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Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All Kindle Edition
Now a National Bestseller!
Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.
Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.
But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.
Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.
Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions.
What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication date30 Jun. 2020
- File size30268 KB
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| Customer Reviews |
4.6 out of 5 stars
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4.6 out of 5 stars
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| Price | £10.99£10.99 | £15.00£15.00 |
| ✓ | ✓ |
Product description
Review
"Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book. Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger uses science and lived experience to rescue a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart." — Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
“Environmental issues are frequently confused by conflicting and often extreme views, with both sides fueled to some degree by ideological biases, ignorance and misconceptions. Michael Shellenberger’s balanced and refreshing book delves deeply into a range of environmental issues and exposes misrepresentations by scientists, one-sided distortions by environmental organizations, and biases driven by financial interests. His conclusions are supported by examples, cogent and convincing arguments, facts and source documentation. Apocalypse Never may well be the most important book on the environment ever written.” — Tom Wigley, climate scientist, University of Adelaide, former senior scientist National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
“We must protect the planet, but how? Some strands of the environmental movement have locked themselves into a narrative of sin and doom that is counterproductive, anti-human, and not terribly scientific. Shellenberger advocates a more constructive environmentalism that faces our wicked problems and shows what we have to do to solve them.” — Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
"If there is one thing that we have learned from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that strong passions and polarized politics lead to distortions of science, bad policy, and potentially vast, needless suffering. Are we making the same mistakes with environmental policies? I have long known Michael Shellenberger to be a bold, innovative, and nonpartisan pragmatist. He is a lover of the natural world whose main moral commitment is to figure out what will actually work to safeguard it. If you share that mission, you must read Apocalypse Never.” — Jonathan Haidt, author of Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
"The painfully slow global response to human-caused climate change is usually blamed on the political right’s climate change denial and love affair with fossil fuels. But in this engaging and well-researched treatise, Michael Shellenberger exposes the environmental movement’s hypocrisy in painting climate change in apocalyptic terms while steadfastly working against nuclear power, the one green energy source whose implementation could feasibly avoid the worst climate risks. Disinformation from the left has replaced deception from the right as the greatest obstacle to mitigating climate change." — Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science, MIT
"The trouble with end-of-the-world environmental scenarios is that they hide evidence-based diagnoses and exile practical solutions. Love it or hate it, Apocalypse Never asks us to consider whether the apocalyptic headline of the day gets us any closer to a future in which nature and people prosper.” — Peter Kareiva, director of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA, and former chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy
"In this tour de force of science journalism, Michael Shellenberger shows through interviews, personal experiences, vignettes, and case histories that environmental science offers paths away from hysteria and toward humanism. This superb book unpacks and explains the facts and forces behind deforestation, climate change, extinction, fracking, nature conservation, industrial agriculture, and other environmental challenges to make them amenable to improvements and solutions." — Mark Sagoff, author of The Economy of the Earth
"We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias. But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.” — Steve McCormick, former CEO, The Nature Conservancy and former President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
"Michael Shellenberger loves the Earth too much to tolerate the conventional wisdom of environmentalism. This book, born of his passions, is a wonder: a research-driven page turner that will change how you view the world. I wish I'd been brave enough to write it, and grateful that he was." — Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT and author of More from Less
"Will declaring a crisis save the planet? The stakes are high, but Michael Shellenberger shows that the real environmental solutions are good for people too. No one will come away from this lively, moving, and well-researched book without a deeper understanding of the very real social challenges and opportunities to making a better future in the Anthropocene." — Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction
"Michael Shellenberger methodically dismantles the tenets of End Times thinking that are so common in environmental thought. From Amazon fires to ocean plastics, Apocalypse Never delivers current science, lucid arguments, sympathetic humanism, and powerful counterpoints to runaway panic. You will not agree with everything in this book, which is why it is so urgent that you read it." — Paul Robbins, Dean, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
About the Author
Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings, and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.
Product details
- ASIN : B07Y8FHFQ7
- Publisher : Harper; Illustrated edition (30 Jun. 2020)
- Language : English
- File size : 30268 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 430 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 69,368 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 9 in Human Geography (Kindle Store)
- 101 in Social Science Human Geography
- 169 in Meteorology
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never" and "San Fransicko" (HarperCollins, October 2021).
"Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” says historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger rescues with science and lived experience a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart.”
He has been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.
Shellenberger advises policymakers around the world including in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In January 2020, Shellenberger testified before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives.
He has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.
Shellenberger was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019 to serve as an independent Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, to be published in 2022 his most recent Congressional testimony on the state of climate science, mitigation, and adaptation.
Shellenberger is a leading environmental journalist who has broken major stories on Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires.
He also writes on housing and homelessness and has called for California to declare a state of emergency with regards to its addiction, mental health, and housing crises. He has authored widely-read articles and reports on the topic including “Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse,” “California in Danger.”
His articles for Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and his TED talks ("How Fear of Nuclear Hurts the Environment," "Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power" and “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet”) have been viewed over six million times.
Shellenberger was featured in "Pandora's Promise," an award-winning film about environmentalists who changed their minds about nuclear, and appeared on "The Colbert Report." He debated Ralph Nader on CNN’s "Crossfire" and Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen at UCLA .
His research and writing have appeared in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology, The New Republic, and cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News, The New Republic.
Shellenberger has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years. In the 1990s he helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, and inspire Nike to improve factory conditions in Asia. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.
He lives in Berkeley, California and travels widely.
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In short, this book's important.
I can't imagine the painful shift in worldview the author had to go through to write it - he basically turns his entire personal history and life experience through 180 degres to reach the beliefs he now holds - but whatever it costs him, it's worth it.
Yes, it's well written and nicely sequenced - as any professional book should be - but its value comes from filling in the blanks the environmental movement consistently and unforgivably fails to fill. Over a quarter of the book is footnotes and attributions. Properly contextual scientific data, reasonable assumptions and projections instead of doom-mongering, a look at history and trends instead of media-friendly snapshots.
Yes, there are more forest fires, but it's because the controlled burns of the past don't happen, and disasters are getting pent-up. Yes, there are natural disasters, but they harm fewer people in developed economies, despite a far larger population. Yes, there may be a tipping point beyond which catastrophe becomes likely, but it's more like a 4C rise than 2C, impossible on current trendlines. Yes, we burp a lot of Co2 into the atmosphere - but levels in developed countries have been falling for decades, and are already starting to peak in much of the developing world.
All this means good news for the planet. Yes, our pale blue dot is fragile and we shouldn't abuse it. But it also lets us thrive economically with its resources, build better lives, create more opportunities for ourselves. Technology is solving climate-related problems - and has been solving them for hundreds of years. We live in a dynamic system. Coastlines change, seasons fluctuate, and in response populations move and cities die and grow. Humans are adaptable.
Most unforgivable of all? That friendlier technologies - fracking, natural gas, nuclear, intensive farming - are consistently opposed by those who claim to love this planet most. The worst environmental issues may already be behind us. Far too many green-thinking people are charlatans, however well-meaning. And chapter by chapter, this book explains why.
The author takes on multiple green shibboleths and demonstrates just how many of them stem from the excitable imaginations of activists - not real science or observed reality. All the more poignant when you learn the author is himself a lifelong activist - the real deal, living and working with peasants in Brazil and Nicaragua in his socialist youth, not an "armchair activist" applauding truanting teens on YouTube.
For those of us (most) who care deeply about the world we share, but want to base our decisions on actual facts rather than histrionics, this book lets you rebut essentially every argument. The world isn't perfect, but nor is it dying, and it doesn't have an expiration date of a few years ahead. Indeed, on the evidence, we're treating that planet better and better as we learn more about it.
This book is both enjoyable and informative. Everyone with even a passing interest in ecology should read it.
And a final word to all those "activists" who'll doubtless be turning on the author in fury: we might have taken you a bit more seriously if you didn't all dress like postapocalyptic children's entertainers.
Many of these facts will be hard for some readers to take on board, which is understandable, especially since we've all been marinated in eco-doom for years now, little wonder there is so much anxiety and depression surrounding the whole issue these days.
However, Shellenberger shows us that this is a largely false impression and that when looked at in a sincere, critical and unbiased way, many claims and scenarios we all take for granted now, have long been exaggerated and hyped for various, unscientific reasons. Openly so in many cases, if you care to look, as Shellenberger has.
Indeed it appears that our history is littered with scares and hysteria-driven panics and it doesn't look as if this situation will change any time soon. Yet this current panic, which is being fed by everything from news organisations selling bad news - because people read that - through fairly basic and obvious ideological motivations, to outright disdain for humanity as a whole, needs to be challenged vigorously. Many of the motivations for advocating such fear I have had personal experience of, through some of my 'deep green' friends and so this message resonated particularly with me as I read the book.
Incredibly, to most people anyway, there are activists in the world who would rather not cure the situation they the urge us all to 'panic' about but simply to use it as an excuse to halt economic growth. For them, human existence is a stain on the world, a world that would just be better off if we weren't around, or if we are around, there should be far less of us and we should be living an agrarian existence - and so live shorter lives and generally suffer more for the sin of being here.
Of course most cannot say that outright, but by influencing energy policies in developing countries in such a way that it denies them the growth they so badly need, they can achieve this aim to some extent.
And so Shellenberger's support for nuclear energy is not to enrich himself, or for any such selfish motive, it is simply the result of going through the process of discovering what the environmental activist world he used to be part of really thinks and believes. How it seems to be obsessively against nuclear energy, yet it is the cleanest, safest and most energy dense method of generating electricity we have. And that if we really are worried about CO2 emissions - and also want people to thrive and flourish (you do don't you?), as we have in the developed world, then this is he way we must go.
The problem is that, as mentioned above, this is not what motivates many of eco activists. The policies they advocate, cloaked in semi-scientific terminology and respectability, are nothing more than an attempt to limit growth, to constrain human progress and to scare us into believing that this world of windmills, intermittent unreliable and expensive, land-gobbling energy production is somehow 'better'.
Thankfully, Shellenberger writes of ways in which we can counter some of the claims, prophecies and language used by people who don't necessarily want you or I to travel, live comfortably and become wealthy. And especially don't seem to want people in under-developed countries living like we do.
Sensible people, who don't want to indulge in unquestioning, zealous fear-mongering should read this bit carefully and act upon it. It's no coincidence that green environmentalism bears many similarities to religion, as Shellenberger also explores in some depth.
The last word I think, should go to hydro-electrical engineer John Briscoe: 'Time and time again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, have never followed, nor are willing to follow'.
And I'm afraid that about sums it up. And I think that's tragic.
It begs the questions, "Who are you to tell a struggling mother and father in any part of the world that they can't connect to the power grid to help feed/raise their children due to "climate change"?
Which brings up the worst part of the entire book. It mentions the hypothesis that burning hydrocarbons will rapidly heat up the entire planet and cause a massive apocalypse without going into any of the science that refutes this. I can't understand why the author wouldn't address this anywhere in the book considering it is the antithesis to the entire motive underpinning Thunberg, Just Stop Oil and others in that camp. Patrick Moore, Randall Carlson and Peter Clack are names for anyone interested in reading about the other side of the argument.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 December 2022
It begs the questions, "Who are you to tell a struggling mother and father in any part of the world that they can't connect to the power grid to help feed/raise their children due to "climate change"?
Which brings up the worst part of the entire book. It mentions the hypothesis that burning hydrocarbons will rapidly heat up the entire planet and cause a massive apocalypse without going into any of the science that refutes this. I can't understand why the author wouldn't address this anywhere in the book considering it is the antithesis to the entire motive underpinning Thunberg, Just Stop Oil and others in that camp. Patrick Moore, Randall Carlson and Peter Clack are names for anyone interested in reading about the other side of the argument.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Brazil on 6 September 2022
Environmental alarmism has polarized policy makers and paralyzed the rest of us. Climate change is of course real. But many of the policies that could dampen its ramifications are worsened by environmental groups.
This book delves into the politics of climate change. Instead of alarmism, this book provides pragmatic solutions. One such solution is to embrace Nuclear Energy. It is the safest, cleanest and most reliable source of energy. If we can solve the energy problem, we can solve nearly all challenges faced by the world - including climate change. Unfortunately, as a result of many activist groups, nuclear energy has been unfairly berated in favor of “renewable energy”. So today, many nations are obsessively destroying large swaths of land for solar and wind farms; ironically, this has resulted in an overall increase in emissions since their unreliability must be supplanted with burning more coal and fossil fuels.
Many environmentalists see the world through a Malthusian perspective - one that sees development in the third world as harmful to the ecosystem and hence denies them energy dense solutions to stutter their progress. But how can the poor be expected to take care of the environment if they are forced to rely upon it for sustenance? People kept at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid cannot possibly be persuaded to give up hunting and deforestation. What we need is for more people to move to cities so better waste management and energy solutions can be provided. In other words, it is only through human development that farmlands can be reclaimed by forests.
There is hope. But this hope is stunted when the solutions offered are short-sighted and laced with apocalyptic scaremongering.
Reviewed in Canada on 22 January 2021
Environmental alarmism has polarized policy makers and paralyzed the rest of us. Climate change is of course real. But many of the policies that could dampen its ramifications are worsened by environmental groups.
This book delves into the politics of climate change. Instead of alarmism, this book provides pragmatic solutions. One such solution is to embrace Nuclear Energy. It is the safest, cleanest and most reliable source of energy. If we can solve the energy problem, we can solve nearly all challenges faced by the world - including climate change. Unfortunately, as a result of many activist groups, nuclear energy has been unfairly berated in favor of “renewable energy”. So today, many nations are obsessively destroying large swaths of land for solar and wind farms; ironically, this has resulted in an overall increase in emissions since their unreliability must be supplanted with burning more coal and fossil fuels.
Many environmentalists see the world through a Malthusian perspective - one that sees development in the third world as harmful to the ecosystem and hence denies them energy dense solutions to stutter their progress. But how can the poor be expected to take care of the environment if they are forced to rely upon it for sustenance? People kept at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid cannot possibly be persuaded to give up hunting and deforestation. What we need is for more people to move to cities so better waste management and energy solutions can be provided. In other words, it is only through human development that farmlands can be reclaimed by forests.
There is hope. But this hope is stunted when the solutions offered are short-sighted and laced with apocalyptic scaremongering.






