In his review of my new book, Apocalypse Never, at Yale Climate Connections, Peter Gleick accuses me of mischaracterizing environmentalism and misrepresenting climate science. He argues that I construct strawmen, promote nuclear energy above other energies, and engage in ad hominem (personal) attacks.

In fact, Gleick mischaracterizes Apocalypse Never, which accurately reflects the best available science and promotes energy progress, not nuclear to the exclusion of other sources, without making personal attacks.

Most troubling, Gleick writes, “if Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place.” But in Apocalypse Never I show that, for Malthusians, making the world a “better place” has meant letting the poor starve, keeping poor nations dependent on wood fuel, and diverting World Bank funding from dams, roads, and fertilizer for development to charitable endeavors like solar panels for rural villagers aimed at making poverty sustainable. //

What we differ on is how to get there. In Apocalypse Never I show why poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will enjoy higher standards of living, and protect the natural environment, by doing the exact same thing Americans and Europeans have done, which is to industrialize, urbanize, build flood control systems, modernize agriculture, and move up the energy ladder, from wood and dung to hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels to nuclear. 

I further argue that, if we continue to develop in these ways, deaths from natural disasters will continue to decline, food surpluses will continue to rise, and global carbon emissions will likely peak and decline soon, preventing temperatures from rising more than three degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels.

Gleick disagrees and defends the Malthusian notion that future food surpluses are highly uncertain due to climate change, and argues that I ignore such risks. To get to the bottom of the disagreement, we need to review the best available science, as well as the history of Malthusian ideology. //

My point is, again, that human development and disaster preparedness massively outweigh whatever increase there’s been in hurricane wind speed, the length of forest fire season, or modestly more precipitation. “What most determines how vulnerable various nations are to flooding,” I note, “depends centrally on whether they have modern water and flood control systems, like my home city of Berkeley, California, or not, like the Congo.” //

What I note — again – is that however much climate change might be making extreme weather worse, it hasn’t made up for the huge improvements in resilience which have made natural disasters better. Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90 percent in the last century, and there has been no increase in the cost of natural disasters once greater wealth and development are accounted for. //

In truth, a major theme of Apocalypse Never, is that what matters is the direction of travel. We should want to move up the energy ladder — from wood and dung to hydro-electric dams, liquified petroleum gas (to replace wood and dung), natural gas (to replace coal), and then, yes, nuclear energy — and not down the energy ladder, which is what Malthusian environmentalists advocate. //

Gleick writes, “Shellenberger no doubt believes in, and supports, the goal of a better future. So do environmental scientists, activists, and any decent human.” The question is what we mean by “better future.” For Malthus and Malthusian scientists, a better future is one where there are fewer people. “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England,” Malthus famously wrote, “and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.”

Conservationists and environmentalists defend Malthus by claiming that he wrote his famous book when it was still too early to know that the industrial revolution would radically increase food production. Malthus came of age in what historians call the “advanced organic economy,” which, due to its reliance on renewables, namely wood fuel and waterwheels, “condemned the majority of the population to poverty” for inherently physical reasons, notes Malthus biographer Robert Mayhew. //

Did Malthus’ ideas have any impact on the real world?

They did. British elites used Malthus’ ideas to justify letting one million people starve to death during the Great Irish Famine. To this day, when people think of the Great Famine, they tend to focus on the fungus that killed potatoes and overlook the fact that, between 1845 and 1849, Ireland exported food, including beef, to England. Irish families had to sell their pigs in order to pay the rent, even as their children were starving.

Malthus taught the British to blame the Irish. “The cheapness of this nourishing root [potatoes],” Malthus wrote, “joined to the ignorance and barbarism of the [Irish] people, have encouraged marriage to such a degree that the population has pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country.”

Thirty years later, the British governor-general of India argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.” Later he claimed the “limits of increase of production and of the population have been reached.”

Then, between 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, local food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes Mayhew.

“Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was three times the death toll of the Great Irish Famine.

After World War II, American conservationists adopted the thinly-veiled Malthusian idea that making the world a better place involved letting poor people in poor nations starve to death. Top academic institutions helped make Malthusian ideas mainstream.

In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth,” a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse, which The New York Times covered on its front page. “The most probable result,” the report declared, “will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” The collapse of civilization was “a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’” //

Ehrlich and Holdren argued that the world likely did not have enough energy to support the development aspirations of the world’s poor. “Most plans for modernizing agriculture in less-developed nations call for introducing energy-intensive practices similar to those used in North America and western Europe—greatly increased use of fertilizers and other farm chemicals, tractors, and other machinery, irrigation, and supporting transportation networks—all of which require large inputs of fossil fuels,” they noted.

A better way, they said, was “much greater use of human labor and relatively less dependence on heavy machinery and manufactured fertilizers and pesticides.” Such labor-intensive farming “causes far less environmental damage than does energy-intensive Western agriculture,” they claimed. In other words, the “secret” to “alternative farming methods” was for small farmers in poor nations to remain small farmers. //

In 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published Poverty and Famines showing that famines are not caused by a lack in food, and occur primarily in times of war, political oppression, and the collapse of food distribution, not production, systems. Sen won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998.

By 1987, demographers knew the number of humans added annually to the global population had reached its peak. Seven years later, the U.N. held its last Family Planning meeting. Between 1996 and 2006, United Nations family planning spending declined 50 percent.

As it became clear that the growth in the global birth rate had peaked, Malthusian thinkers started to look to climate change as a replacement apocalypse for overpopulation and resource scarcity. The influential Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider embraced the Malthusianism of John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, and he invited them to educate his scientists. //

Gleick defends Holdren and the Ehrlichs as part of his broader defense of Malthusianism. Gleick claims they did not claim fossil fuels were scarce in the 1970s, and points to a book published in 2003 where Holdren said, “What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy, but that we are running out of environment…”

But I make this exact point in Apocalypse Never. I show how Malthusians have used climate change to shift from claiming fossil fuels were scarce to claiming that the environment was scarce. “Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce; now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce.”

The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse. Where in 1977, Ehrlich and Holdren proposed international control of the “development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources,” many Malthusian scientists, green NGOs, and U.N. agencies today similarly seek control over energy, food, and water policies in developing nations in the name of climate change and biodiversity.

In his 1989 book, The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argued that humankind’s impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion. //

It is notable that Malthusians have long opposed nuclear energy not because it is dangerous but it eliminates the scarcity and pollution problems that Malthusians ostensibly are so worried about.

Scientists had known since the early 20th Century that nuclear energy was the key not just to bountiful fertilizer, water, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint. Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce. Some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced too much cheap and abundant energy.

“If a doubling of the state’s population in the next twenty years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,” wrote the Sierra Club’s executive director, opposing Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, “[California’s] scenic character will be destroyed.”

Behind an advocacy ostensibly motivated by concerns for the environment lies a very dark view of human beings. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,” said the Malthusian advocate of renewable energy, Amory Lovins, in a 1970 interview, “because of what we would do with it.” Ehrlich agreed. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

And most of all they stoked fears of the bomb. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that “nothing is more likely to lead to an H-bomb war than the threat of universal destitution through over-population.” They called the growing population in developing nations a “population explosion.” And Ehrlich titled his book, The Population Bomb. //

In Apocalypse Never, I point to a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about a resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.

In his review of Apocalypse Never, Gleick does something similar. He suggests that I am wrong that hydro-electric dams, flood control systems, and nuclear power plants will allow human societies to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. I believe Gleick is wrong to do so, in both senses of the term “wrong.” I’m sad about that, not angry.

In the end, as I argue in the last chapter of Apocalypse Never, Malthusian scientists, activists, and journalists are lost souls seeking false gods. They are individuals in the grip of religion without knowing it. That’s not a personal attack. It’s a criticism of an ideology that has become the dominant religion of supposedly secular people.