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A review by miguelf
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger
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.