APOCALYPSE NEVER—Amazon review
Apocalypse Never is an extremely important—and highly readable—book about Earth’s environment and contemporary human society. The author is a lifelong environmentalist. This book carries forward Michael Shellenberger’s personal mission—to protect the natural environment and to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people.
Shellenberger explains, “I wrote Apocalypse Never because the conversation about climate change and the environment has spiraled out of control.” In England, for example, leaders of an organization called Extinction Rebellion have made claims on national television, that because of climate change “Billions of people are going to die. Life on Earth is dying. Governments aren’t addressing it.”
A 16-year old Swedish girl became an international celebrity in 2019 for crying out that same message. In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.
Many young people are suffering psychic trauma because they have heard some of their elders predicting over and over again that “our kids will be dead in ten to fifteen years,” while declaring that awful fate has been proven scientifically.
Shellenberger interviewed Sarah Lunnon, a representative of Extinction Rebellion, about the basis for her statements on television that billions would die because of global warming. She said that scientists like Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany are saying it.
Shellenberger interviewed Rockström by telephone. Rockström told Shellenberger, “We don’t have evidence that we can provide freshwater or feed or shelter today’s world population of eight billion in a four degree [Celsius] world. My expert judgment, furthermore, is that it may even be doubtful if we can host half of that, meaning four billion.”
Shellenberger asked Rockström whether anyone has done a study of food production at four degrees. Rockström replied, “I must admit I have not seen such a study. It seems like such an interesting and important question.”
Shellenberger comments, “In fact, scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels and that . . . fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization mattered more than climate change.”
We learn from the book that in 1989, thirty years previously, Associated Press reported that a senior U.N. environmental official claimed that if global warming wasn’t reversed by the year 2000 rising sea levels would wipe entire nations off the face of the Earth, ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures. Governments have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control.
Shellenberger explains, “I also care about getting the facts and science right . . . Much of what people are being told about the environment, including climate change 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 a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.”
In Apocalypse Never Shellenberger says “Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”
The book takes readers along with Shellenberger in his investigatory travels to Africa, England, India, Indonesia, and South Korea. Shellenberger reports interviews in person and by telephone with interesting people including environmental scientists and activists.
In 291 pages of text and 19 color photos the book presents many surprising facts about the Earth’s environment and climate. For example carbon dioxide emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s; the Amazon River basin is not “the lungs of the world;” climate change is not making natural disasters worse; and projected future global food supply exceeds consumption demand by 20% to 30%.
Statements of fact are supported by references in 104 pages of notes citing scientific sources including studies from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Michael Shellenberger and his wife Helen traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2014 to study the impact of widespread wood fuel use on people and wildlife, particularly the fabled mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park.
Congo was at the center of the Great African War (1988-2003). The war involved nine African countries and caused the deaths of three to five million people, mostly due to disease and starvation, but many by violence and atrocities. Another two million were displaced from their homes or fled seeking asylum.
The U.S. Department of State warned against travel to Congo because it was not safe due to widespread crime and lack of effective policing. For security, Michael Shellenberger hired a guide and translator, Caleb Kabanda, who has a reputation for keeping his clients safe.
Michael and Helen saw extreme poverty in Congo. They met Bernadette Semutaga (Bernadette), age 25, near Virunga National Park, home of the mountain gorillas. Bernadette told them, “I got married when I was fifteen years old. When I met my husband he was an orphan. He had nothing.”
Bernadette and her family lack basic medical care. Her seven children often go hungry and get sick. Bernadette was in fear of the heavily armed militias that roam the countryside robbing, raping, kidnapping, and murdering.
Bernadette is among the one billion people, one in seven worldwide in the early 21st century, who lack access to clean water, sanitation facilities, and electricity. Bernadette farms to survive. She must spend several hours each day walking to fetch water and firewood, hauling and chopping wood, building and fanning smoky fires, and cooking over them. Wild animals eat her crops.
Congo is rich in natural resources, but energy poor. Bernadette lives near Goma, the provincial capital city. Shellenberger told his Congolese guide, Caleb Kabanda, that he was in Congo in part to study the relationship between energy scarcity and conservation. Caleb said of Goma, “can you imagine a city of nearly two million people relying on wood for energy? Its’ crazy!”
The Congolese people hope for the completion of a planned hydroelectric dam that would bring them electricity. The book informs us that such dams in poor countries have been opposed by a non-governmental organization known as International Rivers. Their opposition is based on the loss of white water rafting if such dams are completed.
The book takes us to visit Indonesia, where Shellenberger traveled to investigate the working conditions for factory workers. Indonesia is rich both in natural resources and in energy. In Indonesia, Shellenberger met Suparti, a 25-year old woman from the island of Java. She was raised in a strict Islamic community where she couldn’t go to social gatherings if men were there.
Suparti’s family home had no electricity or TV. She worked alongside her parents and siblings in the fields. After she turned seventeen years old, Suparti left home for a city in Sumatra where she had an aunt and a sister. She found work in a factory that supplied products to Mattel, the American maker of toys and dolls.
At age eighteen Suparti changed jobs, taking work at a chocolate factory. Over the next seven years she moved to progressively more responsible positions. Her wages more than tripled since her first job. Eventually her work involved the factory’s computer systems. By age twenty-five Suparti was able to purchase a flat-screen TV, a motor scooter, and even a home.
Suparti told Shellenberger that she missed home, but had no desire to go back; that her parents encouraged the Muslim way of marriage where religious teachers would introduce her to someone they think is a good match. However, Suparti preferred to get to know the man before marriage. She wanted four children, two boys and two girls. At age twenty-one she met her future husband via Facebook. They married and have a child.
This review is just a brief sampling of the book. A few of the chapter titles, listed below, provide a foretaste of the richness of detail and thoughtful analysis in Apocalypse Never:
• It’s Not the End of the World
• Earth’s Lungs Aren’t Burning
• The Sixth Extinction Is Cancelled
• Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace
• Destroying the Environment to Save It
• False Gods for Lost Souls
This book may make Michael Shellenberger famous—or infamous in the opinion of people who were already trying to impede its circulation not seven days after it was issued.
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Reviews with images
Empower yourself for any discussion with the most extreme environmental activists
Michael has tapped into a frustration many of us have experienced regarding discussions of the environment. As Americans, we love our beautiful earth and resources it has to offer. Unfortunately, as many of us have learned over the years, it’s almost impossible to engage in any discussion on the environment that is contrary to the popular media narrative. Who knew that even highly credentialed and knowledgeable professional environmentalists like Michael were feeling the same frustration. In this book, Michael tackles everything from plastics, to renewable energy, to economic development in third world countries. This book is well written: substantiated facts, personable, and humorous. Watch my video review on Rumble (link in my Amazon bio).
Top reviews from other countries
Blaise Allen
A must read to understand climate reality vs. apocalypse fear mongering
Reviewed in Brazil on September 6, 2022
Blaise Allen
Reviewed in Brazil on September 6, 2022
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Jawad Shuaib
Apocalyptic scaremongering causes paralysis
Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2021
Jawad Shuaib
Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 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.
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