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snowbenton's review against another edition
I made it 22 minutes in before the ick got too strong. I did some googling to find out why, and this article says it best. I have no interest in finishing this.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/07/shellenbergers-op-ad/
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/07/shellenbergers-op-ad/
erica_palmisano's review against another edition
2.0
Read 85% of this book for book club. Skipping the rest because I didn't enjoy it and I think others have argued more persuasively and thoroughly for whatever is valuable here and haven't fallen into the centrist guy traps.
conflagrationinthenight's review
4.0
Really solid read. So much scientific information, especially about nuclear energy. This book convinced that a well designed nuclear program is likely to be the path to a post-scarcity future. I don't agree with everything Michael ShellenBerger says, though.
soleadohmbt's review against another edition
2.0
Relies on a whole raft of logical fallacies including ad hominem attacks, reductio ad absurdo, and straw man arguments so that even when he’s making a somewhat reasonable point, his entire argument remains specious.
miguelf's review against another edition
2.0
It becomes readily apparent shortly into this book that this is going to be more of a polemic than an unbiased set of facts, figures and analysis on the environment. A 2 second google search of the author reveals that he’s a paid lobbyist for the nuclear power industry, and boy does he earn his pay and more in this. One learns that scaling down nuclear has been one of man’s greatest sins in the past few decades and that the reality is that nuclear waste is largely benign and the Chernobyl exclusion zone is totally safe and that anything negatively reported regarding nuclear accidents have been completely overblown. Ooooooo-kay.
I really wanted to hear a well-reasoned critique of some of the excesses of the doom & gloom that’s been associated with rising CO2 levels and our impending environmental catastrophe. It seems, as the author points out, that the common refrain that we have only 12 years to control CO2 emissions or somehow the earth will implode do seem completely overblown. It would have been great to read about what a more accurate prediction would be in terms of allowable emission limits or more realistic model scenarios. Perhaps Shellenberger just isn’t the right person to deliver a thoughtful and dispassionate account without sounding like something you would hear coming straight from Tucker Carlson, or on Breitbart or Zero Hedge. The polemicizing is that bad, with a lot of personal attacks on well-known environmentalists and use of phrases like “regressive Left” that leave no room for his way or the highway on any of the data. Vaclav Smil he is not.
Certainly all of humanity will be better off if some of the climate models are off and overestimating the changes in future temperature, ocean acidic levels and overall extreme weather changes – we should all celebrate if these do not come to pass. However, this book doesn’t nearly make a good enough case why we shouldn’t have concern and instead goes off the rails on Fox news style of tirades that simply can’t be taken seriously with this very real issue.
I really wanted to hear a well-reasoned critique of some of the excesses of the doom & gloom that’s been associated with rising CO2 levels and our impending environmental catastrophe. It seems, as the author points out, that the common refrain that we have only 12 years to control CO2 emissions or somehow the earth will implode do seem completely overblown. It would have been great to read about what a more accurate prediction would be in terms of allowable emission limits or more realistic model scenarios. Perhaps Shellenberger just isn’t the right person to deliver a thoughtful and dispassionate account without sounding like something you would hear coming straight from Tucker Carlson, or on Breitbart or Zero Hedge. The polemicizing is that bad, with a lot of personal attacks on well-known environmentalists and use of phrases like “regressive Left” that leave no room for his way or the highway on any of the data. Vaclav Smil he is not.
Certainly all of humanity will be better off if some of the climate models are off and overestimating the changes in future temperature, ocean acidic levels and overall extreme weather changes – we should all celebrate if these do not come to pass. However, this book doesn’t nearly make a good enough case why we shouldn’t have concern and instead goes off the rails on Fox news style of tirades that simply can’t be taken seriously with this very real issue.
jamie_o's review
4.0
If I had to sum this book up it would be, love/care for people, love/care for the environment, in that order, followed closely by the sky is not falling.
Apocalypse Never is a well researched/documented (the notes section in the back is extensive - like a quarter of the total book length) and comprehensive book. I have a Christian worldview so I don't necessarily agree with Michael Shellenberger on everything. But as a Christian who believes that God gave humans dominion over everything on Earth, commands that we love others, and that we be good stewards of His creation, I found a lot of commonality with him. He is concerned with finding truth, not pushing an agenda.
The activist journalists and apocalyptic environmentalists that he describes, who exaggerate and mislead make environmentalism off-putting. In my childhood, they shouted that we were depleting the ozone and global warming was melting the glaciers.
I love that Shellenberger cares about people (even above the environment) and understands the importance of economic development. It's only when people's basic needs are met, when they are raised up out of poverty, that they can be concerned with environmental issues. He explains that industrialization/manufacturing is what makes countries wealthy (every industrialized country has become wealthy this way). But to attract manufacturing companies, a country must have a level of infrastructure and security. Manufacturing can be dirty, but as a country gains wealth, it allows for more environmentally friendly processes and higher level industries, which are generally cleaner.
Shellenberger is passionate about his support for nuclear energy and he makes a very convincing case for its use. Nuclear energy is energy dense, cheap, clean, and yes, safe. He likewise demonstrates that renewables, which he dubs "unreliables," are energy dilute, expensive, inconsistent, and even harmful for the environment.
Perhaps my strongest disagreement is with parts of chapter 7 - Have your steak and eat it too. I've read a lot on nutrition/diet and found parts of this chapter faulty. Nonetheless, it's overall a well balanced book and one I will have each of my children read when they are in high school.
The Colorado plateau is more naturally radioactive than most of Fukushima was after the accident. "There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer," said Gerry. And whereas radiation levels at Fukushima declined rapidly, "those [other] areas stay high over a lifetime, since the radiation is not the result of contamination but of natural background radiation." - pg 169
Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have hard physical limits. The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years. The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter. - pg 188
For example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required. By contrast, today's energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States. - pg 191
Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions. - pg 193
"The climate denialists" were right: devastating declines in the number of polar bears have indeed failed to materialize, which was something the creators of the starving polar bear footage were forced to admit. - pg 252
As we have seen, the death toll and damage from extreme events have declined 90 percent during the last century, including in poor nations. - pg 260
Apocalypse Never is a well researched/documented (the notes section in the back is extensive - like a quarter of the total book length) and comprehensive book. I have a Christian worldview so I don't necessarily agree with Michael Shellenberger on everything. But as a Christian who believes that God gave humans dominion over everything on Earth, commands that we love others, and that we be good stewards of His creation, I found a lot of commonality with him. He is concerned with finding truth, not pushing an agenda.
The activist journalists and apocalyptic environmentalists that he describes, who exaggerate and mislead make environmentalism off-putting. In my childhood, they shouted that we were depleting the ozone and global warming was melting the glaciers.
I love that Shellenberger cares about people (even above the environment) and understands the importance of economic development. It's only when people's basic needs are met, when they are raised up out of poverty, that they can be concerned with environmental issues. He explains that industrialization/manufacturing is what makes countries wealthy (every industrialized country has become wealthy this way). But to attract manufacturing companies, a country must have a level of infrastructure and security. Manufacturing can be dirty, but as a country gains wealth, it allows for more environmentally friendly processes and higher level industries, which are generally cleaner.
Shellenberger is passionate about his support for nuclear energy and he makes a very convincing case for its use. Nuclear energy is energy dense, cheap, clean, and yes, safe. He likewise demonstrates that renewables, which he dubs "unreliables," are energy dilute, expensive, inconsistent, and even harmful for the environment.
Perhaps my strongest disagreement is with parts of chapter 7 - Have your steak and eat it too. I've read a lot on nutrition/diet and found parts of this chapter faulty. Nonetheless, it's overall a well balanced book and one I will have each of my children read when they are in high school.
The Colorado plateau is more naturally radioactive than most of Fukushima was after the accident. "There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer," said Gerry. And whereas radiation levels at Fukushima declined rapidly, "those [other] areas stay high over a lifetime, since the radiation is not the result of contamination but of natural background radiation." - pg 169
Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have hard physical limits. The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years. The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter. - pg 188
For example, if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required. By contrast, today's energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States. - pg 191
Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions. - pg 193
"The climate denialists" were right: devastating declines in the number of polar bears have indeed failed to materialize, which was something the creators of the starving polar bear footage were forced to admit. - pg 252
As we have seen, the death toll and damage from extreme events have declined 90 percent during the last century, including in poor nations. - pg 260
lpm100's review
5.0
No more destructive a force than Bored White People Seeking Inner Peace
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2020
This is a brilliant book, and although it does have some overlap with things that I've read before it is still well worth the purchase price because it consolidates so much helpful information all in one place.
Of the book itself:
1. It runs 392 pages including the bibliography. (The bibliography itself is 103 pages, or just over one quarter of the length of the book.)
2. 12 chapters over 283 pages of prose works out to about 25 pages per chapter.
Moreover, the chapters are subdivided into bite-sized essays. (It's something like 8 to 10 subsections for each chapter.)
3. Shellenberger strikes just the right balance between prose that is too terse or too fatty--and as such, he is a delight to read.
4. The book can be read out of order.
*******
The Salem Witch Hysteria only happened several hundred years ago, and it's a pretty safe bet to say that the structure of the human brain is not changed in that blink of an eye (in evolutionary terms) that we should be surprised that a new version of the Salem Witch Hysteria is happening all over again. (Even as this book was going to print, we were just at the beginning of the Current Coronavirus Hysteria.)
In that way, Shellenberger's dazzling and erudite documentation of the chimpanzee part of the human brain at work is a lot of old wine in new bottles.
1. There are eschatological elements in this that look like those in any other religious movement.
-By the environutballs, the world is going to end if we don't repent and change our ways. (Maybe Jeremiah in the prophetic books of The Hebrew Bible?)
-The Magical Date/ Endtimes keeps being pushed out further and further until it is at some point in the indeterminate future. (Maybe Karl Marx/anyone else unable to give us an exact date when we are going to reach Idealized Communism?)
2. There are prophets/clerics/courtiers / time servers that are very happy to repurpose these issues as reasons for them to have a job or have followers or have government grants. And which specific movement is chosen to create power is completely incidental.
3. The issue becomes one of morality instead of preference. In this case, it is climate believers versus climate heretics. And it's not just a matter of different opinions, but that one side has to actually be evil. (Huguenots versus Papists in France, maybe?)
*******
Of books that I have read before, this book reminds me very distinctly of several of them:
1. "The Tyranny of Experts" / "Misadventures in the Tropics," both by Bill Easterly. And he details extremely clearly that development experts have no idea what they are talking about and they don't get any closer to knowing what they are talking about over the decades.
In this case, the technology can save a lot of people but it has been put off limits by Well-Meaning Fabulous White People in Western countries. (DDT!)
2. "Fooled by Randomness" / "The Black Swan," both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It really is impossible to predict large complex systems with any degree of accuracy. But, that doesn't stop "experts" from trying.
3. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change." Most of these people really are wrong on the facts. And nobody bothers to actually read any papers or reviews these days.
4. "Big Fat Surprise." By Tishkoff. The bureaucracy that is put in place to solve such problems is self-perpetuating and self-generating. Whether or not they are technically accurate is completely incidental. And in the case that they are wrong, it will be many decades before they even begin to realize it. If ever.
5. "The True Believer." Eric Hoffer. (I'm sorry to refer to him so often, but what he wrote was so massive and time independent that I can't help myself.) Mass movements are all interchangeable.
6. "Innumeracy." John Allen Paulos/ "Thinking Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. The EXTREMELY poor quantitative skills of modern human beings are kindling upon which the idiocy described in this book can burn forevermore.
7. Various basic/popular Economics books.
8. "Extortion" by Peter Schweitzer. Africa and China ain't got nothing on the US in terms of corruption.
*******
What is the takeaway message from each chapter, in ~2 sentences?
1. The world is not going to end (as has been predicted many times), and different things can be explained by: availability bias, and other statistical illusions. Governments refuse to do controlled burns (thereby creating more wood to be burned if an accidental for is started) and more population growth near coastline areas actually make the situation worse.
2. Deforestation with economic development is what Europe and the United States both went through, and therefore this is not new. On oxygen accounting: The Amazon forest is NOT "the lungs of the world," Leonardo DiCaprio's opinions notwithstanding.
3. The danger of plastic is dramatically overstated, and only a small percentage of it ends up in the ocean. What kills the largest number of ocean life is actually fishing/overfishing.
4. The Sixth Extinction Hoax was attributable to a 25-year-old paper that was demonstrated to be false (p. 66), and the increase in biodiversity outweighs the actual rate of extinctions--which is more like 2 species per year. Conservation zones in various African countries set up and managed by Fabulous White People actually end up displacing/vexing more (African) human beings and causing more damage than the species that might have been saved.
5. In some countries, low-wage jobs ("sweatshops") are the least bad option available for many, and when enviro nutballs remove those jobs they remove the best choice that many might have. The best cure for poverty Is wealth, no matter how little it may seem to a wealthier observer.
6. Technology transfer automatically finds/creates more sources of energy, if idiot politicians and well-meaning (but practically destructive) environmental groups do not stymie the process. Spontaneous transitions to more environmentally friendly energy sources are neither a rarity nor a miracle.
7. Vegetarianism is most often based on emotional / irrational reasons--and that makes sense because a simple reviewing of the evidence shows that industrially produced meat is the most environmentally efficient and humane way. The religious overtones of vegetarianism / veganism clear when it is observed that the overwhelming majority of such people are on the extreme left.
8. You can't have it both ways: either you want nuclear power with zero emissions or you want coal-fired power with no (easily managed) nuclear waste. On a risk benefit analysis, nuclear power is the best choice; but how can people even make that calculation when they don't understand that nuclear power is not even close to the same thing as nuclear weapons?
9. Solar/wind-powered this or that sounds great –– until you stop to make some calculations. (Since it is ultimately an engineering issue, calculations do actually have to be made-believe it or not.) Bird populations are decimated by wind power, and solar panels are a significant toxic cleanup challenge.
10. Environmentalism is an excellent cover for special interest pleading. The author details the extreme corruption (especially in California) of lifetime politicians with inappropriate links to whatever industry they are trying to put out of business for their own personal benefit.
11. The empirically false environmental notion (Malthusian Theory/ Energy source "leapfrogging") of the right wing in one era is the same empirically false environmental notion of the left wing in another era. Plenty of Phony Celebrities will organize conferences to preach to Third World Nations about how they should not use energy for development-- and in the process they will use more energy than an entire small African nation for a year.
12. Religious energy is neither created nor destroyed; It only changes its form. Environmentalism is very much a repackaging of familiar motifs/religious impulses from the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Sinners and saints. Apocalypse, doom and jeremiads. Doomsayers and enlightened clerics/academics.)
*******
Best quotes of the book:
"I have to say that there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian. And part of me pities him, too. Dreams of Innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris." (p. 139)
"There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions..... And the climate activists of today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse." (p.242).
"Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people." (p. 247).
*******
Second order questions:
1. As a country becomes more complex, is democracy necessarily the best choice to manage it? Given that putting ignorant people near a ballot box is more destructive to a country than a nuclear bomb ever could be....
But then, as more of the government is managed by regulatory agencies, that creates more opportunities for corruption by people that are regulating the industries in which they will be working in the next term.
2. It appears that much of this environmentalism is a misplaced religious impulse that is universal in mankind. How to make people learn that substituting one religious impulse for another is not helpful, at a minimum? And destructive, in practice.
3. Does this depend on the type of legal system that a country has? In the United States, the loser does not have to pay the legal fees of the winning party. How might things be different if they did?
4. Is there any Force more destructive than Bored White People Seeking Inner Peace (BWiPSIPs)? Is there anything more narcissistic/disgusting? I myself am at pains to think of anything. (Even pedophiles do less damage to smaller numbers of people than the BWiPSIPs.)
These excessive regulatory burdens/placing of land off limits actually harm way more Black-African/Latino/Third World People than what it does comfortable/ bored/ anomic young white people.
5. How do I keep my own kids away from this idiocy? (It really seems like there's nowhere I can hide them. They could go through the university system in the United states, in which they would be exposed to the idiocy domestically. Or, they could be any place else in the world, and it would be much of the same thing.)
6. How to know what's real?
It seems like ideas are repackaged/interpreted/reinterpreted ONLY in service of somebody's ego stake/ influence agenda. (Malthus is on the extreme right in one century and then on the extreme left in the next. p. 235)
7. Has anybody ever even thought about the ethics of all these experiments that are run on developing country guinea pigs? It sure doesn't seem so.
Verdict: I strongly recommend this book, even at the new price. And the fact that this is written by a disgruntled disillusioned environmentalist makes it all the more credible.
Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2020
This is a brilliant book, and although it does have some overlap with things that I've read before it is still well worth the purchase price because it consolidates so much helpful information all in one place.
Of the book itself:
1. It runs 392 pages including the bibliography. (The bibliography itself is 103 pages, or just over one quarter of the length of the book.)
2. 12 chapters over 283 pages of prose works out to about 25 pages per chapter.
Moreover, the chapters are subdivided into bite-sized essays. (It's something like 8 to 10 subsections for each chapter.)
3. Shellenberger strikes just the right balance between prose that is too terse or too fatty--and as such, he is a delight to read.
4. The book can be read out of order.
*******
The Salem Witch Hysteria only happened several hundred years ago, and it's a pretty safe bet to say that the structure of the human brain is not changed in that blink of an eye (in evolutionary terms) that we should be surprised that a new version of the Salem Witch Hysteria is happening all over again. (Even as this book was going to print, we were just at the beginning of the Current Coronavirus Hysteria.)
In that way, Shellenberger's dazzling and erudite documentation of the chimpanzee part of the human brain at work is a lot of old wine in new bottles.
1. There are eschatological elements in this that look like those in any other religious movement.
-By the environutballs, the world is going to end if we don't repent and change our ways. (Maybe Jeremiah in the prophetic books of The Hebrew Bible?)
-The Magical Date/ Endtimes keeps being pushed out further and further until it is at some point in the indeterminate future. (Maybe Karl Marx/anyone else unable to give us an exact date when we are going to reach Idealized Communism?)
2. There are prophets/clerics/courtiers / time servers that are very happy to repurpose these issues as reasons for them to have a job or have followers or have government grants. And which specific movement is chosen to create power is completely incidental.
3. The issue becomes one of morality instead of preference. In this case, it is climate believers versus climate heretics. And it's not just a matter of different opinions, but that one side has to actually be evil. (Huguenots versus Papists in France, maybe?)
*******
Of books that I have read before, this book reminds me very distinctly of several of them:
1. "The Tyranny of Experts" / "Misadventures in the Tropics," both by Bill Easterly. And he details extremely clearly that development experts have no idea what they are talking about and they don't get any closer to knowing what they are talking about over the decades.
In this case, the technology can save a lot of people but it has been put off limits by Well-Meaning Fabulous White People in Western countries. (DDT!)
2. "Fooled by Randomness" / "The Black Swan," both by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It really is impossible to predict large complex systems with any degree of accuracy. But, that doesn't stop "experts" from trying.
3. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change." Most of these people really are wrong on the facts. And nobody bothers to actually read any papers or reviews these days.
4. "Big Fat Surprise." By Tishkoff. The bureaucracy that is put in place to solve such problems is self-perpetuating and self-generating. Whether or not they are technically accurate is completely incidental. And in the case that they are wrong, it will be many decades before they even begin to realize it. If ever.
5. "The True Believer." Eric Hoffer. (I'm sorry to refer to him so often, but what he wrote was so massive and time independent that I can't help myself.) Mass movements are all interchangeable.
6. "Innumeracy." John Allen Paulos/ "Thinking Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. The EXTREMELY poor quantitative skills of modern human beings are kindling upon which the idiocy described in this book can burn forevermore.
7. Various basic/popular Economics books.
8. "Extortion" by Peter Schweitzer. Africa and China ain't got nothing on the US in terms of corruption.
*******
What is the takeaway message from each chapter, in ~2 sentences?
1. The world is not going to end (as has been predicted many times), and different things can be explained by: availability bias, and other statistical illusions. Governments refuse to do controlled burns (thereby creating more wood to be burned if an accidental for is started) and more population growth near coastline areas actually make the situation worse.
2. Deforestation with economic development is what Europe and the United States both went through, and therefore this is not new. On oxygen accounting: The Amazon forest is NOT "the lungs of the world," Leonardo DiCaprio's opinions notwithstanding.
3. The danger of plastic is dramatically overstated, and only a small percentage of it ends up in the ocean. What kills the largest number of ocean life is actually fishing/overfishing.
4. The Sixth Extinction Hoax was attributable to a 25-year-old paper that was demonstrated to be false (p. 66), and the increase in biodiversity outweighs the actual rate of extinctions--which is more like 2 species per year. Conservation zones in various African countries set up and managed by Fabulous White People actually end up displacing/vexing more (African) human beings and causing more damage than the species that might have been saved.
5. In some countries, low-wage jobs ("sweatshops") are the least bad option available for many, and when enviro nutballs remove those jobs they remove the best choice that many might have. The best cure for poverty Is wealth, no matter how little it may seem to a wealthier observer.
6. Technology transfer automatically finds/creates more sources of energy, if idiot politicians and well-meaning (but practically destructive) environmental groups do not stymie the process. Spontaneous transitions to more environmentally friendly energy sources are neither a rarity nor a miracle.
7. Vegetarianism is most often based on emotional / irrational reasons--and that makes sense because a simple reviewing of the evidence shows that industrially produced meat is the most environmentally efficient and humane way. The religious overtones of vegetarianism / veganism clear when it is observed that the overwhelming majority of such people are on the extreme left.
8. You can't have it both ways: either you want nuclear power with zero emissions or you want coal-fired power with no (easily managed) nuclear waste. On a risk benefit analysis, nuclear power is the best choice; but how can people even make that calculation when they don't understand that nuclear power is not even close to the same thing as nuclear weapons?
9. Solar/wind-powered this or that sounds great –– until you stop to make some calculations. (Since it is ultimately an engineering issue, calculations do actually have to be made-believe it or not.) Bird populations are decimated by wind power, and solar panels are a significant toxic cleanup challenge.
10. Environmentalism is an excellent cover for special interest pleading. The author details the extreme corruption (especially in California) of lifetime politicians with inappropriate links to whatever industry they are trying to put out of business for their own personal benefit.
11. The empirically false environmental notion (Malthusian Theory/ Energy source "leapfrogging") of the right wing in one era is the same empirically false environmental notion of the left wing in another era. Plenty of Phony Celebrities will organize conferences to preach to Third World Nations about how they should not use energy for development-- and in the process they will use more energy than an entire small African nation for a year.
12. Religious energy is neither created nor destroyed; It only changes its form. Environmentalism is very much a repackaging of familiar motifs/religious impulses from the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Sinners and saints. Apocalypse, doom and jeremiads. Doomsayers and enlightened clerics/academics.)
*******
Best quotes of the book:
"I have to say that there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian. And part of me pities him, too. Dreams of Innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris." (p. 139)
"There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions..... And the climate activists of today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse." (p.242).
"Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people." (p. 247).
*******
Second order questions:
1. As a country becomes more complex, is democracy necessarily the best choice to manage it? Given that putting ignorant people near a ballot box is more destructive to a country than a nuclear bomb ever could be....
But then, as more of the government is managed by regulatory agencies, that creates more opportunities for corruption by people that are regulating the industries in which they will be working in the next term.
2. It appears that much of this environmentalism is a misplaced religious impulse that is universal in mankind. How to make people learn that substituting one religious impulse for another is not helpful, at a minimum? And destructive, in practice.
3. Does this depend on the type of legal system that a country has? In the United States, the loser does not have to pay the legal fees of the winning party. How might things be different if they did?
4. Is there any Force more destructive than Bored White People Seeking Inner Peace (BWiPSIPs)? Is there anything more narcissistic/disgusting? I myself am at pains to think of anything. (Even pedophiles do less damage to smaller numbers of people than the BWiPSIPs.)
These excessive regulatory burdens/placing of land off limits actually harm way more Black-African/Latino/Third World People than what it does comfortable/ bored/ anomic young white people.
5. How do I keep my own kids away from this idiocy? (It really seems like there's nowhere I can hide them. They could go through the university system in the United states, in which they would be exposed to the idiocy domestically. Or, they could be any place else in the world, and it would be much of the same thing.)
6. How to know what's real?
It seems like ideas are repackaged/interpreted/reinterpreted ONLY in service of somebody's ego stake/ influence agenda. (Malthus is on the extreme right in one century and then on the extreme left in the next. p. 235)
7. Has anybody ever even thought about the ethics of all these experiments that are run on developing country guinea pigs? It sure doesn't seem so.
Verdict: I strongly recommend this book, even at the new price. And the fact that this is written by a disgruntled disillusioned environmentalist makes it all the more credible.