Or is climate change one of a number of important environmental issues, perhaps not the most important? And is the solution more progress, more development, more high technology, such as nuclear energy? Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never makes a case against catastrophism, a case for environmental progress, and ponders how environmentalism became “the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations”.

Shellenberger is a California-based environmental activist. Unlike many environmental activists, he’s been there and done it, from agricultural co-operatives in Nicaragua in the 1980s to the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil in the early 1990s, and he attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. He’s been to the Congo to study wood-fuel use, rainforest habitat protection and development aid. And he’s been to Indonesia to “see for himself what the situation was like for factory workers”.

Shellenberger co-founded in 2002 the New Apollo Project, a renewables and clean technology program picked up in 2007 by then presidential candidate Barack Obama and backed by him as President with some $150 billion from 2009 to 2015. But it became increasingly clear to Shellenberger that:

In the end, there is no amount of technological innovation that can solve the fundamental problem with renewables. Solar and wind make electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100 percent back up, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.

Like some other environmentalists including James Lovelock and James Hanson, Shellenberger came to see nuclear power as essential to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In recent years, he’s been a prominent nuclear energy advocate, but is adamant he’s not a lobbyist for the industry and accepts no funding from “energy companies or energy interests”.