The eco-warrior who's made greens see RED: Going veggie? Almost pointless. Mass loss of species? A myth. The real climate change culprit? Poverty, not power stations. So says a Time Magazine 'environment hero'

When it comes to radical activism, there are few who can hold an ethically-sourced candle to Michael Shellenberger.

At 16, he threw his first fundraising party for a rainforest conservation group. At 17, he lived in Nicaragua to show ‘solidarity’ with the Sandinista socialist revolution.

By his early 20s, he was raising money for Guatemalan women’s co-operatives and small farmers to fight off corporations trying to take their land in the Amazon. In 2008, Time magazine named him its ‘Hero of the Environment’. His ideas to promote renewable energy led to the Obama administration pumping $150 billion into the now trendy sector.

But far from being a ‘hero’ of the Green movement, he’s now become a heretic they’d happily burn at the stake — if that didn’t increase the global carbon footprint, of course. For the American environmentalist has changed his mind. Rather drastically.

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When it comes to radical activism, there are few who can hold an ethically-sourced candle to Michael Shellenberger (pictured)

Distilling the contents of his new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, he recently wrote an online opinion article for the business magazine Forbes entitled ‘On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologise For The Climate Scare’. He continued: ‘Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.’

A few days later, Forbes took the story down without explanation, eventually claiming it had removed the article because it violated its editorial guidelines ‘around self-promotion’. (Shellenberger was plugging his book).

Shellenberger, 49, claimed — understandably — that he had been censored after his article sent the Green lobby into a frenzy. But if this was censorship, it backfired spectacularly as his offending article was republished all over the internet and the uproar propelled his book into most bestseller lists (rising to seventh in Amazon’s non-fiction list).

His essential message is not one his old comrades would want you to hear. His thesis is that rabid Green alarmism is creating a raft of dangerous myths about climate change and blinding the public to real solutions that could address far more pressing global problems. Having once campaigned for them, Shellenberger now believes that most forms of renewable energy such as solar and wind power are simply impractical for large scale use in much of the world. They’re also damaging because they require huge amounts of land and harm wildlife.

Meanwhile, hysterical Green doom-mongers — he singles out Britain’s Extinction Rebellion group and 17-year-old Swedish eco-warrior Greta Thunberg — must stop saying the world is about to end due to climate change. It isn’t even close, he says.

The humdinger of a row sparked by his extraordinary volte face comes just two months after Michael Moore, documentary-making darling of the Left, created a similar stink with Planet Of The Humans, a new film that also claimed that Green energy cannot possibly solve the world’s energy needs and isn’t nearly as ‘renewable’ as is claimed.

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Shellenberger is putting a big red pen through pretty much everything the modern Green movement holds dear. He takes particular aim at the UK’s Extinction Rebellion (file image)