THE ESSENCE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM: False Gods for Lost Souls. In the Wall Street Journal, I review Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a new book from a refreshingly sane environmentalist, Michael Shellenberger. He sees nuclear power as the cleanest and safest source of energy — and the only practical way to drastically curtail carbon emissions. So why do greens oppose it? He details the financial benefits that Jerry Brown’s family and green groups have reaped by opposing nuclear power.

“Every major climate activist group in America,” he writes, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, “has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from or investing in natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.”

Shellenberger’s debunking of green myths will be familiar to readers of Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom and Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks, but maybe it will be more convincing to devout greens because of his own record as an activist. He understands the irrational appeal of the movement.

 “I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago,” he writes. “I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.”

For him and so many others, environmentalism offered emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving them a sense of purpose and transcendence. It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths, as he explains in his concluding chapter, “False Gods for Lost Souls.” Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one.

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating,” he writes. “It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

Someone should give the book to Greta Thunberg and the journalists working so hard to publicize her inanities. It might even cheer them up.