Book Review: Apocalypse Never
Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger (buy now on Amazon)
Summary
Sometimes a book – the words within it – can be compelling in its own right. Other times, the book becomes something more and the weight of each word is felt when you begin to understand the person behind it. Apocalypse Never is such a book, with the weight of each word amplified by an unlikely voice from an equally unlikely location – Michael Shellenbeger is a low-carbon advocate and environmentalist from Berekely, California. You don’t get much more hippie than that.
Understanding The Berkeley Environmentalist
While most of us were concerned with the coolest toys of the day, Michael Shellenberger, at age 16, upset by the images of destruction in the Amazon Rainforest, held a fundraiser for the Rainforest Action Network. Believing that beef production was causing rainforest destruction, he stopped eating beef and became a vegetarian by the time he went to college in 1989. At fifteen years old, he founded Amnesty International at his high school, causing teachers to question whether he was Communist. Two years later, he moved to Nicaragua to learn Spanish and witness the Sandinista socialist revolution. Afterward, he traveled through Central America. While in college, he learned Portuguese so he could live in Brazil and work with the Landless Workers’ Movement. He attended the 1992 United Nations environment summit in Rio De Janeiro, where deforestation was a hot topic.
This is a man who co-founded a progressive, Democratic, labor-environment push for a New Apollo Project, the predecessor to AOC’s Green New Deal. The New Apollo Project sought $300 billion for efficiency, renewables, electric cars, and other technologies. That plan would later be picked up by the Obama Administration.
Michael is the recipient of the most prestigious of awards from environmental groups too, including Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment. If you believe Renewables with a capital R (denoting wind and solar) are good for the environment, he is an unlikely critic.
“Much of what people are being told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.”
It’s About the Environment
As with most of the books I gravitate to, every fact, claim, and argument in this book is based on the best available science, including as assessed by the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and other scientific bodies.
He uses the science to “call bullshit” (using the words of an IPCC lead author) on claims like “The Amazon is a major source of the World’s oxygen supply.” He even shows how groups like Greenpeace do more harm than good for the environment.
Greenpeace, for example, is an unlikely culprit for deforestation and methane emissions. To paraphrase the logic, groups like Greenpeace advocate for free-range cattle (chicken, and similar), instead of industrial beef. This results in ever-increasing amounts of land requirements because free-range takes significantly more land to develop the animals and over a longer period of time. Researchers have found that this policy has resulted in beef production in Brazil being half its potential. It’s added to methane emissions and increased the land-use requirements, which has lead directly to the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest.
Apocalypse Never is a book about the environment and Shellenberger provides numerous examples of how there’s more to the stories we’ve read than we’ve been told. He breaks down multiple seemingly counterintuitive lessons and I recommend his book highly.
Shellenberger is one of the unique voices in the climate change discussion, and his book is a must-read for anyone that chooses to hold an opinion on the matter.
Notes from the Book
“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.”
As I’ve begun to do with other book reviews, I take some time to condense some areas of the book for the lazy readers and people who don’t want to pick up a book. Here were some of the highlights, in my view.
The Psyche of Alarmists
This excerpt from the book was particularly insightful for me, and Shellenberger’s willingness to publicly admit this about his own life and psychology was powerful for me.
“An exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one’s life. What we really fear when we obsess over our death is that we aren’t making the most of our lives. We feel stuck in bad relationships, unsupportive communities, or oppressive careers.
That was certainly the case for me [Shellenberger]. I 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.
Perhaps it is a coincidence, but it is notable that the spike in environmental alarmism comes at a time when anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising within the general population, especially among adolescents, in both the United States and Europe. Seventy percent of American teenagers call anxiety and depression a major problem.
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. ”
He goes on to write and reflect
“Twenty years ago, I 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 politics, of love, not anger.
It was, in part, my awareness of the impact that reading about climate and the environment had on my mood that led me to doubt whether environmentalism could be successful. It was only several years later that I started to question environmentalism’s claims about energy, technology, and the natural environment. Now that I have, I can see that much of my sadness over environmental problems was a projection, and misplaced.
There is more reason for optimism than pessimism.”
Greed Saved the Whales, not Greenpeace
If anything qualifies as a miracle of nature, it’s the blue whale. As a baby, it gains ten pounds an hour drinking its mother’s milk. It takes one ten years to achieve maturity.
By 1830, the United States was the global whaling leader. Whale oil was a luxury commodity because it burned brighter than candles and cleaner than wood fires. Whales provided much else: food, soap, machine lubricants, the base oil for perfume, and from their baleen, corsets, umbrellas, and fishing rods.
The discovery of the Drake Well in Titusville, PA (1859) 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 the peak of the whaling industry, whales 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 petrolem’s high energy-density.
To commemorate the achievement, Vanity Fair magazine published the following cartoon in 1861, showing the whales celebrating the find. By 1900, whaling looked like a dying industry, and U.S. whaling output was less than 10 percent of its peak.
Vanity Fair (1861): cartoon of whales celebrating commercial oil being found which saved the whales from being harvested.
Environmentally Destructive Free-Range
Like the other two examples, much of what we’ve heard and read about meat is 100% wrong. Shellenberger caught when the 2019 IPCC Report proposed a 70% reduction in emissions, it was referring to agricultural emissions. This, among other studies, suggested we eliminate meat and transition humanity to vegetarianism.
While meat production is a relatively modest contributor to climate change, it represents humankind’s single largest impact on natural landscapes. Today, humans use more than one-quarter of Earth’s land surface for meat production.
As it applies, density matters. A gram of protein from beef requires two tines the energy input in the form of feed as a gram from pork, and eight times a gram from chicken. Pasture-beef requires fourteen to nineteen times more land per kilogram than industrial beef. Pasture beef also generates 300-400% more carbon emissions per kilogram than industrial beef.
The dramatic gains in production per hectare are largely due to commercial operations. Meat production nearly doubled in the US since the early 1960s, yet greenhouse gas emissions from livestock declined about 11% during the same period due to these efficiencies. Thankfully, the amount of land used by humankind to produce meat peaked in 2000. Since then, it’s decreased by more than 540 milion square miles – and it happened without a vegitarian revolution The spread of pasture for cattle and other domesticated animals continues to threaten many endangered species, including mountain gorillas and yellow-eyed penguins. Between 1961 and 2016, pastureland expanded by an area almost the size of Alaska. “Free Range” puts this trend at risk.
The Result of Anti-Nuclear Environmental Lobbyists (e.g. Sierra Club)
Shellenberger is pro-nuclear, and he has good reason to be. Nuclear is carbon-neutral and provides cheap, reliable power for decades. It’s particularly energy-dense; its energy output per land use (measured in watts per square meter) is 10,000 w/m2. By comparison, Solar is only able to generate between 5-10 w/m2 and Wind 1- 2 w/m2 (source: Bill Gates in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster)
You’d imagine those deeply interested in decarbonization and the environment would champion such a fuel, capable of cleanly powering first-world economies with reliable, firm power at a fraction of the land use requirement. Instead, Michael exposes how they have done the exact opposite:
· The Sierra Club was responsible for expanding coal use in the United States and killing nuclear energy.
· The Sierra Club deliberately sought to make nuclear plants expensive as part of their strategy to kill nuclear, “We should try to tighten up regulation of the [nuclear] industry,” wrote the organization’s executive director, in a 1976 memo to the board of directors, “with the expectation that this will add to the cost of the industry and render its economics less attractive.”
· Anti-Nuclear groups, including The Sierra Club, killed six nuclear reactors in Ohio. Were the anti-nuclear activists themselves really so afraid of nuclear? There are reasons to doubt it. 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 that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.”
· The Sierra Club and other groups used fear to promote unfounded claims about nuclear energy, like Chernobyl radiation had made its way to Western Europe, to kill nuclear as a fuel. It’s in this vein, fear, that they continue to get their way with climate. And more.
For some perspective, France spends about half as much on electricity as Germany, while producing one-tenth the carbon emissions. The difference? France invested in Nuclear while Germany chose to invest (hundreds of billions) in Renewables.
Money Buys Washington
A popular refrain is that lobbyists buy Washington. Recently we saw how environmentalists and groups like 350.org resulted to guerrilla-style journalism to expose a couple ExxonMobil lobbyists. Not only is their intellectual dishonesty is exposed for deploying the same tactics as Project Veritas who they denounce often, but their intellectual dishonesty about money is equally as troublesome.
Michael exposes in this book that Climate activists massively outspend climate skeptics. The two largest U.S. environmental organizations, EDF and NRDC, have a combined annual budget of about $384 million compared to the mere $13 million of the two largest climate skeptic groups. That amount of money, $384 million, is significantly more than all of the money Exxon gave to climate-skeptical organizations for two decades.
If #ExxonKnew and lobbying is bad, what should we then think of environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Sierra Club, NRDC, 350.org, and similar? Why does the Sierra Club believe they hold the moral high ground, particularly when they were the ones partly and directly responsible for coal generation increases in the 1970s?
Killing Birds & Endangering Species
The expansion of wind turbines has particularly harmed the golden eagle (a protected species) in the western United States, where its population is at a very low level.
Wind turbines are the most serious new threat to several important bird species to emerge in decades. Scientists calculate that a single new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany, will kill hundreds of endangered eagles because it will be located on a major flight path of migratory birds. Governments rarely stop wind projects or require changes in wind turbine locations or operations. Nor do governments require that wind developers disclose when they kill birds and bats, or count the dead. Wind developers have even sued to prevent the public from accessing data about bird kills.
All three environmental organizations (Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, and the NRDC) are advocating the rapid expansion of wind farms in New York State, even though they pose a direct threat to bald eagles.
In 2013, U.S. wildlife officials outraged conservationists and bird enthusiasts when they took the unprecedented step of informing industrial wind energy developers that they would not prosecute them “for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.”
Killing Insects at a Genocidal Rate
The German wind insect death toll [from wind] is an astonishing one-third of the total annual insect migration in southern England, a comparison that scientists say “shows that losses of a trillion per year certainly have a relevant order of magnitude.”
Insects cluster at the same altitudes used by wind turbines. In Oklahoma, a major wind energy state, scientists found that the highest density of insects is between 150 to 250 meters.114 Large new turbine blades stretch from 60 to 220 meters above the ground.
Not in my Backyard (NIMBYism)
“Turns out there’s something called the Starbucks Rule when it comes to siting wind farms,” reported BusinessWeek in 2009. Wind developers “plot where Starbucks are in the general area and then make sure their project is at least thirty miles away. Any closer and there’d be too many NIMBYs who’d object to having their views spoiled by a cluster of 265-foot-tall wind towers.”
Those communities that have proven most able to resist the introduction of a wind farm tend to be more affluent. In 2017, the upper-class residents of Cape Cod, for example, defeated an effort by a wind developer to build a 130-turbine farm, despite the developer having spent $100 million on the project.
The Problem with Renewables is Natural, not Technical
Various studies have shown that the cost of integrating unreliable wind energy is high and rises as more wind is added to the system. For example, in Germany, when wind is 20 percent of electricity, its cost to the grid rises 60 percent. And when wind is 40 percent, its cost rises 100 percent.
Consulting giant McKinsey announced in the fall of 2019 that Germany’s Energiewende programme (nearing $1 trillion invested in wind and solar) posed a significant threat to the nation’s economy and energy supply. Today France spends about half as much for electricity as Germany, while producing one-tenth of the carbon emissions.
If the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required. By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.
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 they are energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical – it’s natural.
(Non)Renewable Waste
Solar panels and wind turbines also require far more in the way of materials and produce more in the way of waste. Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.
California is in the process of determining how to divert discarded solar panels from landfills, which is where they currently go, because solar panel disposal in landfills is “not recommended,” concluded a group of experts, “in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil.”
It is far cheaper for solar manufacturers to buy raw materials than recycle old panels. “The absence of valuable metals/materials produces economic losses,” wrote a team of scientists in 2017. “If a recycling plant carries out every step by the book,” a Chinese expert concluded, “their products can end up being more expensive than new raw materials.”
Since 2016, many solar companies have gone bankrupt.When that happens, the public inherits the burden of managing, recycling, and disposing of photovoltaic waste. In 2019, the New York Times reported: “As solar energy booms in the region, so do expired lead-acid batteries for rooftop solar panels and lithium batteries for solar lamps. E-waste can damage the environment by leaking dangerous chemicals into groundwater and harm people who scavenge recyclable materials by hand.”
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, somewhere between 60 percent to 90 percent of electronic waste is illegally traded and dumped in poor nations.
Biofuels
Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions. The main problem with biofuels—the land required—stems from their low power density. If the United States were to replace all of its gasoline with corn ethanol, it would need an area 50 percent larger than all of the current U.S. cropland.American taxpayers poured an astonishing $24 billion into failed biofuels experiments from 2009 to 2015.
A Vice Presidential Cover-Up for the Closing of a Nuclear Facility
SONGS closed permanently, natural gas replaced the plant’s electrical output, and California’s carbon emissions spiked, as did electricity prices. In November 2014, state and federal agents raided the CPUC’s offices in a joint investigation of potential criminal activities related to the permanent closure and settlement proceedings of SONGS.
Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general at the time, either killed or stalled the investigation. The CPUC refused to turn over sixty or more emails from Governor Brown’s office. In 2014, CPUC attorneys acknowledged that their colleagues might have been destroying evidence related to a criminal investigation into a Pacific Gas & Electric natural gas explosion, which killed eight people. The California legislature passed legislation to reform the CPUC in August 2016, but it was halted at the last minute at Picker’s urging, according to reports by the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune.
State Superior Court Judge Ernest Goldsmith made a strongly worded request for the CPUC to disclose Picker’s correspondence related to SONGS. “This is a big deal,” Goldsmith said. “This is not a trivial issue to the taxpayers of California. And just like the San Bruno events [natural gas explosion that killed eight people] were not a trivial deal, and when something is big enough, it’s just got to come out. It’s going to come out, and it’s either going to be horribly painful, or you can just do the right thing.”
While the dark cloud of criminal investigation hung over CPUC, it has moved forward on closing the state’s last surviving nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon. These circumstances include many of the very same actors and groups involved in negotiating the closure of SONGS. One of the key antinuclear advocates, Americans for Nuclear Responsibility, was represented by John Geesman, a longtime Brown advisor, the former chairman of the California Energy Commission, and a renewable energy industry advocate. When CPUC chairman Peevey proposed his scheme to shut down SONGS, he specifically asked that Geesman be part of the effort.
Corruption in the Democratic Party
Few Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Greentech portfolio, sixteen of twenty-seven, received loans or outright grants from the government. “Considering that the acceptance rate in most of the Department of Energy programs was often 10 percent or less, this is a stunning record,” wrote an investigative reporter. “That $2 million Doerr had invested in politics may have provided the best return on investment he had ever seen.”
Fisker, which produced some of the world’s first luxury hybrid vehicles, received $529 million in federal loans; Doerr was one of Fisker’s major investors. It eventually went bankrupt, costing taxpayers $132 million.
But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $573 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser.
In 2017, Tesla joined NRDC, EDF, and the Sierra Club in urging California government regulators to close Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, the state’s single largest source of clean, zero-emissions energy. Tesla’s statements were transparently self-serving. The nuclear plant, Tesla’s lobbyist claimed, could be replaced by (Tesla’s) solar panels and (Tesla’s) batteries. The government of California, in return, was as of late 2019 subsidizing nearly half the cost of Tesla’s $6,700 Powerwall battery.
The people who benefited the most from the green stimulus were billionaires, including Musk, Doerr, Kaiser, Khosla, Ted Turner, Pat Stryker, and Paul Tudor Jones. Vinod Khosla led Obama’s “India Policy Team” during the 2008 election and was a major financial contributor to Democrats. His companies received more than $300 million.
The Cute Polar Bears!
Remember that National Geographic video depicting a starving bear with the title, “This is what climate change looks like?” Well, better not look now. If you don’t remember, here’s the video.
What about the polar bears? devastating declines in the number of polar bears have indeed failed to materialize, which was something the creators of the starving polar bear footage were forced to admit. “National Geographic went too far with the caption,” said one of them, seeking to shift the blame. But the primary purpose of her expedition was to link dying polar bears to climate change. “Documenting [the effects of climate change] on wildlife hasn’t been easy,” she added. But the reason it wasn’t easy is that there was no evidence for polar bear famine. Of the nineteen subpopulations, two increased, four decreased, five are stable, and eight have never been counted. There is no discernible overall trend.
What a weird place to find yourself when the very people that we are trained to hate by the Social Machines, “climate deniers” are right?
Buy the Book
To gain full insight to the surface details provided and to support Michael’s work, please consider purchasing a copy of his book on Amazon.