published in The Guardian in May 2019, which quoted Rockström[.]

"[W]hy should we rely on the speculations of [one or] two scientists [instead of] the IPCC? 'It's not about choosing science,' said Lunnon, 'it's about looking at the risk we're facing. And the IPCC report lays out the different trajectories from where we are and some of them are very, very bleak.'

"[So] I interviewed Rockström[.] He said [t]he Guardian reporter had misunderstood[.] What he had actually said...was[:] 'It's difficult to see how we could accommodate 8 billion people or even half of that'[.] Even so, Rockström was predicting four billion deaths.

"[H]e said[, 'W]e don't have evidence that we can provide freshwater or feed or shelter today's world population of eight billion in a four degree world. My expert judgment...is that it may even be doubtful if we can host...four billion.'

"But is there IPCC science showing that food production would actually decline? 'As far as I know[,] they don't say anything about [that],' he said.

"Has anyone done a study of food production at four degrees? I asked. 'That's a good question. I must admit I have not seen [such] a study,' said Rockström, who is an agronomist.

"[S]cientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström's colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels. And...technical improvements...mattered more than climate change.

"The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself[:] policies...that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use[,] which...would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs....IPCC comes to the same conclusion." – pp. 11–2

A Small Part of Big Conflicts

"In 2006, a...political science professor from the University of Colorado in Boulder organized a workshop for thirty-two of the world's leading experts to discuss whether human-caused climate change was making natural disasters...more costly. Th[at] professor [was] Roger Pielke, Jr....

"The group met in Hohenkammer, Germany[.]

"The experts agreed[,] in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement[,] that...more people and property in harm's way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters." – p. 13

"Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario....

"What about the claim IPCC contributor Michael Oppenheimer made that...2-foot, 9-inch sea level rise would be 'an unmanageable problem?'

"[M]illions of small farmers, like the ones on Bangladesh's low-lying coasts, move to cities every year, I pointed out [to him]. Doesn't the word 'unmanageable' suggest a permanent societal breakdown?

" 'When you have people making decisions they are essentially compelled to make,' he said, 'that's what I'm referring to as 'an unmanageable situation.'...

"In other words, the problems from sea level rise that Oppenheimer calls 'unmanageable' are situations like the ones that already occur, from which societies recover, and to which they adapt." – pp. 15–6

Development > Climate

"Near the entrance to Virunga National Park [in Congo, I met] Mamy Bernadette Semutaga. She went by Bernadette. She was twenty-five years old....

"Much of...Bernadette's life has been difficult....

"We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations[.]

"[Bernadette] is also...vulnerable to the weather and natural disasters today. [A plethora of things threaten her] surviv[al.] Understandably, then, climate change is not on her list of things to worry about.

"As such, it's misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine...the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes.

"What will determine whether or not Bernadette's home is flooded is whether...Congo builds a hydroelectric, irrigation, and rainwater system, not the specific change in precipitation patterns. What will determine whether Bernadette's home is secure or insecure is whether she has money to make it secure. And the only way she'll have money to make it secure is through economic growth and...higher income." – pp. 18–9

Exaggeration Rebellion

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

"The main reason [for g]reater fire damage in Australia...is that the government[,] as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia's climate not warmed....

"Climate alarmism, animus among environmental journalists toward the current Australian government, and smoke that was unusually visible to densely populated areas, appear to be the reasons for exaggerated media coverage.

"[O]ther human activities have a greater impact on the frequency and severity of forest fires than the emission of greenhouse gases." – pp. 19–21

"In July 2019, one of Lauren Jeffrey's science teachers...in...a city of 230,000 people...fifty miles [from] London...made an offhand comment about how climate change could be apocalyptic. Jeffrey was seventeen[.]

" 'I did research on it and spent two months feeling quite anxious,' she told me. 'I would hear young people around me talk about it and they were convinced that the world was going to end and they were going to die.'

"Studies find that climate alarmism is contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children. In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety[.] In 2020, a large national survey found that one...of five British children was having nightmares about climate change....

" 'I found a lot of blogs and videos talking about how we're going extinct at various dates, 2030, 2035, from societal collapse,' said Jeffrey. 'That's when I started to get quite worried. I tried to forget it at first but it kept popping up in my mind.

" 'One of my friends was convinced there would be a collapse of society in 2030 and "near term human extinction" in 2050,' said Jeffrey. 'She concluded...we've got ten years left to live.'

"[O]ne...Extinction Rebellion activist climbed atop a desk in...a classroom to give a terrifying talk to children...ten years old....

"The BBC's Andrew Neil interviewed a visibly uncomfortable Extinction Rebellion spokesperson in her mid-thirties named Zion Lights. 'One of your founders, Roger Hallam, said in April, "Our children are going to die in the next ten to twenty years"[.] What's the scientific basis for these claims?'

" 'These claims have been disputed, admittedly,' Lights says....'But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.'

" 'But most scientists don't agree with this,' says Neil. 'I looked through [IPCC's recent reports] and see no reference to billions of people going to die[.]

" 'I've seen young girls on television, part of your demonstration...crying because they think they're going to die in five or six years' time, crying because they don't think they'll ever see adulthood,' says Neil. 'And yet there's no scientific basis for the claims...your organization is making.'

"[R]eplies Lights[,] 'They're learning about the consequences.'

"Happily, not all of Britain's schoolchildren trusted Extinction Rebellion to honestly and accurately explain the consequences. 'I did research and found there was a lot of misinformation...on the doomsayer side of things,'...Jeffrey told me.

"In October and November 2019, she posted seven videos to YouTube and joined Twitter to promote them. [S]aid Jeffrey in one of the videos[:] an open letter to Extinction Rebellion, '[Y]our persistent exaggeration of the facts has the potential to do more harm than good to the scientific credibility of your cause as well as to the psychological well-being of my generation.' " – pp. 21–3

Apocalypse Never

"In November and December 2019, I published two long articles criticizing climate alarmism[.] I received many emails from scientists and activists alike, thanking me for clarifying the science.

"One of the main questions I received, including from a BBC reporter, was whether some alarmism was justified in order to achieve changes to policy....

"Governments 'have a ten-year window...to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,' [a] June...article quoted [an anonymous] senior U.N. environmental official[.]

"Did the Associated Press publish that apocalyptic warning from the United Nations in June 2019? No, June 1989[!]

"In early 2019[,] Pielke reviewed the apocalyptic climate tract, The Uninhabitable Earth, for the Financial Times....Pielke described a filtering mechanism that results in journalists, like the one who wrote the book, getting the science so wrong.

" 'The scientific community produces carefully caveated scenarios of the future, ranging from the unrealistically optimistic to the highly pessimistic,' Pielke wrote. By contrast, '[m]edia coverage tends to emphasize the most pessimistic scenarios and in the process somehow converts them from worst-case scenarios to our most likely futures.'

"The author of The Uninhabitable Earth, like other activist journalists, simply exaggerated the exaggerations. He 'assembled the best of this already selective science to paint a picture containing "enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic." '

"What about so-called tipping points, like the rapid, accelerating, and simultaneous loss of Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, the drying out...and die-back of the Amazon, and a change of...Atlantic Ocean circulation? The high level of uncertainty...and...complexity...make many tipping point scenarios unscientific. That's not to say that a catastrophic tipping point scenario is impossible, only that there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including an asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, or an unusually deadly influenza virus....

" 'Richer countries are more resilient,' [MIT] climate scientist [Kerry] Emanuel said, 'so let's focus on making people richer and more resilient.'

"The risk of triggering tipping points increases at higher planetary temperatures, and thus our goal should be to reduce emissions and keep temperatures as low as possible without undermining economic development. Said Emanuel[,] 'We shouldn't be forced to choose between growth and lifting people out of poverty[,] and doing something for the climate.'...

"Most energy experts believe emissions in developing nations will peak and decline, just as they did in developed nations, once they achieve a similar level of prosperity.

"As a result, global temperatures today appear much more likely to peak...between two to three degrees [Celsius] over preindustrial levels, not [at] four, [so] the risks, including from tipping points, are significantly lower....

"Can we credit thirty years of climate alarmism for these reductions in emissions? [No, w]e can't. Total emissions from energy in Europe's largest countries[:] Germany, Britain, and France, peaked in the 1970s, thanks mostly to the switch from coal to natural gas and nuclear—technologies that [Bill] McKibben, [Greta] Thunberg, [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (']AOC[')], and many climate activists adamantly oppose." – pp. 24–6

Chapter 2: Earth's Lungs Aren't Burning

'There's No Science Behind That'

"I...call[ed] Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon[, to] ask...whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth's oxygen supply.

" 'It's bull——,' he told me. 'There's no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration'[.]

"[R]ainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere...can only be saved if the need for economic development is accepted, respected, and embraced. By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon[—]particularly the most productive forms[—]many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse." – pp. 30–1

Looking Down on the Poor

"In 2016, the Brazilian model Gisele Bündchen flew over the Amazon forest with the head of Greenpeace Brazil[,] Paulo Adario...as part of a National Geographic television series called Years of Living Dangerously.

" '[C]attle is not even natural of the Amazon!' Bündchen says. 'It is not even supposed to be here!'

"[Replies] Adario[,] 'When you eat a burger you don't realize [it's] coming from rainforest destruction.' Bündchen starts to tear up. 'It's shocking[,] isn't it?' asks Adario.

"But[,] is it really so shocking? After all, agricultural expansion in Brazil is happening nearly identically to how it occurred in Europe hundreds of years ago....

"And yet developed nations, particularly European ones[—]which [themselves] grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels[—]are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including...Congo, from developing the same way....

"The good news is that, globally, forests are returning, and fires are declining. There was a whopping 25 percent decrease in the annual area burned globally from 1998 to 2015, thanks mainly to economic growth. That growth created jobs in cities for people, allowing them to move away from slash-and-burn farming. And economic growth allowed farmers to clear forests for agriculture using machines, instead of fire.

"Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined. An area of forest the size of Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark combined grew back in Europe between 1995 and 2015....

"Part of the reason the planet is greening stems from greater carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and greater planetary warming....From 1981 to 2016, four times more carbon was captured by plants due to carbon-boosted growth[,] than from biomass covering a larger surface of Earth." – pp. 31–3

Romance and Reality

"I am sensitive to the insensitive behaviors of developed-world environmentalists because I lived with the small farmers Bündchen looked down upon, and life was exceedingly difficult....

"The people I worked with were too poor to have much livestock, though that was the next rung up the economic ladder. Slashing and burning was brutal work. The men drank large quantities of rum[,] while doing it....

"I can count on a single hand the number of young people who told me they wanted to remain on their family's farm and work their parents' land. The large majority of young people wanted to go to the city, get an education, and get a job. They wanted a better life than...low-yield peasant farming could provide. They wanted a life more like mine. And I knew, of course, that I didn't want to be a small farmer. Why did I ever think anyone else wanted to? The reality I lived, up close and in person, made it impossible for me to hold on to my romantic views.

"In August 2019, the news media's portrayal of the burning rainforest as...result[ing from] greedy corporations, nature-hating farmers, and corrupt politicians annoyed me. I had understood [this] for a quarter century[.]

"Anyone looking to understand why Brazil cuts down its rainforests to produce soy and meat for export must start with the reality that it is trying to lift the last one-quarter of its population out of a poverty comparable to that of Bernadette in...Congo, of which environmentalists in Europe and North America are oblivious or, worse, unconcerned." – pp. 33–5

Fire and Food

"What we today view as a pleasing natural landscape—a grassy meadow surrounded by a forest and with a river running through it—is often a landscape created by humans to hunt game[,] seeking...drinking water. Using fire to create a meadow in which to slaughter animals is one of the most frequent[ly] mention[ed] uses of fire by hunter-gatherers around the world. The meadows of the North American eastern forests would have disappeared had they not been burned annually by Indians for five thousand years....

"In short, fire and deforestation for meat production are major parts of what made us humans....

"For twenty-first-century environmentalists, the word wilderness has positive connotations, but in the past it was a frightful 'place of wild beasts.'...

"Thus, for early European Christians, removing the forest was good, not bad. Early Christian fathers, including Saint Augustine, taught that it was humankind's role to finalize God's creation on Earth[.]

"It was only after humans started living in cities, and growing wealthier, that they started to worry about nature for nature's sake." – pp. 36–8

Greenpeace Fragments the Forest

"Insensitivity to Brazil's need for economic development led environmental groups...to advocate policies that contributed to the fragmentation of the rainforest and [actually] the unnecessary expansion of cattle ranching and farming....

" 'The mastermind of the soy moratorium was...Adario of Greenpeace Brazil,' said Nepstad. Adario is the man who made Bündchen cry....'People dressed up like chickens and walked through a number of McDonald's restaurants in Europe. It was a big international media moment.'...

"In 2008, the World Bank published a report that...'said that small is beautiful[;] that modern, technologically sophisticated agriculture (and especially the use of GMOs) was bad,' wrote the World Bank's representative at the time to Brazil[;] that 'the path that should be followed was small and organic[,] and local agriculture.'

"The World Bank report enraged Brazil's agriculture minister, who called the Bank's representative and asked, 'How can the World Bank produce such an absurd report. Following the "wrong path"[,] Brazil has become an agricultural superpower, producing three times the output we produced thirty years ago, with 90 percent of this coming from productivity gains!'...

"The World Bank had already cut 90 percent of its development aid for Brazil's agricultural research efforts as punishment because Brazil sought to grow food in the same ways that wealthy nations do....

"Much of the motivation to [prevent] farming and ranching is ideological, Nepstad said. 'It's really antidevelopment[:] you know, anti-capitalism. There's a lot of hatred of agribusiness. Or at least hatred of agribusiness in Brazil. The same standard doesn't seem to apply to agribusiness in France and Germany.' " – pp. 38–40

'Take Your Dough and Reforest Germany'

"Greenpeace's agenda fit neatly into the agenda of European farmers to exclude low-cost Brazilian food from the European Union. The two European nations that were the most critical of deforestation and fires in the Amazon also happened to be the two countries whose farmers most resisted the Mercosur free trade agreement with Brazil: France and Ireland....

"Brazil's former socialist president grew just as angry at the hypocrisy and neo-imperialism of foreign governments[,] more than a decade earlier. 'The wealthy countries are very smart[:] approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation,' said President Luiz Inácio 'Lula' da Silva in 2007, 'but they already deforested everything.' " – pp. 41–2

After Amazon Alarmism

"Farmers should be allowed to intensify production in some areas, particularly the Cerrado, to reduce pressure and fragmentation in other areas, particularly the rainforest.

"Creating parks and protected areas goes hand-in-hand with agricultural intensification....

"The determination by activist journalists and [television] producers to paint deforestation in the Amazon as apocalyptic was inaccurate and unfair. Worse, it further polarized the situation in Brazil, making it harder to find pragmatic solutions between farmers and conservationists.

"As for the myth that the Amazon provides '20 percent of the world's oxygen,' it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist. Four years later, a climatologist explained in the [respected] journal Science why there was nothing to be frightened of." – pp. 42–4

Chapter 3: Enough with the Plastic Straws

Things Fall Apart

"In 2019[,] scientists...discovered that sunlight breaks down polystyrene in ocean water over a period as short as decades....

"But environmental groups have long considered polystyrene waste in the ocean to have a lifespan in the thousands of years, if not longer, because it can't be broken down by bacteria.

"[T]he scientists...discovered...that sunlight breaks...polystyrene into organic carbon and carbon dioxide. The organic carbon dissolves in seawater[.] At the end of the process, the plastic is gone." – pp. 51–2

The Elephant in the Room

"In 1863, in upstate New York, a young man named John Wesley Hyatt learned about [a] billiard ball maker's offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone who could create a suitable substitute to ivory, and he started experimenting in his backyard shed with various materials. Six years later, he had invented celluloid from the cellulose in cotton....

"Combs were one of the first...uses for celluloid. For thousands of years, humans had made combs of tortoiseshell [and] ivory[.]

"Celluloid had the advantage of being colored in ways to imitate the distinctive marbling of tortoiseshell combs. Hyatt...boast[ed] of the product's environmental benefits, claiming 'it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.' " – pp. 54–5

Plastic Is Progress

"[B]ecause bioplastics come from crops[,] rather than the resin waste product from the oil and gas industry, they have large land use impacts[.]

"[S]witching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. To replace fossil plastic with corn-based bioplastic would require thirty to forty-five million acres of corn, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the entire U.S. corn harvest[.]" – p. 61

Waste Not, Want Not

"The plastics parable teaches us that we save nature by not using it, and we avoid using it by switching to artificial substitutes. This model of nature-saving is the opposite of the one promoted by most environmentalists, who focus on either using natural resources more sustainably, or moving toward biofuels and bioplastics.

"We must overcome the instinct to see natural products as superior to artificial ones, if we are to save species like sea turtles and elephants.

"[A]rtificial substitutes are necessary but not sufficient to save wildlife like the hawksbill sea turtle and African elephants. We must also find a way to train ourselves to see the artificial product as superior to the natural one.

"[T]o some extent, this is already happening. In many developed nations, consumers condemn the consumption of natural products, like products made from ivory, fur, coral, and tortoiseshell.

"Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what's natural." – pp. 61–2

"[T]here are few things more demoralizing than hiking or swimming to a place of great natural beauty only to discover plastic waste that has either been left behind by thoughtless people, or has migrated there through rivers and oceans.

"But for the people who are often struggling to survive in poor and developing nations, there are many things more demoralizing than uncollected waste....

"For poor nations, creating the infrastructure for modern energy, sewage, and floodwater management will be a higher priority than plastic waste, just as they were for the United States and China before them." – p. 64

Chapter 4: The Sixth Extinction Is Canceled

Exaggerating Extinction

"In 2014, the Oscar-nominated documentary film Virunga depicted the possibility of oil-drilling in Virunga Park as a major threat to...mountain gorilla tourism.

"[But 't]he gorillas are on an escarpment[. O]il companies...aren't interested in those areas'[,] primatologist Alastair McNeilage, of Wildlife Conservation Society, told me....

"The real threat to the gorillas and other wildlife isn't economic growth and fossil fuels[,] but rather poverty and wood fuels." – p. 68

Wood Kills

"People prefer charcoal for cooking because it is lighter, burns cleaner, and does not become infested, like wood, with insects. And charcoal is labor-saving: you can put a pot of beans onto a charcoal fire and go do something else." – p. 69

Why Congo Needs Fossil Fuels

"[F]or people to stop using wood and charcoal as fuel, they will need access to liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, which is made from oil[;] and cheap electricity. Researchers in India proved that subsidizing rural villagers in the Himalayas with LPG reduced deforestation and allowed the forest ecosystem to recover.

"[Wildlife Conservation Society's Andrew] Plumptre...agrees. 'If they had hydro and oil, and if it can be done in a clean way, to generate electricity and gas to use instead of charcoal, that would be good for the environment.' " – pp. 81–2

Power for Progress

"Experts agree that the easiest and cheapest way for Congo to produce abundant supplies of cheap electricity is by building the long-planned Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River. 'You have 100,000-megawatt potential through Inga,' [Michael] Kavanagh[, reporter in Congo] said. 'You can provide all of Africa with that power.'

"The Inga would be fifty times larger than the Hoover Dam, which serves eight million people in California, Arizona, and Nevada.

"But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists[,] Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind that has lifted so many nations out of poverty in the past." – p. 84

Chapter 5: Sweatshops Save the Planet

Leaving the Farm

"In June 2015[,] I decided to go to Indonesia and see for myself what the situation was like for factory workers there....

"I [met] twenty-five-year-old...Suparti, who had come from a small village on the coast. Her...second...job was...at a chocolate factory....

"Suparti [had] worked alongside her parents...in the fields. [S]he [remembered,] 'We cooked with rice husks.' " – pp. 88–9

Manufacturing Progress

"The declining number of workers required for food and energy production, thanks to the use of modern energy and machinery, increases productivity, grows the economy, and diversifies the workforce.

"[B]uying cheap clothing, and thus increasing agricultural productivity, is one of the most important things we can do to help people like Suparti in Indonesia and Bernadette in Congo, while also creating the conditions for the return and protection of natural environments, including rainforests." – pp. 90–2

The Great Escape

"Before 1800, notes Harvard University's Steven Pinker, most people were desperately poor. 'The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today'[.] The Industrial Revolution constituted what Pinker calls the 'Great Escape' from poverty.

"The Great Escape continues today. From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44 percent to 10 percent.

"[Humanity's] prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines[,] so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy, and consumer products, and more and more of us can do work that requires greater use of our minds and...even offers meaning and purpose to our lives." – pp. 93–4

The Power of Wealth

" 'It is comparatively easy to turn a rice farmer into a garment factory worker,' notes Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik.

"During the last 200 years, poor nations found that they didn't need to end corruption or educate everyone to develop. As long as factories were allowed to operate freely, and the politicians didn't steal too much from their owners, manufacturing could drive economic development. And, over time, as nations became richer, many of them, including the U.S., became less corrupt.

" 'You could start with very poor initial conditions, get a few things right to stimulate the domestic production of a narrow range of labor-intensive manufactures—and voilà! You had a growth engine going,' Rodrik says." – p. 96

"In the early 2000s[,] economist...Arthur van Benthem was working for Shell Oil Company...to develop scenarios to predict future energy supply and demand....

"Shell [had] pioneered scenario planning [i]n the 1960s[.] To forecast market collapses, Shell's scenario planning depended on thinking in counterintuitive, contrarian ways[,] continually seeking new evidence, rather than relying on assumptions.

"[M]any energy analysts at the time...assumed that more energy-efficient...technology meant...poor nations could get rich using far less energy than rich economies....

"Van Benthem...told me, 'I found...that developing countries exhibit more energy-intensive growth at the same levels of GDP than developed countries did.'...

"Since 1800, lighting has become five thousand times cheaper. As a result, we use much more of it in our homes, at work, and outdoors. Cheap light-emitting diodes (LEDs) allow Suparti to consume much more lighting than our grandparents could when they were at similar income levels.

"[E]conomists demonstrated that cheaper lighting led to greater consumption in 1996 and again in 2006.

"How wealthy we are is...reflected in the amount of energy we consume....

"Almost all of the average Congolese person's energy consumption is in the form of burning wood and other biomass, where[as] just 24 percent of the average Indonesian's is[.]

"Globally, the history of human evolution and development is one of converting ever-larger amounts of energy into wealth and power in ways that allow human societies to grow more complex." – pp. 97–9

Energy Density Matters

"[W]omen [who] cook with wood [don't] complain about...toxic smoke[. W]hat they complain about...is how much time it takes to chop [and] haul wood, start fires, and maintain them....

"Fossil fuels were...key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries....

"Centralizing energy production has been essential to leaving more of planet Earth for natural landscapes with wild animals....

"While the energy density of coal is twice as high as the energy density of wood, the power density of coal mines is up to twenty-five thousand times greater than forests....

"The more people and wealth an area has, the higher [its] power density....

"Horse-drawn carriages made New York City unlivable in the years before the introduction of the automobile. The streets...stank of urine and feces, which brought flies and disease. Petroleum-powered vehicles allowed for much higher power densities with much less pollution....

"A simple technical fix added to coal plants...after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99 percent. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions....

"People burn wood not coal, and coal not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford[.]

"As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, [and] cleaner vehicles, [along with] other technological changes, developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality....

"Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy. Ending the use of wood for fuel should thus be one of the highest priorities for [those] seeking...environmental progress." – pp. 99–102

The Manufacturing Ladder

"The real risk to forests comes not from the expansion of energy-intensive factories in poor nations, as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion claim, but rather from the [reduction of] them....

" 'Most countries of Africa are...experiencing de-industrialization,' writes Rodrik[.]

"One exception is Ethiopia[.]

"Ethiopia had [first] to end and recover from a...seventeen-year civil war[.] 'The resources spent on investment—in basic infrastructure such as roads and hydroelectricity—appear to have been well spent,' says Rodrik....

"'To be successful, industrialization has to come from the very top,' Hinh Dinh, a former World Bank economist who advised the Ethiopian government...told me....'Ethiopia got good results because...the[n] prime minister [Meles Zenawi] went to China to get garment and shoe factories.'...

" 'In the U.S., manufacturing employment peaked at twenty million people in 1978,' said Dinh, 'and since then, it has shed its low-end industries to focus on higher, more specialized manufacturing. That's different from Nigeria de-industrializing at 7 or 8 percent (share of manufacturing in GDP) before its manufacturing reached the maturity stage.'...

" 'There is nothing wrong with growing through agriculture,' said Dinh. 'But historically, nations did not do it that way because the scope for innovations is fairly limited.'...

"I asked Dinh, what should...Congo...do? [H]e said[,] 'I advised[d] Nigeria...to open up to foreign direct investment and try to get as many jobs created as possible....

" 'First you make bicycles and that allows you to make motorcycles. From there you can go to automobiles. From automobiles you can start thinking about satellites.

" 'The goal in Ethiopia is to have as many jobs as possible, and have the education system turning out the factory workers that you need. That's why I push for light manufacturing. It's not just the skills but also the discipline instilled in people. Later on, when the country reaches the second stage, the education system should produce more skilled workers capable of producing medium tech products, and so on.' " – pp. 102–4

Fast-Fashion for Africa

"Contrary to what I and others have long believed, the positive impacts of manufacturing outweigh the negative ones. We should thus feel pride, not guilt, when buying products made by people like Suparti. And environmentalists and the news media should stop suggesting that fast-fashion brands like H&M are behaving unethically for contracting with factories in poor nations....

" 'If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,' said...Emanuel. 'It doesn't sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it's by burning a lot of coal they make themselves wealthier...and have less children.'...

Late economic developers like...Congo have a much harder time competing in international markets than did early economic developers like the United States and Europe. That means early developers, today's rich nations, should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize. Instead[—]as we will see[—]many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable[,] rather than to make poverty history." – pp. 105–6

Chapter 6: Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace

Greenpeace and the Whales

"[B]y the mid-twentieth century, with the rise of massive industrial ships, humans nearly hunted whales to extinction.

"Scientists raised the alarm about declining whale stocks, and a small group of committed...activists set out to save them....

"Things came to a boil in the summer of 1975.

"[T]he activists boarded their...high-speed inflatable boat, and drove between a Soviet catcher vessel...and a pod of...whales....

"Walter Cronkite aired the Zodiac crew member's Super 8 footage...and millions of people would learn the name of the new organization: Greenpeace.

"After another seven years of media publicity, grassroots organizing, and political pressure, in 1982 environmental activists successfully inspired the world to impose a complete ban on commercial whaling." – pp. 107–8

'Grand Ball Given by the Whales'

"Th[at] story of a small band of committed nature lovers saving the environment appeals to us. It is the story we learn from [television] and movie documentaries, books, and news reports. It is an exciting drama with obvious heroes and villains. On one side there are greedy, cowardly people destroying nature for profit, and on the other side there are idealistic, brave youths. It is a story that has inspired millions to take action.

"The only problem with it as a guide for protecting the environment is that nearly everything about it is wrong." – p. 109

"In 1849[,] Samuel Kier...launched...'Kier's Petroleum, or Rock Oil'[.]

"A chemist recommended distilling it[,] and using it as lighting fluid. Kier's contribution to the emerging petroleum revolution was the creation of the first industrial-scale refinery in downtown Pittsburgh.

"A group of...investors...hired an...engineer with...expertise in salt drilling to poke around in Pennsylvania for petroleum. In 1859[,] Edward Drake...hit...oil near Titusville[.]

"The discovery of the Drake Well led to widespread production of petroleum-based kerosene, which rapidly took over the market for lighting fluids in the United States, thus saving whales, which were no longer needed for their oil. At its peak, whaling produced 600,000 barrels of whale oil annually. The petroleum industry achieved that level less than three years after Drake's oil strike. In a single day, one Pennsylvania well produced as much oil as it took a whaling voyage three or four years to obtain, a dramatic example of petroleum's high power density." – pp. 110–1

How Congo Saved the Whales

"In 1905, European chemists invented a way to turn liquid oil into solid fat for making soap. The process was called hydrogenation because it involved blowing hydrogen gas over nickel fi[l]ings into the oil. Then, in 1918, chemists discovered how to solidify whale oil while eliminating the smell and taste, allowing it to be used for the first time as margarine.

"But then, industrial chemists succeeded in making margarine almost entirely from palm oil, eliminating the need for whale oil. By 1940, palm oil, much of it coming from...Congo, had become cheaper than whale oil....Whale oil as a share of global trade in fats declined from 9.4 percent in the 1930s to 1.7 percent in 1958, resulting in declining whale oil prices in the late 1950s....

"Whaling peaked in 1962, a full thirteen years before Greenpeace's heavily publicized action[,] and declined dramatically during the next decade....

"It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whale...kill[s] in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982. The Commission's moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to...the most careful study, was a 'rubber stamp' on a 'situation that had already emerged....Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.'

"The International Whaling Commission set whaling quotas, but they weren't low enough to prevent over-whaling....Concludes the leading historian of the period, 'The thirty years of work by the IWC have proven a fiasco.'

"Those nations that thundered the loudest against whaling after the Greenpeace action didn't themselves hunt whales. 'Strong anti-whaling positions became a...convenient way of portraying a green image as virtually no material costs were involved for nations without whaling interests.'

"Rising prosperity and wealth created the demand for...substitutes that saved the whales. People saved the whales by no longer needing them[,] because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.

"Today, the populations of blue whales, humpback whales, and bowheads...are all recovering[.] Not a single whale species is at risk of extinction. Nations harvest fewer than two thousand whales annually, an amount that is 97 percent less than the nearly seventy-five thousand whales killed in 1960.

"The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, 'to some extent, economies can "outgrow" severe environmental exploitation.' " – pp. 112–3

A System Without a Schedule

"[H]istories emphasized the role of scarcity in raising prices and stimulating innovation....But...in the early 1970s[,] Italian...physicist...Cesare Marchetti...found that 'the market regularly moved away from [any given] primary energy source, long before it was exhausted[.]

"[I]t is often rising economic growth[,] and rising demand for a specific energy service, like lighting, transportation, heat, or industry, that allows fossil fuels to replace renewables, and oil and gas to replace coal.

"[And t]hat's what happened with whales. Other substitutes, principally hog fat and ethanol, emerged before the discovery of oil fields in Pennsylvania and the distillation of petroleum into kerosene. [But i]t was petroleum's abundance and superior power density that ultimately led to its triumph over [those] biofuels....

"Energy transitions...occurred in the way...Marchetti predicted, from more energy-dilute and carbon-dense fuels toward more energy-dense and hydrogen-dense ones....

"The chemistry is simple to understand. Coal...comprise[s] roughly one carbon atom for every hydrogen atom. Petroleum...comprise[s] one carbon atom for every two hydrogen atoms. And natural gas, or rather, its main component, methane, has...one carbon atom [for every] four hydrogen atoms[.]

"Marchetti was right that human societies tend to move from energy-dilute to energy-dense fuels[.]

"What determines the rate of these transitions is politics. And, as we will see, sometimes politics can [even] move societies away from energy-dense fuels...back toward more energy-dilute ones." – pp. 114–6

The Gasland Deception

"In spring 2010[,] documentary filmmaker...Josh Fox...released the trailer to his new film, Gasland, about the natural gas boom in the United States.

"[T]he film's depiction of...flammable water was deceptive....

"Irish documentary filmmaker...Phelim McAleer called out Fox...at a 2011 Gasland screening[:]

" 'McAleer[:] "You have said yourself people lit their water long before fracking started. Isn't that correct?"

" 'Fox: "Yes, but it's not relevant." ' " – pp. 116–8

Fracking the Climate

"[O]n virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury. Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution. And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.

"The technological revolution allowing for firms to extract far more natural gas from shale and the ocean floor is the main reason...U.S. carbon emissions from energy declined 13 percent between 2005 and 2018[.]

"Despite a nearly 40 percent increase in natural gas production since 1990, the EPA reported a 20 percent decrease in methane emissions in 2013, in part because of improved gaskets, monitoring, and maintenance....

"Fracking brings pipelines, rigs, and trucks, which can disrupt peaceful landscapes that people rightly care about....These problems...are nowhere as bad as coal mining, which has in many ways become worse throughout the decades, not better, culminating in mountaintop removal and the destruction of river ecosystems.

"What explains the lower environmental impact of natural gas fracking as compared to coal mining is power density. A natural gas field in the Netherlands is three times more power-dense than the world's most productive coal mines.

"[C]limate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert told The Washington Post[,] 'People should prove that we can actually get the CO-2 emissions down first, before worrying about whether we are doing enough to get methane emissions down.'

"[A]s Marchetti predicted[,] what mattered most was the creation of a more power-dense, abundant, and cheaper alternative. What Marchetti didn't foresee was how powerful[,] and important[,] opposition to the new technology, particularly from [the] upper classes of society, could be in the case of energy transitions." – pp. 118–20

Fish Go Wild

"In late 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a genetically modified salmon, one that delivered major environmental benefits over existing farmed salmon....

"The AquAdvantage salmon, developed by AquaBounty Technologies in 1989, grows twice as fast and needs 20 percent less feed than Atlantic salmon. While eight pounds of feed is needed to harvest one pound of beef, only one pound of feed is required for one pound of AquAdvantage salmon.

"Unlike the majority of farmed salmon, which is produced in floating sea cages in coastal areas, AquAdvantage is produced in hatcheries and facilities in warehouses on land. It thus minimizes the impact of aquaculture on natural ocean environments and prevents harmful interactions with wild species, which can result in disease....

"By genetically altering the salmon, AquaBounty...eliminated the need for antibiotics[.]

"Fish farming is critical for saving wild fish and other marine species[.] Overfishing has resulted in many local extinctions[.]

"[F]ish farming, or aquaculture, is developing rapidly. Aquaculture output doubled between 2000 and 2014, and today it produces half of all fish for human consumption....

"A big environmental benefit from aquaculture comes from moving fish farms from oceans to land. Doing so reduces their impact on marine environments and allows for closed or near-closed systems where water is constantly being cleaned and recycled....

"And yet, the most outspoken critics of replacing wild fish consumption with farmed fish are environmental groups...which claimed AquAdvantage...might contaminate populations of wild salmon.

"[S]everal large supermarket chains...announced they would not carry the AquaBounty fish, even though spokespersons...admitted the stores offer other foods [also] produced with genetically modified ingredients or feed.

"Fish farming is not without its problems. Early fish farms, such as shrimp farms, were quite destructive....But...their negative environmental impact has significantly declined[,] through better siting of fish and shrimp farms and the cofarming of species such as scallops and mussels with seaweed and microalgae.

"[S]aid [a] scientist[, 'T]here's nothing in this...genetically engineered salmon...that would last more than a single generation [in] the ocean...because of its low fitness.'...

"But five years later, neither the environmental groups supposedly worried about the future of wild fish, nor Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger, [or] Target, had changed their minds." – pp. 120–2

Class War

" 'If you look at [Leonardo] da Vinci's drawings of storms and clouds, he understood the immense indifference of nature,' said...Marchetti['s] friend and coauthor, Jesse Ausubel[,] 'and a lot of the human enterprise.'

"I asked Ausubel why he thought Marchetti's model of energy transitions had been so off in terms of timing[.] 'You can look...at any phenomenon and find interruptions, hiatus[es], digressions, and diversions. That's what happened with energy.'

"Opposition to...new fuel usually comes from the wealthy....Coal smoke smelled bad against the sweet smell of wood-burning. The upper-class of Victorian England resisted the transition from wood to coal [for] as long as they could.

"It was educated elites who similarly waged the war on fracking. The key antagonists were The New York Times[,] McKibben, and well-financed environmental groups[.]

"Ausubel pointed to the election of President Jimmy Carter in 1976...who, with the support of major environmental groups, pushed for more coal instead of nuclear and natural gas." – pp. 122–4

"Happily, the war on fracking failed. When it came to fracking shale for natural gas, the United States interfered less than other countries and benefited enormously as a result. The United States allows property owners the mining and drilling rights to the Earth beneath them....

"Politics even interfered with saving the whales. While environmentalists often blame capitalism for environmental problems, it was communism that made whaling worse than it needed to be. After the fall of communism, historians found records that the Soviet Union was whaling at far higher numbers than they had admitted. It did so [despite being] no longer profitable[,] thanks to Soviet central planning. 'Ninety-eight percent of the blue whales killed globally after the ban in 1966 were killed by Soviet whalers,' wrote a historian, 'as were 92 percent of the 1,201 humpbacks killed commercially between 1967 and 1978.'...

"The moral of the story is that economic growth and...rising demand for food, lighting, and energy drive product and energy transitions, but politics can constrain them. Energy transitions depend on people wanting them." – pp. 124–5

Chapter 7: Have Your Steak and Eat It, Too

Eating Animals

"When Jonathan Safran Foer was nine years old, he asked his babysitter why she [did]n't eat...chicken[.]

" 'I don't want to hurt anything,' she said.

" 'I put down my fork,' Foer wrote in his 2009 vegetarian memoir[,] Eating Animals." – p. 126

The Meat-Free Nothingburger

"[W]ere IPCC's 'most extreme' scenario of global veganism to be realized[,] total carbon emissions would decline by just 10 percent....

"Plant-based diets, researchers find, are [also] cheaper than those that include meat. As a result, people often end up spending their money on things that use energy, like consumer products.

"[T]he thing that makes chicken production environmentally superior to beef production is the very thing [that] Foer most laments: the higher density of meat production allowed for by factory farming." – pp. 128–9

The Nature of Meat

"[T]he total amount of land humankind uses[,] to produce meat[,] peaked in the year 2000....

"Developed nations like the United States saw the amount of land they use for meat production peak in the 1960s. Developing nations, including India and Brazil, saw their use of land as pasture similarly peak and decline.

"Part of this is due to the shift from beef to chicken. A gram of protein from beef requires two times the energy input in the form of feed as a gram from pork, and eight times a gram from chicken.

"But mostly it is due to efficiency. Between 1925, when the United States started producing chicken indoors, and 2017, breeders cut feeding time by more than half while more than doubling the weight.

"Meat production roughly doubled in the United States since the early 1960s, and yet greenhouse gas emissions from livestock declined by 11 percent during the same period.

"Throughout Eating Animals, Foer argues that factory farms are far worse for the natural environment than free-range beef. He writes, '[I]f we consumers can limit our desire for pork and poultry to the capacity of the land[,] there are no knockdown ecological arguments against [free-range] farming.'...

"Consider that pasture beef requires fourteen to nineteen times more land per kilogram than industrial beef[.]

"Since grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly and live longer, they produce more manure and methane....

"Attempting to move from factory farming to organic, free-range farming would require vastly more land, and thus destroy the habitat needed by mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and other endangered species. Foer unwittingly advocates nineteenth-century farming methods that, if adopted, would require turning wildlife-rich protected areas like Virunga Park into gigantic cattle ranches.

"Farmers make this point to Foer in Eating Animals. 'It's cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens,' says one. 'It's more efficient[,] and that means it's more sustainable....Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?' " – pp. 129–31

Meat = Life

"While writing for Science and The New York Times Magazine in the early 2000s[,] science journalist Gary Taubes...unearthed studies finding that a high-fat diet would lead to weight loss and improvements in heart disease risk factors compared to...low-fat, plant-rich diets[.]

"Yet, for decades, the scientific consensus remained that high-fat diets were dangerous. That consensus led many governments to promote a diet high in carbohydrates, low in animal protein, and very low in animal fats.

"[H]e explained[, 'M]etabolic syndrome—which is a cluster of abnormalities, including weight gain and high blood pressure, which affects around half of middle-aged men and women in the U.S.—is linked to the carb content of the diet, not to the fat content.' " – pp. 132–3

Death for Life

"[A]nimal fats contain two to five times as much energy by mass as protein[,] and ten to forty times as much as fruits and vegetables. Those higher densities allowed early humans to gain more energy with less work than carbohydrates....

"During the decade I was [a] vegetarian, I grew tired most afternoons after eating a carb-heavy lunch[.]" – p. 134

"For decades, psychologists have been interested in the relationship between vegetarianism and the emotion of disgust....

"An Italian team of psychologists recently found [that] vegetarians view meat as 'the representation of death as a contaminating essence.'...

"In 1989, when I arrived at college, animal rights activists were eager to share horrifying videos of factory farming conditions.

"[Such] videos[,] made and distributed by groups like [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (]PETA[)] before the Internet[,] led me...to stop eating meat in the late 1980s.

"And...videos like those...continue to motivate young people[.] 'I became a vegetarian in fifth grade,' my colleague Madison, who turned twenty-five in 2020, said....It was the main thing for me.'...

"In 1999, McDonald's[, perhaps in response,] hired...animal welfare expert Temple Grandin....

" 'Animals don't think in language,' she said. 'They think in pictures.'

"In Eating Animals, Foer argues...it's 'plainly wrong to eat factory-farmed pork[,] poultry or sea animals. [F]eedlot-raised beef...offends me less (and 100 percent pasture-raised beef...is probably the least troubling of all meats)'[.]

"Grandin...found that what cattle most wanted was cleanliness and predictability[:] 'Keeping the pens dry and keeping cattle clean'[.]

"Grandin discovered that cows were being made nervous by visual and auditory surprises that had until then been ignored, such as swinging chains and loud, high-pitched banging. Things that felt out of the ordinary signaled danger to cows[.]

"She and a student...proved that cattle that remained calm during handling had higher weight gains than stressed cattle." – pp. 135–7

The Nature of Death

"[I]s...it...unethical for animals to eat animals[?]

"[S]ays a PETA spokesperson[, 'T]he entirety of human society and moral progress represents an explicit transcendence of what's "natural." '...

"The consequence of deciding [that] meat is immoral is not making animals free. It's not making animals.

"Is it more ethical to never create life than to create it and take it away?...

"Grandin documented 'deliberate acts of cruelty,' notes Foer. 'Deliberate acts,' he emphasizes, 'occurring on a regular basis'[.]

"But one can find many more acts of cruelty in nature than in the slaughterhouse....

"From the perspective of the calf[,] deliberate, regulated, and painless modern slaughterhouses may be better than the random, painful, and instinctual cruelty of nature....

"And yet some vegetarian journalists, activists, and scientists have sought to demand that others follow their personal [food] preferences in the name of environmental protection, particularly as it relates to climate change, and often in stealth fashion.

" 'Ninety percent of the climate scientists and environmentalists I've met are vegetarian,' Foer told Huffington Post in 2019. 'And the ones that aren't eat very little meat. It's something that seems to go without saying. I wish they would talk about it more, but it's been heartening to see.'

"But it may be that scientists don't talk about it because people would rightly wonder if their vegetarianism biased their scientific objectivity. In my research I kept coming across cases of vegetarian activists who kept their motives hidden....

" 'A few years ago[,] two young guys...asked if they could take footage for a documentary about farm life,' a farmer told Foer. 'Seemed like nice guys. But then they edited it to make it look like the birds were being abused.'...

"Foer notes that PETA activists used the former head of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri as a scientific authority on climate change because 'he argues that vegetarianism is the diet that everyone in the developed world should consume, purely on environmental grounds.'

"Sometimes Foer [irrationally] condemns animal farming for reasons that appear to have more to do with anti-capitalist ideology than the environment. The 'economics of the market inevitably leads toward instability,' he writes.

"Such a logic leads Foer to attack farmed salmon as worse for the environment than wild salmon, even though...farmed salmon...substitute for wild salmon, and open up the potential of reducing overfishing, one of humankind's largest...impacts on wild animals.

"[W]rites University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan...in...his 2007 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma[, 'P]art of me pities...the vegetarian[.] Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.'...

" 'In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups and we got burned real bad,' a farmer told Foer. 'So [w]e put up a wall and that was the end. We don't talk[;] don't let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA...want[s] to end farming.' " – pp. 137–40

"Taubes...seemed partly vindicated in late summer 2019, when the British Medical Journal published a review of the nutritional science that upended decades of orthodoxy.

" 'Diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat do not convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality,' it found.

[And t]he pro-carb, anti-fat crusade turned out to be as bad for the environment as it was for people. By making pigs less fatty, breeders made them less efficient in converting feed into body mass. More grain and thus more land was required under the low-fat regime than would have been required under a normal-fat one....

"Consumers continue to express anxiety over things like the use of growth-promoting hormones in beef, even though...meat produced with them is safe for human consumption." – pp. 140–1

Don't Eat Wild Meat

"The hunting and consumption of wild game remains one of the primary causes of the decline of wild animals in poor and developing nations....

"Poor nations like...Congo desperately need to...increase the productivity of meat production to take pressure off the habitats of mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and other endangered species....

"Creating cheap and easily obtainable substitutes in the form of domesticated meat should thus be a high priority for conservationists. Reducing the amount of land required for meat production will allow for more land for people and wildlife....

"Increasing meat production must go hand-in-hand with increasing agricultural yields to improve and increase feed....

"We must change our thinking, too. Just as we overcame our preference for authentic furs, ivory, and tortoiseshell, we must retrain our preferences toward domesticated meats and away from wild meats, including fish, for wild animals once again to flourish." – pp. 141–2

Beyond Food and Evil

"Whatever its psychological origins, vegetarianism appears to stem less from a rational consideration of the evidence than an emotional rejection of killing animals, something Foer acknowledges. 'Food is never simply a calculation about which diet uses the least water or causes the least suffering.'

"[S]aid my colleague Madison[,] 'I went to Paris and accidentally tried pâté'[.]

" 'But you must have decided...the act of killing animals...was okay, ethically?' I asked.

" 'As I've grown up, things don't seem as black and white as they did when I was a kid,' she said. 'When I learned that it wasn't having the impact I thought on combating climate change, I decided it wasn't worth it....Besides, now I more clearly see a separation between humans and animals. Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human.'...

" 'The question of eating animals,'...Foer...writes, 'is ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, "being human." ' " – pp. 142–4

Chapter 8: Saving Nature Is Bomb

The End of Nuclear Energy

"[N]uclear energy was on the decline well before the...2011...Fukushima accident: not a single...nuclear reactor had begun construction in the United States since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident[.]

"And Fukushima turned public opinion even further against nuclear.

"Every effort to make nuclear plants safer makes them more expensive, according to experts, and...soaring subsidies...from governments...make nuclear one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.

"Meanwhile, from Finland and France to Britain and the United States, nuclear plants are way behind schedule and far over budget....

"Today, the developed world is abandoning nuclear. Germany is almost done phasing it out." – pp. 145–6

"At least that's how the story goes. While all of the above is technically accurate, I carefully excluded key facts in order to be misleading in the same ways that antinuclear campaigners have been for fifty years." – p. 146

'That Could Be Quite Nasty'

"The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in modern-day Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) was the worst nuclear energy accident in history. [R]adioactive particulate matter escaped.

"[T]hyroid cancer has a mortality rate of only 1 percent[. T]he expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be just 50 to 160 over an eighty-year lifespan.

" 'Thyroid cancer is not what most people think of as...cancer,' said...Gerry Thomas[,] an expert on radiation and health...and...professor...at Imperial College, London[,] 'because it has such a low mortality rate when treated properly....The key is replacement hormones[;] and...thyroxine is dirt cheap.'

"What about non-thyroid cancers? The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl claimed there was 'a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus.' That assertion is false: residents of those two countries were 'exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,' according to the World Health Organization (WHO). If there are additional cancer deaths they will be 'about 0.6 percent of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.'

"The WHO claims on its website that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of four thousand liquidators, but, says [Thomas], that number is based on a disproven methodology[,] 'LNT,'...the linear no-threshold method of extrapolating deaths from radiation.

"LNT assumes...there is no threshold below which radiation is safe[;] but people who live in places with higher background radiation, like my home state of Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer....

"In Fukushima, Thomas says, nobody will die from [any] radiation they were exposed to[,] because of the nuclear accident." – pp. 148–50

"It[']s difficult to find other major industrial accidents that kill nobody....

"Nuclear's worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe[,] for the same inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel. Splitting atoms to create heat...requires tiny amounts of fuel." – pp. 150–1

France Beats Germany

"It's true that new nuclear plants are behind schedule and above costs, but this [w]as [also] the case for many highly profitable ones operating today. Because [they] are relatively inexpensive to run, the importance of [their] cost overruns declines over time....

"As for nuclear waste, it is the best and safest kind of waste produced from electricity production. It has never hurt anyone and there is no reason to think it ever will....

"When I talk to people who fear the waste, they often can't articulate why they believe it is dangerous, but it appears to emanate from a conscious or unconscious fear of nuclear weapons....

"Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat. Thus, only nuclear can affordably create the hydrogen gas and electricity that will provide [the] services such as heating, cooking, and transportation, which are currently provided by fossil fuels.

"And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment.

"And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don't need nuclear." – pp. 152–4

Atoms for Peace

"In early 1953, Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the first atomic bomb, gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations....

"Oppenheimer explained that [n]o defense against...nuclear weapons...was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.

"[In] December [of that year,] America's newly elected president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower[,] stood before the United Nations General Assembly with a message of hope....

"The rules of the game had irrevocably changed, Eisenhower explained....

"Humankind could...redeem itself...by realizing the dream of universal prosperity [through] cheap and abundant energy. 'Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities,' Eisenhower said. 'A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world[, t]hus...serv[ing] the needs[,] rather than the fears of mankind.'...

" 'The United States,' he said, 'pledges...to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but...to his life.'...

" 'Atoms for peace'...was born....

"But the atomic hope wouldn't last[; w]ithin ten years, the war on nuclear power would begin." – pp. 157–60

The War on Nuclear

"[A] 1961 study...in the journal Science...found that levels of strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope, were...higher in children's teeth born during nuclear weapons testing[.] The amount was about 200 times less than the levels known to cause cancer, but enough to generate headlines. Parents demanded that U.S. President John F. Kennedy negotiate an end to weapons testing with the Soviet Union, which he did in 1963.

"One of the men who['d first drawn] attention to radioactive fallout from weapons testing was Barry Commoner[:] a World War II veteran, socialist, and [plant physiolog]ist at Washington University in St. Louis[. I]n the early 1950s...he helped...Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling to circulate a petition calling for a moratorium on weapons testing. Their argument was that the testing risked contaminating the public.

"Commoner viewed nuclear power plants as a 'non-warlike excuse for continuing the development of nuclear energy'[.]" – p. 161

"Opposition to nuclear power started rising in the mid-1960s....

"By 1971, the antinuclear faction had taken over the Sierra Club, which threw its full weight behind an effort to kill nuclear plants in Ohio....

"The Sierra Club was joined by a charismatic and aggressive young attorney named Ralph Nader[.] 'A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland,' Nader told an Ohio newspaper in 1974....

"It would be difficult to exaggerate Hollywood's role in turning the public against nuclear energy. Nuclear is the go-to[,] scary technology for makers of films and television, and not just the bombs, nor even just the power plants, but even the largely harmless used fuel rods....

"The nuclear industry in the West [was] taken aback by the cultural power of the anti[n]uclear movement, and could barely muster a response. What the technology needed...were humanistic and environmentalist defenders like [former] president of the Sierra Club, Will Siri, a biophysicist from the University of California, Berkeley....Instead, it was defended by nuclear engineers and utility executives, who came across as patronizing and uncaring. The industry retreated from public engagement[.]

"[T]wo decades of widespread misinformation...went largely unanswered by anyone[.]" – pp. 163–5

"Antinuclear environmentalists openly favored coal and other fossil fuels over nuclear. 'We do not need nuclear power,' said Nader. 'We have a far greater amount of fossil fuels in this country than we're owning up to[:] the tar sands[,] oil out of shale[,] methane in coal beds'[.]

"It's not that nobody knew of coal's dangers. In 1979, The New York Times published a front-page article noting that coal's death toll would rise to fi[f]ty-six thousand if coal instead of nuclear plants were built....

"All in all, the antinuclear movement managed to help kill...half of [the] nuclear reactors[, even some] after construction[,] that utilities in the United States had planned to build[.]

"Were the antinuclear activists themselves really so afraid of nuclear?...A Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon confessed, 'I really didn't care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway....I think...playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.'

"[Former] Sierra Club staffer [and activist] David Pesonen...adopted the Machiavellian view that the ends justify the means. He scolded an ally for not lying. 'If you had been as unscrupulous as [the opposition] just this once,' said Pesonen, 'it would have strengthened our position immeasurably.'

" 'If you're trying to get people aroused about what is going on,' said one of Pesonen's antinuclear colleagues, 'you use the most emotional issue you can find.'

"The experience left Sierra Club board member and landscape photographer Ansel Adams bitter. 'It shows how people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times,' he said." – pp. 166–7

The Peace Bomb

" 'I remember once talking with Victor Weisskopf,'...said Pulitzer Prize–winning author...Richard Rhodes[.] 'He said, "We were...at Los Alamos[, and famous Danish physicist Niels] Bohr arrived[. H]e gave us the possibility...there was hope at the end of all this."

" 'How did Bohr do that? He did that by saying that nuclear was a fundamental change in our relationship with the natural world. Inevitably, it's going to change the way nation-states relate to each other. They will no longer be able to dominate one another. Now it would be possible for even a small state to deter a large state that wanted to dominate it.'...

"One of America's leading historians of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, credits nuclear weapons with keeping the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union for so many decades....

"When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, 'Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.'

"After [its use] Oppenheimer [said, 'T]he atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.' " – pp. 171–4

Chapter 9: Destroying the Environment to Save It

Renewables Predator, Wildlife Prey

"In 2002[,] Lisa Linowes...and her husband purchased property in New Hampshire. They soon learned there was a wind farm being built near town. 'And...like everyone else[, I said], "What's the problem with wind?"

" 'We were all indoctrinated into the idea that renewables are better than fossil fuel and the only reason renewables haven't taken off is because the oil and gas industry squeezed them out of the market,' she said....

"Linowes and others learned that a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant." – pp. 181–2

"No nation has done more to support renewables than Germany. For the last twenty years it has been going through what it calls an Energiewende, or energy transition, from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

"[D]espite having invested nearly a half-trillion dollars, Germany generated just 42 percent of its electricity from wind, solar, and biomass, as compared to the 71 percent France generated from nuclear in 2019....

"In 2019, German electricity prices were 45 percent higher than the European average.

"In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent backup, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining....

"The physical demands of renewables thus spark local environmental opposition around the world....

"Globally, 2018 was the first year since 2001 that growth in renewables failed to increase....'The wind power boom is over,' concluded German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2019." – pp. 183–5

Powering Utopia

"The idea that a prosperous society could be powered by renewables was first proposed in 1833 by a man named John Etzler [in] his utopian manifesto: The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery....

"Etzler laid out a plan for scaling up concentrated solar power plants, gigantic wind farms, and dams to store the power when neither wind nor sun was available." – p. 185

"After World War II, many intellectuals conjured visions of a world powered by renewables. The key to ending humankind's alienation from nature, the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued in 1954, was for societies to use unreliable, not reliable, renewables. He condemned hydroelectric dams, which created large reservoirs of water that allowed for energy to be created whenever humans needed it. By contrast, he praised windmills.

"In 1962, American socialist writer Murray Bookchin denounced cities for spreading over the countryside like a rampant 'cancer' and praised renewables as an opportunity for bringing land and city into a 'synthesis of man and nature.'

"[Socialist,] antinuclear activist...Commoner similarly saw renewables as the key to bringing modern civilization, or the 'technosphere,' into harmony with the 'ecosphere.' Commoner invented the basic outline of the Green New Deal that was introduced first by European Greens and then by...Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. Commoner viewed the transition to a low-energy, renewable-powered economy as key to 'massively redesigning the major industrial, agricultural, energy, and transportation systems'[.]

"Commoner's vision will sound familiar: farmers should go organic; we should use biofuels and other bioenergies; our cars should be smaller; homes and buildings should be made more energy efficient; and we should reduce our use of plastic....

"Advocates claimed renewables could replace fossil fuels and nuclear. In 1976, [un-degreed energy specialist] Amory Lovins wrote in Foreign Affairs that the obstacles to a renewables economy are 'not mainly technical, but rather social and ethical.' Like Etzler, Lovins dismissed concerns over reliability. 'Directly storing sunlight or wind,' he explained, 'is easy'[.]

"Lovin's policy framework became the policy agenda of nearly all of...the country's largest environmental philanthropies, U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and all of the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates." – pp. 187–8

Why Dilute Energy Destroys

"Since the 1970s, when the renewable energy agenda was proposed as an alternative to nuclear, most scenarios for 100 percent renewables depended heavily on burning biomass when the sun wasn't shining and the wind wasn't blowing....

"If just 10 percent of the electricity in the United States were to come from wood-burning biomass power plants, the fuel to power them would require an area of forest land the size of Texas." – p. 192

"In 2001, researchers found that the build-up of dead insects on wind turbine blades can reduce the electricity they generate by 50 percent.

"In 2018[,] Dr. Franz Trieb of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, in a major report[,] concluded that 'a rough but conservative estimate of the impact of wind farms on flying insects in Germany' is a 'loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year,' which 'could be relevant for population stability.'

"While much of the media coverage has blamed industrial agriculture, it is notable that the biggest insect population declines are being reported in Europe and the United States, where the land area dedicated to agriculture has declined...over the last two decades. What have spread are wind turbines." – pp. 195–6

Defenders of Wind Wildlife

"In 2015, the novelist and birder Jonathan Franzen questioned whether the emphasis on climate change was sacrificing nature. 'To prevent extinctions in the future,' argued Franzen in The New Yorker, 'it's not enough to curb our carbon emissions. We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now.'...

"In 2005, leading bat scientists warned federal regulators that wind turbines threatened migratory bat species....

" 'The politicians fear citizen resistance,' Der Spiegel reported in 2019. 'There is hardly a wind energy project [in Germany] that is not fought.' " – pp. 197–8

The Starbucks Rule

"The fact that the energy density of fuels, and the power density of their extraction, determine their environmental impact...is not...taught in every environmental studies class....There is a psychological and ideological reason[:] the romantic appeal-to-nature fallacy, where people imagine renewables are more natural than fossil fuels and uranium, and...what's natural is better for the environment.

"Just as people imagined 'natural' products from tortoiseshell and ivory to wild salmon and pasture beef are better than 'artificial' alternatives, people imagine that 'natural' energy from renewables like solar, wood, and wind is better than fossil fuels and nuclear....

"Those communities that have proven most able to resist the introduction of a wind farm tend to be more affluent.

"[R]eported BusinessWeek in 2009[, w]ind developers 'plot where Starbucks are in the general area and then make sure their project is at least thirty miles away.' " – p. 199

Chapter 10: All About the Green

Green on the Inside

"Every major climate activist group in America, including NRDC [(Natural Resources Defense Council)], EDF [(Environmental Defense Fund)], and Sierra Club, has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from [(] or investing in [)] natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.

"Killing nuclear plants turns out to be a lucrative business for competitor fossil fuel and renewable energy companies. That's because nuclear plants generate large amounts of electricity. During a ten-year period, Indian Point's owner could bring in $8 billion in revenue....If the plant closes, those billions will flow to natural gas and renewables companies.

"Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF have worked to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and a smattering of renewables...since the 1970s. They have created detailed reports for policymakers, journalists, and the public purporting to show that neither nuclear plants nor fossil fuels are needed to meet electricity demand, thanks to energy efficiency and renewables. And yet, as we have seen, almost everywhere nuclear plants are closed, or not built, fossil fuels are burned instead.

"The Sierra Club Foundation has taken money directly from solar energy companies....

"EDF's board of trustees and advisory trustees have...included investors and executives from oil, gas, and renewable energy companies, including Halliburton, Sunrun, [and] Northwest Energy[.]

"[T]he environmental movement's strategy [is one] of taking money from oil and gas investors[,] and [then] promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants." – pp. 204–5

Brown's Dirty War

"In the late 1960s, the Indonesia...government asked...Edmund 'Pat' Brown[,] California's governor from 1959 to 1967, to help recapitalize its state-owned oil company, Pertamina[.] Brown was well-connected on Wall Street....

"In exchange for Brown's services, Pertamina gave him exclusive rights to sell Indonesian oil in California....

"Shortly after [Pat's son,] Jerry...first became governor, [he] took actions that protected his family's oil monopoly in California. [A] change [in] air pollution regulations meant that [the comparatively cleaner] Indonesia[n] oil would enjoy a monopoly in California[. A] top Jerry Brown political aide–turned–appointee, Richard Maullin, chairman of the California Energy Commission, began pressuring the state's utilities to burn more oil rather than shift to nuclear energy....

"Jerry Brown made the top investment manager for the Getty Oil fortune a state superior court judge. [As] judge, the Getty man lobbied for and passed legislation that protected [the] Getty...family money from taxation. The Getty Oil man's name was Bill Newsom[,] the father of California's current governor, Gavin Newsom....

"Jerry Brown's advocacy for natural gas was part and parcel of his antinuclear work, which didn't end when he left office in 1983. Seven years later, two close allies, Bob Mulholland and Bettina Redway, passed a ballot initiative to shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant near Sacramento, California[.]

"Redway's husband, Michael Picker...later play[ed] a central role in overseeing the closure of California['s] last two nuclear plants." – pp. 211–3

Bigger than the Internet

" 'Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,'...said [in 2007] John Doerr, an early Google and Amazon investor[.] 'It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.'...

"Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on...the predecessor [(which I helped promote)] to...Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal.

"[The s]timulus money wasn't evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party....

"The people who directed the loan program had been fundraisers for Obama. In March 2011, the U.S. Government Accountability Office...noted that not a single one of the program's first eighteen loans had been documented.

"[F]ew Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Greentech portfolio...received loans or outright grants[.]" – pp. 217–8

Leaving a Legacy

"In 2018, Arizona voters considered...a ballot initiative that ostensibly promoted renewables[,] but in reality would have resulted in the premature closure of the...Palo Verde...nuclear plant[,] America's largest single source of zero-emissions clean energy....

"The ballot initiative's sponsor was Tom Steyer[,] who might have benefited personally. And yet few in the mainstream news media explored Steyer's potential conflict of interest.

"During the very same years they were denouncing fossil fuel interests...for funding their political opponents, and demanding universities stop investing in fossil fuels, 350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and [Michael] Bloomberg.

"Where the news media have for decades demonized Exxon, the Koch brothers, and climate skeptics, they have largely given a pass to fossil fuel billionaires like Steyer and Bloomberg and the environmentalists they fund.

"Steyer and Bloomberg may be motivated to do good in the world, but [f]inancial conflicts of interest are no less conflicts of interest just because a person is ideologically committed....

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

"If Steyer and other fossil fuel and renewable energy investors get their way and kill some or all of the remaining ninety-nine U.S. nuclear reactors, which provide nearly 20 percent of America's electricity, they will not only make a fortune, they will spike emissions and eliminate the only real hope for phasing out fossil fuels before 2050." – pp. 220–1

Chapter 11: The Denial of Power

Power Tripping

"In 2019, some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people started responding to demands that we act on climate change....

"Prince Harry...described the climate emergency to...assembled guests, bare-footed[.]

"[Some objected to] celebrities [with] high-energy lifestyles...moralizing for low-energy lives....

" 'Imagine being attacked,' said Ellen DeGeneres, 'when all you're trying to do is make the world a better place.'

"Al Gore wouldn't have been...embarrassed...for living in a...home that used twelve times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee, had he not claimed, 'We are going to have to change the way we live our lives' to solve climate change." – pp. 222–3

Not as We Do

"For two decades after World War II, the World Bank, which is financed by developed nations, loaned money to developing nations to build the basic infrastructure of modern societies: dams, roads, and electricity grids....

"But then, in the late 1980s, under the sway of green NGOs like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace, the United Nations started to promote a radically different development model: sustainable development." – p. 226

The Power of Electricity

"The United Nations pioneered the notion that poor nations could grow rich without using much energy, in sharp contrast to every other rich nation in the world....

"In 1987, the United Nations published a book called Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future[.]

" 'Both the routine practice of efficient energy use and the development of renewables will [somehow allow] developing countries to realize their growth potential'[,] the report claimed[.]

"And yet [t]here was no example in 1987 of any nation escaping poverty with renewables and energy efficiency.

"The fact that developed nations [had] required fossil fuels to grow wealthy could not possibly have been a mystery to the lead author of Our Common Future, Gro Brundtland. After all, she was the former prime minister of Norway, a nation that just a decade earlier had become one of the richest in the world thanks to its abundant oil and gas reserves....

"The United Nations and environmental NGOs described their work as helping poor nations 'avoid the mistakes made in the industriali[z]ed world'[.]

" '[S]ome European politicians or technocrats think that Africa could and should develop by eliminating corruption first,'...Dinh...told me. 'Never mind that not a single country in the world has become developed through that route.'

"As climate change emerged as an elite concern in the 1990s, efforts within developed nations to cut off financing for cheap energy, industrial agriculture, and modern infrastructure to poor and develop[ing] nations grew stronger.

"By 2014, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the...Committee on Appropriations, sought to cut off U.S. development funding to poor nations seeking to build hydroelectric dams[.]

"European governments actively promote bioenergy in poor nations....

"In 2017, Eva Müller, the director of forestry at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, claimed, 'Woodfuel is kinder to the environment than fossil fuels'[.]

"Not all environmentalists oppose cheap energy, including hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels for poor nations. In my experience[,] perhaps most environmentalists in developed nations believe it is unethical for rich nations to deprive poor ones of the technologies responsible for our prosperity....

"Poor nations, claimed...IPCC in 2018, can leapfrog [over] centralized energy sources like dams, natural gas plants, and nuclear plants to [arrive at] decentralized energy sources such as solar panels and batteries....

" 'Time and...again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,'...wrote...Harvard[-educated] South African...environmental engineer...John Briscoe[,] 'nor are willing to follow.' " – pp. 226–9

'A Stain on the Race'

"In 1793, British philosopher William Godwin published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness[,] argu[ing] that...rationalism would...massive[ly] reduc[e] human suffering.

"One year later, the Marquis de Condorcet, a French nobleman and mathematician, published...Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind[.] He championed...using technology to grow more food on less land in order to support a larger...population[, and] us[ing] science and reason...to advance human progress.

"Godwin and Condorcet's combined ideas were a vision of what we now call the Enlightenment, and both thinkers were 'humanists' because they believed humans were special through our unique capacity to reason. They had effectively secularized the Judeo-Christian concept that humans were chosen by God to have dominion over Earth.

"As feudal dictatorships gave way to capitalist democracies, Enlightenment humanism became the dominant political ideology....

"Thomas Robert Malthus, an economist, grew so annoyed with [the] Enlightenment['s] optimism that...he sought to refute Godwin and Condorcet in a 1798 book called An Essay on the Principle of Population.

"Malthus argued that...humans...reproduced 'geometrically[,' so t]he result of progress would...inevitably be overpopulation and famine. [He] wrote[, 'P]remature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.'...

"Malthus added this remarkable passage to the second edition[:] 'A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.'

"Godwin [suggested] birth control[.]

"Malthus responded not by arguing that humans wouldn't use birth control but rather that they shouldn't. Why? Because doing so would be 'unnatural.'

"[So,] the only way Malthus's prediction of population outstripping resources could be correct is if everybody in the future subscribed to Malthus's opposition to birth control.

"Malthus...advocated that policymakers maintain the [current] aristocratic system by favoring agriculture over manufacturing, and pointed to the superiority of country life[:] or rather, the country life that he, as an aristocrat who avoided manual labor, enjoyed....

"Malthus came of age in what historians call the 'advanced organic economy,' which, due to its reliance on renewables, namely wood fuel and waterwheels, 'condemned the majority of the population to poverty' for inherently physical reasons." – pp. 229–31

"To this day, when people think of the Great Famine, they tend to focus on the...1845...fungus and overlook the fact that, for the next four years, Ireland exported food, including beef, to England. Irish families had to sell their pigs in order to pay the rent, even as their children were starving....

"The real reason the Irish were starving, held good opinion in Britain during the famine, was the Irish people's lack of moral restraint. Increasing the wages of Irish workers, The Economist warned, 'would stimulate every man to marry and populate as fast as he could, like rabbits in a warren.'

"The Economist and other British elites simply repeated the thinking pioneered a half-century earlier by Malthus....

"The British governor general of India between 1876 and 1880 argued that the Indian population 'has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.'

"[A] historian writes[,] 'The famine relief offered to the starving by Lytton's administration was less in terms of calorific intake than that Hitler gave[,] to those interned in Buchenwald concentration camp.'

"In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it.

"Why? 'Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,' concludes historian Robert Mayhew....

"Adolph Hitler, too, was inspired by Malthus. 'The productivity of the soil can only be increased within defined limits and up to a certain point,' he wrote in Mein Kampf....

" 'Strong and direct connections can be drawn between [Malthus's] work,' historian Mayhew concludes, 'and some of the most abhorrent moments in twentieth-century history.' " – pp. 231–3

"In the early twentieth century, the Tennessee Valley region of the United States was a lot like...Congo today....

"By 1933[,] George Norris, a progressive Republican senator[,] had convinced Congress and...newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create...the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)....

"In 1930, forty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar and Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in the opening essay in a famous collection, I'll Take My Stand, 'the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.'

"Ransom and the other 'Southern Agrarians' disparaged cities and industry for their impact on the environment and on people. They declared farm machinery, paved roads, and indoor plumbing as part of the 'disease of modern industrial civilization.'...

"The people of the Tennessee Valley region who suffered from malaria and hunger likely might have disagreed with the view that they had been living at peace with nature....

"Ransom, Malthus, and the Malthusians who came after him were socially and politically conservative. Malthus was against birth control, viewing it as against God's plan for humans. He was against social welfare programs for the poor, viewing th[ose] as self-defeating. British leaders who justified their policies based on Malthus's thinking were conservatives.

"[S]ocialists and leftists loathed Malthus. Marx and Engels called him a 'stain on the human race.' Malthus, in their view, had made an avoidable situation look inevitable, or 'natural.' In his 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, the progressive American thinker Henry George attacked Malthus as a defender of inequality. 'What gave Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes,' George wrote, 'was the fact that he furnished a plausible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to existence than others.' " – pp. 233–5

"But then, after World War II, Malthusianism switched sides and became a left-wing political movement in the form of environmentalism, while anti-Malthusianism became a right-wing political movement in the form of libertarian, pro-business, free market conservatism....

"The most prominent critic of Malthusian alarmists was Julian Simon, an economist who argued 'natural resources are not finite,' and that children [a]ren't just mouths to feed[,] but rather grow up to be producers, not [merely] consumers. Simon was embraced by conservative and libertarian scholars, think tanks, and media[—but,] not [by] left-wing and progressive ones." – p. 235

Lifeboat Ethics

"In 1948[, literary ornithologist] William Vogt published a best-selling book, Road to Survival[. He] warned of rampant breeding in poor nations, particularly India. 'Before the imposition of Pax Britannica, India had an estimated population of less than 100 million people,' Vogt wrote. 'While economic and sanitary conditions were being "improved," the Indians went to their accustomed way, breeding with the irresponsibility of codfish....Sex play is the national sport.'...

"Vogt attacked the medical profession's 'duty to keep alive as many people as possible.'

"Vogt felt he had a solution[: 'i]nternational control of resources exploitation, in order to protect technologically retarded nations'[.]

"American leaders and elites embraced Malthusian ideas just as British elites had. In 1965, in the first televised State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson...called for 'population control.'

The New York Times scolded Johnson for not being Malthusian enough....

"That same year, the journal Science published an article, '[The] Tragedy of the Commons,' by University of California at Santa Barbara [zoologist and micro]biologist Garrett Hardin, which argued that environmental collapse was inevitable because of uncontrolled breeding, and that the only way to avoid the tragedy was 'mutual coercion,' in which everybody agree[s] to similar sacrifices.

"Many conservation leaders embraced Malthusianism. In 1968, Sierra Club executive director David Brower conceived and edited a book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University [entom]ologist Paul [Ralph] Ehrlich, which claimed the world was on the brink of mass starvation....

"Like Vogt and Malthus before him, Ehrlich was particularly concerned with breeding by poor people in developing nations....Ehrlich described the Indians he looked down upon [as] 'people eating, people washing, people sleeping....People defecating and urinating. People, people, people, people.'

"Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on The Tonight Show six times[.]

"Malthusianism grew an even harder edge in the 1970s. Hardin...published an essay, 'Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor'[.]

"The picture Hardin painted was of keeping people out of the lifeboat. Otherwise[,] people trying to get in would doom the people in the lifeboat, in addition to themselves.

" 'However humanitarian our intent,' said Hardin, 'every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations.'...

"In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse[.]

"The collapse of civilization was 'a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and "progress." '...

"The Malthusian Ehrlich and the ostensibly socialist Commoner clashed over population and poverty....Commoner blamed industrial capitalism for environmental degradation, where Ehrlich blamed too many people.

"The clash resolved itself when [the] Malthusians including Ehrlich [somehow] accepted a redistributive agenda of rich nations assisting poor nations...so long as th[e] money went to charity and not...infrastructure. This was the seed of what the [United Nations] would christen 'sustainable development.'

"Lovins, for his part, married the demand for energy scarcity to a romantic vision of a 'soft energy' future that [also] rejected the infrastructure of the rich world. In 1976, Foreign Affairs published [his] thirteen-thousand-word essay...making the case for small-scale energy production[.]

"Lovins viewed electricity as authoritarian, disempowering, and alienating. 'In an electrical world, your lifeline comes not from an understandable neighborhood technology run by people you know who are at your own social level, but rather from an alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by [a] faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you,' he wrote.

"The [new] Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus [had] warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned [instead] that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.

"Ehrlich and Lovins said they opposed nuclear energy [precisely] because it was abundant....

" 'It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,' said Lovins, 'because of what we would do with it.' Ehrlich agreed[: 'G]iving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a...gun.' " – pp. 235–9

Power Against Progress

"So much death and suffering was coming[,] believed...Ehrlich and [University of California, Berkeley aero/astronauticist and theoretical plasma physicist] John Holdren[, that] humankind needed to play 'triage,' and leave some people to die....

"Ehrlich and Holdren argued[,] 'Most plans for modernizing agriculture in less-developed nations call for...greatly increased use of fertilizers and other farm chemicals, tractors and other machinery, irrigation, and supporting transportation networks—all of which require large inputs of fossil fuels'[.]

"A better way, they said, was 'much greater use of human labor'[.]

"Malthusians justified their opposition to the extension of cheap energy and agricultural modernization[,] to poor nations[,] by using left-wing and socialist language of redistribution. It wasn't that poor nations needed to develop[:] it was that rich nations needed to consume less.

"Ehrlich and Holdren claimed in their 1977 textbook[,] Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment[,] that the only way to feed seven billion people by the year 2000 was for people in the rich world to eat less meat and dairy—the same recommendation IPCC made in 2019....

"Where in 1977, Ehrlich and Holdren proposed international control of the 'development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources[' as did Vogt before them,] many green NGOs and U.N. agencies today similarly seek control over energy and food policies in developing nations[,] in the name of climate change and biodiversity." – pp. 239–40

"In 1930, Democrats had understood the necessity of cheap energy and food to lifting people out of poverty, but by 1980, President Jimmy Carter's administration had endorsed the 'limits to growth' hypothesis....

"In 1972, the editor of Nature...noted that fear-mongering 'seems like patronizing neo-colonialism to people elsewhere.'

"Others agreed. One demographer said the problem wasn't a population explosion but rather a 'nonsense explosion.' " – p. 240

"In 1963, two economists published an influential book called Scarcity and Growth. [T]hey described how nuclear changed the classical economic assumption of natural resources as scarce and limited....

"Policymakers, journalists, conservationists, and other educated elites in the fifties and sixties knew that nuclear was unlimited energy[: which] meant unlimited food and water.

"[Earlier,] inspired by the discovery of radium by Paul and Marie Curie[, Nobel Prize–winning radiochemist] Frederick Soddy [had produced] a best-selling book[,] The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1908 describing a...similar vision of a nuclear-powered world, and [of] the benefits that would result from such high power densities....

"Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce....

" 'If a doubling of the state's population in the next twenty years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,' wrote the Sierra Club's executive director, [while] opposing [the] Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, '[California's] scenic character will be destroyed.'

"[So, in response, they] stoked [subconscious] fears of the bomb[: t]hey called the growing population in developing nations a 'population explosion.' And [Ehrlich] titled his book, The Population Bomb.

"[M]ixing up reactors and bombs was, as we saw, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists.

"And, as would become routine in U.N. reports, including those published by the IPCC for the next three decades, the United Nations' 1987 report Our Common Future attacked nuclear energy as unsafe and strongly recommended against its expansion.

"There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse." – pp. 241–2

The Climate Bomb

"As it became clear that the growth in the global birth rate had peaked, Malthusian thinkers started to look to climate change as a replacement apocalypse for overpopulation and resource scarcity.

"The influential Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider embraced the Malthusianism of...Holdren and...Ehrlich, and...invited them to educate his scientists.

"[W]rote Schneider[,] 'That talk [by Holdren] helped the [National Center for Atmospheric Research] scientists to see the big picture clearly and early on.'

"[A]t a conference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1976, Schneider said he made the case that 'humans were multiplying out of control and were using technology and organization in a dangerous, unsustainable way.'

"Schneider attracted media attention by speaking of climate change in apocalyptic terms....

"In 1982, a group of economists...call[ing] themselves 'ecological economists' met in Stockholm, Sweden, and published a manifesto arguing that nature imposes hard limits on human activity.

" 'Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems,' notes an environmental historian....'The problem [they proposed] lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse.'

"Ecological economics, not to be confused with the mainstream environmental economics used by IPCC and other scientific bodies, was popular among philanthropies and environmental leaders in wealthy nations....

"McKibben has done more to popularize Malthusian ideas than any other writer. The first book about global warming written for a popular audience was his 1989 book, The End of Nature. In it, McKibben argued that humankind's impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming[,] and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion.

"Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce, now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce. 'It's not that we're running out of stuff,' explained McKibben in 1998[,] 'what we're running out of[,] are what the scientists call "sinks." '...

"By the twenty-first century[,] Schneider was as much an activist as a scientist. [He] writes[,] 'I remembered my "five horsemen of the environmental apocalypse": ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism, and short-term thinking.' " – pp. 242–4

"Environmentalists used climate change as a fresh reason for opposing hydroelectric dams and flood control[.]

" 'Look at the food crisis last year,' said Briscoe in 2011....'The NGOs did not reflect on the fact that many NGOs had [successfully] lobbied against many irrigation projects and other agricultural modernization projects because these "were not pro-poor and destroyed the environment," ' Briscoe said." – p. 245

"[A] little-known but influential environmental NGO[,] International Rivers, based in Berkeley, California...has, since its founding in 1985, helped [to] stop 217 dams from being built, mostly in poor nations.

"[I]n 2003, Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist from The Washington Post, discovered International Rivers had severely misrepresented the situation on the ground in Uganda, where the group was trying to stop a dam....

"Mallaby wrote[,] 'The dam people...promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate.

"[I]n my [own] interviews[, n]ot only were Congolese...enthusiastic about the Virunga Park dam, [but] Rwandans...near hydroelectric dams [also] were ecstatic at the prospects of getting electricity.

"Why is International Rivers so opposed to dams? Partly because dams can make it harder to do recreational rafting. 'The Batoka scheme will flood the gorge and drown the massive rapids that have made Victoria Falls a prime whitewater rafting location,' laments International Rivers about one project. Its allies consist of rafters around the world.

"[T]he reason so many poor nations begin the process of urbanization, industrialization, and development by building large dams is that they produce inexpensive and reliable power, are simple to build and operate, and can last for a century or longer....

"The Inga Dam would have very-high-power densities and thus lower environmental impact than other dams around the world....And yet International Rivers is not seeking to remove dams in Switzerland nor in California, where for one hundred years they have provided the state with cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity, freshwater for drinking and agriculture, and flood control." – pp. 245–6

Experiments in Poverty

"[C]elebrities who moralize about climate change...are flaunting their special status. Hypocrisy...is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules[.]

"Were...statements...environmentalists made in support of the right of poor nations to develop [also] mere virtue signaling?

"[I]n...September...2019, Thunberg...said, 'We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.'...

"Economic growth is necessary for creating the infrastructure required for protecting people from natural disasters, climate-related or not. And economic growth created Sweden's wealth, including that of Thunberg's own family. It is fair to say that without economic growth, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist." – p. 247

"In 2013, while in Tanzania to promote 'Power Africa,' a U.S. government program supporting electrification, President Barack Obama dribbled...a modified[, energy-storing] soccer ball known as...Soccket. [It] wasn't...the kind of energy that could industrialize Africa.

"Two years later, an Indian village made worldwide headlines after it rebelled against the solar panel and battery 'micro-grid' [that] Greenpeace had created[,] as a supposed model of energy leapfrogging for the world's poorest people. The electricity was unreliable and expensive....

"I pressed...Joyashree Roy, a professor of economics at Jadavpur University...in...Kolkata[,] India, and an IPCC coordinating lead author[,] on why her chapter suggested nations could leapfrog. She...then expressed frustration with people who advocate energy[-]demand reductions, even among India's poorest....

" 'Because it's an experiment on the most vulnerable people in the world?' I asked.

" 'Yeah,' she said." – pp. 248–9

Chapter 12: False Gods for Lost Souls

Parable Bears

"[In] 2017, National Geographic posted a video, set to sad music, of an emaciated and slow-moving polar bear[.]

"One of the viewers was student climate activist...Thunberg....'[W]hen I was younger[,] our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears, and so on,' she recalled in spring 2019. 'I cried through all the movies.'

"Climate change is polar bears' greatest threat, concluded scientists in 2017, because it is melting the arctic ice caps at a rate of 4 percent per year....

"For forty years, climate denialists funded by fossil fuel companies have misled the public about the science of climate change in the same way that tobacco companies misled the public about the science linking smoking and cancer, argued Harvard historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their influential 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt.

"[I]n 1983[,] the National Academy of Sciences[,] which the U.S. government created in 1863 to objectively evaluate scientific questions for policymakers[,] published its first major report on climate change....

"Right-wingers had effectively hijacked the [process, the] historians [argued; theoretical physicist and oceanographer] William Nierenberg, who chaired the National Academy of Sciences' Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee, was a political conservative who trampled over the views of natural scientists like John Perry, a meteorologist, who had concluded, 'The problem is already upon us.'

"Oreskes and Conway write, 'Perry would be proven right, but [economist Thomas] Schelling's view would prevail politically....

"Schelling's view was simply that the effects of restricting energy consumption could be worse than the effects of global warming. That view was mainstream back then and remains so today.

"[And,] there [i]s no evidence for polar bear famine.

"[T]he misinformation about polar bears perfectly captures the ways in which many of the stories people tell about climate change don't have much to do with science." – pp. 250–3

Climate Politics Takes Its Tol

"As a university student in the Netherlands, Richard Tol was a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Concerned about climate change, he earned a PhD...in 1997[,] becoming one of the most-cited economists in the world on the topic.

"Now a professor at the University of Sussex, in Britain, Tol became involved with the IPCC shortly after it was created, in 1994....

"Tol's reputation came, in part, from being on a team that rigorously established that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet. 'We were the first to show that in a statistically sound way,' he says.

"In 2012, Tol was named the convening lead author of one of the chapters in...IPCC's fifth review of climate change[.] He was assigned to the team to draft...IPCC's Summary for Policymakers[.]

"Tol said that the primary message of an earlier draft of the Summary was[:] 'Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.'...

" 'IPCC is partly a scientific organi[z]ation and partly a political organi[z]ation,' Tol explained. As a 'political organi[z]ation, its job is to justify greenhouse gas emission[s] reduction.'...

"Two years later, despite Tol's protests, IPCC approved a Summary for Policymakers that was far more apocalyptic than the science warranted....'IPCC shifted from..."Not without risk, but manageable," to "We're all gonna die," ' explained Tol. It was a shift, he said, 'from what I think is a relatively accurate assessment of recent developments in [the] literature to...the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse[:] Pestilence, Death, Famine[,] and War were all there.'...

"Pielke...found instances where IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.

" 'What does Pielke think about this?' an external IPCC reviewer...asked[,] about a claim being made about climate change and natural disasters. The official IPCC response was, 'I believe Pielke agrees.' But[,] he had never been consulted....'IPCC...fabricated a response [from me] to justify keeping that...misleading...material in the report[,' he] said.

"[E]nvironment ministers from around the world demanded an independent review of IPCC policies and procedures by the InterAcademy Council, the international organization of national science academies. The InterAcademy Council made recommendations for improving research quality[, which] IPCC adopted, such as better practices for including research that had not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals.

"But...IPCC kept publishing apocalyptic summaries and press releases, and IPCC contributors and lead authors kept making apocalyptic claims, such as[:] that sea level rise will be 'unmanageable' and that 'the potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing.' And, as Tol noted, journalists exaggerated further. The system appeared biased toward exaggeration.

"Ausubel was one of the first to recognize the politicization of climate science. After pioneering ways to forecast energy demand, [energy] transitions, and emissions for Changing Climate, he helped create...IPCC. 'And then the expected happened,' Ausubel said. 'Opportunists flowed in. By 1992, I stopped wanting to go to climate meetings.'

"In response to...IPCC's decision to let...exaggerators write the Summary for Policymakers, Tol resigned. 'I simply thought it was incredible,' he said. 'I told Chris Field, the chairman, about this, and I quietly withdrew.' " – pp. 253–6

"This book began with a defense of the science assembled by...IPCC and others against those who claim climate change will be apocalyptic. We saw how the scientific consensus, as reflected in IPCC reports, supports Tol's view that, 'Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.'

"Now we must address the question of how so many people, myself included, came to believe that climate change threatened not only the end of polar bears but the end of humanity.

"The answer is, in part, that while...IPCC's science is broadly sound, its Summary for Policymakers, press releases, and authors' statements betray ideological motivations, a tendency toward exaggeration, and an absence of important context.

"As we saw, IPCC authors and press statements have claimed sea level rise will be 'unmanageable,' world food supplies are in jeopardy, vegetarianism would significantly reduce emissions, poor nations can grow rich with renewables, and nuclear energy is relatively dangerous.

"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. Leading media companies have been exaggerating climate change at least since the 1980s. And, as we have seen, elite publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker have frequently and uncritically repeated debunked Malthusian dogma for well more than a half century.

"IPCC and other scientific organizations are [the] most misleading in what their summaries and press releases don't say—or at least[,] not clearly. They don't clearly say that the death toll from natural disasters has radically declined[,] and should decline further with continued adaptation. They don't clearly say that wood fuel build-up and constructing homes near forests matters more than climate change[,] in determining the severity and impact of fires in much of the world. And they don't clearly say that fertilizer, tractors, and irrigation matter more than climate change to crop yields." – pp. 256–7

Who Framed Roger Pielke?

"In...2015, Raúl Grijalva, a U.S. congressman from Arizona, sent a letter to the University of Colorado's president suggesting that...Pielke might have taken money from the fossil fuel industry....

"Starting in 2008[,] Center for American Progress (CAP)...was able to persuade many in the news media that Pielke was a [paid] climate skeptic.

"[T]he...University of Colorado president cooperated and investigated Pielke[, finding] that Pielke had never received any funding from fossil fuel companies." – pp. 257–9

"The effort to delegitimize Pielke was one of the most audacious and effective attacks by a fossil fuel–funded think tank on a climate expert in history.

"[R]enewable energy and natural gas interests funded CAP during the period when CAP was overseeing both Obama's green stimulus program and the administration's effort to pass cap-and-trade climate legislation in Congress...between 2009 and 2010....

"Democratic, progressive, and environmental leaders [believed] they needed...to claim that climate change's impacts are happening right now, and are catastrophic, in order to pass legislation to subsidize renewables and tax fossil fuels, and recruit, mobilize, and win over swing voters....

"It felt like a witch hunt[.] The scapegoating of Pielke, like apocalyptic environmentalism more broadly, had an undeniably religious quality to it." – pp. 259–60

False Gods

"In 2019[,] McKibben...argued that climate change is the 'greatest challenge humans have ever faced.'...

"McKibben['s] organization, 350.org, has a nearly $20 million annual budget. He is respected by other journalists, members of Congress, presidential candidates, and millions of Americans.

"[F]or McKibben's claim to be true, climate change must prove to be a greater challenge than coping with the Black Death, which killed about half of all Europeans[:] about fifty million people; the control of infectious diseases, which killed hundreds of millions; [and] the great wars of Europe and the Holocaust, which killed more than 100 million people[.]

"And climate change must prove to be greater than...the monumental...contemporary challenge...of lifting one billion souls out of extreme poverty in a world where manufacturing is playing a smaller role in economic development[.]

"McKibben's apocalyptic vision didn't start with climate change. In 1971, when...McKibben was eleven years old, police arrested his father for defending the right of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to gather [publicly. His] mother says [he] was 'furious...he wasn't allowed to be arrested with his father.'...

"After Harvard, McKibben says his 'leftism grew more righteous.'...In...his 1989 The End of Nature, he described climate change as an apocalyptic threat, like nuclear war.

"The underlying problem, said McKibben, was spiritual. Through capitalist industrialization, humankind had lost its connection to nature. 'We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves,' he wrote[.] 'That is what this all boils down to.' " – pp. 260–1

"In the early twentieth century[,] American scholar William James defined religion as the belief in 'an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in adjusting ourselves thereto.'...For environmentalists, the unseen order we need to adjust ourselves to is nature.

"Throughout this book we have seen environmental support for various behaviors, technologies, and policies motivated not by what the science tells us but by intuitive views of nature. These intuitive views rest on the appeal-to-nature fallacy.

"Th[is] fallacy holds that 'natural' things, e.g., tortoiseshell, ivory, wild fish, organic fertilizer, wood fuel, and solar farms, are better for people and the environment than 'artificial' things, e.g., plastics from fossil fuels, farmed fish, chemical fertilizer, and nuclear plants.

"[This] is fallacious for two reasons. First, the artificial things are as natural as the natural things. They are simply newer. Second, the older, 'natural' things are 'bad,' not good, if 'good' is defined as protecting sea turtles, elephants, and wild fish.

"This background and largely unconscious idea of nature is, in my experience, very strong. I have seen many environmentalists dismiss evidence demonstrating, for example, the larger impact of renewable energy and organic farming on landscapes. 'Natural' things must, by definition, be better for the environment.

"Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into...environmental sciences. In the 1940s, scientists attempted to create a science of nature, ecology, which was based on cybernetics, the science of self-regulating systems[.]

"The assumption was that nature, when left alone, achieves a kind of harmony or equilibrium....

"But 'nature' doesn't operate like a self-regulating system. In reality, different natural environments change constantly. Species come and go. There is no whole or 'system' to collapse. There's just a changing mix of plants, animals, and other organisms over time. We might prefer one version of that mixture, like the Amazon rainforest, but there is nothing in the mixture telling us that it is better or worse than some other combination[.]

"Apocalyptic scientists and activists list various changes, such as melting ice sheets, changing ocean circulations, and deforestation, and suggest that they will add up to an apocalyptic sum greater than their parts.

"[T]he notion of nature existing in a delicate balance is Neoplatonism, and ungrounded in empirical reality. 'The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as "everything connects," ' writes environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff, 'recall...the [N]eoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species fits.'

"Some ecological scientists recognized that they had inadvertently and unconsciously imposed a fundamentally religious idea onto science. 'I am convinced that modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man's interference with it,' admitted one, 'owes its origin to the [Judeo-Christian intelligent] design argument[:] The wisdom of the creator is self-evident. [N]o living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other.' " – pp. 261–3

"Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.

"On the one hand, environmentalism and its sister religion, vegetarianism, appear to be a radical break from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. For starters, environmentalists themselves do not tend to be believers, or strong believers, in Judeo-Christianity. In particular, environmentalists reject the view that humans have, or should have, dominion, or control, over Earth.

"On the other hand, apocalyptic environmentalism is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to God. In the apocalyptic environmental tradition, human problems stem from our failure to adjust ourselves to nature. In some Judeo-Christian traditions, priests play the role of interpreting God's will or laws, including discerning right from wrong. In the apocalyptic environmentalist tradition, scientists play that role. 'I want you to listen to the scientists,' Thunberg and others repeat.

"Most environmentalists are unaware that they are repeating Judeo-Christian myths, concludes [economist] Robert H. Nelson [in his] 2010 [book,] The New Holy Wars. Because Judeo-Christian myths and morals are prevalent in our culture, environmentalists know them subconsciously and repeat them unintentionally, albeit in the ostensibly secular language of science and nature.

"Having first experienced and then studied the phenomenon for fifteen years, I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions. Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars, as we will see, believe we need in order to find meaning in our lives.

"At the same time, apocalyptic environmentalism does all of this while retaining the illusion among its adherents that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy. 'For the many people skeptical of institutional Christian religion,' wr[ites Nelson], 'but seeking greater religious meaning in their lives, that is no doubt part of the attraction of secular religion.'

"There is nothing wrong with religions and often a great deal right about them. They have long provided people with the meaning and purpose they need, particularly in order to survive life's many challenges....

"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 [which] its ostensibly secular devotees seek." – pp. 263–5

Apocalypse Angst

"To believe in imminent apocalypse is, according to one scholar, to believe that 'the accepted texture of reality is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which the long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed.'

"[T]o some extent, th[is] is what is happening, and has been happening[,] since...the rise of the [I]ndustrial [R]evolution[.]

"For thousands of years, religion sought to constrain what we today call science[:] efforts to understand the world, including ourselves. [T]he pursuit of knowledge outside of morality was dangerous.

"After the rediscovery of classical texts...in the Middle Ages, Western thinkers initially concentrated on reconciling classical philosophy with Christianity. Over time[,] the focus shifted to making sense of the natural world, leading to what is called the scientific revolution. Although most early scientists professed that they did their science in service of God, they pursued knowledge without knowing whether it would lead to good or ill....

"During the Enlightenment, philosophers tried to apply the same rational approach to morality and politics in the form of 'secular humanism.' It borrowed from Judeo-Christianity the idea that humans were special, but it emphasized the use of science and reason in the pursuit of virtue[.]

"[I]t quickly became clear there was no 'objective' basis for morality....By the 1920s, European philosophers argued that moral jud[g]ments could not be justified empirically[.]

"After World War II, many leading scholars and universities in Europe and the United States rejected the teaching of morality and virtue as unscientific and thus without value. 'Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning,' was the intellectual consensus, a historian notes. 'Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect, but that leads inevitably to technology[,] and...ultimately...to the bomb.

" 'From humanists we learned that science threaten[s] civilization,' the historian added. 'From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope.' The result, he argued, was a 'culture of despair.'

"Apocalyptic environmentalism emerged from this crisis of faith and...became pronounced during moments of global change....In 1970, [a]mid...national turmoil over the Vietnam War[,] Earth Day was held...wh[ile] fears of overpopulation were at their peak[.] In 1983, during heightened Cold War tensions, more than 300,000 people protested in London's Hyde Park against nuclear weapons. And in the early 1990s, [as] the Cold War...end[ed,] climate change emerged as the new apocalyptic threat.

"After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people in the West no longer had an external enemy against which to direct their negative energy and define themselves. 'Being the sole winner in a conflict means concentrating on oneself all the criticism that could earlier be deflected onto others,' observed Pascal Bruckner in The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.

"In the wake of the 2016 elections in Britain and the United States, where voters rejected...the established global order, climate alarmism grew more extreme.

"Where environmentalism had until recently offered the prospects of utopia in the form of a return to low-energy and renewable-powered agrarian societies, it is striking the extent to which apocalyptic environmentalist leaders have deemphasized that vision for an emphasis on climate Armageddon.

"Green utopianism is still there. Apocalyptic environmentalists in Europe and the United States advocate a Green New Deal not just to reduce carbon emissions but also to create good jobs with high pay, reduce economic inequality, and improve community life.

"But negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today's apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction." – pp. 265–7

"[A]nthropologist Ernest Becker [in his] Pulitzer Prize[–winning 1973] book[,] The Denial of Death, believed...that...we are all born with strong survival instincts. [We] repress [our] fears, making them mostly unconscious.

"To defend ourselves...against this low-level fear[,] we create what [he] calls an 'immortality project,' a way of feeling that some part of us will live on after our deaths....

"We subconsciously cast ourselves as the heroes of our immortality projects. '[T]he cultural hero,'...Becker wrote[,] 'is...a mythical hero-system in which people serve[,] in order to earn a feeling of primary value[,] of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.'

"Such appear to be the benefits of climate activism. 'Extinction Rebellion,'...Lunnon told me, 'offered a way of being courageous.'...Lights...pointed to research [asserting] 'children who engage with climate activism have better mental health then kids who know about climate change but...do [no]thing about it.' And Thunberg's climate activism allowed her to escape depression. 'It is like day and night,' said her father. 'It is an incredible transformation.'

"[E]nvironmentalism and vegetarianism...represent 'the will to give a future to the entire planet, including its animals,' conclude the Italian psychologists who studied vegetarian beliefs....

"For Becker, an exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one's life....

"I [myself] was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment....

"Because addressing our personal lives is painful and difficult, suggests Becker, we often look for external demons to conquer. Doing so makes us feel heroic, and creates a feeling of immortality through the recognition, validation, and love we receive from others." – pp. 267–9

Lost Souls

"[C]ould a...hatred of human civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, be behind claims of environmental apocalypse?

"[This] might help explain why the people who are the most alarmist about environmental problems are also the most opposed to the technologies capable of addressing them, from fertilizer and flood control to natural gas and nuclear power.

"After two weeks of Extinction Rebellion parading coffins through the street[,] one British columnist...wrote[,] 'This is an upper-middle-class death cult.' " – p. 270

" 'I want you to panic,' said Thunberg to a gathering of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019....

"Two days later[,] Extinction Rebellion protestors stood [a]top...a train...in the London Tube....

"Many in the crowd were gripped by a sudden, uncontrollable fear and wildly unthinking behavior. In other words, they were in a panic.

"[O]n British television['s] This Morning[,] Lunnon...said[, 'I]t's taken us being this disruptive to get on your program[. U]nless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.'

"On BBC's Newsnight, as host Emma Barnett was wrapping up the program, Lunnon practically shout[ed], 'No! We waited! We waited for thirty years for capitalism to work and it hasn't worked!'...

"Thunberg sp[oke] to the United Nations in September 2019. '[Y]ou all come to us young people for hope?' she said, practically shouting. 'How dare you!' " – pp. 270–1

"The late British philosopher Roger Scruton thought deeply about the politics of anger.

"[W]hen 'resentment loses the specificity of its target and becomes directed to society as a whole,' Scruton...argued, [a]t that point [it] becomes 'an existential posture' adopted not 'to negotiate within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves....That posture is, in my view, the core of a serious social disorder.'...

"Young people...might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions....Given [i]t's what climate activists have been taught to believe, it's understandable that so many of them would be so angry.

"In reality, [e]missions are a by[p]roduct of energy consumption, which has been ne[eded] for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, [to] achieve human dignity.

"[P]eople tend to feel put down by climate activists who condemn economic growth, eating meat, flying, and driving. 'Why would people listen to you,' asked Lunnon, 'when...you're some kind of new age Puritan?'

"As such, while some climate leaders and activists may derive psychological benefits from climate alarmism[,] many more people are harmed by it, including the alarmists themselves.

"[A]fter Extinction Rebellion's protests[,] 'I was hearing people my age saying things I found quite disturbing,' says Jeffrey. ' "It's too late to do anything." "There is no future anymore." "We're basically doomed." "We should give up." '...

"Twenty years ago, I [myself] discovered that the more apocalyptic environmentalist books and articles I read, the sadder and more anxious I felt. This was in sharp contrast to how I felt after reading histories of the civil rights movement, whose leaders were committed to an ethos, and [a] politics, of love, not anger.

"[S]everal years later[,] I started to question environmentalism's claims about energy, technology, and the natural environment.

"Now[,] I can see that much of my sadness over environmental problems was a projection, and misplaced. There is more reason for optimism than pessimism.

"Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations[,] and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.

"The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests in rich nations are growing back and wildlife are returning.

"There is no reason poor nations can't develop and adapt to climate change.

"[I]f we embrace technology, [then] habitats available for endangered species, including...gorillas...and penguins, should keep growing in size.

"[The] work to do...has to do with accelerating...existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.

"And so, while I can empathize with the sadness and loneliness behind the anger and fearmongering about climate change, deforestation, and species extinction, I can see that much of it is wrong[—]based on unaddressed anxieties, disempowering ideologies, and misrepresentations of the evidence." – pp. 272–4

Environmental Humanism

"The answer from many rational environmentalists, including myself, who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of apocalyptic environmentalism, has been that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study.

"Others, like Scruton, urge us to aim for a world 'where conflicts are resolved according to a shared conception of justice' and the 'building and governance of institutions'[.]

"But Scruton himself doubted that such a rationalist project could succeed against the apocalyptic tendencies of the regressive left. 'Clearly we are dealing with the religious need, a need planted in our "species being," ' he writes. 'There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought...can ever eradicate.'

"Attempts to affirm the boundary between science and religion will thus likely not work so long as apocalyptic environmentalists speak to deep human needs for meaning and purpose and environmental rationalists don't.

"As such, we need to go beyond rationalism and re-embrace humanism, which affirms humankind's specialness, against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself. As environmental humanists, whether scientists, journalists, or activists, we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress, and then in rationality....

"The 'corrective spice' to science, said...Sir Francis...Bacon, was 'charity (or love).'

"[Thus,] when we hear activists, journalists, IPCC scientists, and others claim [that] climate change will be apocalyptic unless we make immediate, radical changes, including massive reductions in energy consumption, we might consider whether they are motivated by love for humanity or something closer to its opposite." – pp. 274–5

"I[']ve kept Bernadette in the foreground throughout [this book,] to remind us...to feel gratitude for the civilization we take for granted, put claims of climate apocalypse in perspective, and inspire empathy and solidarity for those who do not yet enjoy the fruits of prosperity.

"The stories we tell [do] matter. The picture promoted by apocalyptic environmentalists is inaccurate and dehumanizing. Humans are not unthinkingly destroying nature. Climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, and species extinction are not, fundamentally, consequences of greed and hubris but rather side effects of economic development[,] motivated by a humanistic desire to improve people's lives.

"A core ethic of environmental humanism is that rich nations must support, not deny, development to poor nations. Specifically, rich nations should lift the various restrictions on development aid for energy production[,] in poor and developing nations.

"[F]actories...remain the only way we know...to transform large numbers of unskilled subsistence farmers into city people. The main opposition to [c]heap hydroelectricity [through] the Grand Inga Dam[,] outside of...Congo[,] comes from apocalyptic environmentalists. Environmental humanists should stand up to them." – pp. 275–6

"News media, editors, and journalists might consider whether their constant sensationalizing of environmental problems is consistent with their professional commitment to fairness and accuracy, and their personal commitment to being a positive force in the world. While I am skeptical that stealth environmental activists working as journalists are likely to change how they do their reporting, I am hopeful that competition from outside [of] traditional news media institutions, made possible by social media, will inject new competitiveness into environmental journalism and raise standards.

"Improving environmental journalism requires coming to grips with some fundamentals. Power density determines environmental impact. As such, coal is good when it replaces wood and bad when it replaces natural gas or nuclear. Natural gas is good when it replaces coal and bad when it replaces uranium. Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind's environmental footprint. Power-dense farming, including of fish, creates the prospect of shrinking humankind's largest environmental impact.

"We need to correct our misunderstanding of nuclear energy. It was born from good intentions, not bad ones, nor from some mindless accident of science. Nuclear weapons were created to prevent war and end war, and that is all they have been used for[,] and all they will ever be good for. The United States and other developed nations should renew the commitments they made under 'atoms for peace' in the 1950s in the form of a Green Nuclear Deal, for reasons including but going beyond climate change.

"Th[is] will require recognizing that nuclear weapons, like nuclear energy, are here to stay. We can't get rid of them[—]even if we wanted to[—]for reasons experts have understood since 1945....

"The continued existence of nuclear weapons...stimulate[s] some amount of...existential angst. We need to find a better way to manage, and channel, those anxieties. Confronting them directly as objects of death, and even as symbols of the apocalypse, may help....

"I told...Rhodes [that] I thought the continued existence of nuclear weapons should remind us to be happy to be alive.

" 'You mean like a memento mori," [he] said[.]

"The classic memento mori is the skull...seen in still-life paintings by European artists...after the Black Death....

"When psychologists...encourage people to imagine they are dying, and to look back on their lives, they tend to do so with gratitude, appreciation, and greater love toward those around them.

"The same has been true for me after visiting poor and developing nations[.]" – pp. 277–9

Love > Science

"[At] Environmental Progress, which [is] my new...organization...in Berkeley, California, [n]ature and prosperity for all determine how we do our research, not the other way around....

"When my staff and I meet[,] images of a high-energy, prosperous world with flourishing wildlife frame our thinking. They represent our commitment to goals that are human and natural, rational and moral, and physical and spiritual. Research should be, we believe, in [the] service of some ultimate value. Our [values] are the love of humanity, and the love of nature.

"[While] renovating the office, I realized we had created a shrine, of sorts, to a vision that could be fairly called spiritual. 'Nature and prosperity for all' is our transcendent moral purpose. [And] Environmental Progress is our immortality project." – pp. 279–81

"In 2015, [my wife] Helen [Jeehyun Lee] and I viewed the endangered mountain gorillas[,] up-close and in-person....

"We smelled the gorillas before we saw them. Their smell was unique[:] a pungent mix of very strong body odor, musky perfume, and skunk....

"Finally we were treated to the sight of an infant gorilla. Its mother lay a few feet away. She smiled at us as her baby played near her. It felt like we were two individuals in a single primate community. Scientists warn against the anthropomorphization of animals, but it is impossible not to see gorillas as kin[—]particularly when they are smiling at you.

"People who see gorillas in the wild feel awe and wonder[:] a mix of happiness, surprise, and a bit of fear. 'This wonderful and frightful production of nature walks upright like a man,' wrote a sea captain[.]

"Scientists have long named self-interest as a reason...why humans should care about endangered species like the mountain gorilla. But if the mountain gorillas were ever to go extinct, humankind would become spiritually, not materially, poorer.

"Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them [because] we love them." – pp. 281–2

Epilogue

"Few things make one feel...immortal[,] more...than saving the life of a nuclear plant.

"[S]o, between 2016 and 2020, I worked with environmental humanists around the world to save nuclear power plants....Where nuclear energy was viewed...as optional, it is today increasingly viewed as essential for dealing with climate change.

"[Yet] California and New York are moving forward with plans to prematurely close [the] Diablo Canyon and Indian Point nuclear plants, which provide reliable and low-cost[,] carbon-free power to roughly six million people[.]

"Zion Lights of Extinction Rebellion told me she had changed her mind [about nuclear energy] after a scientist friend told her it was safe. 'I said, "That's not what I've been told." And he said, "Don't just listen to what people tell you." And so I looked it up and he was right. The data shows it is safe.'

"I...testif[ied] before Congress on the state of climate science...in January 2020....I noted...that some scientists, journalists, and activists were finally pushing back against...both [of the] extremes[:] den[ial,] and...exaggerat[ion].

"Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. [W]hile some environmentalists claim [that] their agenda w[ould] also deliver a greener prosperity, the evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse...for most people and for the natural environment.

"While environmental alarmism may be a permanent feature of public life, it need not be so loud....With care, persistence...and, I dare say, love, I believe we can moderate the extremes[,] and deepen understanding and respect[,] in the process. In so trying, I believe we will bring ourselves closer to the transcendent moral purpose most people...share: nature and prosperity for all." – pp. 283–5

Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.