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A Radical Environmentalist Apologizes for the Climate Scare
Left-wing environmentalist, Michael Shellenberger, has penned an apology for his contribution to climate alarmism. Shellenberger, author of the book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, offers some inconvenient facts:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s
Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
And he also provides some common sense advice and observations on ways to protect — and not to protect — the environment and on ways to deal with global warming:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Global warming is real, but we don’t need to terrify ourselves and our children into dealing with it. Free markets provide incentives for people and businesses to act efficiently. Government renewable energy projects typically do just the opposite. Inefficiency is waste, waste is pollution.
Published in General
I’ve been informed both are correct, although I prefer “anthropogenic” since it contains the “man-made” term.
Which I reject in both cases — “man-changed” or “man-caused” — I deny that either are known to be true.
Well just using the correct term doesn’t really assert that it’s true. But it’s still important to use the correct term. Anthropomorphic is ascribing human qualities to something, like what comic strips and cartoons are that make animals seem like people: walking upright, talking, having marital arguments with spouses… Just because the words start out the same doesn’t make them even remotely similar.