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Thread: On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

  1. #1

    On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare


    On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare
    June 29, 2020
    On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare — Environmental Progress

    On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It's just not the end of the world. It's not even our most serious environmental problem.

    I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

    But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

    Here are some facts few people know:

    Humans are not causing a "sixth mass extinction"

    The Amazon is not "the lungs of the world"

    Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

    Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

    The amount of land we use for meat — humankind's biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

    The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

    Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

    Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level

    We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

    Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

    Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

    Preventing future pandemics requires more not less "industrial" agriculture

    I know that the above facts will sound like "climate denialism" to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

    In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the 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.

    Some people will, when they read this imagine that I'm some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I'm not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women's cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

    I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

    But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that's because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an "existential" threat to human civilization, and called it a "crisis."

    But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

    I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren't getting worse.

    But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said "The world is going to end in twelve years if we don't address climate change." Britain's most high-profile environmental group claimed "Climate Change Kills Children."

    The world's most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the "greatest challenge humans have ever faced" and said it would "wipe out civilizations."

    Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was "the lungs of the world," and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

    As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

    Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is.
    I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

    I thus decided I had to speak out.
    I knew that writing a few articles wouldn't be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

    And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

    It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism.
    At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

    Some highlights from the book:

    Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress

    The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land

    The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

    100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today's 0.5% to 50%

    We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities

    Vegetarianism reduces one's emissions by less than 4%

    Greenpeace didn't save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

    "Free-range" beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions

    Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon

    The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

    Why were we all so misled?

    In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty "sustainable." And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism

    Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.

    Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

    The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.

    The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

    But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.

    The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate "crisis" into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

    Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.

    Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

    Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.

    The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

    The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. "Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book," writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. "This may be the most important book on the environment ever written," says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

    "We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias," wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. "But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers 'tough love:' a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the 'mental muscle' we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future."

    That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you've made it this far, I hope you'll agree that it's perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

    I further hope that you'll accept my apology.

    Michael Shellenberger/













    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

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  3. #2
    Very telling. Though the most of us may not have known those particular points we did know climate change was not an issue. What made me grin was the turning point in his paradigm, AOC's madness in saying we are doomed in 12 years "if". Climate alarmism relies on insanity and hysteria. Good article.

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  5. #3
    No surprise here...


    Noted Environmentalist Issues Climate Scare Apology, Forbes Removes Article
    By Thomas Catenacci
    Published on July 1, 2020
    Noted Environmentalist Issues Climate Scare Apology, Forbes Removes Article | The Stream


    Forbes unpublished an article Monday in which an environmental activist apologized for scaring people about climate change.

    Michael Shellenberger's article was originally published by Forbes Sunday, but was taken down one day later. Shellenberger, who is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, decried "climate alarmism" in the article, which he posted on his website after Forbes took it down....




    ...Shellenberger presented his full argument in his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which went on sale Tuesday.

    Forbes replaced his article with an editor's note that said, "This page is no longer active. We regret any inconvenience." No further explanation was given.

    Forbes didn't immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation's request for comment.

    Shellenberger was named a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment" in 2008, and is slated to serve as an expert reviewer for the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change annual report. He testified in front of the House Committee On Science, Space, and Technology in January.

    "It is a peculiar feature of climate policy that its advocates feel the need to exaggerate with so much severity and frequency," Shellenberger said during his testimony.










    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

  6. #4

    Climate-change hysteria costs lives — but activists want to keep panic alive
    By Michael Shellenberger
    July 21, 2020 | 7:28p
    Climate-change hysteria costs lives — but activists want to keep panic alive

    Last month, I published a book, "Apocalypse Never," which debunks popular environmental myths. Among them: that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction and that climate change is making natural disasters worse.

    While I expected my book to be controversial, I didn't expect CNN's top climate reporter to compare it to an advertisement for cigarettes. Or to have an environmental journalist with nearly half a million followers on Twitter *accuse me of promoting "white supremacy."

    I'm hardly a climate denier.
    In fact, I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmental *activist for more than 30. Governments, including the US Congress, regularly ask me to offer my testimony as an energy expert. And this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked me to serve as an expert reviewer of its next major report....



    ...So why do some alarmists claim that climate change is making disasters worse? In part, it's so they can use the world's most visual and dramatic events, from Hurricane Sandy to California's forest fires, to make the issue more salient with voters.

    If it were acknowledged that Hurricane Sandy's damage owed overwhelmingly to New York failure to modernize its flood-control systems or that California's forest fires were due to the buildup of wood fuel after decades of fire suppression, alarmist journalists, scientists and activists would be deprived of the visually powerful events and "news hooks" they need to scare people, raise money and advocate climate policies.

    Climate alarmism isn't just about money. It's also about power. Elites have used climate alarmism to justify efforts to control food and energy policies in their home nations and around the world for more than three decades.

    In just the last decade, climate alarmists have successfully redirected funding from the World Bank and similar institutions away from economic development and toward charitable endeavors, such as solar panels for villagers, which can't power growth.

    Contrary to the claims of CNN's top environment reporter, using energy that emits carbon dioxide isn't like smoking cigarettes. People need to consume significant amounts of energy in order to enjoy decent standards of living. Nobody needs to smoke cigarettes.

    In the end, climate alarmism is powerful because it has emerged as the alternative religion for supposedly secular people, providing many of the same psychological benefits as traditional faith.


    Climate alarmism gives them a purpose: to save the world from climate change. It offers them a story that casts them as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives — while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy....


    ...The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly destructive. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper spiritual needs.

    Happily, real-world events, starting with the coronavirus pandemic, are *undermining the notion that climate change is an "emergency" or "crisis." After all, it was a disease that brought civilization to a halt, not climate-fueled natural disasters. And while COVID-19 has killed more than half a million people and counting, alarmist scientists struggle to explain how climate change will make diseases and disasters worse.

    Meanwhile, emissions are declining in much of the world. ...


    ...As a result, most experts *believe that global temperatures are unlikely to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. No amount of warming is ideal, since it will change conditions for both people and wildlife. But 3 degrees isn't catastrophic for, much less an existential threat to, human societies and economies.

    For pointing out these basic facts, I have been smeared, bizarrely, as a racist. Yet readers will discover that, far from being a defense of white supremacy, "Apocalypse Never" exposes *European and North American environmentalists for promoting discriminatory anti-development policies toward poor African, Asian and Latin-American *nations.

    The activists and their media allies censor news articles. But eventually, the public will get to review the evidence and realize that the censors are wrong.

    It is my hope that, after the public reckoning, everyone, particularly anxious adolescents, will go from seeing climate change as the end of the world to viewing it as a highly manage*able problem.








    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

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  8. #5

    Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?
    869,270 views
    •Premiered Aug 10, 2020

    PragerU


    Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and noted climate activist, used to think so. Now he's not so sure. He explains why in this important video.

    Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It? - YouTube










    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

  9. #6
    Senior Member Romans828's Avatar
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    Guess I'm just not *enlightened* enough to understand all of this, but...

    The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein - For HE hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods - Psalm 24:1-2

    As far as I'm concerned, God created the Earth, and He knows how to maintain, and cool it!

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  11. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Romans828 View Post
    Guess I'm just not *enlightened* enough to understand all of this, but...

    The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein - For HE hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods - Psalm 24:1-2

    As far as I'm concerned, God created the Earth, and He knows how to maintain, and cool it!
    Amen. But the activists must have a problem to drive their activism. Hoax after hoax, Al Gore, flakey fake alarmism and suddenly they are chasing the wind.

    But you knew that.

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