‘Apocalypse Never,’ with Michael Shellenberger

This week's guest is Michael Shellenberger, the founder and president of Environmental Progress, and author of an important new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Most books about the environment typically feature breathless panic about how the world is coming to an end. Michael's book is a rare outlier that debunks the extremism of most such apocalyptic claims, which too often are the predicate for not just bad policy, but counter-productive policy when it comes to environmental improvement in poor nations.

Michael began his intellectual and political odyssey on the left, and has by degrees migrated to the center, along the way coming to support nuclear power as the most important current alternative energy source for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. But the book goes well beyond the issue of climate change to lay out a vision of what Michael calls "environmental humanism"—a conception of environmental protection that puts humans beings at the center of the story, a welcome contrast to the often explicit misanthropy of many modern environmentalists.

I'll add as a personal note that I've known—and learned much from—Michael for more than a decade, and our episodic collaborations have been one of the more rewarding experiences of my professional life.