Why I'm not an environmentalist

I cared about the planet's future before it was cool to do so.

I carried huge stacks of paper home from the office on my bike to throw them in the recycle bin. I protested with four others to prevent trees from being cut on an island in my hometown. I attended public hearings that questioned evil companies that wanted to ruin the planet for all of us. I became a vegetarian to reduce animal suffering and reduce my carbon footprint. I even tried to read IPCC reports about climate change though I gave up rather quickly (it was more boring than the worst of the obligatory reading you get in school).

Eco-consciousness through development

As you grow up, you inevitably realize the nature of trade-offs.
An ever-growing portion of humanity enjoys an unprecedented quality of life which would be impossible without impacting the planet.

Paradoxically (or not), the more advanced technologies we use, the less we need to impact the planet. We cannot compare the current ways of burning fossil fuels in the developed world to how households burned coal in their stoves two centuries ago. To develop cleaner technologies, we had to come up with them and afford the research. Just as you don't jump from counting stones to a Macbook Pro, you don't go from burning wood in the cave to carbon capture.

Along the way, at any given time, people prefer to improve their lives with what's available to them then. The households burning coal in their stoves in the early 19th century? They preferred having a warm (though sooty) home to freezing in the winter, without a doubt.

Mother Nature is unforgiving

The Gaia Myth holds that nature is a perfect, pristine, caring environment that nurtures all living beings, including humans. But, instead of being grateful, those filthy humans are destroying the planet with their insatiable hunger for comfort and prosperous life.

The nurturing nature concept is complete nonsense. Life in untamed nature was brutish and short: no wonder man has always strived to improve his lot by building houses, dikes, dams, inventing heating, air conditioning, cutting trees, mining ores, and the list could go on. Heck, the whole country of the Netherlands is made possible by reining in nature!

In its currently popular form, environmentalism is backward and anti-human: it prefers not touching nature to making life more secure and comfortable for all of us.

First, have a decent life

People care about the environment if they can afford to: if their income rises above a certain level, they'll start paying attention to green issues. It makes sense - you don't give a damn about having crystal clear lakes or cleaner energy if you can't provide dinner to your kids.

The good news is that the graph showing eco-consciousness as a function of income starts its uptick at a reasonably low value. However, it is above the current income level of most developing countries that underlines the importance of economic growth.

So we're back at my most important realization, which turned me away from environmentalism: people living well without worrying about their basic needs is desirable. Tools and machines are indispensable to achieve this; energy is what they need, so we need plenty of it.

Economic growth and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive – you need the former to get the latter.

But we're destroying the planet

When people say "we're destroying the planet," they usually mean that human activities change the environment in ways that make it uninhabitable for humans or other species. Ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, waste islands are floating in the oceans, and so on.

Climate change (previously known as global warming) is the source of a lot of these woes: human activity, the burning of fossil fuels, has warmed the atmosphere, setting off an environmental catastrophe.

First, increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere hasn't led to significant warming. That's because the greenhouse effect of CO2 is hugely diminishing. It starts to taper off at 400ppm drastically, a concentration we've now passed. That's good news: most of the warming has already happened, so no matter how much more CO2 we pump into the air, it will have minimal effect.

Second, even if the effects of climate change (whether man-made or not) become more adverse or frequent, we have all the tools at our disposal to protect ourselves. That's what we started doing as cavemen when we were burning fires to keep ourselves warm, and we have become way more sophisticated and technologically advanced since then.

Also, the doomsday scenario of climate change is patently false. Our CO2 emissions rapidly escalated in the last 80 years; despite that, climate-related deaths have dropped by 98 percent. In other words, fifty times fewer people die in natural disasters than back then.

Climate change should not be the most significant issue

Thanks to economic growth (made possible by using cheap energy, I should note), tens of millions of people emerge from poverty each year.

Unfortunately, there are still billions more who live in awful conditions: they don't have drinking water, are not sheltered from weather conditions, don't have access to simple medical treatments, can't give their children a basic education, and so on.

A lot of those who are no longer considered abjectly poor are far from being able to live a life those in the developed world can. There's more to life than having a full belly and roof above one's head.

To think, then, that fighting climate change should be everyone's primary duty is entirely misguided. As we've seen, even if you care a lot about the planet, your priority should be making people better off: they'll care about polar bears as soon as they can afford to do so.

I'm still an environmentalist

All the above said, I still love being in nature and would love to preserve more of it for all of us. My favorite leisure activity is hiking in the mountains – I'm in awe of just being away from civilization's hustle and bustle, breathing in the mountain air, and looking at the rugged ridges. I'm not religious but being there in total silence is the most spiritual experience I've felt.

However, I believe the politics touted by the green movement throw us back in time and lead to humans living worse lives.

To keep more of the planet in its natural form and enjoy more of it, we have to keep marching forward on the road of economic progress. First and foremost, this lifts people out of poverty, making them care about the environment and giving them spare time to enjoy nature.