We hope that those readers who made it to the end of this book will appreciate how far humanity has come and the sheer improbability of what it has accomplished. Struggling against conflict, hunger, and disease, we have managed to gradually gain the upper hand. In a world trending toward entropy, we have succeeded in creating a complex and

Yet it is that transition from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity that makes capitalism so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass while

Since ideas are not made of matter, the laws of thermodynamics do not apply. Innovations can thus create exponential new value.

The world’s problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Julian Simon,

Reason, we contend, is needed to reveal the quasi-religious role that the belief in the coming of an environmental apocalypse plays in the lives of many well-meaning but increasingly unreasonable individuals. Evidence, we insist, provides rational grounds for cautious optimism about the state of the planet.

Besides anger, apocalyptic environmentalism creates a lot of sadness. It is a pessimistic worldview that holds that the pursuit of prosperity will drive our species extinct. Shellenberger recalled from experience that “the more apocalyptic environmentalist books and articles I read, the sadder and more anxious I felt.”92 He noted that while

Constructive anger, Shellenberger wrote, can change the system, but nihilistic anger threatens a great deal of destruction.

To explain this apocalyptic trend, Shellenberger borrows from The Denial of Death, a 1973 book by American anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924–1974). Fear of death, Becker wrote, is a core part of our subconscious. We realize our own mortality early in our lives and spend the later part dealing with it, often subconsciously. One way we deal with

Rather than striving for a green utopia, as the environmentalists of yesteryear did, the contemporary green movement has become obsessed with fear, predicting the end of the world by technology-induced climate change.