The book explores the ecological problems we face now. It deals not only with climate change but also with environmental degradation, waste, and extinction. It explains how dangerous are the threats, how we got here, and how to get out. The climate change from the news is like a big black blob hanging over the future. If it comes, it will be terrible, and if something terrible happens, it means it is already here. In the book, Michael Schellenberger dissects this threat and gives us a more concrete picture of what we are fighting.
To get the best political solution, we need to know how much risk climate change brings and how much costs preventing it. For instance, 48% of people believe that climate change will make humanity extinct. That belief justifies you to do almost anything to prevent it. But the data do not support that. How to select the policy such that the cure is not worse than the illness? The author reminds us that (economic) progress should not be sacrificed for the climate. (but also not an environment for progress) The progress feeds and protects us.
The book starts with climate change then explores other environmental questions. It ends sadly, Michael explains the problem with nuclear power. I was mainly interested in climate change. He deals with common objections such as rising sea levels. Some risks are unlikely but should also enter the equation, for instance: "what if permafrost unfreezes and releases a lot of methane and diseases." Then I don't know. (And then, we should evaluate it against the risk of war when some countries find out that the progress is not for them.)
The middle third of the book is the least interesting. I can summarize it as: "The protection of animals has some costs." It contains interesting information about human progress. It is nice, but I would rather see more about climate change. The last part was depressing. We have the solution, but it is too easy to shut it down, so we do not build clean power plants.
The author often uses IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change), a part of the UN. They give a high-end estimate for the rising sea levels. They should rise by 0.83 meters. It is the warning. Catastrophic? Not in the slightest. Moreover, we will have time to prepare for this. It will happen by 2100.
Curiously, there is a nation with a third of its land under sea level. Some areas are even seven meters underwater. Dutch started their reclamation projects in the 15th century in a much more primitive world. Some land will be hard to save, but drowning because of climate change is laughable.
The increase of CO2 is helping plants to grow, and the excess heat does not hinder them too much. Funnily, FAO estimates that we would have even slightly higher production capacities thanks to climate change.
Any food production would be overshadowed by the development anyway. The investments in food production in Africa would increase the yield significantly. These things matter more than even 5 degrees increase in global temperatures.
Why is Amazon important, and we do not want to deforest it? Because it contains a lot of carbon that would be released. But the "lungs of the planet" are pretty inefficient. As an ecosystem, Amazon does not generate oxygen. It consumes as much it creates.
Deforestation is slowing. The reason is simple: people are getting richer. In Europe, there are much more forests than at the start of the industrial revolution. People are cutting down their forests because they want to plant their food there or exchange it for necessities.
People also burn forests to cook their food. They have no better way to get energy than from wood. It is very inefficient. For instance, to decrease the carbon emissions of India, we should support coal power plants.
The topic of deforestation is complicated. As with a lot of climate change, you can hide a lot of side interests in it. The people banning imports in the fight against deforestation produce competing products. Hypocrisy sneaks into everything.
The author often emphasizes that progress is what helps more than restrictions. For instance, introducing plastic bags in California would decrease their production of CO2. Now, they are using recyclable and thicker bags for shopping. These need to be reused many times (which is not happening) to have a smaller environmental impact than plastic bags.
We (as a developed world) try to protect the environment. Often somewhere in a less developed world. The protection can have different forms. We should ensure that We will eliminate poverty, not make poverty sustainable.
The developed world protects its environment but exports some problems. And then, it prevents the building of coal (or even hydro) power plants. It is hypocrisy and looks a lot like colonialism.
Nuclear power is the safest and the most ecological way to generate energy that we know. (After hydroelectric, but we are a bit maxed out) It does not release any greenhouse emissions (except water vapor to be correct), and it takes care of its externalities 100%. There are problems with that. People get easily scared. Nuclear was a type of bomb that killed a lot of people. Thanks to this, the waste is hard to get rid of. And the worst thing is that a nuclear power plant is very vulnerable to being shut down politically.
It is easy to be scared of nuclear power. It is magical. You don't feel it, and it can kill you or give you cancer. Michael presents estimates of death from the Chernobyl catastrophe. Radiation killed less than 200 people (outside first responders).
Germany is shutting down its nuclear power plants. The decision costs money and lives. They switch to gas power plants that emit CO2 and pollute.
Nuclear waste is the safest kind of waste from electricity production. It never killed anybody and most likely never will.
The problem with nuclear power plants is a political one. Building a power plant takes more time than four years, the politicians will change. Moreover, an overreaction might shut the power plant anytime. To recover the investment, you need to run the power plant for a long time.
Generating electricity from wind or sun is seen as green, but it requires some backing or storage. Storage is the music of the future. So, when the wind is not shining, or the sun is not blowing, we need something to generate electricity instead. And we use gas for it. The oil companies lobby for renewables themselves. (To be used instead of the atom) Atom can substitute them. With gas, we will need them anyway. The author then compares the money that lobbyists and think tanks supporting renewables get from the oil industry. And the "green" ones are getting a lot of money.
Now, we promote (by loans) renewables in third-world countries. We give them a map towards prosperity. The problem is that it never worked for anyone.
Michael is also a politician (or tried his luck in politics). He traces some bad decisions in California and US to the interests of politicians. It was personal, and it should have been rather a detective story.
Scientists are humans (even me). There lies the problem. Alarmist article gets much more publicity and more citations. And news article picks the worst scenario. It attracts attention. By the time the research gets to the public, it can turn from serious science (as a researcher you know know how RPC8.5 is probable) to almost disinformation.
At the end of the book, the author lists why some environmental activism does not make sense to him. He sees some environmentalism as a religion. Whatever is natural is good (appeal to nature fallacy). Whatever is artificial is bad.
Some of it is influenced by Calvinism. It views human creations as bad and the return to nature as good. But some things are also self-sacrifice for a bigger goal.
The philosophical basis for the view comes from Malthus that claims that resources cannot grow as fast as the population. He concluded that mass starvation will occur very soon, thanks to overpopulation (we are still waiting).
I liked the book. It told me what to expect from climate change. It explained some tradeoffs that we are doing to mitigate it. The book also focused on people from third-world countries and their views (they are bystanders in this war).
I was pro-nuclear, now I see why there are not too many nuclear power plants.
For a lot of things related to CO2 in the atmosphere, you can see higher numbers for everything. The values in 2100 depend more on the CO2 emitted in the future. Prediction can vary. Anything that has higher sea-level rise and higher scare potential gets to newspapers. For instance, there is an RPC8.5 scenario: the 90th percentile of no action (and it expects we quintuple the use of coal). If you plug these expectations, you get a high number, perfect for newspapers, citations, and scares. Not very good for a policy decision.