Recanting Climate Alarmism

With all that's going on in the country right now this article at Quillette by prominent environmentalist and climate activist Michael Shellenberger has passed pretty much under the radar, but it's remarkable in its implications for the climate debate.

Shellenberger is a progressive activist who has been persuaded that the changes occurring in the global climate are not nearly as dire as we've been led to believe by the Al Gores of the world. Shellenberger writes:

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

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

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

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

So Shellenberger's no right wing coal CEO seeking to rollback regulations on carbon emissions. His article begins with an apology:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

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

Shellenberger goes on to list a dozen climate-related facts that few people know. Among them are these:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction.”
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s.
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse.
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change.
• Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003. 

What finally made him go over to the "dark side"? Last year, he writes, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.” 

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.” Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

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

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough.

He proceeds to discuss his book titled, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All in which he makes claims such as,

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

"Why were we all so misled?" Shellenberger asks. His article goes on to give some reasons. Anyone interested in the environmental controversy surrounding climate change should check it out. 

When someone of Shellenberger's background and status as an environmentalist says we've been duped it's a bit like Anthony Fauci telling us that the Covid-19 pandemic was pretty much a hoax. It should grab our attention.