Forbes Cancels Environmentalist Who Wrote ‘I Apologize for the Climate Scare’
“On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologise for the Climate Scare,” said an article published in Forbes magazine by Mike Shellenberger.
At least it did, till Forbes caved to furious green activists and pulled it within hours of publication. By arguing that climate change is real – but “not the end of the world” and “not even our most serious environmental problem,” Shellenberger had been found guilty of wrongthink....
This was published at Forbes.com (who now are blocking the page) but the author has put up a duplicate atEnvironmental Progress-dot-Org. Here are his bullet points (cut-and-pasted verbatim):
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years...
...Here are some facts few people know:
* 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
Some highlights from the book:
* 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
Here are some facts few people know:
* “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
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