Miranda Devine: Sorry for the scare campaign, the planet is fine
When a climate activist apologised for how environmentalists had misled the public over climate change threats, the fearmongers were not happy, especially when Greta is upping her fight, writes Miranda Devine.
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“On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologise For The Climate Scare.”
So wrote heretic climate activist Michael Shellenberger in Forbes magazine this week.
It didn’t take long for the article to be pulled offline by Forbes — “censored” as Shellenberger described it.
But it has since been republished all over the internet, and the book it presages has leapt to No. 1 on Amazon.
Flowing on from Michael Moore’s documentary blowing the whistle on the fraud of the renewable industry’s toxic environmental footprint, Shellenberger’s defection has sent shockwaves through the climate-alarm movement.
He apologises for the “climate scare we created over the last 30 years”.
“Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem,” he writes.
He is in a position to apologise. Once named a Hero of the Environment by TIME magazine in 2008, and winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, he was an energy expert invited by the US Congress to provide expert testimony, and was “invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report (so) I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public”.
He states the following facts: “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 per cent around the world since 2003.
“The amount of land we use for meat 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.
“Air pollution and carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for 50 years.
“Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels.”
He said he was red-pilled when fearmongering political leaders started scaring children by saying the world is going to end in 12 years.
His new book is called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us.
It’s not a moment too soon, with teenage eco-evangelist Greta Thunberg upping the ante on her climate activism, advocating acting with “necessary force” including lining up climate sceptics “against the wall” and copying violent BLM protests to force change.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
Originally published as Miranda Devine: Sorry for the scare campaign, the planet is fine
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