Michael Shellenberger

An environmentalist’s apology: ‘I was guilty of alarmism’

Picture credit: Getty

This article was originally published on Forbes website, but subsequently taken down. 

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise 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 have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, so I may seem like a strange person to be saying this.

But as an energy expert asked by the US Congress to provide objective expert testimony and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as an Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologise 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 definitively 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
  • Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have declined in Britain, Germany, and France from the mid-1970s
  • Netherlands is becoming richer, not poorer while adapting to life below sea level
  • We produce 25 per cent 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 potentially larger 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, but that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

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Written by
Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger is an American author and environmental policy writer. He is the author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020), a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and Green Book Award Winner.

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