 I want you to panic. Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. If there's one consistent message coming from activists and politicians pushing the Green New Deal and massive new subsidies for renewable energy, it's that if we don't take radical action now, life on Earth as we know it will soon be irreversibly destroyed. The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. The claim is that time is running out. And science tells us that how we act or fail to act in the next 12 years will determine the very livability of our planet. This fear-mongering is flat-out misleading, and the findings of the scientists studying global warming don't support such alarmist claims, according to the new book Apocalypse Never. Please welcome Michael Schellenberger. I know you're an environmentalist because you're not wearing a tie, but you're a radical new kind of environmentalist because you're very well quaffed. The book argues that deforestation and deaths from extreme weather are actually declining, and concerns about environmental damage from plastics are fundamentally misplaced. Schellenberger, who began his career as an advocate for more government spending on wind and solar, was eventually disillusioned after witnessing the failure of subsidies to fix the inherent drawbacks of renewables. Named a hero of the environment by Time Magazine in 2008, Schellenberger is an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also appeared in the 2013 documentary Pandora's Promise, which was shown at Sundance and featured several prominent environmentalists who have come around to see the virtues of nuclear power. It really took us getting clear about how big the gap was between fossil fuels and renewables for us to take a second look at nuclear. Cold, natural gas fracking, and nukes, you're my kind of liberal. I interviewed Schellenberger over Zoom about his new book and why he believes that environmentalism has become a replacement for religion in an increasingly secular world. Michael Schellenberger, thanks for talking to me. Thanks for having me. So your book is Apocalypse Never, subtitled Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Give me the elevator pitch of the book. I mean, the elevator pitch of the book is that everything they told us about the environment is wrong. Often it's the opposite of what they said. Climate change is real, but it's not the end of the world. It's not even our most important environmental problem. Poverty and development bad government are the biggest factors driving environmental degradation, the same factors behind poverty and disease and all the things we're familiar with. But more proximate problems that are much more serious in my view is the continued use of wood as fuel by one to two billion people in the, one to two billion people in the world. The overeating of wild animals in general, certainly wild fish, the oceans are in much worse shape than many people realize. But just the kind of poverty that pushes people into forests to farm and use wood as fuel and eat wild animals are really underappreciated threats. And the solutions are industrialization and urbanization. Solutions are moving away from renewables towards fossil fuels and eventually towards nuclear, which is obviously the best form of energy. And that trajectory, the physical hierarchy of energy and the moral hierarchy are just perfectly overlapped. It's not, I don't know, any other discipline or any other science that shows this so clearly that one's life is deeply improved by moving from wood to fossil energy. And then one's life is further improved by becoming French and getting most of your electricity from nuclear. That's a bold claim to say that we need to become French in order to improve the future or to have a future. But let's start, you know, there's a lot of claims there. And I want to work through some of them. And the book is, and I'll congratulate you up front, it is, I mean, it's both kind of a memoir, but it's also a policy book and you do a really great job of blending them. Your personal story is really interesting, because you are, you are an environmentalist. Can you talk a bit about why you are interested in preserving or, you know, improving the environment and how that stems out of earlier political commitments? Yeah, I mean, so one of the, I'm going to give away the ending, but basically some of the punchline to the book is that our love of nature is irrational. There's no, there's no justification. And I criticize conservationists for somehow suggesting that the continued existence of yellow-eyed penguins or mountain gorillas are somehow important to human civilization, that if those species went extinct, that somehow would be like a Jenga puzzle. And then the human civilization would crash down and suddenly we wouldn't have roads and electrical systems and sewage systems and whatever. And it's just ridiculous. There's no mechanism for any of it. And that the reason that we want to save these species is the same, you know, one might say it's the same reason that we preserve and go paintings or it's the same reason that we, you know, protect old churches or something. So it's a preference, you know, it's a preference that we have. Is it enough to say that? Of course, you can say that. You can say it's aesthetic. You can say it's spiritual. You can, that's all those are fine to me as an environmental activist. And now we were saving redwood trees. We never had it. We would hear our strategy to save redwood trees was like, was like, here's a photo of ancient redwoods. Don't you want to save them? It wasn't, we must save these redwoods because if we don't, then, you know, the apocalypse will come and, you know, and so you kind of, well, how did that, like, how do we get to the end is near? And so that, that traces back through the birth of what we call environmentalism, which is really the marriage of Malthusianism and socialism. Well, can I ask to dilate a little bit on this, the kind of preference question? Early conservationists, I guess, more than environmentalists or even preservationists would often talk about going into the woods. And of course, this happens after kind of industrial is industrialization. Second place, but you go to the woods to commune with nature and that that's a powerful feeling and a meaning. That's that's kind of where you're talking about the the preference for keeping nature going is there. How does that then get yoke to Malthusianism and a kind of an apocalyptic alarmism about the end of, you know, the last mountaintop or the last tree, something like that. Right. Well, so there's sort of two reversals that occur. I mean, the first reversal is that the woods go from being a place of danger and criminality to that have to be conquered for God's plan, you know, in Europe, the United States to something that is beautiful and sacred and special. So that occurs, you know, at least in Europe and what's called the early modern period between 16th and 18th centuries. And of course, it occurs after we start living in cities, right? You know, so you only appreciate the thing after you're not victim of it. The American Indian was never so beloved as when he was no longer a threat, right, to frontier people. Yeah, you got it. Exactly. So so that's the first reversal. And then we get this period of sort of conservation called aesthetic for spiritual doesn't matter, which lasts until about World War Two. And so after World War Two, there is a very powerful Malthusian drive, I would say, by elites in the West, particularly in the Anglo-American countries, but it spreads throughout Europe. And it attaches itself to a bunch of conservation concerns. And it does that in a bunch of different ways. But for the most part, conservationists in America, in the United States, and really probably in Europe as well, that we look to mostly, I spend most time in California, was the conservationists were pro-nuclear, pro-economic growth, pro-people, pro-cities. They even said things like you have to have a lot of cheap energy to just protect nature, to just have nature. Nature takes a lot of work. You have to you have to you have to have the boundaries. You know, I talk about in Congo, you know, you talk to people and like, how is your life, you know, just interview them, what's going on around here. And they're like, hey, I wouldn't, you know, I always know because you're a big tall white guy, they know why you're there. You're there to be at the park. And they go, can you ask the park director to put electric wire around the park because the wild animals keep eating my crops, right? So that reality, of course, still exists in really poor countries, but, but managing nature turns out to be very expensive. And of course, there's opportunity costs, loss. But, but it's an amazing thing. If I can just interject, I know at in the early sixties when students for democratic society and their founding documents, Port Huron statement and the young Americans for freedom, their conservative counterpart that was founded by William F. Buckley and a couple of other conservatives, each of their manifestos, they take, they assume nuclear power and essentially free unlimited non polluting energy, you know, and that was, you know, in in the early sixties, that's what we were looking forward to. Obviously, it didn't work out that way. Yeah, I mean, the Port Huron statement is so interesting because, of course, it's like small modular nuclear reactors, power and suburbs. Yeah. Because people had escaped the, at that point, they still thought the cities were these monster cities. I think that was the language they use, right? Monster cities, and then we're all going to live in suburbs powered by nuclear. Well, today it's the exact opposite. Now, now environmentalists want to have cities, but powered by renewables. And we also, I show why that's physically not going to work for inherent power density reasons. But nonetheless, you get to this, these humanistic, you know, greatest generation conservationists who are overthrown in the Sierra Club elsewhere, too. But we focus on the Sierra Club because that's such a pivotal organization. And they're overthrown by the Malthusians who are anti nuclear, whereas the earlier conservationists are pro nuclear. And so the, the I unrighted, I had, it took me a long time. It took me many years to get to the bottom of what that was about. Can you, is it, is it partly that nuclear I mean, talk a little bit about how nuclear went from being the savior of kind of the jet age or whatever to being, you know, the ultimate thing that we had to avoid. Was it, and I mean, you talk about it at length in the book, but is it a kind of transference from nuclear power to nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons, obviously, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the things to be avoided where, you know, in the post World War Two era and through the sixties, we're living, you know, you know, you know, 15 minutes from the end of humanity and all of that kind of stuff. Is that what made nuclear energy such a pariah? Because I know people like Stuart Brand, the whole earth catalog founder, Mary Prangster, you know, important figure in the development of personal computing as a concept and a technology was always pro-nuclear, but that went missing in the in the counterculture years, right? Well, just on the case of Stuart, he changed his mind around 2009, and that was why I changed my mind. So he only changed his mind very late. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think the short version is that I see two big factors animating anti-nuclear ideology really starting to more strongly in the sixties, and it was first just the true the truly shocking nature of the bomb and the truly terrifying nature of the bomb is real. And I think some people feared it and hated it for some ideological reasons, but there is some independent just the bomb is a very serious invention. The second is the Malthusianism, which is that the problem that nuclear energy poses to Malthusians who want to control society and restrict growth and do all the things that we know what the people that call themselves environmentalists want to do, it's threatened by nuclear energy because nuclear energy means you have infinite energy, infinite freshwater, infinite fertilizer, and that means you have infinite food. So nuclear eliminates resource scarcity. Now, how much resource scarcity really was there before nuclear? I mean, it wasn't really, it wasn't like we were ever really running out of energy. We now know we weren't running out of oil or gas or coal or any of that. So that wasn't really real necessarily. But nonetheless, I think I document basically a reaction to nuclear by Malthusians that I think is clearly motivated by a fear that basically this human cancer, in their view, the human virus, we have to cut off its power source. That was always the idea. And again, I think it's more irrational than rational. Sometimes these guys don't really pull it apart and you're right about the transference or I don't have transferences. I probably shouldn't use that word because it has some psychoanalytical media, but displacement, I think is the word I use and we use in the book, which is that the fear displaces from the bomb on to the power plant. And that's true, although it's worth noting that it's not something universal and true. It's true among people who are on the left, not just the radical left either. But really, this is often just mainstream liberals. And I think this comes from the kind of old Kantian view. I didn't get into it in the book necessarily, but this desire that human reason be the thing that ends war, not a technical fix, which is ultimately what gets confusing very quickly. Because, you know, you mentioned France, France supplies a large percentage of a vast majority of its electricity needs via nuclear power plants. And in Europe, nuclear power seems more, you know, is more acceptable. Nuclear weapons definitely not in the United States, nuclear, you know, nuclear power is pretty verboten. You know, is it? Is there a consistent threat or is is that its Malthusianism and a dislike of of a post-scarcity world and it just takes different forms, depending on the social or political context? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that countries that have the bomb are more comfortable with nuclear. And in fact, I think that I think it's I've been it's not in the book because I didn't quite have the argument, but I've been looking at whether or not it could be that Japan and Germany are uniquely anti-nuclear because they they weren't allowed to have it and they would like to level the playing field. Plus, I think there's some pride. I mean, look, it's the best weapon and obviously it's the best weapon and Japan and Germany as anybody has spent any time there knows these are the the there. These are people that are deeply committed to excellence and have deep pride in doing the best of everything. And here they are denied the best weapon. Before we get to the apocalyptic turn, because that's really what you know, what your book, you know, in its title, its apocalypse never you're confronting that that certainly the contemporary political discourse. Talk a little bit about how you individually grew to be an environmentalist and you know, why it matters to you. I mean, yes. So for me, you know, just probably boring like everybody, my parents took me camping a lot. So I love being out. I love nature, you know, and and they were sort of I think my mom was still Christian. My dad was more post Christian, but but out of the men and I tradition, which is a pacifist, anti-statist, libertarian tradition, by the way. Right. Yeah, very much so. I'm happy to see you wearing buttons. You've you've gotten past that, right? It was progress. Yeah. So. So so that was so I mean, some of us always feel like I had a very basic morality. I never believed I never I never I was never Malthusian. You know, I just was never I people would say there's too many people in the world and they'll always struck me as racist because I was I knew they would be like, no, no. And of course, there's too many, you know, rich white people too. And you guys be kind of like, yeah, but it seems like you're always it seems like all the sterilization camps are in India, you know, it's like doesn't seem like this is evenly distributed concern. But I was definitely had more apocalyptic view and, you know, I and I treat that in some ways to just the bomb. I mean, I when I was I'm a Gen X or I don't know what I was born in 1971. So by by 1980, the movie the day after, I think it's 1983. So I was like 12 in this movie. They they the ABC encourages parents to watch this movie with their children. And it just like whatever, you know, 15 minutes in, it's just I mean, and they show like classrooms of children being carbonized. Right. You know, so schools out, you know, yeah, exactly. So, you know, so that was everything there. And my my my certainly my dad was more left wing than my mom. I read Chomsky at like 17 and went to Nicaragua at 17 to work, you know, help the Santanistas. And so I think the apocalyptic system also comes from socialism or Marxism a bit too, which is a kind of view that, you know, of course, there will be this becoming of the kingdom of heaven except for the communism or socialism in the transition phase. So I had all of that. Um, you know, I think there was a bunch of things. I mean, in the book, I talk about just living with small farmers and trying to be a revolutionary socialist with small farmers, you discover small farmers are like, they're not on board necessarily with collectivization. You know, they've got their own farm, you know, they don't really want their brother telling them how to how to do it, you know, that was a big deal on seeing kind of the difference between first world problems and third world problems, which most people never experience in poor countries had a big impact. And it just became clear that like a lot of environmentalists were just putting nature ahead of lifting people out of poverty and that that was unethical. And in fact, the humans had to always come first because otherwise, you know, bad things happen and bad things are justified. And so I think they'll, you know, and then I think another big moment was just changing my mind about nuclear. And once once you change your mind about nuclear, you kind of go, there's an aha moment that goes, oh, so we don't have to spread all this these crappy renewables all over our deserts and forests. We don't have to grind up all this nature for climate change. You can just have nuclear power plants. And once you understand how power density works and that it's good to move up the energy ladder from wood and dunk the coal to oil to natural gas to uranium and that industrial intensified agriculture produces more food on less land. There's kind of a picture that you get. And it was that picture that I had and it just took a while to be able to actually turn it into the book. Let's talk about contemporary alarmism in October. And these are quotes that are in the book Apocalypse Never October 2018 Greta Thunberg or rather in 2019 in October of 2018, a UN IPCC report comes out which was widely kind of misinterpreted to say we have 12 years left. Greta Thunberg in 2019 says, I want you to panic about the coming the imminent end of the world. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who was pushing the Green New Deal along with Senator Martin O'Malley, a Democrat from Massachusetts or Maryland. But she says the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. They're wrong. How how can you according to you they're wrong. What is the brief argument of how wrong they are? So the two most important things anybody needs to know about climate change are that deaths from natural disasters have declined 90 percent over the last hundred years. They've declined 80 percent over the last 40 years, including in very poor countries. We should be celebrating this like every day that we tiny amounts of people are swept away and in floods and hurricanes and cyclones and killed or it's just great news. And then the other thing is that carbon emissions have peaked in rich countries. They're going to peak in four countries in the next 10, 20 years, maybe most. Some people think they peaked already. I don't. But and so we're probably most likely going to be come in around three degrees increase in temperatures globally over pre industrial levels. You know, any increase in temperature does create changes to how we've created our society and what the habitats that we've set aside for animals are. So any increase in temperatures does create problems. There are benefits to. But it definitely creates more problems. So you don't want to have higher temperatures. If you can't avoid them, all else being equal. But you know, the guy that won the Nobel Prize for Economics on climate change, the Yale University professor William Nordhausen, the optimal level for balancing costs and benefits was four degrees. So now three when it hit three degrees, it's not the end of the world. Again, close to literally literally and figuratively not the end of the world. There is. Yeah. And so I opened that first. I'm going to publish it. I'm just going to give away the first chapter. I think I've spent my publisher to just give away the first chapter. And I wanted to. I go through that evidence that you describe. And then I say, does any of that sound like the end of the world? Let's go to the end of the world and see what life is actually like there. And if you go to the Congo, the difference between the Congo and my home in Berkeley is that we have like when the rain floods down my hillside here, we have a flood control system that makes sure my house is not washed away. They don't have that in the Congo. They don't have electrical grid that functions properly. I do. There's nothing in any climate scenario that's going to basically wipe out our roads and electrical systems and sewage systems or flood control systems. And yet that's the way that the climate change is described in these apocalyptic scenarios which you can't find in anything in the IPCC. IPCC doesn't even suggest that that we. I mean, I think I've been trying to. I've been looking at this question of could you ever say that anybody that you think anybody will die? I think I can safely say nobody should die from climate change. I don't see a scenario where that death toll that's declined from disasters will go up. Now this is let me make a point on this because I think it's important I'm going to write something about this. People who say climate change is making disasters worse are either deliberately misleading you, completely ignorant, or they are using a definition of disasters that the IPCC and scientists don't use. A hurricane on its own is not a disaster. What a disaster is according to IPCC is the effect of the hurricane on deaths and costs. People or whatever that's the interaction between the weather event and the thing. So I'm having I'm actually I've been going talking trying to get the scientists to tell me how she's claiming that climate change is making disasters worse. When how would you be able to claim that if the deaths from disasters are going down? You'd have to sort of imagine that they would have gone down more if you had a less temperature increase. Deaths are going down even though we are we have developed and we everybody around the globe have developed much more along coastlines along places that are more likely to have extreme weather events. Yeah, and they experienced like a 90 years have even higher percent decline in deaths from cyclones in the Indian Basin just by having better weather because of their better better able to predict weather. And then they have storm shelters that's super low costs. Like really it wasn't. So in the one hand you kind of go well we're more wealthy so we're more protected for natural disasters which is true. But some of it's just cheap stuff. But I mean I'm kind of like I can't figure out if you kind of go hurricanes are getting a little bit more severe. The fire season is a bit longer. It's just outweighed by other factors. You know, so in the fires I point out that it's the buildup of wood fuel and forests and it's building houses near forests that explain all of the increase in fuel in fire frequency and severity. In the case of floods it's whether you have a flood control system or not. I mean the New York Times has been running these news stories like hyping flood threat and you're kind of like well so then we'll make our flood systems better. I mean it's not like I mean it's not like somehow we're all going to be flooded because of climate change. They make it sound almost biblical in the threat it poses as opposed to fairly modest changes that were very easily especially in rich countries able to adapt to. And so I mean is the equation for you as simple or as direct rather as if you care about people the good news is that fewer people are dying from weather, fewer people are dying from pollution or environmental degradation as we're getting better at that and the way to kind of supercharge all of that is to increase general wealth. I mean obviously yeah I mean we should I mean there's so many reasons to increase wealth so obviously that should be a major goal. Economic growth should be a that it is and it already is of course at the highest priority but you basically see the what you get with the Malthusian left is they say we have to do this to all this I mean they just the Democrats put out another terrible oh just a mash of bad spending on climate stuff that doesn't first of all most of it doesn't actually reduce emissions doesn't have anything to do with carbon emissions jobs programs and all this stuff I mean some of it might be fine I mean I might be fine with some I'm not even saying it's all bad I'm just saying it's not about climate change and a lot of the emphasis in terms of renewables I point out is that precisely because renewables make energy expensive that was the that was not a bug that was a feature of renewables as it's always been imagined in every green new deal I hope we and the idea there is if it's more expensive you use less of it yeah it's a very crude model basically making energy more scarce and slowing down this virus of growth it's just a degrowth anti-growth agenda masquerading itself in green clothing in a variety of ways that's why I think the watermelon that gets said sometimes I think on the libertarian front you know people see greens as just watermelons I don't think it's quite the same green on the outside and red communists on the inside no certainly marks marks there's an anti-growth quality here that wasn't either so explicit or it wasn't really center central to what marxism and socialism were supposedly about yeah quite I mean marxism was also trying to get to a post-scarcity world and it's I mean it's it's fascinating that kind of the modern environmental movement is really about intensifying scarcity right yeah so it's about I basically the book is in you know it's in three and I don't have it broken into three parts in the book but basically the first third is everything you've been told about the environment is wrong it's just a debunking of climate deforestation plastic straws species extinctions the second third is how do humans actually save the natural environment like in the real world how did we save the whales you know that's urbanization industrialization substitution you know we save sea turtles by not making glasses out of their shells anymore we use plastics and then the last third is like how if environmental problems are manageable if many of the trends are going in the right direction if there's really no there's no like scientific basis for imagining some catastrophic events from climate change what's going on what is this about and so I basically just summarized it as money power and religion and while I think money and power are really important obviously I wrote whole chapters on them I think they're independent factors behind this I think this is at bottom this is people constructing an alternative religion so this is because of the general secularization of the world we still have a religious impulse and it's being rooted in a kind of transcendental symbolic love of nature yeah and the problem with it is that it doesn't acknowledge it in other words if you're if I'm a if I'm a Jew and you're a Christian or a Muslim or whatever and we're like I'm a Jew I'm a Christian almost that's who I am but in and I'm it's my religion and then I have science I mean you know most religious people very few don't very few rejects I suppose we're like my religion and I've got my science and then there's kind of a science and there's sort of two different when I go to church I'm a church when I when I'm reading IPCC report to something else environmentalists they're because they don't think that they're in the grip of a religion they start treating nature as a new God they start treating science as a new religion and that's when things just go absolutely bonkers and problematic let's let let me ask you to work through kind of how do you convert is the wrong word but how do you engage somebody constructively if they are kind of thinking religiously without acknowledging it and to go back to renewables you know it's interesting to hear you talk about how part of the whole point of renewables was to increase the cost of energy so that even if it wasn't destroying you know even if we weren't sucking oil out of the earth and you know and ruining things that way we have renewable energy but it's going to be more expensive so even though it doesn't spoil the environment we use less of it can you quickly kind of sketch is the problem with renewables now that they are too expensive compared to other alternatives or is it that they don't work at scale or is it a combination of both of those so think of it this way that there's basically you know renewables are for you know pre-industrial subsistence farming societies they're low energy density it's woods sunlight water wind they're all very low energy density fuels or flows fossil fuels are much bigger increases in energy density they're what allow us to have cities you can't have renewable powered cities we did try we had horse drawn carriages and you had horse feces everywhere and disease and all sorts of problems so with electricity then also you can have elevators and the buildings can go higher until you get to nuclear where really you completely dematerialized your power source so the problem with renewables is just it's just physics you know this Michael Moore movie which got all this controversy which documents the big environmental problems of renewables they document the big environmental problems with renewables but then they kind of suggest that it's because of capitalism as though like a solar farm wouldn't require 400 times more land in a socialist society solar farm requires 400 times more land in a natural gas plant or a nuclear plant because of the physics of sunlight or wind I mean there's you know it's just there's just nothing but well the solar panels have become 2% or 10% more efficient okay so then it'll be just 360 times more land there's no and that's by the way that's it's actually been 2% efficiency improving over 10 years not 10 so you're talking about so and then there's just the unreliability of it you know you have to have reliable power for it to be cheap power every time you're moving electricity out of the grid into a battery or something else and then back in you're getting two energy conversions so the renewables you know they're doing a lot of work for people renewables are doing the work for Malthusians of trying to of at least a fantasy of moving to a low energy society there they're obviously a place that people that crony capitalists can make a lot of money just subsidy farming and then and then they're providing the spiritual fantasy of harmonizing human societies with nature which is the whole point so renewables just aside you know renewables and organics and and humans are now making themselves right by nature in the same way that Christians wanted to make themselves right by God and so it's a new morality anybody that opposes renewables is immoral right and and and satanic in some sense and nuclear itself is kind of satanic it plays a satanic role in this new cosmology which is so powerful because it's so unconscious so part of the reason I want to write apocalypse never was just let's just make it conscious and just kind of go if you want to justify your religion fine but then I think you need to explain to everybody why it's worth the devastating impact it has on the natural environment why it's worth the big cost increases the increase is that it forces in the electricity system because often what renewables are doing is they're externalizing their cost the unreli- the managing the radical unreliability of wind turbine until it's like five a.m. or four a.m. and all this energy is on the grid you have to pay people to take it like it's just not like this is not great energy it's often producing large amounts of garbage energy so you know you kind of go at the bottom you kind of go how you know what could possibly allow such terrible energy to be viewed as something so good right only a religion could perform that right um do you find a uh and obviously you have uh you know throughout your career you engage mostly you know environmentalists and people like that are people receptive uh are you know hardcore greens receptive to being told you are in the throes of a religion that you can't even see because you're so deep into it well what do you think yeah well i i you know i guess the question is because we live in a world where you know we have the the democratic party of basically every one of their presidential candidates uh had signed on to some version of the green new dealer at least paid lip service to it um you know in an environmental i mean in a in a in a profound way i think we are all environmentalists now in the sense that we we think about the costs and benefits of of choices of energy choices and i'm old enough to remember the public service ads to treat you know to teach people not to just throw garbage out the window of a car on a highway i mean we had to work we all think in environmental terms if you know in terms of cost benefit to the surrounding areas um but where it looks like we're about to make a great leap forward into a very extreme version of it so how do you you know how do you what is what is the target audience i guess in a way for your book is it to get hardcore greens to you know kind of change the way they're thinking uh is it to get i mean there's a sizeable group of people including in the republican party who are like nothing is wrong that can't be fixed by just you know dumping crude oil everywhere um you know i mean who had how do you convert people to what your position is which strikes me as like eminently sensible so i mean part of the i mean i wrote this book for so many different audiences i mean i would definitely had conservatives on my mind while i was writing it i definitely had progressed since on my mind for writing it um they should be getting different things out of it if it's working so for conservatives i think the most important thing to do is to just get grounded truly do get grounded in the science um there's still a lot of guys out there on the right who think that they're either the planet's not really warming or that carbon dioxide is not or as our as our esteemed president calls it you know that climate change is a hoax right it's a project by the chinese government somehow and uh yeah i don't even want to try and diagram that yeah that flow chart but i think it's a kind of a troll honestly i don't really know that anybody that says that actually believes it there's definitely some sunspots people but you know i testified in front of the house committee on science space and and technology and in january and like not a single republican was a climate denier you know and they were all asking questions and they had other concerns but it wasn't this this kind of the old caricature and certainly trump obviously is responsible for some of that so but the old character i don't find is true among like most republicans um you know i think that they didn't i think most republicans didn't know i talk a little bit about how as the romanian became malthusian the right actually became anti-malthusian even though malthus is truly a conservative in just the kind of true conservative sense and why that was and so i think that there's and it's sort of the same reason libertarians ended up on the right i think in united states so i think that there's a um you know so i think there's sort of like a just kind of reject all that because look the ipc if ipcc science is like fine ipcc policy recommendations are stupid and just reflect the green agenda and we should criticize them i'm actually a reviewer i criticized them recently but i think if the conservatives were to actually get a more scientific view on climate change and to adopt this more humanistic view that i'm proposing which says look it's not like you're ever satisfied with your energy source just like you're never satisfied with your food production you always want to improve it but the key is to be going in the direction of higher power density is not in the direction of lower power densities because that requires more nature more material more matter more natural environment must be ground up to produce either electricity or food or products or whatever and and republicans i think have been articulating they've been sort of articulating something close but it's been around the economy and therefore they've ended up reinforcing the sense that there's some there's some there's some necessary trade-off between the economy and the environment but the truth is like France 75 percent nuclear it's not poor because it has 75 percent nuclear i think you'd actually argue that it's rich so i think that there's been a confusion on this i want to write this book for conservatives and republicans and libertarians okay so then and then for progressives obviously yeah well talk a bit oh just on progressives it's just getting similarly it's getting to the energy power yeah yeah it's just the progressives it's just going also similarly getting your head screwed on right with the science and being like renewables are problems because of low power density and this is just nothing to do with capitalism or the man or whatever like that's just a problem with your fuels do you and that actually yeah well do you have a sense uh it seems you mentioned you're a gen x or i'm a late uh baby boomer and uh you know your argument makes perfect sense to me and i i suspect to a lot of gen xers for millennials gen z younger americans the environment regularly shows up in kind of polls and surveys as a very high-order principle and kind of moving towards a you know fully renewable post-carbon kind of energy future um why do you think that is and how do you reach younger people of whatever kind of ideological orientation i mean look it's a religion i mean it's just a complete we're in a total religious revival it's supposedly secular but i think i i look at i don't work on race but i i i listened to john mcwartir and you know john mcwartir was doing one of his things with glenn laury and i think i saw you interview glenn laury and and i think mcwartir goes mcwartir goes i'm gonna he's like i want to write a book on how anti-racism is the new religion and i was like i was like i just i just did that on the environment and it's like it's like i haven't i haven't spent any time trying to figure out how they kind of work together but it's like the same people that are in the street around anti-racism we're in the street around climate apocalypse so i mean i think you know the death of god secularization you so first of all people need something to believe in you know that includes like some view of their own immortality and that's okay there's nothing wrong with that that's actually i think it's part of being human you know the argument i make is that actually our awareness of our mortality creates anxiety that then this is i'm taking this from a major anthropologist who wrote on this makes us want to have some kind of legacy that's natural that's okay makes us want to feel heroic that's great be aware of it don't you know pretend like you don't need that or want that and then and then i think you need a new morality this whole thing of the you know the the obsession with plastic straws you know the i'm vegetarian i show these things are of no importance can i ask you i i try to eat vegan and i do that mostly for calories not for ethical reasons but you have a stat in the in the book which put me back on my heels uh it's that if everybody adopted a vegetarian diet how much how much of the earth would that say from farming it's basically oh from the um or i'm sorry what what is what is the metric emissions you mean yeah i was gonna say i mean carbon emissions it's um it's two to four percent right so it's not nothing yeah it's just nothing you should not you should not and only that but like there's i can explain why basically like it just it doesn't even work out that if you became vegetarian you could sort of be like there's more wilderness because there's less pasture the big thing on and how much land we use for meat is just whether are you spreading your cows all over the hillsides like michael paulin and the organists want us to do or are you confining them in the evil industrial farming way because the evil industrial farming way leaves more of the earth to the natural environments obviously right like just i don't need to provide any math i mean just think about you concentrate a hundred cows over a hundred miles of land versus you know one mile right i mean i mean not you know one of the things that i really appreciate about the book too is that you're not just you know picking off you know certain things for your argument i mean you talk about how there is a massive reforestation of the planet which is a good thing you know we have more plants more trees less land is being used for food production and energy production and things like that but then that there are also problems with kind of forests that are planted by you know people who are creating timber forests right i mean yeah everybody knows that an old growth forest is just if you've ever been in an old growth forest it's like a it's like for me it's one of my peak spiritual existential peak experiences old growth or redwood forest or old growth oak forest you feel they feel differently feel like you're in a cathedral if you're in some tree farm so i point out yeah there's reforestation but it's not exactly it's not what you there's real loss in the amazon the bigger dynamic is that by promoting bad forms of agriculture greenpeace has encouraged fragmentation of the primary forest primary old growth forest which we need if you're going to have like big cat species that can move around hundreds of kilometers of space you need these big apex predators and so they fragmented it because they actually thought that there was something wrong with concentrated industrialized intensified agriculture when that's the key that's the one of that's the most important thing when it comes to saving the natural environment what we call the natural environment conservation it's concentrating animal production concentrating food production intensifying food production more food on less land it's just obvious it's physics um you don't i mean there's no advanced physics it's just simple when you think about it and yet the dogmatism and the religiosity then has resulted in real ecological harm not just harm to people could you i want to get to uh i want to hear you make the best case possible for nuclear power ubiquitous nuclear power in a second but just as a specific point you had mentioned this in passing about how the you know the next or the sixth extinction is not going to happen it's not happening this is something that we hear a lot it's like plastic straws you know killing all sorts of uh sea life um you know these are the kind of uh talking points or aphorisms of the of the environmentalist movement what is going on with extinctions and why should we not be overly concerned right now that you know we're going to wake up uh you know by the fall most of the our species are going to be extinct let me tell you what we should first be concerned about and i'll tell you what you should be concerned about we should just be concerned that humans have a large footprint we take up a lot of the earth there's just not as much habitat for endangered species as we would want um poverty in particular often drives people into forested or grassland areas converts them into farming or ranching and that is how you get lots of habitat it's also how you get wild animal consumption so that's what you want to worry about extinction because it's such a powerful word is used by scientists to advance public relations and advocacy for their conservation agenda the problem is that we're not in the six mass extinction we would be i mean you'd have to be the the mount the no the the the the share of extinctions has to be enormous we're just at a very tiny and it's you know and the other actually put on realize is that what happened was the way they construct this is they model they create these models where they assume a certain amount of loss of habitat would lead to a certain number of extinctions well they were wrong the models always overestimated extinctions just turns out species are actually many animal and plant mother species are just good at occupying less and less land it's kind of sad actually i mean it's kind of amazing as well but it's not like extinction is like in other words we're really good at maintaining a lot of species diversity even if you just don't have you know enough i think for me half of all wild animals we have half the number of wild animals in the world today that we had in 1960 that's the issue if you just care about wild animals and you want more wild animals that's too bad we should have been eating cows and pigs and chickens instead of eating all those animals and taking their habitat so that's why the extinction and then the other problem with the extinction stuff is that it's very it's just very apocalyptic like if you kind of i quote this conservation scientist who is if you believe all that six extinction stuff then why would you bother you know like why would you bother saving things it's it's wrong and stupid one of the things i'm i did in this book very deliberately very carefully is i got the key scientists on the phone that often make these apocalyptic claims i interviewed them like a proper reporter would which amazingly no environmental reporters had done before me and basically got them on the record admitting that you know i there they were bullshitting basically or grossly exaggerating you know or in the case of the species of extinctions one i just got some of the main scientists just go on the record and just be like no you're right we're not in the midst of a six extinction you know like okay then why did why did you guys tell everybody that for like the last 10 god years you know well how you know from a from a lay position you know and we live in both simultaneously and i guess these things are related in age of experts and an absolute loss of faith in experts confidence in in experts in institutions what are the tells that you're being sold a line of BS on environmental claims you you spend a fair amount of time in the book and it's it's it makes for good reading but it's infuriating looking at the tactics and the claims of the group extinction rebellion in which is primarily or very big in england but how do you know when people are kind of stretching for for true claims well i mean this book i mean i mean i don't i think that some of i look at things like healthcare you know as like complicated i look at energy environment is not that complicated i mean in some ways you just go those things i mentioned you know declining death tolls you know from natural disasters someone starts talking about people dying any number millions or billions you have to be like what is the mechanism for that what is the mechanism like how will those people die oh well we might run out of food well actually it turns out most everybody agrees that that as long as the poor countries using fertilizer irrigation tractors and have roads we're going to produce much more food than we produced today we produce 25 percent more food than we need obesity is a problem we have we throw away huge amounts of food that's great i mean in some ways it's great it's terrible the waste but it is kind of a sign that we're secure and wealthy and that that's not the issue so you know and then in terms of like this story about energy moving from lower energy densities both on energy and food production as well as all cities by the way power densities increase it's like down like Manhattan is like insanely high power densities Singapore right high power densities these little rural parts of Congo super low so just understanding that and that energy substitutes for matter that you can leave the natural environment by using more energy to protect it to save it i think these things once people get that framework this is like the last i'm not going to do another book on the environment i've already decided like i've just got other things i want to do i write other articles but like this book actually there's a secretly i've hidden an environmental studies textbook in this book it has all of the science it has the basic framework that you should get in your environmental studies textbook and are not getting so i do feel like once you read this book your brain will be able to detect the bullshit okay well let's here let's try it out and see if i can detect bullshit from you when you talk about nuclear power and uh you know we we talked a bit about how okay you know the nuclear age is born in you know Hiroshima and Nagasaki the mushroom cloud that's terrifying and then you know we still have god knows where more than enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet a million times over and all of that we have nuclear power in parts of the world France overwhelmingly you know generates the electricity by that places like Japan places like Russia but you know then the history of nuclear power seems to be littered with these warning signs these blips or more than blips Fukushima Chernobyl three-mile island which not in the same league i guess but why should we be moving towards nuclear you know and and and also then is it actually affordable in any kind of meaningful way i mean i think the first thing you have to understand about nuclear you have to appreciate what it is it is a revolutionary moment in human evolution it's a completely radical new technology okay um it is and we knew it would be like literally before it was invented in the early 1900s before they even split the atom there was books describing how once we got nuclear energy it would both open up the possibility of super bombs huge bombs and limitless energy basically limitless queen energy they didn't quite use that word but that was where they were talking about so this is first thing second thing is you get it at the lab level i mean this is i mean we the manhattan project required this huge only the u.s government could have done it with massive wartime mobilization but splitting the atom happens in the lab i mean that's just and they literally as soon as the word gets out that they did it they replicate everybody replicates it in their lab around the world so this is not something where you can just kind of be like like smallpox where you can be like well okay we'll have some smallpox in a couple of freezers in the united states and russia like this is this is comes right out of human knowledge so what that what that means is so first of all i mean one of the so interesting i discovered in the research for apocalypse never was like really right after the bomb this group of scholars at Yale and some guys from harvard too they figured out right away what it would mean in fact neils borer the nobel prize-winning danish physicist who visits manhattan project sees oppenheimer goes up to him and is like this is going to change everything this is going to end war i mean like literally they were like it's going to end war and then they were and then they freaked them out because of what it meant for it to end war and so there was some backpedaling and how do we control it and whatever but basically a long story short like it was clear that this weapon is truly terrifying and and in fact that's how it works if it wasn't so terrifying it wouldn't be creating peace between india china india pakistan right you know and other countries soviets and uh and the and the west yeah and the chinese and whatever so it's that so but that's but that is so kind of horrible in the sense that that was what like i remember talking to a friend of mine who's progressive very much a u n type you know and she was and i was like what just sounds like you just it just upsets you that this is how what it took to kind of tame the human beast she was like yeah it's horrible like it was supposed to happen through brotherly love and reason and this was console that whole idea so that's the so i think that was yeah that's the weaponry then how do we you know make the case for it as as the best power source for the future so so then you get to the energy and it was obvious to everybody that it was going to be the best form of energy like just because of all the reasons we know now the high power densities the fact that there's no air and water pollution the fact that the so-called waste is just these used fuel rods that can be stored on site tiny quantities of which never hurt anybody never will hurt anybody that was all that and there was almost a manic enthusiasm for nuclear energy in the fifties in part I think as a kind of like way to make this terrifying new reality more palatable but that then didn't last very long and then the Malthusians start going after nuclear the the the Quakers and Mennonites and pacifists and others start going after nuclear weapons and then it eventually just displaces itself onto nuclear energy both deliberately and through concerted political action and then so your question and this is all my way of getting to your question the accidents whatever first of all it'd be like saying like when you kind of go well I don't know chemistry you know chemistry look at all the accidents with chemistry I mean it's kind of like if there's a new a whole new field of science which is what nuclear a whole new field of science a whole new industrial capacity like I can kind of go well of course there's going to be a shitload of accidents like you're kind of like I'm kind of amazed there haven't been more and they haven't been worse and that's what we keep finding at point out that basically the radiation that escapes from these accidents just not the super potent toxin that people imagine there's not very much of it because of the high power densities meaning that it's just you know nuclear fuel rods you know as opposed to coal and wood you're just putting a lot of material particulate matter into the environment very little of that escapes from nuclear so I go the overreaction to those accidents is displacement you know it's one of the one of the reactors melted and like three mile island and it's like wow okay yeah that's and there's that kind of we knew that would happen and it and it was like you know this is a first generation and and then like anybody I mean so how many people were killed in this major industrial accident oh nobody so okay Fukushima how many people were killed a little bit of radiation there oh nobody Chernobyl you kind of dig down into it I at best you can kind of count 200 dead bodies over like an 80 year period so you so ultimately nothing if you believe that science and I document all in the book I have the best expert on it blah blah blah then something else is going on and clearly the bomb is a big part of that now it's again it's more progressive than conservatives who are worried about nuclear it's more women than then you know so there's other things going on there but but nonetheless I think that's the big anime factor that freaks us out about the technology my understanding of nuclear plants in the United States at the very least and I I think this may be true in Europe as well is that they really once they're up and running if you if you can assume a plant has been built and is running it's incredibly cost effective compared to you know carbon or you know oil gas things like that but that it actually it takes an enormous amount of subsidies to put a plant in operation is that accurate or how would you how would you address that no it's not they're not subsidies there are I mean I guess you could argue that you know loan guarantees are a subsidy but it doesn't have to be with subsidies it can also just be you know under the traditional regulated public utility model where you have a natural monopoly in the form of electrical electrical electric company because you don't want you know more than one electric company stringing up wires everywhere it's a natural monopoly we said we're gonna either have it's either gonna be socialist 30% of of US electricity is socialist basically publicly owned utilities 70% is privately owned it's similar to that in Japan but South Korea France and many other countries are just publicly owned utilities and so when they invest they'll just they don't usually need a subsidy they usually just need to be able to start charging for some of that electricity in advance in order to make the capital if they borrow cheaper so the most important thing is that you have cheap capital but it's like what you said I mean it's like if you think that this is important to the civilization and again I don't I'm not suggesting that if we don't do it that the civilization is indeed through our climate change I'm actually just sort of criticizing that nonetheless if you think like and there's that nuclear is something that you need for civilization it's just like building a bridge or or a highway or a stadium or anything like that and there's cost overruns just like there are with those things you expand the subway you do the big dig and Boston you do the high speed rail and Britain and those things have cost overruns but there's no need for you know unless it's a you know what it would basically happen was with deregulation and it made it harder to be able to do the kind of investments that we did with nuclear in the 1970s but we're still able to it just we don't really have the we're just not really set up right to do it I guess as a closing thought are you optimistic that that kind of high watermark I'm reaching for bad metaphors here high watermark fever you know the high you know high fever whatever of kind of environmental alarmism are we is that cresting or do you see that cresting sometime soon how optimistic are you that the message that you're putting out in your book apocalypse never is going to carry the day I mean I think after apocalypse never and some of the stuff that we're going to do to call out the really bad science I think it's going to be increasingly hard to claim that climate change is causing natural disasters that it will increase deaths from natural disasters in the future I think that climate change will eventually have the same trajectory as fears of overpopulation had which is that it will continue to sort of be something that people say and talk about but it won't have the kind of it won't be what AOC the next AOC is crusading on I do think the left will keep coming around on nuclear I just hired Zion lights from extinction rebellion who's the person that is in the book to help us to build nuclear plants in Britain but I think the point I would make is that until there's some alternative religion until there's like some national I mean whether it's nationalism or socialism or some alternative to the traditional Judeo-Christianity people are going to keep finding new religions because we need that so I mean for me the question is what would the alternative I mean I would argue in some sense libertarian is a kind of spiritual existential moral worldview what I'm proposing environmental humanism is the same but I do think that in some ways there's just the work of Sisyphus that we do have to keep confronting apocalyptic millenarian ideologies because they are harmful I mean they're causing they're contributing to anxiety and depression and people it's being used as a strategy to basically keep poor countries from accessing cheap energy and less economic growth so for me it's more like I don't know I can't tell you exactly how big our victory will be but I do think that the work is essential and you've got to kind of push back on this stuff so it doesn't cause the kind of harm that it's been causing in recent years I'm thinking with the myth of Sisyphus if we could only harness the energy of that bolder rolling down the hill every night we would need to curb it right yeah right right we'll leave it there the book is Apocalypse Never Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All the author is Michael Schellenberger Mike thanks so much for talking to reason thanks for having me Nick good to see you