“The World Has just over a Decade to Get Climate Change under Control, U.N. Scientists Say,” proclaimed a 2018 Washington Post headline. Prompted by a United Nations study considering the implications of a 1.5°C increase in global mean temperatures above preindustrial levels, the article warned that a “radical transformation” of the global economy would be necessary in that time in order to prevent more than “moderate” warming.

Environmental activists echoed this apocalyptic framing of the UN report. A lack of radical action would “likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it,” warned teen climate activist Greta Thunberg. A spokesperson for the activist group Extinction Rebellion claimed the failure to mitigate climate would kill billions. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) may have been hyperbolizing when she declared in an interview that “the world is going to end in 12 years,” but that is certainly the message that many are getting. Indeed, when challenged about the claim, an Ocasio-Cortez spokesperson derided efforts to “quibble” over whether climate change was “existential or cataclysmic.”

Climate change is a serious concern, perhaps the most serious environmental concern of the 21st century. But the 2018 UN report did not suggest a greenhouse apocalypse would soon be upon us, nor that humanity faces an imminent ecological deadline to act. More prosaically, it noted that limiting greenhouse warming to the somewhat arbitrary target of 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures likely requires significant emissions reductions in the coming years, offering a reduction target of 45% by 2030. Failure to meet that goal would not mean the end of civilization or even prevent future climate change mitigation. It would, however, make it more difficult to limit warming to 1.5°C. That number is a useful benchmark but hardly the threshold between survival and oblivion.

Environmental doomsaying is nothing new, nor is the failure of apocalyptic environmental predictions. “The United States has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its blighting effects will be felt by every household in the land,” warned Gifford Pinchot in 1910. Yet the country saw net forest growth over the subsequent century, with little sacrifice in timber supplies. “The battle to feed all humanity is over,” proclaimed Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968, and yet per-capita food production has risen steadily over the past half century.

The prophets of ecological doom have a poor track record, but that hardly means doomsaying is without consequence. Ehrlich’s “population bomb” may have never exploded, but his book of that name sold over 3 million copies and influenced public perceptions about the fate of the planet. It is not clear that such projections helped advance sensible environmental policies.

Michael Shellenberger, co-founder of the environmental research center Breakthrough Institute, former Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of the advocacy group Environmental Progress, is “fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism and extremism” that characterizes environmental policy debates. In Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, he argues for an end to apocalyptic environmentalism and urges “getting the facts and science right” in pursuit of “a positive humanistic and rational environmentalism.” However well intentioned, fearmongering can get in the way of practical solutions to real environmental concerns. Understanding the actual causes and contours of the world’s environmental problems is necessary to developing and deploying practical and human solutions to the world’s environmental problems while preserving economic opportunity.

Challenging platitudes: The failure to understand the actual scope, scale, and source of environmental problems prevents the development and adoption of effective policy responses. To make matters worse, conjuring specters of ecological doom can be paralyzing. Fatalism is not particularly compatible with problem-solving. The never-ending message of environmental crisis is “contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children,” and yet it is not producing the desired political response.

Fears of an imminent ecological collapse may have helped drive environmental legislation in the 1970s, but it does not seem particularly effective today, and those policies designed to prevent an apocalypse are often not those most useful to address contemporary ecological threats. Indeed, as Shellenberger notes, those “who are the most apocalyptic about environmental problems tend to oppose the best and most obvious solutions to solving them.” Misdiagnoses produce unhelpful (if not positively harmful) policy responses.

Apocalypse Never is far from the first book to confront the apocalyptic strain of environmentalism, but it is certainly among the most engaging. Shellenberger deftly challenges green platitudes and demonstrates how our environmental challenges are better confronted with pragmatic realism than with blinkered ideological visions or ecological fearmongering. This is must-reading for those who care about human welfare and environmental conservation.

Though it boasts over 100 pages of endnotes, Apocalypse Never is not a data tome of numbers and charts. Shellenberger makes his case by blending an exhaustive amount of information with engaging anecdotes and vignettes.

A viral YouTube video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nose prompted local governments and multinational corporations to endorse phasing out this insidious ecological threat. Plastic straws made for a powerful symbol of environmental wastefulness but replacing them with paper straws will not do much to save endangered sea turtles or curtail ocean pollution. Insofar as plastic waste in the ocean is a problem, straws are an insignificant contributor, accounting for less than 0.05% of the estimated 9 million tons of plastic waste deposited in the ocean every year. Banning straws is an easy symbolic measure, but it does not do much to protect sea turtles, let alone keep the ocean clean. Worse, as Shellenberger observes, “the intense media and public focus on plastic … risks distracting us from other equally important — perhaps more important — threats to endangered sea life, which may be easier to address.”

Gratitude for civilization: Climate change looms large in Shellenberger’s account, both as an example of apocalyptic environmentalism at work, as well as the sort of genuine environmental problem we need to learn to address. In his view, “the national conversation about climate change has been polarized between those who deny it and those who exaggerate it.” Climate change cannot be ignored, but it is also not the only environmental problem the world faces. It also should not be used as an excuse to deny those in developing nations the opportunity to improve their own lives.

Growth and technology are often conceived as environmental problems. In a famous formulation, humanity’s environmental effect is the product of population, affluence, and technology, with each variable magnifying the effect of the others. Shellenberger challenges this formulation, arguing that technological advance and the wealth to deploy it are essential to the preservation of nature and controlling pollution, while still making room for people. Economic growth and technological advance have the potential to increase humanity’s ecological footprint, but they also can increase resilience to ecological threats and make it easier to meet human needs with less ecological effect. “For poor nations, creating the modern infrastructure for modern energy, sewage, and flood water management will be a higher priority than plastic waste, just as they were for the United States and China before them,” Shellenberger writes. In much of the world, industrialization, urbanization, and the proliferation of modern technology are more environmental boon than bane. Increased agricultural productivity and energy density leave more room for nature and help generate the wealth necessary for environmental improvements. Those of us in developed nations should “feel gratitude for the civilization we take for granted, put claims of climate apocalypse in perspective, and inspire empathy and solidarity for those who do not yet enjoy the fruits of prosperity.” More plainly, “rich nations must support, not deny, development to poor nations.”

Shellenberger is extremely bullish on the power of technology to solve climate change and other environmental problems. He sees one technology in particular as offering hope: nuclear power. Indeed, he is somewhat evangelistic on this point: “Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint.”

Greater reliance on nuclear is almost certainly necessary if the world is going to reach some of the more ambitious climate mitigation goals, but it cannot do it all. Nuclear accounts for only 10% of the world’s electricity generation, and it is not as if new plants can be erected overnight. Other energy sources will need to play a role, including the renewable sources Shellenberger diminishes. Not a single new nuclear plant was constructed in the United States between 1979 and 2019, and the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiiachi nuclear plant in Japan has dampened enthusiasm for nuclear power in much of the developed world. Whatever role nuclear has to play — and he is likely correct that there is no stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases without it — other sources of carbon-free power will be necessary too.

In his zeal to promote nuclear’s virtues as a dense, carbon-free source of power, Shellenberger is too quick to dismiss the role other technologies might play. All sources of energy involve tradeoffs. None is free of environmental effects. While criticizing environmental activists for their selective focus on the downsides of life-enhancing technologies, Shellenberger obsesses about the drawbacks of renewable energy, such as the tendency of wind turbines to kill birds and bats. Given his treatment of the ecological concerns raised by other technologies, it is odd that he does not view this as yet another modest environmental problem that technology and ingenuity can address. Indeed, since his book was published, new research suggests avian mortalities can be cut dramatically by something as simple and cheap as painting black one blade on each turbine so that birds can better see the danger. It is fair for Shellenberger to claim that “the industrial revolution could not have happened with renewables,” but the world is not likely to meet the climate change challenge without them.

Conclusion: Apocalypse Never is clearly intended to provoke as much as persuade. Shellenberger is correct that economic development and technological advance are essential for successful environmental conservation, and he properly excoriates those environmental activists who obstruct such developments. Yet, the book provides minimal exploration of the sorts of policies and institutional arrangements necessary for such changes to take place.

Economic growth and innovation are necessary, but insufficient, for continued environmental progress. Neither is automatic. The broader legal and institutional framework in which technologies are developed and deployed often determines whether they are used in ways that enhance or undermine ecological sustainability. The environmental horrors of former Soviet countries were not due to a lack of industrialization or urbanization. Nor are the ecological problems in developing nations solely a consequence of poverty. Legal institutions, and the incentives they create, channel human ingenuity. Fulfilling Shellenberger’s vision of a “high-energy, prosperous world with flourishing wildlife” will ultimately require attention to such concerns. It cannot be just willed into existence. Shellenberger has stood athwart the visions of apocalypse, yelling stop. The next step is to chart the course for a new destination.