Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger

I

Here’s Michael Shellenberger’s solution to our environmental problems: let’s all get rich.

But aren’t all the cool people on Twitter talking about degrowth? They are, and they are wrong.

Rich countries have a better record on many issues specifically because they can afford this. Sure, they are responsible for more carbon emissions, but it’s not because people in Congo choose to lead a clean lifestyle. They would love to have a steady power source (even if it would burn coal), and we should them more often. Also, rich countries are resilient. Climate change may cause more extreme events, but hurricanes and fires are less dangerous when you have money to build better and evacuate faster.

But can’t we talk about climate as an existential risk even if it’s not? Maybe Extinction Rebellion is wrong about humans dying out in ten years, but what’s so bad about getting a wonderful green world of solar and wind even if we didn’t really need it? Argument #1: One in five UK kids have nightmares about climate change. Childhood may be less pleasant if people around you are constantly talking about the end of the world in 2030. Argument #2 (which, it seems to me, isn’t explicitly made by Shellenberger): some problems are better dealt with in non-obvious ways that require longer timescales. Argument #3: people just give up.

Shellenberger thinks that some environmentalists have misled us into alarmism. Here are some of the stories where they have been wrong:

Fires in the Amazon rainforests don’t kill the planet’s lungs, because this isn’t how the lungs work (forests produce and consume oxygen, so the net contribution is effectively zero). Deforestation is a problem, but not a new one—people are worried about Brazil converting large areas into pastures and soy fields, yet European farmers won’t be ordered to plant the trees and leave their lands. Greenpeace and other NGOs pressured the Brazilian government into unnecessarily strict forest laws, and this led to Bolsonaro’s presidency. Also, Greenpeace conflated Cerrado savannahs with Amazon rainforests; World Bank published reports saying that modern intensive agriculture is bad; Macron revitalised the deforestation debate to protect French farmers.
Plastic straws do kill turtles and plastic recycling basically doesn’t exist (dumping all your stuff to China or Malaysia doesn’t count as recycling). But there are some studies showing that maybe plastics can disintegrate faster and better than previously thought (thanks to sunlight and microbes). More importantly, even though plastic stuff is killing a lot of marine life now, humans killed many more elephants and turtles before they invented plastics. Even more importantly, plastic stuff is not as devastating as fishing boats are which kill both directly and through overfishing.
Animals are dying out, but we are far from a global extinction event. That popular book you’ve seen relies on a specific model too much, and this model isn’t doing great. Also, we are pretty good at saving very small populations and we are already protecting about 15% of the land surface as important habitats.
The whales have been saved not by activism, but by capitalism. By the time International Whaling Commission created a moratorium in 1982, 99% of all whales killed in the 20th century had already died; also, IWC set quotas too high. Whales have been saved by kerosene and palm oil becoming cheaper, not by Greenpeace. Notably, countries without free markets have continued whaling for longer (not just USSR but also Japan and Norway that had protectionist policies).
Carbon emissions from meat are noticeable, but cutting just those won’t be enough. Even if we all went vegetarian or vegan, total carbon emissions would go down by five, maybe ten percent. Free-range farming sounds great, but pasture beef requires fifteen times more land and emits three times more carbon than industrial beef (also, cows like predictability and cleanliness, so they might be okay with not roaming the fields.

There are more, obviously; I’m leaving out a lot of IPCC reports, penguins, and fires. And many of these stories are definitely simplifying difficult question from almost intrinsically hard fields. Modelling climate change is definitely hard. Measuring plastic levels in seas takes a lot of time. Even counting animals requires either many high-quality cameras and computer vision advances or an integrated solution that’s also known as a human sitting and watching a single tree for twelve hours a day.

(And after you’ve counted some animals, you’re left with questions like what to do with animals you can’t count because they died out eons—or fifty years—ago. Here’s a paper saying that we are in the sixth extinction because current extinction for species is much higher than the standard rate between the mass extinction events. But how sure are we about species that died out in the 1600s? IUCN Red List (source for the Threatened-Vulnerable-Extinct plaque in Wikipedia) has a graph showing that more assessed species get classified as threatened each year, but the percentage of threatened is going down. Should we even be counting species since they are so dependent on whether we have enough biologists to classify everything?)

II

What do all those stories have in common? Weirdly, Shellenberger isn’t very interested in why wrong versions have become popular or what are general working solutions. Instead, he is very interested in talking about Malthus.

A lot of people in the twentieth century were worried about overpopulation. Some of those people (including Paul Ehrlich—the worse Paul Ehrlich, of course) also thought that “giving society cheap and abundant energy would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun” (apparently, because this energy would make the humanity to industrialise every corner of the planet; also, he thought we should all adopt ways of living that are traditional in French Polynesia. I’m sorry for talking about Paul Ehrlich in polite society.)

Of course, overpopulation didn’t happen. But this thinking led to rich countries and global organisations putting their aid money in charity and not in infrastructure development. If we are not helping poorer countries, let’s at least not stop their attempts at industrial growth, says Shellenberger.

The current degrowth vogue probably also partly stems from these Malthusian roots. But even more important is the fact that most of those calling for stopping growth don’t know enough about poor countries. We can’t just redistribute everything—not because it’s politically, but because it isn’t enough. There will be a lot of growth in poor countries, and it will lead to more carbon emissions—and an enormous increase in human well-being.

If people are indeed actively fighting against power stations in Africa, we should fight back. If people are started to burn gas instead of coal, we shouldn’t immediately think they’ve sold their souls to Gazprom. But I think we should be interested in why people worry about straws instead of overfishing. “We humans should take as little space as possible” is a useful takeaway from Shellenberger’s energy density discussions, but it doesn’t help in every case.

Some issues make people rise up to immediately call for a ban on this barbaric and medieval thing that can’t be tolerated in modern society. Free-range farming sounds great because of the beautiful image of a cow running its first non-steeplechase mile. However, banning industrial farming will hit not only the poorest people but also the wildlife for which you don’t have an immediate image. Non-ban decisions need explanations and transparency, but people can like cute non-intuitive explanations (sometimes even too much)!

And when you do need a ban, just redeploy Extinction Rebellion.

III

Shellenberger spends a lot of time on the ways solar and wind aren’t enough because of the unsolved storage issues—batteries aren’t there yet, and pumped-storage hydroelectricity needs tenfold more dams in the US to handle everything (pumped hydro is putting the water up a hill when it’s sunny or windy, and letting it go down to spin the generators later).

(I think Shellenberger is attacking a straw man here. Sure, that particular plan of putting everything into dams isn’t going to work, but we don’t need to do it. Real Engineering has a recent video on pumped hydro in Ireland (including a visit to the Turlough Hill station). His estimate is that Ireland would need about 37 such stations to switch from gas to wind completely. Building them is expensive (about one billion dollars per station) and lengthy; more importantly, you need some help from geography (ideally, two freshwater lakes, one on the hill, another just below that hill). In some places you can use seawater, and there are ideas about putting water underground, but it all won’t happen any time soon. In practice, however, you need all 37—Li-ion will get better, hydrogen will get better, some efficiencies will increase, and helping all that with a station or ten might be enough.)

(On a related note, existing dams aren’t in a good shape, and we should spend a lot on their maintenance to avoid another Banqiao.)

More importantly, both solar and wind need a lot of space, and that space is being taken away from wildlife (noise is bad, mercury is dangerous, getting your wings crushed by a fan is lethal). Meanwhile, nuclear plants are comparatively small, provide a steady baseline and emit zero carbon. Also, they are extremely safe.

And despite all that, people are afraid of nuclear plants. How did that happen?

Shellenberger’s non-obvious answer is the Brown family famous for being disproportionally represented among California governors.

In the late 1960s, the Indonesian state-owned oil company Pertamina asked Pat Brown, who just left the governor’s post, to help them raise some money on Wall Street. Brown raised some 13 billion and in return got a concession to sell Pertamina’s oil in the US and to lobby for its interests in Washington. Quite soon California enacted a regulation that would allow only low sulphur oil to be used there—and, would you believe it, that’s just the type of oil found in Indonesia (an attempt to build a refinery for Alaska oil has been blocked).

Pat’s son Jerry, both as governor between 1975 and 1983, and in his later career was very keen on closing existing nuclear plants in California and killing any plans for the new ones. Sure, he didn’t own anything himself, but his sister Kathleen was on the board of the company responsible for a massive gas leak that might have been ignored for too long by the government of California.

Shellenberger has more such stories about lobbying and hidden interests: for instance, if you’re Tesla and you own SolarCity, why wouldn’t you tell the government it’s a good idea to kill the last remaining nuclear plant in California? If you’re a traditional fossil fuel company, you love to be seen near wind and solar, and those still need your gas baseline, so why wouldn’t you put Greta Thunberg pictures in all your corporately sincere #solar tweets while spending your actual efforts on lobbying against nuclear?

Other examples are less convincing. I don’t think you can call Michael Bloomberg a “major investor in natural gas” based on an article in which the main evidence is Bloomberg’s hedge fund manager saying “yeah, maybe we will invest in gas a bit more”. Should you chastise Al Gore for selling a TV channel he co-founded to Al Jazeera (which means Qatar which means oil)? I don’t find this purism helpful: Sierra Club taking money from a gas company CEO and coming out against nuclear is evidence of dishonesty; having a small percentage of your money in stocks of gas companies isn’t.

Overall, I think Shellenberger overestimates the politicians’ role in the decline of nuclear power. He has a scene where Jerry Brown comes to an approving crowd at a “No Nukes” concert in 1979, but people weren’t there for Brown. Shellenberger talks a bit about Jane Fonda and Simpsons but is more interested in journalistic investigations. Fair enough, it’s not a media studies book. And yet, hundreds of millions more people have seen the nuclear plant in Springfield than have heard about Jerry Brown (hundreds of millions would be surprised to learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t a governor anymore). I don’t think I have a complete understanding of why Chernobyl is a household name and an HBO series but Banqiao and Bhopal aren’t. It is mostly a product of confusion caused by nuclear bombs using the same uranium, plutonium and the word “nuclear”?

But no matter what happened previously, it is now on nuclear plants builders and proponents to fight the misconceptions. I don’t think we are doing a good enough job here.

IVa

From 2012 to approximately 2021 Belarus has been building the Astraviec nuclear power plant, and by “Belarus has been building” I mean “Rosatom has been building in Belarus using money provided by the Russian credit”. Rosatom is a great company, and reactors of the same type are either already built or under construction in Russia, China, Egypt, Bangladesh and Finland. Despite this, Belarusian nuclear has been a disaster.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the reactor itself. Belarus isn’t sunny or windy, but it doesn’t have serious storms or earthquakes, so building a nuclear plant here is a good idea. You just have to convince the population scarred by Chernobyl that what you’re is fine and great and useful, and the way to do that is definitely not through empty repetitions of “everything‘s fine, you don’t need to know more“ mantra. It doesn’t matter whether a random construction element falling is a serious mishap, what matters is whether people think it is. “Something happened, and the government doesn‘t want to talk about it” is an instant pattern-match for Chernobyl. You can’t fight it by putting out interviews with mumbling bureaucrats who look like just came back to Belarus after receiving a medal from Brezhnev. You can only fight it with honesty and good explanations.

In Minsk, I’ve seen several billboards praising wind as a source of energy (our ancestors used it!), but not a single one about nuclear safety. I don’t think Belarusian state TV channels have even tried making a good documentary explaining how Astraviec is different from Chernobyl (one can find some token attempts on Youtube, but they are either badly made by a local TV station or badly made by Rosatom itself). If you’re spending 10 billion to build the plant, you shouldn’t worry about spending 10 million to build great messaging about it.

Of course, it’s all completely moot for some time. Belarus is now a failed state, with its government being laser-focused on making the word “ridiculous” unusable (10 years for being a witness of a murder by a policeman? 4 years for throwing a flower into riot police’s direction? Talking about creating own vaccine because you spent too much time denying COVID, and anyway you need money to pay the military to protect you?). There aren’t any TV ads explaining how the nuclear plant works, because there are only ads praising the army and the riot police. Still, there will be a new government, and nuclear in Belarus deserves a better future. In the end, the old government’s not doing any propaganda work around it might even be helpful.

IVb

Smog is the worst thing about living in Kraków. People have been successfully selling masks in Poland before 2020. Scientists in the Kraków’s Jagiellonian University are the world’s leading experts the air pollution allergy. I thought about buying noise-cancelling headphones just to battle the second air purifier in my apartment.

People are telling me it’s been worse. Kraków has now banned burning any wood and coal inside the city by private citizens. Poland is now generating less than half of its electricity from coal (although it’s still 46 percent, and it’s been replaced by oil and gas; it also probably happened mostly because Poland imports more electricity by the year, since burning Polish coal is becoming too expensive).

Aside from just buying power from outside, there are plans for more renewables (wind) and (finally) nuclear (six (!) plants with the first one up and running by 2033). Poland had a failed attempt at nuclear once before: Żarnowiec nuclear plant has been started in the 1980s but was abandoned in 1990 after Chernobyl-inspired protests and a referendum in the Gdańsk voivodeship. Some parts of Żarnowiec are now in use in the Paks nuclear plant that generates more than 50 percent of Hungary’s electricity.

I’m hopeful but not entirely optimistic. On the hand, it seems too easy to make fun of a party that thinks LGBT is the main threat to Poland’s future and instead of solving an existing crisis (COVID) creates a new one by banning abortions at the worst possible moment. On the other hand, there will be protests both by misguided environmentalists and redundant coal miners, and it might be too nice and easy for any party to cave in and delay this mess even further. Luckily gas is too Russian for anyone’s liking here.

And there is already a lot of complacency from the government’s side. There won’t be any building until 2024. Nuclear plants take this long and cost this much partly because they are large and complicated machines, but also because we decided to have much stricter safety requirements for them (compared to, say, chemistry factories, and coal mines). But you’re the government! You can change it! (Maybe Brussels won’t like it, but Brussels didn’t like killing independent judiciary and media, and yet here we are.)

V

Shellenberger doesn’t have a chapter full of ambitious yet completely realistic solutions. Instead, he spends much of the last chapter arguing that environmentalism is a religion. This seems to me if not exactly something in a bad faith, but at least completely useless. Maybe environmentalism does check all the requirements from your favourite definition. Maybe now you feel better about yourself when you can’t win an argument against an anti-nuclear alarmist. But weren’t we talking about how we need to make this whole environment stuff more about facts and less about feelings?

No, says Shellenberger and decides to go full Haidt against apocalyptic environmentalists. They have spirituality and death-adjacent excitement? Let’s one-up them! And... and that’s it going to happen? “<..> we need to go beyond rationalism and re-embrace humanism, which affirms humankind’s specialness, against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself. <..> we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress, and then in rationality.”

I don’t know. It seems to be super-standard consequentialism? But with environmental progress, which just converts to higher weights for non-humans?

A bit further, Shellenberger starts his epilogue with the sentence “Few things make one feel more immortal than saving the life of a nuclear plant.” People who are protesting the closures of coal mines that existed for hundreds of years probably feel the same. Let’s just save nuclear plants because they are small, efficient, and clean. One day they will be replaced by fusion and better batteries, and I hope Shellenberger won’t feel a need to protect a fission plant.

I don’t think we should get into this game of “who can better exploit human moral foundations”. On a recent Rationally Speaking episode, Haidt was still talking about the left not utilising all these foundations completely, but it seems to me that all people are getting better at this. Supporting solar and wind and hating nuclear is right up the purity alley, and loyalty importance on the left might have been underestimated by Haidt.

Understanding why people don’t like nuclear is useful. Finding out why apocalypse pronouncements are so popular may help us. And there is nothing more important than development economics. But we don’t need to make a religion out of it. Esther Duflo can be wrong, Saint Esther can’t. You can tell inspiring stories of progress and showcase examples of growth helping people (as Shellenberger does) without sliding into an emotional contest. You can explain things to people. You can tell people something is x when it’s x, even if 10x would make them care more about this problem.

You don’t need to tell me I’m a naive optimist. I know that.