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Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All Hardcover – Illustrated, June 30, 2020
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Now a National Bestseller!
Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.
Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.
But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.
Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.
Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions.
What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateJune 30, 2020
- Dimensions6 x 1.35 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100063001691
- ISBN-13978-0063001695
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book. Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger uses science and lived experience to rescue a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart." — Richard Rhodes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
“Environmental issues are frequently confused by conflicting and often extreme views, with both sides fueled to some degree by ideological biases, ignorance and misconceptions. Michael Shellenberger’s balanced and refreshing book delves deeply into a range of environmental issues and exposes misrepresentations by scientists, one-sided distortions by environmental organizations, and biases driven by financial interests. His conclusions are supported by examples, cogent and convincing arguments, facts and source documentation. Apocalypse Never may well be the most important book on the environment ever written.” — Tom Wigley, climate scientist, University of Adelaide, former senior scientist National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
“We must protect the planet, but how? Some strands of the environmental movement have locked themselves into a narrative of sin and doom that is counterproductive, anti-human, and not terribly scientific. Shellenberger advocates a more constructive environmentalism that faces our wicked problems and shows what we have to do to solve them.” — Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
"If there is one thing that we have learned from the coronavirus pandemic, it is that strong passions and polarized politics lead to distortions of science, bad policy, and potentially vast, needless suffering. Are we making the same mistakes with environmental policies? I have long known Michael Shellenberger to be a bold, innovative, and nonpartisan pragmatist. He is a lover of the natural world whose main moral commitment is to figure out what will actually work to safeguard it. If you share that mission, you must read Apocalypse Never.” — Jonathan Haidt, author of Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
"The painfully slow global response to human-caused climate change is usually blamed on the political right’s climate change denial and love affair with fossil fuels. But in this engaging and well-researched treatise, Michael Shellenberger exposes the environmental movement’s hypocrisy in painting climate change in apocalyptic terms while steadfastly working against nuclear power, the one green energy source whose implementation could feasibly avoid the worst climate risks. Disinformation from the left has replaced deception from the right as the greatest obstacle to mitigating climate change." — Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science, MIT
"The trouble with end-of-the-world environmental scenarios is that they hide evidence-based diagnoses and exile practical solutions. Love it or hate it, Apocalypse Never asks us to consider whether the apocalyptic headline of the day gets us any closer to a future in which nature and people prosper.” — Peter Kareiva, director of the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability, UCLA, and former chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy
"In this tour de force of science journalism, Michael Shellenberger shows through interviews, personal experiences, vignettes, and case histories that environmental science offers paths away from hysteria and toward humanism. This superb book unpacks and explains the facts and forces behind deforestation, climate change, extinction, fracking, nature conservation, industrial agriculture, and other environmental challenges to make them amenable to improvements and solutions." — Mark Sagoff, author of The Economy of the Earth
"We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias. 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.” — Steve McCormick, former CEO, The Nature Conservancy and former President of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
"Michael Shellenberger loves the Earth too much to tolerate the conventional wisdom of environmentalism. This book, born of his passions, is a wonder: a research-driven page turner that will change how you view the world. I wish I'd been brave enough to write it, and grateful that he was." — Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at MIT and author of More from Less
"Will declaring a crisis save the planet? The stakes are high, but Michael Shellenberger shows that the real environmental solutions are good for people too. No one will come away from this lively, moving, and well-researched book without a deeper understanding of the very real social challenges and opportunities to making a better future in the Anthropocene." — Erle Ellis, professor of geography and environmental systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction
"Michael Shellenberger methodically dismantles the tenets of End Times thinking that are so common in environmental thought. From Amazon fires to ocean plastics, Apocalypse Never delivers current science, lucid arguments, sympathetic humanism, and powerful counterpoints to runaway panic. You will not agree with everything in this book, which is why it is so urgent that you read it." — Paul Robbins, Dean, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
About the Author
Michael Shellenberger is the nationally bestselling author of Apocalypse Never, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings, and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; Illustrated edition (June 30, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0063001691
- ISBN-13 : 978-0063001695
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.35 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #19,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Environmental Policy
- #8 in Climatology
- #18 in Environmental Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never" and "San Fransicko" (HarperCollins, October 2021).
"Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” says historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger rescues with science and lived experience a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart.”
He has been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.
Shellenberger advises policymakers around the world including in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In January 2020, Shellenberger testified before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives.
He has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.
Shellenberger was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019 to serve as an independent Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, to be published in 2022 his most recent Congressional testimony on the state of climate science, mitigation, and adaptation.
Shellenberger is a leading environmental journalist who has broken major stories on Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires.
He also writes on housing and homelessness and has called for California to declare a state of emergency with regards to its addiction, mental health, and housing crises. He has authored widely-read articles and reports on the topic including “Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse,” “California in Danger.”
His articles for Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and his TED talks ("How Fear of Nuclear Hurts the Environment," "Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power" and “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet”) have been viewed over six million times.
Shellenberger was featured in "Pandora's Promise," an award-winning film about environmentalists who changed their minds about nuclear, and appeared on "The Colbert Report." He debated Ralph Nader on CNN’s "Crossfire" and Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen at UCLA .
His research and writing have appeared in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology, The New Republic, and cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News, The New Republic.
Shellenberger has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years. In the 1990s he helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, and inspire Nike to improve factory conditions in Asia. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.
He lives in Berkeley, California and travels widely.
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Apocalypse Never
5 stars plus
°°°°°°°
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 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.
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 Teicholz. 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 nut balls 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 with 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.
Apocalypse Never is an extremely important—and highly readable—book about Earth’s environment and contemporary human society. The author is a lifelong environmentalist. This book carries forward Michael Shellenberger’s personal mission—to protect the natural environment and to achieve the goal of universal prosperity for all people.
Shellenberger explains, “I wrote Apocalypse Never because the conversation about climate change and the environment has spiraled out of control.” In England, for example, leaders of an organization called Extinction Rebellion have made claims on national television, that because of climate change “Billions of people are going to die. Life on Earth is dying. Governments aren’t addressing it.”
A 16-year old Swedish girl became an international celebrity in 2019 for crying out that same message. In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.
Many young people are suffering psychic trauma because they have heard some of their elders predicting over and over again that “our kids will be dead in ten to fifteen years,” while declaring that awful fate has been proven scientifically.
Shellenberger interviewed Sarah Lunnon, a representative of Extinction Rebellion, about the basis for her statements on television that billions would die because of global warming. She said that scientists like Johan Rockström from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany are saying it.
Shellenberger interviewed Rockström by telephone. Rockström told Shellenberger, “We don’t have evidence that we can provide freshwater or feed or shelter today’s world population of eight billion in a four degree [Celsius] world. My expert judgment, furthermore, is that it may even be doubtful if we can host half of that, meaning four billion.”
Shellenberger asked Rockström whether anyone has done a study of food production at four degrees. Rockström replied, “I must admit I have not seen such a study. It seems like such an interesting and important question.”
Shellenberger comments, “In fact, scientists have done that study, and two of them were Rockström’s colleagues at the Potsdam Institute. It found that food production could increase even at four to five degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels and that . . . fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization mattered more than climate change.”
We learn from the book that in 1989, thirty years previously, Associated Press reported that a senior U.N. environmental official claimed that if global warming wasn’t reversed by the year 2000 rising sea levels would wipe entire nations off the face of the Earth, ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures. Governments have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control.
Shellenberger explains, “I also care about getting the facts and science right . . . Much of what people are being told about the environment, including climate change is wrong, and we desperately need to get it right. I decided to write Apocalypse Never after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.”
In Apocalypse Never Shellenberger says “Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”
The book takes readers along with Shellenberger in his investigatory travels to Africa, England, India, Indonesia, and South Korea. Shellenberger reports interviews in person and by telephone with interesting people including environmental scientists and activists.
In 291 pages of text and 19 color photos the book presents many surprising facts about the Earth’s environment and climate. For example carbon dioxide emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s; the Amazon River basin is not “the lungs of the world;” climate change is not making natural disasters worse; and projected future global food supply exceeds consumption demand by 20% to 30%.
Statements of fact are supported by references in 104 pages of notes citing scientific sources including studies from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (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.
Michael Shellenberger and his wife Helen traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2014 to study the impact of widespread wood fuel use on people and wildlife, particularly the fabled mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park.
Congo was at the center of the Great African War (1988-2003). The war involved nine African countries and caused the deaths of three to five million people, mostly due to disease and starvation, but many by violence and atrocities. Another two million were displaced from their homes or fled seeking asylum.
The U.S. Department of State warned against travel to Congo because it was not safe due to widespread crime and lack of effective policing. For security, Michael Shellenberger hired a guide and translator, Caleb Kabanda, who has a reputation for keeping his clients safe.
Michael and Helen saw extreme poverty in Congo. They met Bernadette Semutaga (Bernadette), age 25, near Virunga National Park, home of the mountain gorillas. Bernadette told them, “I got married when I was fifteen years old. When I met my husband he was an orphan. He had nothing.”
Bernadette and her family lack basic medical care. Her seven children often go hungry and get sick. Bernadette was in fear of the heavily armed militias that roam the countryside robbing, raping, kidnapping, and murdering.
Bernadette is among the one billion people, one in seven worldwide in the early 21st century, who lack access to clean water, sanitation facilities, and electricity. Bernadette farms to survive. She must spend several hours each day walking to fetch water and firewood, hauling and chopping wood, building and fanning smoky fires, and cooking over them. Wild animals eat her crops.
Congo is rich in natural resources, but energy poor. Bernadette lives near Goma, the provincial capital city. Shellenberger told his Congolese guide, Caleb Kabanda, that he was in Congo in part to study the relationship between energy scarcity and conservation. Caleb said of Goma, “can you imagine a city of nearly two million people relying on wood for energy? Its’ crazy!”
The Congolese people hope for the completion of a planned hydroelectric dam that would bring them electricity. The book informs us that such dams in poor countries have been opposed by a non-governmental organization known as International Rivers. Their opposition is based on the loss of white water rafting if such dams are completed.
The book takes us to visit Indonesia, where Shellenberger traveled to investigate the working conditions for factory workers. Indonesia is rich both in natural resources and in energy. In Indonesia, Shellenberger met Suparti, a 25-year old woman from the island of Java. She was raised in a strict Islamic community where she couldn’t go to social gatherings if men were there.
Suparti’s family home had no electricity or TV. She worked alongside her parents and siblings in the fields. After she turned seventeen years old, Suparti left home for a city in Sumatra where she had an aunt and a sister. She found work in a factory that supplied products to Mattel, the American maker of toys and dolls.
At age eighteen Suparti changed jobs, taking work at a chocolate factory. Over the next seven years she moved to progressively more responsible positions. Her wages more than tripled since her first job. Eventually her work involved the factory’s computer systems. By age twenty-five Suparti was able to purchase a flat-screen TV, a motor scooter, and even a home.
Suparti told Shellenberger that she missed home, but had no desire to go back; that her parents encouraged the Muslim way of marriage where religious teachers would introduce her to someone they think is a good match. However, Suparti preferred to get to know the man before marriage. She wanted four children, two boys and two girls. At age twenty-one she met her future husband via Facebook. They married and have a child.
This review is just a brief sampling of the book. A few of the chapter titles, listed below, provide a foretaste of the richness of detail and thoughtful analysis in Apocalypse Never:
• It’s Not the End of the World
• Earth’s Lungs Aren’t Burning
• The Sixth Extinction Is Cancelled
• Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace
• Destroying the Environment to Save It
• False Gods for Lost Souls
This book may make Michael Shellenberger famous—or infamous in the opinion of people who were already trying to impede its circulation not seven days after it was issued.
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Reviewed in Brazil on September 6, 2022
















