About the Book
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.
About the Author :
Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, 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. Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for Journalism. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.
Review :
"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
"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)
"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
"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
"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
"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
