Getting Environmentalism Right

[music]

0:00:07.2 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts, I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:09.2 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.5 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Michael Shellenberger, a long-​time environmental activist, who won Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment Award in 2008. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, the independent nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California. His new book is Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Welcome to the show, Michael.

0:00:30.5 Michael Shellenberger: Thanks for having me.

0:00:32.2 Trevor Burrus: I gave the little bio at the beginning, but when you read the book, you realize that you’ve been doing, fighting for environmental causes for quite a while and gotten your hands dirty in a lot of different places. So, aside from what I’ve read from your bio, can you give us a little background on where you’re coming from and the kind of stuff that you’ve done?

0:00:50.7 Michael Shellenberger: Sure. So I’ve been, like you mentioned, done environmental and progressive advocacy since I was a teenager. I did a little fundraiser when I was 16 for Rainforest Action Network, that was probably the first political event I did. I used to do sort of activist communications for environmental groups, including all the big ones, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC. I then started a labor environment alliance to push for renewables in the early 2000s, and we successfully persuaded the Obama campaign team to go big on a public investment on renewables around 2007.

0:01:34.3 Michael Shellenberger: And then I started, we started documenting a bunch of problems with renewables. Some of the biggest ones are just the impact on the environment. So solar and wind farms require about 300 times more land than a natural gas or a nuclear plant. That started generating a lot of grassroots environmental opposition, everywhere from Cape Cod to California. And around the same time, some friends of mine said, you really ought to take a second look at nuclear power, obviously it’s zero carbon emissions. It has a bunch of fears associated with it, but after I did some research and read about particularly Chernobyl, which was an incident that occurred when I was 15, and was obviously very scary, I changed my mind about nuclear.

0:02:22.6 Michael Shellenberger: And I see that as really a pivotal moment because it sort of changed how I thought about broader questions of resources, the environment. With nuclear power there’s no risk of resource scarcity because you have effectively infinite energy. And infinite energy means you have infinite fresh water and fertilizer and there’s no shortage of food. I mean, even without nuclear, I think there’s some questions about whether there’s really resource scarcity, but nonetheless with nuclear it really makes that clear, and that then kind of raised a set of broader questions about what environmentalism was really about and what it was after, and that’s a bunch of the material that I discuss in Apocalypse Never.

0:03:07.8 Aaron Powell: What do we mean by alarmism in the environmentalist context? I mean, is it really just a different word for disagreeing about magnitude or does it mean something more specific?

0:03:19.8 Michael Shellenberger: It means a lot of… In Apocalypse Never, I certainly describe a lot of different kinds of alarmism and a lot of its motivations, as well as its effects. I mean, I think it’s a neutral word, so I consider myself a pandemic alarmist, for example. I think that when you have an emerging pandemic that it’s better to be alarmist early in the stage of the pandemic where you can most quickly stop its spread. I think now later in the pandemic I actually am less of an alarmist. In fact, I sort of have become more, I’ve become less of an alarmist as the pandemic has progressed.

0:04:03.2 Michael Shellenberger: But I argue in the book, that environmental alarmism hurts us all in a variety of ways. I mean, it certainly, this is probably a motivation for the book, it has just negative mental health consequences, that are now pretty well documented. Half of all people in the world think that climate change will make us extinct. We see that climate change is contributing to anxiety and in depression, including among adolescents, for whom anxiety and depression has been rising, particularly among girls, along with suicides in ways that maybe that appear to be tied in some ways to the right to rise of social media, but certainly adolescents don’t need more things to worry about.

0:04:43.6 Michael Shellenberger: And it’s also been used as a cover for doing pretty bad things, including depriving poor countries of cheap reliable energy, not just in the form of fossil fuels but also hydroelectric dams and certainly nuclear power plants and it’s also been used as cover to do pretty terrible things in the United States, both in the form of closing nuclear plants that could run for decades longer and that are universally replaced by both fossil fuels and also renewables with huge land use impacts, and it’s been used to basically not enforce environmental laws against favored technologies, principally renewables. So I think that what I’ve been trying to document is both a sweeping set of negative consequences that alarmism has as well as some of its darker motivations.

0:05:39.8 Trevor Burrus: Do you have a theory of… Because you came out of this world to some extent and a theory of what… So alarmism can be a strategic position. I mean, you have fiscal hawks or inflation, like think about inflation now. Some people strategically adopt an alarmist position for the purposes of trying to get people to come to maybe a compromise position that is like closer, versus like being in earnest belief, which is the one thing that has always struck me odd because I’ve read the IPCC reports. And so many times when I discuss climate change alarmists, they just prefer the most extreme scenario, which I’m just like, “Well, why would you prefer that most extreme scenario?” So, I mean, do you have a theory like where this is kind of coming from when it’s in the face of the facts?

0:06:28.1 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, sure. Yes. It’s an interesting question, which is to what extent are people actually alarmist, or are they being alarmist to just get attention or as a negotiating posture. I think in general it’s really hard to hold two different positions. You know, a public position and then a private position. I just don’t think people are very good at compartmentalizing that. We all might good at white lies in our daily life, but maintaining a deception like that I think is very difficult and does not particularly explain what’s going on.

0:07:03.4 Michael Shellenberger: You know, that being said, I think a lot of people start by exaggerating, you know, look journalists in particular… Basically, there’s three groups that are engaged in alarmism: There’s the science, there’s activist scientists, there’s activist journalists, and then there’s just activists. In journalism, you want your article to be as dramatic and extreme and as alarming as possible because it attracts readers, and that’s fundamentally the bread and butter of journalism is you want to have readers. Scientists, there’s obviously an incentive to exaggerate as well, it’s good for your career or it elevates your issue among a bunch of other competing issues, it does attract funding; and then for activists, obviously it’s the way to get into the news media, it’s a way to get attention, so there’s certainly all that.

0:07:56.0 Michael Shellenberger: I think that over time, one of the things that has occurred is that I do think alarmism sometimes started as a kind of tactic or a negotiating posture, but then I think that the main actors involved in it really started to believe in it and it started to affect how do they did their research, how they do their science, how they do their advocacy. So yeah, I think that both things are happening.

0:08:24.5 Aaron Powell: It seems, though, the environment is different from other areas where there are potential risks and where those risks aren’t entirely known in advance because it depends on a lot of information that we might not have, so you don’t know how… You don’t know exactly what your chances are when you hop in your car to drive to the grocery store, that you’re going to get in an accident, but you know that there is a risk, and you take that risk. And we might say that there are people who are automobile accident alarmists and maybe they respond by asking, by not ever getting in the car, or only driving at times when they feel like it’s going to be safer or whatever, but the risks of that kind of alarmism are contained to the person and ultimately, I guess reversible, they could change their mind and get back and drive more often.

0:09:20.1 Aaron Powell: But with the environment in this big system that it seems all dependent on all of the other parts and if say the non-​alarmists are wrong and things get out of hand, we’re kind of all screwed, things can turn very, very bad in a non-​reversible way, and so does that counsel us to be maybe more alarmist in this area then we might otherwise be just on, I guess, a precautionary principle sense?

0:09:52.1 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, so the argument certainly for a long time has been that we don’t know… We can’t understand environmental risks, they’re too complex, and therefore we should err on the side of precaution. There’s a bunch of problems with that. The first is like it’s a sweeping statement so… And it ignores the fact that we become more resilient to the environment, we become less vulnerable to, say, extreme weather by doing things that create carbon emissions. So we’ve seen death from national disasters have declined over 90% globally, 99% in places like Bangladesh over the last 40 years.

0:10:38.1 Michael Shellenberger: Well, they achieve… We achieve that not by reducing our carbon emissions, we achieve that through development, and so development makes us resilient to a whole set of risks, not just environmental, but many, many risks in our society, including from conflict or war or asteroids or other extreme tail risks. I think the issue, the second issue, though, is that the uncertainty is… I’ll give you… It’s better to tell this as a story. There’s this idea in climate science that there are potentially these thresholds or tipping points that after we cross them, a set of different systems will start to fall apart, so you hear people talking about you get to a certain level of warmth and the tundra, the frozen tundra melts, methane, which is natural gas, is released that accelerates the warming, that accelerates then ice melting, the ice melting changes the Gulf Stream in some ways and that somehow changes weather patterns in the Amazon, and then the Amazon burns up and then there’s a cycle of the burning.

0:11:49.5 Michael Shellenberger: And you basically… The [0:11:53.2] ____ on climate change does not consider tipping points the basis for influencing their scenarios. So they do discuss it, but they don’t consider it science or the base, a reliable basis for creating scenarios, and the reason is that there’s just too many chains of… There’s too many different chains of causality. And so I interviewed the lead author of the biggest tipping points paper in recent years, it came out 2019 in Nature, and he said, yeah, and he basically agreed with everything I raised and he even pointed out part of the problem is that, say, in the Amazon, the scientists have changed their minds over the last couple of decades into, at first they thought that climate change results in more rain, and now they worry it’ll dry out the Amazon.

0:12:43.3 Michael Shellenberger: So you have some fundamental problems like that where you can’t actually paint a scenario. The other issue is just that there may be hidden thresholds or tipping points that will be crossed no matter what we do, even if we stopped all emissions today, we may still cross most tipping points, so that’s an argument for greater societal resiliency, greater wealth, not I think… The way that the precautionary principle was constructed for many years was that, well, because we can identify this risk, we should completely orient everything around that risk, but the problem is that when you start looking particularly catastrophic risks, you come up with things like pandemics and wars and asteroids and super volcanoes and alien invasions, we can now add to that list.

0:13:31.3 Michael Shellenberger: But with all of them, there’s certain things you would do. I for example, I think we should probably be doing more on asteroid detection, we’ve missed a few, but the bottom line is that you want greater societal resiliency, you want greater societal wealth so that you’re prepared for any kind of disaster that comes, and that’s a separate… After I finish saying that, I think people then they always say, “Well, then, are you saying we should do nothing?” Well, of course not. We should do things and on climate change we are. The United States has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other country over the last 20 years, thanks to the fracking revolution, disproportionately, which similarly was criticized by people who said that it was too risky, so it’s…

0:14:16.1 Michael Shellenberger: I think the precautionary principle discourse has been really disingenuous, has been really misleading, it’s been used to basically used to trigger an emotional response and bully people into believing or saying or wanting to do different things, when when you really start to pull it apart, you just reveal significantly greater levels of complexity.

0:14:46.5 Trevor Burrus: Were you ever an alarmist in the way that we’re discussing? You kind of discuss it a bit in the book, but I feel like almost reading between the lines. As I mentioned, one thing I really like about your book is that it is full of stories, and many of those stories are you getting your hands dirty in very poor countries, relatively poor to America especially, and that’s a huge focus that you actually go and look at people who are struggling with finding any energy, and that seems to be a big influence on your thinking maybe and how it changed over the years when you go away from developed countries, and you go to developing countries or third world countries and see what’s actually going on.

0:15:27.0 Michael Shellenberger: So I was a climate alarmist for probably 20 years. Really, the ’90s and the 2000s, really from the mid-​90s to the late 2000s, I was the most alarmist. And in the book I point out that some of it probably just had to do with some unhappiness in my own life, I just think there is a relationship, I think when… I think there’s a psychological motivation to be alarmist in some circumstances [chuckle], not all of them. Like I said, I think my pandemic alarmism came from a more psychologically healthy place than my climate alarmism did, which was coming up in my life where sort of not wanting to deal with certain personal things and so you end up being like the world is a catastrophe, there’s a… The story of catastrophism is basically the same story of a depressed person, which is the story of environmentalism, which is that humans are terrible, the world is a terrible place, injust, unequal, unfair and the future is dark, the end of the world is coming.

0:16:43.5 Michael Shellenberger: That’s identical to what psychologists have identified as the story of a depressed person, so for sure I was more alarmist. It was really around 2008, 2009, 2010, I started to develop a friendship with Roger Pielke Jr, who’s a character in Apocalypse Never, and who’s basically just shown that all of the increased cost of natural disasters is explained not by natural disasters getting worse, because they haven’t, but really just by the fact that we’re so much wealthier. And I didn’t understand that before 2008, I should have, but I didn’t, and I think for a variety of reasons, a lot of people still don’t understand that, so I think that kind of, I had the alarmism and it was based on a foundation of both ignorance and some amount of my own anxiety and depression.

0:17:51.2 Aaron Powell: It seems like there are two potential like motivating ideas that might lead us to environmentalism. The one is the we care a lot about humanity, and environmental harm, climate change, pollution, whatever the issue is, is going to be bad for people, it’s going to lead to death, shorter lifespans, poverty, and so on. And so therefore, we should be environmentalists because the ultimate goal is what’s good for humanity. The other version of it is, and I think this is somewhat related to the depression angle that you just spoke about, is the Earth and a pristine, untouched, unused and abused environment is an end in and of itself, is worth preserving and that our use of it, even if it benefits us is, if not entirely unjust, is at least unseemly. Is one of those a stronger motivator of alarmism, because it often seems like when you talk with alarmists, they talk in terms of the former, but ultimately when you push back, you get the sense that a lot of it is the latter, that there’s just something wrong with us swarming over all over this pristine environment and we should knock it off.

0:19:17.0 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, great question. I’m actually just finishing my next book, and I’m asking a really similar question. My next book is about sort of the progressive response to drug addiction, mass incarceration, homelessness. And I think that the way it works is, there is this, there is a lot of evidence that progressives, environmentalists, people on the left do have, are kind of what we think, we are more bleeding heart, tend to be more compassionate and sensitive, all the stereotypes. There’s a truth to that, it’s been documented. I think then that then gets married to a really powerful belief system, which is that all of the suffering that you see out there, or at least the vast majority of it, is a fundamental consequence of an unfair society.

0:20:19.2 Michael Shellenberger: And this is just Rousseau, right, this is just… Everything wrong with the world is because of inequality, because of status competitions. Later Marx took this up and said it was because of capitalism, but it’s the same basic idea, and that idea itself implies that some kind of social arrangement is possible where there isn’t all that suffering. So it’s both a… There’s an implicit… And I think that’s developed in people, it’s developed in children in our schools, by our parents, by the culture, whatever. But I think that people forget it sort of, or it becomes unconscious almost, and so then when we grow up, go to college, get our degrees, pursue a life of science or journalism or advocacy, and we come up with… So we confront some problem, we find some way of explaining how that problem is due to fundamentally this question of social inequality and social structure and society, and never even really being honest with ourselves or with others that we have in mind some radically different society arranged in some really different way, and obviously, some people do spend a lot of time talking about what that would look like.

0:21:42.5 Michael Shellenberger: But there’s I think an implicit assumption that that’s possible, rather than, you know, here’s a lot of different belief systems, obviously, that… Mostly religious ones that basically describe sufferings and inequality as inevitable, as nothing you can do about or as… We have Buddhist response to that, which is, suffering is really about our attachments to things in the world. You have a stoic response which is, hey, you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t control, and a lot of these things are out of our control. Those are very different, those are just two, obviously, but those are two very different responses to the suffering we see from I think the dominant progressive, Rousseauean environmentalists’ response.

0:22:30.0 Trevor Burrus: That makes me think about this question I’ve often had with nuclear, which you are a huge proponent of. But the environmental movement has been very, very skeptical, we can always get into where that kind of came from, but going to Aaron’s question about two ways of approaching environmentalism, sometimes I think the people, some of the more ardent environmentalists, they just oppose nuclear because it doesn’t actually create a wholesale change in how we’re living our lives, like that there’s an aesthetic revulsion to consumption, cities, all this kind of stuff, and that if we say, “Alright, you’re right, coal is bad, we’ll just take all the coal power plants offline, we’ll put them all with nuclear power plants. No more emissions problems. We already have some existing, but no more new ones, and everyone can continue to drive their car and then have their refrigerators and all that stuff.” And really what they want is they want that to change, so then they are kind of not being honest about their sort of aesthetic revulsion to modern life.

0:23:28.5 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, you got it. That’s a big part of it. I wrote a piece called The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear is Because It Means We Don’t Have to Use Renewables, which sort of gets at that part. Yeah, it’s obviously, there’s a desire to change society and change other people’s behaviors. And I think that then goes and finds reasons to do that. Religions have always been trying to tell people what to eat, that’s a big part of it. And so environmentalists trying to tell people what to eat and they say, well, I’m telling you what you eat because we… To save the environment.

0:24:09.2 Michael Shellenberger: And I point out in the book, if you go vegetarian, you reduce your carbon emissions somewhere like 2% to 4%, and that’s, many studies find that. So it’s basically irrelevant. Eating meat does take a lot of land, that’s true, but you can significantly reduce the amount of land to produce meat by just moving from pasture-​raised beef to more industrial concentrated meat production. Well, many people find reasons to be against that, so I think your point is exactly right, if your goal is really to change society in supposedly radical ways or even in smaller ways or just demoralizing those [0:24:53.1] ____ behavior, you have to oppose everything that would not… Everything that would obviate the need to do that. So I think that’s probably the case with nuclear.

0:25:03.5 Michael Shellenberger: I will say with nuclear, nuclear has just been such a source of creativity and exploration in so many ways, because when you’re kind of like, why are people anti-​nuclear? There’s several big reasons. One of them is the one that we just talked about. Another one is just that it is a way to make really powerful bombs, and I could never satisfy… I will always try to get to the bottom of it. There must be some motivation that’s deeper or animating the other motivations, and to some extent, I think that’s true with nuclear being a really powerful weapon and truly a potentially apocalyptic weapon. But then I think there’s this other part, which is what we talk about, which is this desire to change society and the threat that nuclear poses in a different sense, a threat to they desired moral lives and to change society, and I could never figure out which of those was more important or…

0:26:06.4 Michael Shellenberger: And I think they both sit right side by side with each other quite comfortably, and are so powerful together that it helps explain how it is that we have still really not used, what is, I think, obviously the best way to make electricity.

0:26:26.5 Trevor Burrus: On the question of poverty this is, as I mentioned, it’s what always gets me when we come to these debates as someone who deeply cares about the environment, but also knows that I use a lot of energy to do things like play music and refrigerate my food that is not available to about two and half billion people. And you do a very good job of going to different places, telling stories in the Congo, for example, or in the Amazon, about what’s actually going on. For example, two years ago, about or so, we had this whole big thing about the Amazon burning and the lungs of the Earth are burning, and you take that on as, A, it’s not true, and B, what’s the actual cause of that? To use just sort of a recent catastrophe that everyone believed something about.

0:27:18.7 Michael Shellenberger: So what we have in the Congo is desperately poor people, small farmers who need land, and so they’re basically encroaching on this absolutely spectacular park full of some of the world’s most fantastic wild life, including the mountain gorillas, but also created by the European colonizers who really made a hash of the Congo. And so it’s a really ambivalent situation, because you have desperately poor people who just want to use the land in the park to survive, but you’ve also got just what is truly one of a kind piece of nature.

0:28:05.0 Michael Shellenberger: And so the obvious thing is that you should want for people… And when you interview people, what they want, most of them is a job in the city. So what you need are jobs in the cities that would basically pull the pressure away from the parks and give people a different way to make their livelihoods. It would also then generate income, so people could buy fertilizer and irrigation and tractors and produce more food on the land that they have. So why don’t environmentalists advocate for industrialization, for factories, for cities, for urbanization.

0:28:40.3 Michael Shellenberger: You move to the Amazon, and it’s more a situation of… And it’s really… Even there, there’s two parts of it, there’s this the Amazon rainforest, and then there’s the savanna area below it, and the pressure has come from both cattle ranchers and soy farmers who tend to be better capitalized, wealthier than the farmers in the Congo, and they’re just expanding the forest frontier, the farming frontier into the forests to produce very valuable commodities to sell on the global market. What needs to happen there is that the farming and ranching ought to be concentrated in the savanna rather than in the rainforest, but instead of doing that, Greenpeace and others advocated that the private land owners should have to set aside basically 50% of their lands for conservation.

0:29:37.3 Michael Shellenberger: It sounds good in principle, but the result is you end up with fragmented forests that can’t sustain the big apex predators that need a lot of habitat to move between. And so the fires in the Amazon are really just a function of how much land is cleared for farming. There are sometimes some fires in the rainforest itself, but they’re not hard to deal with, they don’t spiral out of control. Mostly the big fires that we paid attention to a couple of years ago were just farmers that had cleared a forested area and were burning the biomass to prepare the land for farming or for ranching.

0:30:24.3 Michael Shellenberger: And then you move up to California, and California and Australia are basically the same in this part, and here, it’s a totally different situation because, of course, we’ve converted most of our forests into ranches and farmlands 100 years ago, and our fires… And we have two different kinds, but basically our fires are entirely a problem of just failure to manage them properly. And so well-​managed forests are going to handle climate change just fine, and the proof of that, we saw last summer where these high intensity fires, which we don’t want, because they burn the crowns of the trees and convert forests into shrublands, when these high-​intensity fires in poorly managed forests, which had had too much wood debris built up, when they reached well-​managed forest lands, the high intensity fires dropped into the forest floor, which is where healthy fires exists because of course, you do want fires in a lot of forests around the world, it’s a healthy part of the ecosystem, it burns off the woody debris.

0:31:33.9 Michael Shellenberger: So I think that the way it gets presented, irresponsibly, by the way, by journalists and activists, is fire is bad, we should [0:31:44.3] ____ fire, and that’s not the case, actually, in fact, cleaning out fires in place like California and Australia has been part of the problem. And then it just bulldozes all of the economic questions there, so you have Europeans and people in California moralizing against Brazilians or people in Africa for logging, ranching, farming, when these are some of the poorest people in the world and many of the rich people who are moralizing and criticizing them live in places like Napa in California, Provence in France, or Tuscany in Italy, which are all farm and ranchlands that used to be former forests. So I try to pull apart those issues, a little bit to reveal those, kind of both those ecological and the economic complexities.

0:32:36.2 Aaron Powell: I think take a step back into the rhetoric of this or the strategies for arguing against this kind of alarmism, because the examples that you just gave, and we can go through them, we can find examples, but it feels like we’re often stuck in this game of essentially like issue whack-​a-​mole where there’s this thing, it pops up that’s it’s fires in the Amazon, well, no, it’s not actually, the story that the alarmists are telling us is not actually accurate. But then there’s other stories, and this sort of thing plays out not just in environmentalism but all over the place in policy and political questions, and to steal a point from my colleague Julian Sanchez, it seems like in a lot of these cases the individual instances, fires in the Amazon or deforestation at a particular place are not really what the people are worried about, they’re merely like they’re representative of a broader thing.

0:33:40.4 Aaron Powell: So, deforestation is bad or pollution is bad, and here’s an example. But then as soon as you knock down that example, it doesn’t really matter because the underlying motive of pollution is bad remains, and in attacking the example, so like we need, we need nuclear power… Nuclear power is not as bad as you thought it was and is fact pretty good, gets framed as oh, you don’t actually care about the environment or you’re trying to, I was motivated to this position because I really care about the environment, so by you attacking this position, you’re telling me I shouldn’t worry about it in this instance, what you’re telling me is that I don’t actually care about the environment as much as I say I do, which makes it awfully hard, and I think gets to this like slipping back to just, well, I can find a different example over here. So how do people like you begin to push back on a lot of these views when even the pushback is framed as like an ideological stance that’s somehow dismissive of the underlying concerns?

0:34:50.3 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, I think the first thing is just to take a page from the Stoics to recognize to what some extent that’s just inevitable. I mean, that’s just people arguing, that’s just politics, that’s people trying to frame their opponents as having bad intentions. I do obviously in Apocalypse Never, I spent a lot of time talking about my intentions, about my love of nature, my concern for the poor and lifting people out of poverty. I think it is important to reiterate that, even though, of course, I’m attacked as not really caring about people and the environment, I must be secretly after money or something, so that’s just to be expected.

0:35:36.9 Michael Shellenberger: But I do think it is important to make a value statement and to describe what we’re for. I think that conservatives and then libertarians have in the past said what we’re for is markets or I think more actually, more accurately for freedom. And I think that’s important and it’s important to be in favor of freedom, but I do think you have to just, we also have to at least, if you are in favor of it, have to recognize I think we’re also in favor of nature, of what we call nature, or at least of protected areas of endangered species.

0:36:18.5 Michael Shellenberger: And I think it may be that in the past… You know, I think to be fair, I think there are more people on the right who don’t care as much about those things, who are just not conservationists. I think if you look at the tradition of Julian Simon and even my friend, [0:36:35.6] ____, they just will say we have to put humans before nature. And I always had a bit of a problem with that, not because I disagree necessarily, in other words, if I have to choose between Bernadette, my character from the Congo, a small farmer in the Congo, and a mountain gorillas, of course, I side with Bernadette, but that’s not really what’s going on there.

0:37:05.7 Michael Shellenberger: And it would be mis-​describing the situation to suggest that that we have to choose between Bernadette and the gorilla, and that part I guess I agree with more conventional environmentalists who have insisted that it doesn’t need to be a choice. I agree it doesn’t need to be. We shouldn’t have to choose between Bernadette and the gorillas. We can have both, but it does mean that we have to have urbanization and it does mean that we need to have factories and it does mean that we need to have fracking and nuclear.

0:37:33.0 Michael Shellenberger: On those technical questions, that’s where I don’t think we can wish that stuff away. So, I don’t think there’s any kind of secret rhetorical sauce that makes this different. But I do think it is important to make clear a value statement in favor, of things beyond freedom and markets to really valuing people and the inherent worth of everybody and the right to live prosperous and flourishing lives, which a word… Flourishing is a word I really love that comes, I see it coming more from libertarians, but also, we value nature.

0:38:17.1 Michael Shellenberger: And that we think that there are parts of this planet that should be protected from resource use, markets and exploitation, even though it might be valuable to use them for that, we just would decide that there’s some places that we don’t want to sacrifice because they’re too beautiful or special, or spiritual or whatever, for whatever reason we have to say that.

0:38:45.8 Trevor Burrus: How should we feel about plastics? I like the plastics chapter a lot because you approach it from a bunch of angles, including where plastics have saved environmental issues. But in general, I know a lot of people who police their own plastic use quite a lot. But if you dig down into it, there’s a lot of nuance to this issue, as you point out in the book.

0:39:07.8 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah. The first thing is, obviously, it’s horrible to have plastic waste in the oceans. It’s horrible to have plastic waste in rivers and streams and lakes. Nobody wants that. The good news is, we don’t have to have that. We have already developed the perfect technological fixes to eliminate all plastic wastes from the environment, and that is landfills in the United States is what we mostly use, or incinerators, which is what tends to be used in more densely populated places like Western Europe and Asia. Incinerators had a bit of a bad rap. They used to release dioxins, a dangerous pollutant. But now, they burn so hot that they break apart the dioxin molecules. And there are used to be some concerns about landfills leaking, they’ve totally solved that. We now seal the landfills. We extract the gas that escapes from landfills, we burn it for energy. So these are really fantastic solutions.

0:40:13.0 Michael Shellenberger: Recycling has worked pretty well for paper and tin and glass, for heavier materials. Recycling is totally unnecessary and uneconomic for plastic. And the reason for it is that plastic, what we call plastic today, is made out of a waste by-​product from the petrochemical industry, from the oil and gas industry, so it’s already… You’re already reusing this waste material in plastics, you’re downcycling it by using it for, as various forms of plastic, and then the right… And it’s going to be waste… If you stop… If we stopped using fossil-​based plastic wastes tomorrow, there would still be all that waste to dispose of. And again, we have the waste disposal systems.

0:41:12.3 Michael Shellenberger: Today’s fossil-​based plastics actually have prevented enormous amounts of environmental harm. The original plastics were made out of elephant tusks for billiard balls and piano keys and other things, for ivory. Tortoiseshell glasses. The tortoiseshell was actually made from sea turtle shell, which basically led to the decimation of the hawksbill sea turtle and really almost to the point of extinction. And so, fossil-​based plastics are these amazing substitutes, and that’s before you even get to just the miracles that plastics perform. Anybody that’s been to a hospital or have a loved one in a hospital knows just how important plastics are to having a clean and sanitary healthcare system.

0:42:05.9 Michael Shellenberger: So I think that in the book, we got very close to saying, throw your plastic in the trash can. Do not recycle them, because recycling them is contributing to the ocean waste problem. We couldn’t quite fully connect the dots, but just in the year since the book has come out, it’s become clear that a significant quantity of ocean plastic waste, in fact, is waste that was destined for recycling in poor countries because 90% of our plastic waste that we put in the recycling bin never is recycled and it’s never recycled because it’s not economic to do so. Instead, it shifts to poor countries which don’t have landfills and incinerators, and often ends up in the oceans. So it’s really… I think, I’m not going to do it, but somebody should write a whole book just on plastics and how just terribly, terribly wrong we got it.

0:43:10.8 Trevor Burrus: And I guess, we’ve gone through nuclear a bit, and we’ve talked about plastics and deforestation. The other one that is super hot and seems to get hotter all the time, and you already mentioned that you were involved with this during the Obama administration, was renewables. In places like Germany, I can’t remember the exact number of how much the average power bill has gone up in Germany because they’re switching to renewables, North Sea wind farms, for example. But at the end of the day, they’re buying a lot of coal energy from Poland. That seems to show the renewables are maybe good for augmenting certain parts of the power, but it doesn’t seem like something that we can really rely on.

0:43:51.1 Michael Shellenberger: Yeah. On the one hand, it seems like the headlines every day are renewables are growing so fast and they’re going to take over. It’s not really true. We’ve invested a huge amount of money in solar and winds. They generate about the same amount of electricity as nuclear, but it costs twice as much, and it’s not reliable. And that lack of reliability or the weather-​dependent nature of renewables has basically created crisis everywhere they’ve been deployed at scale. So we see in Germany, they’ve been really limited in how much they can scale up solar and wind just because of grassroots opposition, but also because of the challenges of operating a grid with significant amounts of fluctuating weather-​dependent power coming in and off the grid.

0:44:37.7 Michael Shellenberger: We saw blackouts in California that was directly due to the state relying too much on solar and not… Overestimating its ability to power the state. So we had rolling blackouts last summer because we’d shut down too many natural gas and nuclear plants. I think just to clarify, the problem is that we over-​relied on our renewables. In Germany, they just have maintained their coal plants, so that they didn’t have the reliability problem. But I think now, we’re seeing other things happening that I do think much more significantly threaten the future of solar and wind.

0:45:15.9 Michael Shellenberger: We now know that 90% of the world’s poly-​silicon comes out of China. And so, out of a province in China that the State Department says is a place where genocide is being committed against ethnic Muslims, and so John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, testified last week to Congress that the administration may have to put sanctions on solar panels coming out of China. I don’t see how anybody… I don’t see how we can keep importing solar panels that multiple investigative reports show are being made by workers who have been forced into making a decision about whether they go to concentration camps or work in a solar panel factory. Those are enforced labor conditions or slave conditions, as one member of Congress referred to them last week.

0:46:10.3 Michael Shellenberger: So I think that renewables are actually coming into crisis, I don’t know that it’ll be this year or next year, but I do think over time… I mean, to some extent it’s already happening. The trance that we’ve had around renewables for last decade will break, and we’ve already started to see some of it, we also saw the Biden administration came out for taking measures to keep all of our nuclear plants running, really against the Democratic Caucus in the House and much of the progressive movement that’s just adamantly anti-​nuclear, so I do think there’s some more realism setting in around the limitations of weather-​dependent renewables in particular. But I do think that the love of renewables is so strong that it may take a while for people to really change their minds.

0:47:02.5 Aaron Powell: So for someone who’s listened to us talk for the last 50 minutes, and they’ve heard a lot of skepticism about a lot of the issues that environmentalists seem most concerned about, but they consider themselves to be environmentally conscious and want to do whatever they can to help or to protect the environment, do you have an approach that they can use, rules of thumb for being environmentally conscious in a informed or non-​alarmist way?

0:47:39.0 Michael Shellenberger: Well, yeah, I don’t think there was actually… There’s not an easy set of rules, and in fact, I wrote… I think I wrote Apocalypse Never in part to help with that, which is to sort of go through the different things that people can do, certainly you can stop any meat… I don’t think it’s particularly healthy, at least not for me, and I don’t think it’s necessary to save the natural environment, but it does reduce your land use impact for sure, and very modestly your carbon emissions. You know, we talked about plastics. You know, there’s other things where I just think so much of it is so trivial compared to these big macro forces that I don’t spend a lot of time on it, but you know, I drive my old car. I drive a car that’s almost 20 years old, because I think that the materials throughput, the amount of materials required to make a car is still pretty significant.

0:48:40.1 Michael Shellenberger: And when you look at, for example, electric cars, which a lot of people think are just inevitably the future of transportation, I have my doubts in part because of the heavier nature, like if you see a Tesla, it’s a really heavy car, and what generally happens is our end use technologies get lighter, so you have a lower weight to power ratio with automobiles than you did with horse and carriage, and so when you start to see rematerialization, whether it’s in your car or your products or even the electrical grid itself with renewables, you basically significantly increase the amount of materials as well as land that’s required to produce a unit of energy.

0:49:32.3 Michael Shellenberger: So I think one rule of thumb is you should, we should… The right direction of travel is that we should be using less materials per unit of transportation or energy or wealth over time, and it’s okay to be using more energy in the sense that what we’re trying to do is protect an actual environment, and that means using fewer natural resources. And what we find in many cases is that requires using more energy, and that’s not a bad thing, if your energy sources themselves are becoming less material-​intensive.

0:50:21.4 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.