Apocalypse Never

Author:: Michael Shellenberger Full Title:: Apocalypse Never Tags:#media/book

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* highlights from 2021-02-08

* What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end, nor that civilization would collapse, if temperatures rose above 1.5 degrees Celsius. ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=198))
* Even if these predictions prove to be significant underestimates, the slow pace of sea level rise will likely allow societies ample time for adaptation. ([Location 218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=218))
    * **Note**: But you still have to adapt eventually
* Ninety-eight percent of people in eastern Congo rely on wood and charcoal as their primary energy for cooking. In the Congo as a whole, nine out of ten of its nearly ninety-two million people do, while just one out of five has any access to electricity.44, 45 The entire country relies on just 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which is about as much as a city of one million requires in developed nations. ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=274))
* “It’s not about choosing science,” said Lunnon, “it’s about looking at the risk we’re facing. And the IPCC report lays out the different trajectories from where we are and some of them are very, very bleak.” ([Location 354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=354))
* 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.64 And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change. The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself. The “climate policies” the authors refer to are ones that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use (the burning of biofuels and biomass), which in turn would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs. The IPCC comes to the same conclusion.65 ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=370))
* The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=394))
* We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, without question. There is nothing automatic about adaptation. And it’s true that Bernadette is more vulnerable to climate change than Helen and I are. But she is also more vulnerable to the weather and natural disasters today. Bernadette must farm to survive. She must spend several hours a day chopping wood, hauling wood, building fires, fanning smoky fires, and cooking over them. Wild animals eat her crops. She and her family lack basic medical care and her children often go hungry and get sick. Heavily armed militias roam the countryside robbing, raping, kidnapping, and murdering. Understandably, then, climate change is not on her list of things to worry about. As such, it’s misleading for environmental activists to invoke people like Bernadette, and the risks she faces from climate change, without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine her standard of living, and the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=495))
* The risk of triggering tipping points increases at higher planetary temperatures, and thus our goal should be to reduce emissions and keep temperatures as low as possible without undermining economic development. Said Emanuel, “We’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground. We shouldn’t be forced to choose between growth and lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.” ([Location 631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=631))
* But rainforests in the Amazon and elsewhere in the world can only be saved if the need for economic development is accepted, respected, and embraced. By opposing many forms of economic development in the Amazon, particularly the most productive forms, many environmental NGOs, European governments, and philanthropies have made the situation worse. ([Location 734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=734))
* Between 500 and 1350, forests went from covering 80 percent of western and central Europe to covering half of that. Historians estimate that the forests of France were reduced from being thirty million hectares (about seventy-four million acres) to thirteen million (about thirty-two million acres) between 800 and 1300. Forests covered 70 percent of Germany in the year 900 but just 25 percent by 1900.22 And yet developed nations, particularly European ones, which grew wealthy thanks to deforestation and fossil fuels, are seeking to prevent Brazil and other tropical nations, including the Congo, from developing the same way. Most of them, including Germans, produce more carbon emissions per capita, including by burning biomass, than do Brazilians even when taking into account Amazon deforestation.23 ([Location 748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=748))
* In August 2019, the news media’s portrayal of the burning rainforest as a result of greedy corporations, nature-hating farmers, and corrupt politicians annoyed me. I had understood for a quarter century that rising deforestation and fires are primarily the result of politicians responding to popular economic demands, not lack of concern for the natural environment. The reason deforestation in Brazil rose again starting in 2013 was that of a severe economic recession and reduced law enforcement. The election of Bolsonaro in 2018 was as much an effect of rising demand for land as it was a cause of rising deforestation. Of Brazil’s 210 million people, a full 55 million live in poverty. An additional 2 million Brazilians fell into poverty between 2016 and 2017.35 ([Location 810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=810))
* What we today view as a pleasing natural landscape—a grassy meadow surrounded by a forest and with a river running through it—is often a landscape created by humans to hunt game seeking out drinking water. ([Location 840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=840))
* Hunting with fire became a crucial milestone in the creation of both what we think of as nation-states and markets, through the demarcation of control by individuals and groups competing for food. Indeed, fire was used differently in different zones, for security, agriculture, and hunting.44 ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=849))
* Insensitivity to Brazil’s need for economic development led environmental groups, including Greenpeace, to advocate policies that contributed to the fragmentation of the rainforest and the unnecessary expansion of cattle ranching and farming. Environmental policies should have resulted in “intensification,” growing more food on less land. Instead, they resulted in extensification and a political and grassroots backlash by farmers that resulted in rising deforestation. ([Location 872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=872))
* But there is far more economic and ecological justification for deforestation in the Cerrado, which is less biologically diverse and has soils more suited to soy farming, than in the rainforest. By conflating the two regions, Greenpeace and journalists exaggerated the problem and created the wrong impression that both places are of equal ecological and economic value. ([Location 893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=893))
* The report added insult to injury. The World Bank had already cut 90 percent of its development aid for Brazil’s agricultural research efforts as punishment because Brazil sought to grow food in the same ways that wealthy nations do.54 Brazil was able to make up for the aid that World Bank had denied it with its own resources. After it did so, Greenpeace pressured food companies in Europe to stop buying soy from Brazil.55 “There’s this exaggerated confidence, this hubris,” said Nepstad, “that regulation upon regulation, without really thinking of the farmer’s perspective.”56 ([Location 904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=904))
* The increase in deforestation in 2019 is to some extent Bolsonaro fulfilling a campaign promise to farmers who were “fatigued with violence, the recession, and this environmental agenda,” Nepstad said. “They were all saying, ‘You know, it’s this forest agenda that will get this guy [Bolsonaro] elected. We’re all going to vote for him.’ And farmers voted for him in droves. I see what’s happening now, and the election of Bolsonaro, as a reflection of major mistakes in [environmentalist] strategy.”58 ([Location 913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=913))
    * **Note**: When the backlash to a movement becomes more detrimental to the movement itself than the advocacy for it.
* Green NGOs have had a similar impact in other parts of the world. After environmentalists encouraged such fragmentation in palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia as a measure supposedly friendly to wildlife, scientists found a 60 percent reduction in the abundance of important bird species.62 ([Location 929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=929))
* Macron’s attacks enraged Brazil’s president. “Few countries have the moral authority to talk about deforestation with Brazil,” said President Bolsonaro. “I would like to give a message to the beloved [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel. Take your dough and reforest Germany, okay? It’s much more needed there than here.”67 There was nothing “right wing” about the anger of Brazil’s president with foreign hypocrisy. Brazil’s former socialist president grew just as angry at the hypocrisy and neo-imperialism of foreign governments more than a decade earlier. “The wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation,” said President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva in 2007, “but they already deforested everything.” ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=950))
* The increase in Amazon deforestation should lead the conservation community to repair its relationship with farmers and seek more pragmatic solutions. Farmers should be allowed to intensify production in some areas, particularly the Cerrado, to reduce pressure and fragmentation in other areas, particularly the rainforest. ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=958))
* The scientists seemed shocked by what they discovered: “The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.” ([Location 1117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1117))
    * **Note**: Minimum estimate and doesn’t account for all the plastic that goes to the bottom of the ocean floor (which is a substantial amount).
* In our conversation, after I told Figgener the history of how plastic helped save the hawksbill turtle, she laughed. “Plastic is a miracle product, you know? I mean, the advances in technology that also you know, help to develop. It wouldn’t be possible without plastic. I mean, I don’t want to lie about it. I’m not that hardline on it.”63 ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1214))
    * **Note**: Cornucopian argument (things were way worse before so therefore things are fine now)
* Certainly not in terms of air pollution. In California, banning plastic bags resulted in more paper bags and other thicker bags being used, which increased carbon emissions due to the greater amount of energy needed to produce them.77 Paper bags would need to be reused forty-three times to have a smaller impact on the environment. ([Location 1300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1300))
* Plastics are made from a waste by-product of oil and gas production and thus require no additional land to be used. By contrast, switching from fossil plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States by 5 to 15 percent. ([Location 1326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1326))
* The plastics parable teaches us that we save nature by not using it, and we avoid using it by switching to artificial substitutes. ([Location 1333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1333))
* Humankind is thus well-prepared to understand an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what’s natural. ([Location 1348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1348))
* Ninety percent of the wood harvested from the Congo Basin is used for fuel. “Under a ‘business as usual’ scenario,” concluded researchers in 2013, “charcoal supply could represent the single biggest threat to Congo Basin forests in the coming decades.” ([Location 1497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1497))
* Even though it was foreigners, not local people, who killed mountain gorillas, European colonizers sought to expel the locals from the areas they had designated for parks. American conservationists including Sierra Club founder John Muir successfully advocated for governments to evict indigenous people from Yellowstone and Yosemite parks in the 1860s and 1890s. King Albert of Belgium brought that same model to the eponymously named Albertine Rift, where many people already lived and, indeed, humankind had been born, 200,000 years ago. ([Location 1559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1559))
* But creating those parks involved the eviction of local communities, which has led to disputes and violence. “Virunga Park was created during colonial times,” noted Helga Rainer, a conservationist with the Great Ape Program. “Land is the resource at the heart of the conflict, and it was European colonialists who changed or confused land tenure systems.”38 Scientists estimate that between five and “tens of millions” of people have been displaced from their homes by conservationists since the creation of Yosemite National Park in California in 1864. A Cornell University sociologist estimated that Europeans created at least fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone.39 ([Location 1567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1567))
* Displacing people from their lands wasn’t incidental to conservation but rather central to it. “The displacement of people who herded, gathered forest products, or cultivated land was a central feature of twentieth century nature conservation in southern and eastern Africa and India,” noted two scholars.40 ([Location 1574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1574))
* Something similar happened to Uganda’s Batwa. Since they had depended on harvesting meat, honey, and fruit from within Bwindi Park for centuries, they did not know how to create a new life as farmers. “Consequently,” noted researchers ten years later, “the other community members have taken advantage of the Batwa’s deprivation to exploit them.” ([Location 1585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1585))
* ‘Is it worth saving this species at the cost of the social, political, and economic cost on the human side?’ Or do we say, ‘We hope the species makes it, but there are other priorities in this area right now’?” ([Location 1641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1641))
* Plumptre worries that the management of Virunga Park by foreigners will weaken local support. “My problem is when it’s seen as outsiders coming in and taking care of everything, you are at risk of the park being seen as an ex-pat’s playground. And so when threats come, there may be little support for them.” ([Location 1643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1643))
* Madden believes that the personalities of many conservation scientists undermine their relationships with locals. Conservation scientists “are highly introverted and analytical,” she said. “They want to make big decisions by themselves in a corner with people who think like them, and then give it to people who experience it as an imposition. It’s not like they try to be assholes. They want to get it right. They don’t have the same values, and it looks disrespectful and blows up.” ([Location 1672](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1672))
* Ultimately, for people to stop using wood and charcoal as fuel, they will need access to liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, which is made from oil, and cheap electricity. Researchers in India proved that subsidizing rural villagers in the Himalayas with LPG reduced deforestation and allowed the forest ecosystem to recover.68 ([Location 1720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1720))
* But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists, the Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind that has lifted so many nations out of poverty in the past. ([Location 1774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1774))
    * **Note**: Colonialization explains a lot of the history behind conservation efforts and it cannot be considered without that in mind.  Lots of efforts actually end up harming the local communities for the sake of conservation instead of working with them which is not scalable long term. Because of that, it may be better to try to do less-green methods of energy production that are on the whole _cheaper_ to provide for the local communities and engender good will with them. Always better to work with the people you are affecting and changing things for. Price is a very important point too especially in these developing countries. The main priority is living and surviving.
* In Uganda, I had a conversation with a middle-aged woman who worked at our ecolodge, where we went to see gorillas for a second time. I told her that just two out of every hundred Americans are involved in farming, whereas two out of every three Ugandans are farmers. “How can you grow enough food?” she asked. “With very large machines,” I replied. ([Location 1869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1869))
* For more than 250 years, the combination of manufacturing and the rising productivity of farming have been the engine of economic growth for nations around the world. Factory workers like Suparti spend their money buying food, clothing, and other consumer products and services, resulting in a workforce and society that is wealthier and engaged in a greater variety of jobs. The declining number of workers required for food and energy production, thanks to the use of modern energy and machinery, increases productivity, grows the economy, and diversifies the workforce. ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1872))
* Humankind’s use of wood has peaked and could soon decline significantly.20 And humankind’s use of land for agriculture is likely near its peak and capable of declining soon.21 All of this is wonderful news for everyone who cares about achieving universal prosperity and environmental protection. The key is producing more food on less land. While the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by 8 percent since 1961, the amount of food produced has grown by an astonishing 300 percent. ([Location 1886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1886))
* As such, buying cheap clothing, and thus increasing agricultural productivity, is one of the most important things we can do to help people like Suparti in Indonesia and Bernadette in Congo, while also creating the conditions for the return and protection of natural environments, including rainforests. ([Location 1921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1921))
    * **Note**: Is this a logical jump? May not be strong enough to make this case but certainly they are related
* Around the world, for hundreds of years, young women have been voting with their feet. They have moved to cities from the countryside not because the urban areas are utopian but because they offer many more opportunities for a better life. ([Location 1944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1944))
* Scholars including Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman and Steven Pinker find that rising prosperity is strongly correlated with rising freedom among, reduced violence against, and greater tolerance for, women, racial and religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. Such was the case in Indonesia. ([Location 1975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1975))
* Today, economists point to three reasons why manufacturing, as opposed to other sectors of the economy, has allowed poor nations to develop into rich ones. ([Location 1992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1992))
* First, poor nations can become as efficient as rich nations in making things, and even surpass them. ([Location 1993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1993))
* Second, goods made in factories are easy to sell to other countries. This allows developing nations to make things they cannot yet afford to buy, and to buy things that they themselves cannot yet make. ([Location 1996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1996))
* Finally, factories are labor-intensive, which allows them to absorb large numbers of unskilled, small farmers. Former farmers like Suparti don’t need to learn a new language or special skills to work in factories. ([Location 1999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=1999))
* And yet, for as dysfunctional and corrupt as Indonesia was, and in many ways still is, it has been able to attract enough manufacturing to drive development; per capita annual incomes rose from $54 to $3,800 between 1967 and 2017.51 For Suparti, what that has meant is that her wages have more than tripled since she first started working in the city. As a factory worker, she was able to purchase a flat-screen TV, a motor scooter, and even a home by the age of twenty-five. ([Location 2013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2013))
* Van Benthem’s finding wasn’t particularly new. The fact that energy efficiency, a form of resource productivity, lowers prices, which increases demand, is basic economics. ([Location 2042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2042))
* Globally, the history of human evolution and development is one of converting ever-larger amounts of energy into wealth and power in ways that allow human societies to grow more complex. ([Location 2055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2055))
* “The goal in Ethiopia is to have as many jobs as possible, and have the education system turning out the factory workers that you need. That’s why I push for light manufacturing. It’s not just the skills but also the discipline instilled in people. Later on, when the country reaches the second stage, the education system should produce more skilled workers capable of producing medium tech products, and so on.” ([Location 2166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2166))
    * **Note**: Seems to be saying its a people problem
* Many demographers believe that how quickly the human population peaks and starts to decline, globally, depends on how quickly sub-Saharan nations like the Congo industrialize and people like Bernadette move to the city, get jobs in factories, earn money, and choose to have fewer kids. Understanding this process leads to an apparently counterintuitive conclusion. “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. “It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have less children. The population doesn’t grow, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon. You might be better off in 2070.”84 ([Location 2178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2178))
* That means early developers, today’s rich nations, should do everything they can to help poor nations industrialize. Instead, as we will see, many of them are doing something closer to the opposite: seeking to make poverty sustainable rather than to make poverty history. ([Location 2187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2187))
* It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982.34 ([Location 2327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07Y8FHFQ7&location=2327))
    * **Note**: All or nothing fallacy. Says it was all vegetable oil and green peace and movement to save whales had no effect even if vegetable oil may have had a _greater_ effect