Author of the book "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism
Hurts Us All" is Michael Shellenberger, who has
been a wellknown enviromentalist for many years.
In his book is going to negate all his previous opinions, and he will
address the following points, which will be discussed further:
(I want to make it clear that the following is what Shellenberger is saying
and are not necessarily my opinion. I will comment on each one later.)
- Humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction"
- The Amazon is not "the lungs of the world"
- Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
- Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
- The amount of land we use for meat (humankind’s biggest use of land)
has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
- The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate
change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in
Australia and California
- Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been
declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
- Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea
level
- We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will
continue to rise as the world gets hotter
- Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger
threats to species than climate change
- Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
- Preventing future pandemics requires more not less "industrial"
agriculture
The author will write about climate change, deforestation, plastic waste,
species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
He will address the following topics:
- 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% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from
today’s 0.5% to 50%
- We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower,
power densities
- Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
- 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% 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
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