From The New Atlantis, Fall 2021:
New Atlantis associate editor Brendan Foht sat down with environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, to discuss the moral vision of mainstream environmentalism, why nuclear power can save nature, and how to make the most of nuclear anxiety. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Brendan Foht: Michael, you have been described as one of the leading voices of “ecomodernism,” a movement that aims to apply science and technology to solve environmental problems, as opposed to trying to force human societies to harmonize with nature. In your most recent book, Apocalypse Never, you take aim at the mainstream environmentalist movement for its alarmism about the impacts of climate change and other threats. What do you think distinguishes the ecomodernist perspective? Is it more of a disagreement over what the science shows about the severity of human impacts on the environment, or is it more of a difference in moral visions of the relationship between humanity and nature?
Michael Shellenberger: I definitely think it’s the latter. In Apocalypse Never, I trace back what we call modern environmentalism to its most important thinker, Reverend Thomas Malthus, the British economist who believed that technology would not be able to keep pace with human needs. It’s been maybe one of the most spectacularly wrong theories that human beings have ever created. We produce 25 percent more food than we need, and deaths from natural disasters have declined 99 percent in many countries, over 90 percent globally. People are living ridiculously long lives that were unimaginable just a half century ago.
We’re doing astonishingly well, and most environmental trends are going in the right direction. Carbon emissions have declined more in the United States than in any other country over the last twenty years, mostly due to fracking. Carbon emissions peaked in Europe in the mid-seventies, in the main European countries I should say. And some people think carbon emissions have peaked globally. I personally think they probably have another ten years of growth, but we’re close to global peak emissions, after which they will go down. We appear to be at peak agricultural land use, and that will go down. So Malthus was sort of spectacularly wrong, both on human progress, but also environmental progress.
But I don’t think that apocalyptic environmentalists are wrong because they are not good at math, or because they don’t know how to read a scientific paper, or because they don’t know what the UN Food and Agriculture Organization data say, or because they don’t know that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change doesn’t predict any increase of deaths from natural disasters or food scarcity.
It’s not that they don’t know those things. They do know those things. They are motivated by something much more, much deeper, and it is definitely a morality. I think it’s actually a religion in the sense that it has a supernatural component as well. The supernatural component is the claim that somehow all of this, despite the trends, is leading to some kind of environmental apocalypse. And I think that’s a supernatural claim.
BF: By “supernatural” do you mean that it is a claim based in a kind of faith that goes beyond reason? Because “supernatural” is a specific metaphysical kind of idea as well. And it seems obvious that they’re not thinking that some ectoplasmic entity is going to emerge out of the world in order to cause this apocalypse, once carbon emissions get to a certain level.
MS: I mean, the tipping point stuff gets close to ectoplasm. Vaclav Smil, who Bill Gates says is the most important intellectual, and whom he relies on for most of his energy analysis, wrote a really comprehensive survey, as did Richard Posner, and I’ve reviewed the rest of the tipping point literature.
And when you start to look at “fat tails” — low-probability, high-consequence events — you’re looking at wars and asteroids and volcanoes, and now you probably add alien invasions and pandemics, and climate change. Climate change consistently comes out — in terms of apocalyptic climate impacts — at the lowest probability and the lowest fatalities. Especially when you consider the catastrophic scenarios like losing the West Antarctic’s ice sheet or Greenland’s, those are 700-year to 1,000-year events. It’s hard to make a Hollywood disaster movie with science like that. So Vaclav ends up ranking those things at the bottom, he puts wars and pandemics at the top. Nuclear war would obviously be apocalyptic or at least catastrophic. There’s a debate around whether humans could survive, but there’s no debate that we could destroy our civilization with nuclear weapons.
Pandemics — we’ve just experienced what a real catastrophe looks like. We did pretty well as a human race, despite, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying. But it’s really hard to come up with something like that for climate change. In a Forbes column, I’ve described my interview with Timothy Lenton, the academic who puts together the most recent tipping point, end-of-the-world, doomsday climate scenario. And it just is what it is. They kind of say: There may be some thing we don’t know about how these ecosystems are set up, and you may have a catastrophe.
And of course that’s true because you can’t prove a negative. But you could actually say that could be true regardless of what carbon emissions are. And so if that’s the case, where everybody ends up going — Smil, but also Roger Pielke — it’s just obvious, the place that you go is that we should have societal resilience in general.
That means that we should have functioning electricity grids. We should have a functioning military. We should have functioning public-health systems. And those things all require energy. And that means that climate change is a side effect of them. But you certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that undermined the basis of your civilization in order to address a problem that could, in some way that we don’t know, be a threat to civilization.
A Political AgendaBF: It seems that the concern you have, or your disagreement with the mainstream environmentalist movement, does seem to focus on their outsized weighing of probabilities of catastrophe, which overwhelms their weighing of the costs and benefits of producing energy, which, as you say, is the basis of our civilization.
You were mentioning earlier that you do think there is a moral difference with environmentalists, and not that they simply are unaware of these facts — about IPCC estimates and things like that. So what do you think motivates them? What makes them invest so much in these highly unlikely scenarios of catastrophe?
MS: The catastrophe scenarios are tied to a political agenda, and the political agenda is to return the energy sector back to unreliable and weather-dependent energy sources. That’s number one.
That’s why solar and wind are the highest priority to basically make energy more expensive and scarce and to make food production more land-inefficient and scarce and expensive, out of an idea that doing so will result in there being fewer people in the world. And that’s according to them, that’s just what they say. I’m just repeating what their agenda is. So it’s basically to make energy and food more scarce and expensive.
And then there’s a kind of genuine romanticism tied to it as well. The idea is that we were in greater harmony with nature when we were all farmers or even hunter-gatherers, depending on which radical environmentalism you want. And there’s two varieties. One is kind of Elizabethan England romanticism, and the other is more radical and more hunter-gatherer — one is more feudal and one is more anarchist.
Those exist side-by-side with, I think, a much darker view of human nature. And so you see environmentalism really has these two impulses. One is the Paul Ehrlich, Malthusian view, which is that there’s just too many damn people and we need to do policies that will reduce the number of people at all costs. And then the other has been that we need to grow tomatoes in our backyards and harmonize and heal our relationship with nature. And they — if not being the same — have worked together for a really long time.
The other thing I would just say is that I have never met anybody who has worked in a really poor country for any significant amount of time, either as a researcher or as a volunteer with the Peace Corps, who agrees with any of the things that environmentalists say. In fact, I think the experience for a lot of people when they work in poor countries is very similar to mine, which is that they go, “Wait a second, cheap energy and cheap food is fundamental to prosperity. Anybody seeking to deny those things is seeking to deny prosperity, and that’s just wrong.” So I do think there are people who have these ideologies of Malthusianism and romanticism, but there’s nothing about them in particular — in some ways I do think it’s just a function of their lack of experience of actually living within or near poverty.
Nuclear Existential AnxietyBF: One of the subjects you’ve written and spoken a lot about is nuclear power. Where do you think nuclear power fits into the way the United States and the world can deal with climate change and other environmental challenges?
MS: Nuclear is such a radical event in human development that we still haven’t come to grips with its meaning or significance or implications for us as a species.
The first and main purpose of nuclear is as a weapon, and that is extremely troubling for a lot of people. They wish it weren’t that way. And the more you learn about it, the more you learn that the ability to split the atom came right out of science. It came right out of the laboratories. It came right out of experimentation. It did not require a big industrial project to split the atom. That’s something that just comes right out of the science and right out of the physical theory. And so the problem is you can’t get rid of this technology even if you really wanted to.
And we now know that, we’ve known that really since World War II. In fact, before the bomb was invented, Niels Bohr — maybe the first, most important thinker about nuclear energy — said to Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb, it’s going to end war. And it basically appears to be in the process of doing that.
I think nuclear as a weapon is continuing to spread, as everybody predicted it would. It’s spread much more slowly than anybody thought it would. Only nine countries have it, and most countries don’t need it and are under somebody else’s shield. And if you just look at the situation today and you think that if the future is going to be more like today, then eventually you’ll have a bunch of big powers in the world that will provide nuclear shields to their spheres of influence.
And that’s the end of the story. And there’s no reason to think that every little country is going to go get a bomb, and a lot of the early fears about nuclear were centrally about that and they turned out to be wrong. And that’s great. I get a lot of people suggesting that what I’m saying is bad news. It’s not bad news.
I was born in 1971 and so I grew up when ABC News told parents to watch a special made-for-TV movie about nuclear war, called The Day After, that showed a classroom of children being, um, carbonized. And then Chernobyl happens. To change your mind about nuclear power after that — it is a big deal, that’s why it’s the biggest deal in some ways.
Because it’s about coming to peace with a really radical event in human history.
Now, we haven’t even begun to use nuclear for its benefits. I mean, we’ve done amazing … we now understand the human body in ways that would never have been possible without radiation or isotopes. And we now have proven that nuclear power plants can desalinate water and make hydrogen — in fact, that they’re the best at doing that. And they operate peacefully and we have a great technology, these water-cooled reactors. But because of the overhang, the hangover — either, or both — of nuclear weapons, we haven’t begun to take advantage of nuclear energy’s real benefits.
Its real benefits are to be the energy transition after fossil fuels. Basically, what nuclear does is it allows for everybody on Earth to live high-energy prosperous lives with a radical reduction in our environmental footprint. And, yes, part of that is the power plants, particularly not using renewables, which require 400 times more land than a nuclear plant. But even when you get to fuels, transportation fuels, you don’t have to do fracking anymore, you don’t have to do any oil drilling, you’ve solved your heating and your cooling, and eventually it’ll make hydrogen for next-generation jet planes. Then you kind of go, “Wow, it actually is the solution to all of the carbon in the energy system.”....
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There are quite a few climate activists who don't care for Shellenberger. At all.
If interested see also:
In which @gilliantett absolutely nails it. pic.twitter.com/LWAqLiTm0n
— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) November 11, 2021
