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shillenberger 3

prolly shd include in lmborg tag

see taibbi twitter files BS

see nottheEPA attacks

u texas austin CBR?

see apology for alarmism

drag

NUKES WORKING OUT WELL IN UKRAINE WAR?

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OMG --> DANGEROUS?

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BROWN

Fifth,}:

“Established entities” are represented in gray. These entities predate the

current anti-offshore wind movement and do not fall into any of the

categories above. Finally, a thick black circle outlines groups that have

received at least $20,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, the Charles

Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, SPN, or the American Fuel and Petro-

chemical Manufacturers Association between 2017 and 2021.

The map centers three coalitions whose membership is represented

with dashed lines: Save Right Whales, SPN, and ACOP. Members of each

coalition share goals and resource. Without these coalitions, the move-

ment against offshore wind would more closely resemble discrete, iso-

lated battles against individual energy projects.

A close look at the Save Right Whales coalition reveals its recency – it

formed in 2021 – and the outsized role of two experienced individual

members. Coalition co-founder Lisa Linowes also appears in leadership

of three of the coalition’s eleven member organizations [56]. Michael

Shellenberger, a frequent renewable energy critic [62] and indepen-

dently a member of Save Right Whales, also leads the nonprofit that

dedicates paid staff to maintaining the coalition [56].

By contrast, the State Policy Network (SPN) is the nation’s most

prominent network of conservative state-level think tanks. It seeks to

“limit government and advance market-friendly public policy at the

state and local levels” [63]. The network’s president has likened the

group to the home goods store IKEA for its “catalog” of policies designed

for assembly at the state level that advance the network’s national goals

[64]. The third coalition, ACOP, was “formed to share information, re-

sources, and strategies to protect our beach communities from perma-

nent interference in established patterns of ocean front life” [65].

Fig. 1. Network map of the anti-offshore wind movement (first published by Slevin et al. [56]). [56]).

Critically, five of its founding members were SPN-affiliated think tanks

spread across five states. The other six founding members were local

wind turbine opposition groups [65].

In addition to the think tanks with ACOP membership, additional

groups with SPN connections have entered the picture. In 2023, Linowes

published a report on the cost of renewable energy in Massachusetts

with a grant from an SPN partner in that state [66]. In 2024, the net-

work’s Rhode Island affiliate – another group classified as climate

denying by Brulle et al. [29] – published an 80-minute interview with

the president of a local anti-offshore wind group [67].

There are two other informal but critical groups of actors in this

network. The upper left corner exhibits many actors who have been

fighting against wind power for over a decade. They offer public re-

lations knowledge, strategy, and policy experience. Experienced in-

dividuals such as Droz and North American Platform Against Wind

Turbines CEO Sherri Lange now contribute to wind turbine opposition

via anti-offshore wind content published on the blog MasterResource, a

project of the Institute for Energy Research [56]. This climate denial

think tank received over $150,000 from Koch family charitable foun-

dations between 2017 and 2021.

In the upper right section, commercial fishers and their advocacy

organizations tie into the network. The five fishing organizations rep-

resented in blue are each tied to the Responsible Offshore Development

Alliance (RODA), which describes itself as “a broad membership-based

coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing companies with

an interest in improving the compatibility of new offshore development

with their businesses” [68]. These five organizations were also plaintiffs

in a lawsuit filed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation [56], an SPN

affiliate that has, in recent years, become one of the nation’s most

prolific and powerful renewable energy opposition groups [69].

RODA ties into the anti-offshore wind network a second time as they

were legally represented by prominent lawyers Nancie and Roger Mar-

zulla in the coalition’s lawsuit against a New England offshore wind

project. The Marzullas are contributors at the fossil fuel-backed Feder-

alist Society and were leaders of a now-defunct property rights advocacy

group that was part of the climate denialist Cooler Heads Coalition [55].

Roger Marzulla also represented Save Right Whales, Green Oceans, the

New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, and other plaintiffs

in a January 2024 lawsuit intended to reverse federal approvals of two

offshore wind energy projects in New England [7].

An examination of network members’ financial backings may reveal

additional influence (Table 1). Between 2017 and 2021, SPN, the

Charles Koch Foundation, Charles Koch Institute, DonorsTrust, and the

American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association contrib-

uted more than $8.9 million to the five think tanks that appear in

ACOP’s founding membership. Most of these are full-service think tanks

that work on many issues, but such support builds their capacity to have

an impact on climate policy opposition. These donors also contributed

over $7.2 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which filed the

lawsuit in which the five RODA affiliates are plaintiffs, and which

Table 1

Table of contributions from fossil fuel interests and dark money groups to organizations in the anti-offshore wind network.

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MMA

Corporate broadcast news covered this year’s COP30 global climate summit for 2 minutes — cable networks covered it for just over 3 hours

Fox News used COP30 to attack Gavin Newsom and undermine climate science

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 11/26/25

COP30 — which proceeded without an official U.S. delegation — opened on November 6 while the main sessions got underway on November 10 and concluded on November 21.

This year’s conference sought to address numerous issues, creating a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and a landmark declaration on the threat of disinformation in addressing climate change and a newly proposed initiative to reduce deforestation.

As in previous years, the gathering was met with protests by Indigenous and civil society groups calling for stronger climate action. This year, although 2,500 Indigenous people gathered in Belém, Brazil, for the summit, only 14% (360 individuals) received credentials to attend negotiations. (No members were part of Brazil’s official delegation.) By contrast, fossil fuel lobbyists were overrepresented at the COP30 climate negotiations to the chagrin of climate organizers and Indigenous climate activists. In one demonstration on November 14, indigenous groups blocked the entrance to the conference and demanded to speak to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Reporting on the protests by TV news outlets was sparse, while the attendance of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was widely covered. CNN and MSNBC discussed how the U.S. is falling behind in the clean energy technology race while China gains ground. Additionally, 22% of segments mentioned Bill Gates’ controversial climate memo to world leaders. Meanwhile, Fox News coverage attacked Newsom and undermined climate science.

Two brief headline reports, one from ABC and one from CBS, focused on the protests at the conference. Much of the broadcast coverage focused on a fire that broke out in one of the convention halls on November 20 — though none of the coverage of the fire offered more details about the climate conference.

:{Video

Citation

From the November 21, 2025, edition of NBC's Today

CNN’s coverage of COP30 featured several experts, including Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat who was the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change during the 2015 Paris climate accord negotiations; Margaret Barry, a climate litigation fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University; Kim Cobb, climate scientist and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society; as well as former vice president and climate advocate Al Gore.

A key narrative through CNN’s coverage was the state of the clean energy transition and China’s role in it.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on November 8, Figueres explained some of the progress since the landmark Paris agreement in 2015: “Ten years ago, one in every hundred vehicles that were being sold was electric. Now, we have one in five. We have two times as much investment into renewable energy as we do into fossil fuels. Solar has been deployed 15 times faster than we ever expected 10 years ago, and on and on and on. There are many proof points that there is a new economy rising.”

Amanpour also interviewed Al Gore, who pointed out the cost of the U.S. ceding the clean energy economy to others.

“China is now exporting to other countries more green technology like electric vehicles and windmills and solar,” Gore said. “The value of their green tech exports now far exceeds the exports from the United States to the rest of the world. … We’re seeing this transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy and electric vehicles and batteries and these exciting new technologies that are pollution-free, they create three times as many jobs per dollar spent compared to the old dirty fossil fuels, and that’s where the economic future is.”

Climate scientist Kim Cobb made a similar argument on CNN Newsroom With Fredricka Whitfield*:

“China, of course, [is] transitioning its economy very, very quickly to clean energy sources. About 84% of the demand last year in China for electricity was met by clean energy sources. They are owning EVs, batteries, and solar cells to the tune of 78% of global manufacturing taking place in China for a $2 trillion industry. So right now what we’re looking at is China taking a very bold leadership role and charting its clean energy future. The U.S., in the meantime, swimming very much upstream against the global currents of deployed renewables, which are cheaper than fossil fuels right now.”

While MSNBC covered the climate conference for roughly 13 minutes, its coverage included similar narratives about clean energy. On his November 16 show, host Ali Velshi noted: “Now, in America's absence, China is stepping up as a global leader in climate science. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air reported last week that China's carbon emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months straight. Part of that is attributable to a record amount of renewable energy expansion in China. In 2024, the country installed 333 gigawatts of solar power capacity — that's more than the rest of the world combined.”

Video Citation}:

From the November 12, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

Discussing COP30 earlier in the same segment, Greg Gutfeld declared that the “climate agenda has been fully discredited” and that “the climate computer models have been shown to be corrupt.” He went on to falsely claim, “They are wrong on predicting everything from the temperature increases to the snow or ice melting.”

Laura Ingraham announced that scientists’ warnings on climate change have been “total scams.”

The network also hosted its usual round-up of climate contrarians and skeptics including Marc Morano, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, and Victor Davis Hanson, and Fox coverage continued to cite the controversial October 28 climate memo from Bill Gates to global leaders ahead of COP30 to suggest that climate change is no longer considered a crisis requiring immediate action.

Video{Citation

From the November 15, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Journal Editorial Report

“I think what Bill Gates is really saying is something reasonable,” Lomborg agreed. “Talk about how you think about climate — he’s saying sure, it’s a problem, but it’s not the end of the world.”

In reality, 2025 is set to be the “second or third warmest year on record,” the World Meteorological Organization reports. The warmest year overall remains 2024, which was likely “the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.”

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REF

Right-wing media’s favorite climate contrarians go on Fox shows to bash Biden’s climate plan

In their new books, Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg dismiss the seriousness of climate change

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ted MacDonald

Published 07/17/20

REF OLD

2X?

Right-wing media’s favorite climate contrarians go on Fox shows to bash Biden’s climate plan | Media Matters for America

Climate contrarians Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg both got airtime on Fox shows this week to attack Joe Biden’s recent climate plan and promote their new books, which similarly downplay the seriousness of the climate crisis. This claim is wrong, of course, and plays right into the hands of the right-wing media which is all too eager to use their message to delay necessary climate action.

On July 14, Environmental Progress founder Shellenberger appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss Biden’s new climate plan. With his recent book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All in the background behind him, Shellenberger falsely accused renewable energy of being costly and inefficient, lamented why natural gas and nuclear power weren’t taken seriously by the Biden campaign, and accused “United Nations officials and some scientists” of wanting to “control energy and food production around the world.”

On July 15, Danish political scientist Lomborg appeared on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. to discuss Biden’s new climate plan and to promote his new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. He called Biden’s plan “a very poor deal” that is “phenomenally expensive,” stated that “we need to get out of this ‘it’s the end of the world’ sense” on climate change, and promoted continued investment in research and development of new energy technologies as the sensible solution to climate change.

On July 16, Lomborg appeared on Fox Business’ Making Money with Charles Payne. He referred to Biden’s climate plan as “a phenomenally large cost for not very much benefit” and dismissed dire climate claims, stating that “we've been so force-fed with all these stories that are a little true and a lot of false.”

Shellenberger is a pro-nuclear advocate who has a history of criticizing renewable energy, singing the praises of natural gas, and pushing contrarian and bad-faith views about the environmental movement. He’s espoused deliberately misleading claims on recent issues including the Amazon fires of 2019 and the recent Australia wildfires. Similarly, Lomborg has his own history of downplaying the dangers of climate change. As Media Matters wrote last year, he’s “been long discredited within the climate science community,” including being “caught downplaying the risks of sea level rise and even misrepresenting Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.” His claim to fame, the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, was so riddled with errors that a Danish government committee found him guilty of “scientific dishonesty,” and a website was created specifically to debunk these errors.

Neither of these individuals, of course, are climate scientists.

Their appearances on Fox shows, which have been notorious purveyors of climate misinformation, were the culmination of a slew of op-eds and appearances by Shellenberger and Lomborg in various right-wing media outlets. Although their arguments have been picked apart by actual climate experts, that won’t stop right-wing media from using their works to continue pushing for delay on climate action.

Both books are being heavily promoted by climate deniers and right-wing media

Shellenberger has claimed, “No book on the environment has ever been praised by a more prestigious group of scientists & scholars than ‘Apocalypse Never.’” However, a look at the discourse surrounding his book showed that the praise largely came from climate skeptics within right-wing media.

In the days before and after the release of his book on June 29, climate denier and Fox News staple Marc Morano praised Shellenberger, lumping Apocalypse Never, in with another set of contrarian climate works as “A Winning Trifecta for Climate Science & Rationality.” The conservative, climate-denying Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) shared an op-ed Shellenberger wrote for Forbes that teased some of the arguments made in the book -- the article has since been taken down by Forbes due to violating its standards of self-promotion (and not, as Shellenberger has claimed, due to censorship). The climate-denying CO2 Coalition also tweeted in support of his new book. Breitbart wrote an article on it, and noted how Shellenberger “issued a public apology for the unfounded panic caused by environmentalists over the fabricated horrors of global warming.” This was followed by a fawning profile of Shellenberger’s claims by James Delingpole, who has called climate change “the biggest scam in the history of the world.” Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist with white supremacist ties, called Shellenberger’s book “really a big deal.” The Daily Wire republished an excerpt of his since-deleted Forbes article in which, “on behalf of environmentalists,” he apologizes for the “climate scare.” Zero Hedge, whose recent climate screeds have included “Global Warming Fraud Exposed In Pictures” and “Climate Change is real, but its manufactured. Weather is the new battlefield,” also tweeted about Forbes’ removal of Shellenberger’s piece. Finally, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who recently and falsely claimed that “the data are mixed” on climate change, tweeted a Wall Street Journal review that praised Shellenberger’s book, calling it “worth reading.”

Prior to appearing on Fox News, Shellenberger made the conservative media rounds, appearing on Glenn Beck’s right-wingBlazeTV, The Federalist Radio Hour* podcast, the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia, and the podcast of The Heartland Institute, a group that has “been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.”

Lomborg’s book, published roughly two weeks after Shellenberger’s, has also run the right-wing media gamut. He published op-eds in both the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. His book has been promoted by The Epoch Times, nihilistic Trump defender Scott Adams, and Climate Depot’s Morano. He conducted an interview with uber-conservative radio host and major climate misinformer Dennis Prager on July 16, and he is scheduled to discuss his book on July 23 with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group with a long history of fossil-fuel backed climate denial.

Actual experts have thoroughly debunked Shellenberger and Lomborg’s arguments

Shellenberger’s Forbes article was admonished by seven climate scientists at Climate Feedback, which bills itself as “a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage.” They referred to many of Shellenberger’s claims as “inaccurate” and made “in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change.” Climate scientist Peter Gleick reviewed Shellenberger’s book for Yale Climate Connections, calling it “bad science and bad arguments,” and noted its propensity for “strawman arguments, cherry-picking facts, and ad hominem attacks on scientists, media, others.”

Lomborg’s book was given a scathing review in The New York Times by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, noting the “many contradictions within the book” and taking to task his “underestimation of the damage associated with climate change.” (Indeed, during Lomborg’s appearances on both Varney & Co.and Making Money with Charles Payne, he did not once mention the cost of inaction on climate change, which is estimated to be many trillions of dollars -- much greater than actually taking action.) The Times’ review closed by saying “Lomborg’s work would be downright dangerous were it to succeed in persuading anyone that there was merit in its arguments.”

Unfortunately, climate deniers within right-wing media are all too eager to use these false arguments to contradict the prevailing scientific consensus: Bold and immediate climate action is necessary if we want to maintain a livable climate.

These false claims play right into the hands of those who want to delay climate action

The arguments made by Lomborg and Shellenberger -- who both identify themselves as environmentalists and acknowledge the reality of man-made climate change -- represent a very insidious form of climate skepticism. Doubting the urgency of climate change is one of the three main themes of spreading climate misinformation.

Shellenberger here is just following in the footsteps of Lomborg, who has been at this schtick for years (and making a lot of money in the process). But Shellenberger’s case is particularly egregious because he took the authority to speak on behalf of the entire environmental movement. By painting himself as some sort of reformed environmentalist, he gains a lot of credibility and legitimacy with his readers who either outright deny climate change or are skeptical about it in the first place.

In fact, Shellenberger’s book was explicitly tailored for climate skeptics -- as journalist and meteorologist Eric Holthaus pointed out, Shellenberger’s publicist admitted that the book’s purpose was to get “people to think of climate change as a ‘100 year problem’ not a ‘10 year problem.’” Obviously, climate change is a serious problem that needs to be taken care of right now -- to argue otherwise is to encourage inaction on the issue.

By appearing on Fox to promote their books, they are just showing who their true audience really is -- those who want to kick the can down the road and avoid taking necessary action to address climate change.

---

MMA

Under the leadership of Bari Weiss, The Free Press’ climate change coverage mirrors that of right-wing media outlets like Fox News

As the editor-in-chief of CBS News, Weiss will oversee the broadcast news leader in climate coverage

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 11/04/25

In early October, Paramount Skydance bought the The Free Press and hired its founder, Bari Weiss, as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, a newly created position which will shape how the newsroom covers major stories which could include the climate crisis.

Notably, among the national broadcast networks, CBS has led coverage of climate change for at least the past four years, airing the most coverage, the most climate scientist guest appearances, and the most segments that discussed climate solutions as compared to ABC and NBC. But its role as network leader is already under threat. Reported by HEATED, as part of a series of layoffs at the network, the “majority of the five person team supporting CBS News’s climate coverage” were fired. In the memo announcing the layoffs, the new chief executive David Ellison said “he was ‘phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.’”

And there are other changes that could compound this threat: On October 24, it was reported that Weiss was interested in poaching Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who has a troubling record on climate reporting to “potentially helm the *CBS Evening News.” Additional reporting suggests that she may also be interested in bringing on board another conservative voice, CNN contributor Scott Jennings. And on October 27, *CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson announced he was leaving the network at the end of the year.

Though Weiss infrequently focused her contrarian opinions on climate-related issues in her pieces for The New York Times and on her podcast, under her leadership as founder and editor-in-chief, The Free Press has published a number of articles undermining climate science and promoting contrarian views that mirror commentary from right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

The Free Press has undermined climate science

On August 19, The Free Press reported on a widely criticized climate study from the Department of Energy through an interview with one of its authors, Steven Koonin, a climate contrarian who has appeared on several right-wing media programs including several appearances on Fox. The interview included questions such as “what about climate change is real?” and provided a platform for Koonin to misrepresent a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that affirmed the link between climate change and extreme weather events.

Koonin has made the same false claims on Fox, including on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, where he downplayed the findings of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin dismissed the connection between extreme weather and climate change, a key finding of the report, claiming that natural disasters are “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Canada into triple digits just six weeks before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

In January of this year, The Free Press interviewed Koonin to downplay the role of climate change in intensifying the LA wildfires. Similar to right-wing media outlets like Fox, The Free Press misleadingly suggested that then-President Joe Biden and many climate scientists claimed climate change was the cause of the fires rather than a contributing factor to the intensity of the blazes.

In 2023, The Free Press published one of its signature contrarian pieces – titled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” by Patrick T Brown. In the piece, the author, who works for Breakthrough Institute, which was founded by anti-renewable advocate Michael Shellenberger, claims to have purposely limited his research paper showing warming temperatures increased the likelihood of wildfire growth in California in order to prove that articles in scientific journals were “distorting the scientific process by focusing too narrowly on climate change.” As reported by The Washington Post, “The opinion piece quickly provoked backlash from scientists and the editor of Nature herself.”

The stunt by Brown reflects the decades-old right-wing media narrative that climate scientists are “cooking the books” or playing “fast and loose” with data in order to manufacture a climate crisis.

The Free Press elevates contrarian and conservative voices to disparage climate activism and action

In February of this year, The Free Press published a piece by Doomberg, an independent publication focused on energy, finance and geopolitics, titled “Everybody Freeze! It’s the Climate Police,” which used a proposed policy in the the city of Ottawa “limiting residents from using remote car starters to warm up their vehicles for more than one minute before driving” and reporting that a “Washington Democrat hopes to study the impact of medical anesthesia on climate change” as proof that efforts to address climate change have gone too far – and as a result caused a “global popular revolt” against climate action.

It is the kind of cherry-picked reporting Fox News does to paint the climate movement as out of touch and radical. And like with Fox’s coverage, it feels disingenuous in its failure to either acknowledge the severity of the climate crisis or present the mainstream efforts to decarbonize the economy through policies, like renewable energy deployment, that are both popular and effective.

:{In March, The Free Press published a story on the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to claw back $20 billion of congressionally appropriated climate funds titled “A $20 Billion Slush Fund—Paid by You to Progressive Nonprofits.” The piece largely represents the position of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin that the funds were somehow fraudulent. It also pushes the Fox News narrative that the funding is a slush fund for the left, including Democratic politicians, that was rushed out the door before Biden’s term ended like “gold bars” tossed “off the Titanic.”

The “gold bars” which Fox News has repeatedly mentioned are a reference to a video from Project Veritas — an organization built on deceitful tactics — in which a purported EPA employee was filmed with a hidden camera saying the Biden administration tried to quickly spend federal money before Donald Trump resumed office. He said, “We’re just trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they come in and stop it all,” comparing the effort to “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”}:

But, as Politico noted, the “EPA had already obligated the $20 billion in climate grants months before a conservative activist group shot that video.” In fact, the climate funds were not hastily approved as Biden left office – the funding was legally appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress in 2022, and grants were awarded through established procedures, with public announcements made months before the election.

Additionally, as The New York Times reported, a lawyer for the EPA staffer who appeared in the video “has since said he was not referring to the $20 billion grant program.” The Washington Post also reported that the former employee “had ‘nothing to do with the evaluation and selection’ of the recipients, said a former EPA official briefed on the matter.” These facts were largely absent from the Free Press piece.

In 2024, The Free Press published a contrarian piece by a “retired sustainability influencer” who is also the social media editor for the outlet: “I Helped Make Standing Rock Go Viral. Now I Regret It.”

The author lamented that as an early social media influencer she presented the Native American-led protest against an oil pipeline as “black and white” or “good versus evil.” She claimed her opinion on the Dakota Access Pipeline and fossil fuels changed after she “began reading books and news sources that strayed from the progressive party line, titles like Unsettled by Steve Koonin, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. I realized that the environmental causes I had so breathlessly championed were much more complicated than good versus evil.”

Notably, the titles that she cited and their authors – Koonin, Shellenberger and Epstein – frequently appear across right-wing media to downplay the climate crisis, disparage renewable energy, and/or promote fossil fuel use.

Similarly, in 2023, a former member of Extinction Rebellion UK penned a piece for The Free Press, “Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem,” in which the author argued that the climate action organization, known for controversial direct actions, is run by a cult leader.

The piece was published at a time when right-wing media hostility against climate activists was at a fever pitch and some right-wing media personalities were cheering on calls for violence against climate groups.

Conservative journalists like Bret Baier could undermine CBS’ leadership in climate coverage

For at least the last four years, CBS has led its broadcast counterparts in volume of climate coverage. In 2024, the network accounted for 50% of total broadcast TV news climate reporting – 381 minutes of 771 minutes across all three national broadcast networks. The network also led in the number of climate scientist guest appearances it aired and the number of segments it ran that discussed climate solutions.

Meanwhile, the climate denial that has for decades been a staple of Fox News opinion shows has also appeared on the so-called straight news program anchored by Bret Baier. Fox’s flagship Special Report has repeatedly softened or distorted the stakes of global warming and climate action. From 2009 through May 2021, more than 87%of its climate segments contained misinformation or misleading narratives.

More recently, Baier conducted a nearly 10-minute interview with Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in which Baier promised a “fair” and “balanced” conversation. Instead, he helped the administration justify repealing the endangerment finding — potentially the most consequential climate rollback in modern history.

While Americans may be changing how they consume the news, legacy media and broadcast journalism at networks like CBS still matter, as the entire media landscape still relies on traditional journalism as part of the beginning of the information food chain. This includes how anchors report on extreme weather events, climate action, and scientific reports and findings. If CBS under Weiss approaches this reporting like the outlet she founded or like the anchor she seeks to poach, the network will risk becoming another cog in the machinery of climate denial and delay.

//

  1. ### Trump celebrates CBS News’ new leadership as “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press”

:{11/03/25

  1. ### CBS Evening News fails to cover Trump's pardon of cryptocurrency executive with ties to Trump business venture

:{10/24/25

  1. ### Bret Baier touts CBS News’ move toward “more balance” and “coverage that’s fair”

10/24/2

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stumbled on yt 10 25 omfg

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Michael Shellenberger | “The elites are absolutely obsessed with getting control” | #auspol

23K views

Michael Shellenberger: The EU has assembled a massive censorship machine.

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Cancel Culture Entitlement I Glenn Loury & Michael Shellenberger

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Michael Shellenberger: DHS Denies Censorship SCHEME By Hiding PROXY ACTORS In Big Tech

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"Homeless" is a Propaganda Word. Featuring Michael Shellenberger. #homelessness #drugaddiction

669 views

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1:20:25

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Concentration Camps, Drug Use, and Solar Panels | EP 169 Michael Shellenberger

133K views

2 years ago

Mikhaila Peterson

In this episode I was joined by bestselling author and social commentator Michael Shellenberger. We spoke about the social ...

23 chapters

Preview & Intro | Michael’s Background | Running for Governor of California & Political Stance | Energy Cost & Crisis In Europe | The Political Shift In Europe | The War On Nuclear Power | Natural Gas & The Climate | Reliance On China and Russia For Energy | Solar Panels Come From Chinese Concentration Camps | Economic Virtue Signaling | Farmers In the Netherlands | Blackouts in California | The Fertilizer Controversy | Food Shortages In Europe | Weak Leaders And The Global Consequences | Addiction & Homelessness | Wokism & Victimhood | Why Europe Doesn't Have A Drug Problem | Overmedication In North America | Diet, Mental Health & Stoicism | Why Mikhaila Took Responsibility For Her Health | The Leftist Approach To Responsibility Vs. Victimhood | Michael’s New Book

3:15:30

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Joe Rogan Experience #2211 - Michael Shellenberger

1.3M views

1 year ago

PowerfulJRE

Michael Shellenberger is an investigative journalist and founder of Public, a Substack publication, founder and president of ...

11:31

Now playing

Michael Shellenberger: Why America Quit Wokeness and Zuckerberg Got Manly

21K views

6 months ago

Dad Saves America

Journalist and author Michael Shellenberger explains why America may finally be leaving wokeness behind and entering an age ...

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Michael Shellenberger - The Demise of California | SRS #87

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1 year ago

Shawn Ryan Show

Michael Shellenberger is an award winning Journalist and best selling Author. He is best known for his book "San Fransicko," a ...

8 chapters

Introduction | The Dark Side of California | Running for Governor | Why is Homelessness Such a Specific Problem in California | Average Californian’s Opinion | Politics in California | Proposition 47 | Apologizing to the Police

'Censorship Industrial Complex': Twitter Files Journalist Michael Shellenberger Issues Dire Warning

52K views

2 years ago

Forbes Breaking News

At yesterday's House Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee hearing, reporter Michael Shellenberger spoke about ...

Why renewables can’t save the planet | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxDanubia

5.6M views

6 years ago

TEDx Talks

Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what ...

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6 chapters

Intro | Problems with renewables | California | Solar | Cost | Toxicity

Michael Shellenberger on Climate Change Alarmism

1.6M views

4 years ago

PowerfulJRE

Taken from JRE #1719 w/Michael Shellenberger: ...

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Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All | Mass Extinction | The Death of God

The Biggest Medical Scandal Of Our Time | Michael Shellenberger | EP 435

577K views

1 year ago

Jordan B Peterson

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with bestselling author and journalist Michael Shellenberger to discuss the shocking revelations ...

34 chapters

Coming up | Intro | The pseudoscience of WPATH | PROVEN: doctors are not getting informed consent and they know it | All you have to do to become a professional association… | Gender and distress explained clinically | Gender and identity confusion are the same thing | The astounding evidence for effective treatment that is being ignored | Enticed into denial, and waking up to the truth | Rampant psychopathology, the UK starts banning gender affirming care | The doctors involved did “no serious study or followup for adverse outcomes” | Sadists are overrepresented among surgeons, profit margins of trans care | Selective blindness to the spread of pathology | Abigail Shrier, raising the alarm, and the initial sense of hesitancy | Why the LGB communities are aiding in their own erasure | The reality of transsexualism and autogynephilia | Deep narcissism and a need for immediate gratification | The pathologization of the Devouring Mother | A clear trend of weak fathers in transitioner homes | Snow White and the deprivation of growth | Barbara Walters helped sell the lie | Psychology of hedonism paired with force | The shocking rate that totalitarianism is spreading | Cluster B-Type psychopathy | How does this end? | The oppressor/oppressed narrative formula explained | The monotheistic hypothesis and the end of the Enlightenment | What lies under the sacrifice of one's own child | Is there a secular version of the core transcendent story? | Civilization isn’t good enough to unite; it must serve something greater | Invitation over force, attracting the most people to greatest good | The image of mother and child must remain sacred | See how many snakes appear in the absence of faith | “Cult is an objective description” of the WPATH orchestrators

Michael Shellenberger: Cheap energy is women’s liberation

4.5K views

2 years ago

University of Austin (UATX)

Michael Shellenberger speaks to UATX's Forbidden Courses students. Watch the rest: ...

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'MORAL SICKNESS': Shellenberger calls out Dems' 'dehumanizing' rhetoric after Kirk's assassination

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1 month ago

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Public News founder Michael Shellenberger discusses Charlie Kirk's role in defending free speech and calls out Democrats ...

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Left Increasingly Supports Violence to Deal with Their Trump Brain Rot, with Michael Shellenberger

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Why I changed my mind about nuclear power | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxBerlin

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For more information on Michael Shellenberger, please visit www.tedxberlin.de. Michael Shellenberger is co-founder and Senior ...

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Intro | Growing up pacifist | Renewable energy | Germany | California | France and Germany | What about the future | Solar vs Nuclear | What about Chernobyl | No deaths from radiation | The old Geiger counters | The science | The waste | The weapons | Conclusion

Michael Shellenberger: The CIA is currently hiding this report

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Substack columnist Michael Shellenberger discusses a report that claims the CIA knew Russia favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 ...

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The CIA is currently hiding this report | Two massive intelligence scandals | How do we hold Brennan accountable

Michael Shellenberger on the Rise of the Counter-Elite (Ep. 5)

138K views

2 months ago

University of Austin (UATX)

Michael Shellenberger on Nietzsche, political revolution, and training a better elite. Michael Shellenberger is the founder of Public ...

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Preview | What is the pathology of our elites? | Grooming gangs, machetes & the total state | Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman | Political revolution | Were we betrayed by the Enlightenment? | American exceptionalism | The "Return of the Strong Gods" | Michael's life advice | Are you captive to your audience? | How media works | What happens after our elites fail? | Michael's book recommendation

Tucker Exposes the Growing Censorship Regime Using Charlie Kirk’s Death to Destroy Free Speech

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Streamed 1 month ago

Tucker Carlson

Our live broadcast with journalist Michael Shellenberger to expose the latest attacks on the First Amendment and your God-given ...

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Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger | EP 526

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Jordan B Peterson

Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist, bestselling author, and founder of Public.News, Michael Shellenberger. They discuss ...

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24 chapters

Coming up | Intro | Free speech is a “must have” for America, a “nice to have” for Europe | Europe was the birthplace of the enlightenment - it’s worth saving | JD Vance showed Europe was lagging on innovation and tech, meanwhile America is back | Why there is a fierce debate around DOGE gaining institutional access | What happens after the U.S. shuts down its agency for soft power? The vacuum that cleaning house creates | The mythological trope of the king’s evil brother: camouflage, corruption, and the modern Horus | Magatte Wade: foreign aid does more harm than good | Waste, fraud and abuse: how to balance needed cuts while safeguarding necessities | Trust is the only natural resource: “if everyone can cooperate… then every desert can bloom” | The three levels of masculinity - and which one ruins civilization | What constitutes a weak man | The Enlightenment, our long fall to darkness, and the way back | The power dynamics of hedonism | How hubris wrecked modernity | They projected Hitler onto Trump hoping it would stop him, the huckster salesman archetype | Where government propaganda began, “they forgot what America was about” | The WEF’s fall to irrelevancy and ridicule, the new political age | The betrayal of the elites | The revolution of new nationalism | Tyranny, slavery, and the Exodus | Where the greatest pleasures come from, what Globalism stripped from the world’s great nations | A great rebalancing is underway - why Shellenberger is optimistic

1:20:21

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factcheck by old org?!

No, Offshore Wind Will Not Drive Right… | The Breakthrough Institute

jan 2025

### Seaver Wang Seaver Wang is Director of the Climate and Energy team.

No, Offshore Wind Will Not Drive Right Whales Extinct
A Reminder That Common Environmentalist Tropes Often Boomerang

Jan 24, 2025

“If you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills,” Trump asserted in an Inauguration Day speech before supporters in Washington D.C.. The same day, Trump issued an executive order withdrawing all areas of the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing.

This dramatic reversal for the U.S. offshore wind sector marks a clear victory for offshore wind critics who have long warned that wind projects would devastate Atlantic whale populations. Such arguments have amassed surprising popularity. Earlier this month for example, controversial commentator and self-described journalist [past Breakthrough co-founder?] Michael Shellenberger published a tweet thread to viral acclaim claiming that offshore wind projects off the East Coast of the U.S. threaten the North Atlantic right whale with extinction and calling upon the new Trump administration to “end the slaughter.” In his post, Shellenberger shared*Thrown to the Wind*, a September 2023 movie produced by his organization Environmental Progress that allegedly investigates the links between wind farm construction and whale deaths.

But upon cursory examination, Thrown to the Wind commits numerous factual errors on critical points, systematically omits contextualizing information, neglects to discuss the many other threats that whales currently face, and generally dresses up uncritical sensationalism with vigorous hand waving and worn appeals to science. In 29 minutes of runtime, Shellenberger’s “documentary” presents only tenuous circumstantial evidence that no credible researcher would deem sufficient to support his bombastic, confident claims that offshore wind projects are killing and will kill endangered whales en masse.

When placed in context of the total sum of human shipping, surveying, and construction activities and broader human impacts upon the sea, a conclusive assertion that wind projects represent the existential threat to right whales rightly appears ridiculous. Moreover, Shellenberger appears wholly uninterested in discussing any technical, operational, or policy solutions that could ameliorate or even eliminate any impacts that offshore wind might pose to whales.

Yet this forgettable cinema project actually highlights a broader long standing problem—the boomer environmental movement’s endemic reliance upon appeals to emotion and simplistic tropes to resist new technology and construction. Despite paying reverent lip service to science, old-school conservationists now routinely eschew evidence-based inquiry in favor of such run-of-the-mill indie documentaries. All of this video content borrows from the same playbook—suggestive tricks of cinematography, hamfisted appeals to emotion, grave sermons on the inviolability of the “precautionary principle”, vague claims about the “fragility of intertwined ecosystems” and the certainty of collapse should the objectionable project of the day move forward. Unfortunately, such misleading messaging is often as effective as it is ubiquitous, as evidenced by the social media splash made by Shellenberger’s posts—20,000 retweets, 48,000 likes, and over a million views.

What this all highlights is how commentators of all stripes readily invoke marine wildlife protection for their own purposes. Shellenberger and others attack the offshore wind sector by spinning a whale slaughter narrative while ignoring far more impactful threats whales face from fishing gear and boat strikes. Yet their tactics parallel those of ocean conservation groups catastrophizing about how seafloor minerals exploration will destroy the ocean carbon cycle—with an equal passion for flashy claims that contradict evidence-based reasoning. Meanwhile mainstream environmentalists lament the miniscule quantities of fish eggs and plankton ingested by a nuclear power plant’s cooling system while simultaneously calling for offshore wind development on the same patch of coast.

All of this agenda-driven messaging suffers from the same lack of holistic perspective. Human civilization already interacts profoundly with the ocean through ship traffic, dredging, transoceanic cables, fishing, naval activity, aquaculture, coastal construction, and countless other activities. All of this meanwhile takes place against a larger backdrop of human impacts from nutrient pollution, plastic waste, ocean acidification, noise, and ocean warming. We already have no choice but to balance new activities like wind farm development, now and forever, within this larger landscape of ubiquitous human activities at sea and human impacts on oceans. If we want to work seriously to advance infrastructure development with well-managed impacts on the ocean environment, then we simply must let go of the traditional environmentalist reliance on selective narratives.

Link to tweet: https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1877002130776572270

What does Thrown to the Wind get wrong?

From the very start, Shellenberger’s brazen tweet makes a sweeping causal conflation. He claims that all 12 whale deaths off the U.S. East Coast throughout December 2024 occurred because of wind turbines, and that the North Atlantic right whale will go extinct unless Trump puts a stop to wind project development.

Having reviewed the film Thrown to the Wind in detail, such gyrating leaps of illogic accurately describe Shellenberger’s work on the subject.

Thrown to the Wind’s glaring sin is that it noticeably sidesteps discussion of any other possible causes of whale deaths, particularly the two consistent top known causes of death—entanglement in discarded fishing nets and gear, and collisions with boats of all kinds. These two factors accounted for 25 out of 41 known right whale deaths between 2017 and 2024. If a film were really centering whale welfare, one would expect it to touch at least briefly upon all the varied threats that whales face in practice.

It only gets worse from there. None of 12 East Coast whale deaths in December 2024 were right whales, contrary to what a casual reader might take Shellenberger’s tweet to imply. One of these dead whales washed ashore far away in North Carolina, where no wind construction is ongoing. Several of the dead whales appeared on beaches along the north side of Cape Cod, the side opposite from early-stage wind project development off Martha’s Vineyard south of Cape Cod’s southern coast. And while whale autopsy work on most of these dead whales is still in progress, initial findings so far have already ruled out offshore wind as the clear culprit in a couple cases—a Minke whale dead of disease, and a young humpback whale found on Cape Cod’s north side struck head-on by a boat.

Skating over such inconvenient details, Shellenberger and colleagues pin the blame for whale deaths squarely upon underwater noise pollution from offshore wind development. They claim to have shadowed ships performing preliminary work at the Vineyard Winds offshore wind site and to have taken damning measurements of noise emitted from such work.

A trailer clip Shellenberger shared prominently includes an off-the-cuff statement by a boat crew member recording noise from a survey vessel, who remarks “it sounds like somebody is pile driving.” This alludes to the process of pounding monopile structures into the offshore continental shelf, upon which developers later place the wind turbines themselves. Yet the fast-paced chirping sounds recorded from the small boat clearly do not originate from pile driving, which exhibitsmuch longer intervals between strikes. Robert Rand, who the film credits as an acoustics expert, does correctly identify the noise as scanning sonar shortly thereafter in the film. This clarification is left out of the shorter promotional clip. Yet in any case, multibeam and sidescan sonar typically operate at frequencies above what humpback whales can hear and dissipate over short distances, and are used across oceanic industries like fishing, dredging, and scientific surveys. If sonar systems posed an existential threat to large whales, culpability would extend far beyond the offshore wind sector.

The film’s commentary on underwater sound levels also neglects context regarding the volume of the sounds measured. The film crew claims to have measured 150 decibels of sonar sound at a good distance from a specific seafloor surveying vessel in the Vineyard Wind development area, MISS EMMA MCCALL, then around 90 dB of sonar noise at a distance of 0.5 nautical miles in a separate instance. In comparison, the underwater noise from a moving cargo ship can be 190 dB at the source, while some research papers report that whale watching boats can produce 138-169 dB at the source (all decibel measurements are with respect to 1 μPa at 1 m). Coastal dredging to maintain harbor channels for ships and boats generates 180 dB.

How noisy does underwater sound have to be to bother marine life? Natural “ambient noise levels experienced in gentle weather conditions”, as it turns out, typically reach 94 dB. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service defines a continuous noise threshold of 120 dB beyond which there is a “possibility of behavioral impacts, generically, to marine mammals.” In other words, not all of the wind farm zone noise measured by the film crew was even particularly distinguishable from background ocean noise let alone harmful, while offshore wind operations are far from the only potentially loud noise sources in the coastal marine environment.

MISS EMMA MCCALL also uses exactly the same gear to survey across the U.S. East and Gulf coasts for offshore cables, underwater pipelines, offshore oil and gas drilling, dredging, government and scientific research, and other seafloor surface characterization activities. As of time of this writing, MISS EMMA MCCALL is docked in the Gulf of Mexico.

At another key point, the film shows charts comparing regional ship traffic in the mid-Atlantic and New England against the locations of reported whale deaths over different time frames. Predictably, the charts do show an increase in ship activity in the Martha’s Vineyard region in 2022 and 2023, while the number and location of whale deaths seems to fluctuate wildly between periods. Shellenberger quips in response to a colleague: “I appreciate your caveat about not suggesting causality, but it’s impossible not to look at these correlations and imagine there’s some connection.” His comment unintentionally reveals the skew characterizing the whole documentary project—a deliberate disinterest in alternative hypotheses, uncertainties, and sources of error.

The film, for example, does not seem particularly concerned with comparing its ship traffic and whale deaths narrative against the actual timeline of wind farm construction. Before 2022, the US built just 7offshore wind turbines. Five turbines near Block Island, Rhode Island constructed between 2015-2016, and two turbines off Virginia constructed in 2020. This calls into question the significance of the ship traffic imagery shown from December 2016 through the end of 2021.

The film team’s presentation of ship traffic in inconsistent time periods does not account for seasonal patterns of boat traffic around the Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod regions during the summer months. Nor do they consider the seasonal pattern of whale activity, in which whales are present year-round but concentrate off New England largely in the winter and spring months. In response, federal agencies and wind farm developers have also explicitly agreed that developers will concentrate onsite activity during summer months—another factor that the superficial commentary does not consider.

Meanwhile, dead whales washing ashore do not exactly offer the clear narrative that Shellenberger and company would like. Dead whales appearing on beaches are obviously decoupled in time and place from where and when they died, and researchers often require months of autopsy work to investigate the cause of death. ​​Whale strandings, by nature, are a metric carrying considerable error—an inherently incomplete picture of whale mortality with a lot of chance thrown in that could create illusions of trends. The time needed to detect robust trends in whale deaths in response to a new stressor may be quite long. Simultaneously, one can easily imagine other explanations for increasing whale deaths on the U.S. East Coast since 2016, such as infectious disease, marine pollution, climate shifts, or significant shifts in boat traffic during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the film’s final piece of evidence, activist Lisa Linowes claims that a letter to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management by NOAA Chief of Protected Species Sean Hayes warns that wind turbine turbulence will destroy the plankton that whales feed on. This assertion utterly butchers the actual scientific concern the letter by NOAA scientists highlights—a far more mundane risk that turbines could change local patterns of water circulation and stratification, shifting where zooplankton occur. Many anti-wind activist groups regularly cite this NOAA letter, but few groups draw attention to the NOAA scientists’ proposed solution to protect whales from negative impacts—an incremental 20 kilometer shift of the wind farm development zone. This policy suggestion stands in sharp contrast to how Shellenberger’s film frames the threat to whales from offshore wind projects as a yes or no binary, as opposed to any interest in exploring solutions throughout the whole spectrum of impacts and countermeasures.

Make no mistake—this critique of Shellenberger’s film does not seek to dismiss the real concerns regarding possible negative impacts upon whales from offshore wind development. As evidenced by federal regulations, industry countermeasures, and academic research and oversight, such concerns do demand serious study and attention. But members of the public worried about whale welfare are far better off reading the actual NOAA letter and related scientific work themselves rather than wasting time on this “documentary.”

On the future of humans, the ocean, and the Earth

Overall society would benefit by drawing some much-needed lessons from this silly film. Likely, many clean energy advocates and climate hawks have nodded along so far with this critique of Thrown to the Wind.

Yet members of the broader environmental coalition should consider how this film is actually representative of the highly unscientific, typical documentary often celebrated by the environmental movement. Thrown to the Wind’s distorted narrative echoes that of films like the widely-panned Seaspiracy, which spun similarly superficial and unscientific narratives about fishing and ecological collapse. The ranks of junk food movies on nuclear power include examples like Meltdown: Three Mile Island, which earned a Netflix release despite wildly mischaracterizing numerous technical and historical facts and leaning heavily on appeals to emotion.

One could literally shoot the same kind of documentary speculating about how geothermal power will poison the flamingos, complete with an eerie musical score, camera angles lingering melancholically on a flamingo chick, and sermonizing over the sins of industrializing nature. This is a mirror image of classical environmentalist doco-dramas, just mobilized for different ideological purposes. Shellenberger, after proclaiming the “Death of Environmentalism” just two decades ago, has now essentially chosen to leap into the same grave.

Critics do not need to make up arguments against offshore wind. Shellenberger is likely grossly overstating the impacts of offshore wind development on Atlantic whale populations so far, but neither is it reasonable to argue that the old Biden administration goal of expanding offshore wind capacity from 42 megawatts to 30,000 megawatts by 2030 would have zero impacts upon whales. A more rational discussion of impacts management can appreciate the full spectrum of tradeoffs between building many wind farms speedily and cheaply versus slower, limited construction with obligations to implement a whole suite of high-cost mitigative measures.

From a big picture perspective, one can easily imagine that in a techno-economic future where nuclear power or advanced geothermal scale with great commercial success, the entire case for offshore wind could weaken to the point of non-viability. But the future technological breakthroughs are hard to predict and society needs more clean energy tools, not less.

Meanwhile, one thing is certain: the fate of Atlantic whales will depend upon a far richer set of factors—ranging from fishing to navy sonar to climate shifts—than just offshore wind turbines alone.

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random

Latest posts from Michael Shellenberger

bolsonaro used facebook?

Brazil has been banning and censoring journalists and politicians for years. But now it is taking steps to ban X entirely. It’s time for @SecRubio to block President Lula, Justice Moraes, and their criminal accomplices from entering the US.

11.2K+ likes

shellenberger

X (Twitter) · 10 hours ago

Operating on the bodies of children so they look like the opposite sex is the future, said the media. It wasn’t. It’s increasingly the past. And it won’t come back, not even in CA. Historians will struggle to understand trans medicine alongside bloodletting, lobotomies & Tuskegee

15.5K+ likes

shellenberger

X (Twitter) · 1 day ago

New York's socialist mayoral frontrunner says his policies will lower housing and food prices, and reduce crime and disorder. They won't. They'll increase them. The reason he won is because he pandered to young voters afflicted by envy, entitlement, and willful ignorance.

15.4K+ likes

shellenberger

X (Twitter) · 2 days ago

Allowing surgeons to operate on the healthy bodies of children in an effort to change their gender is liberation

11.2K+ likes · 1 week ago

...

[Shellenberger pushes for changes to Maryland’s juvenile justice system Shellenberger pushes for changes to Maryland's juvenile justice system ... Appearing on the “C4 and Bryan Newhman Show” on Monday, Baltimore...

.

3 weeks ago](https://www.wbal.com/shellenberger-pushes-for-changes-to-marylands-juvenile-justice-system)

[

Fox Business

Democrats are the party of 'decivilization,' says Michael Shellenberger

Public News founder Michael Shellenberger discusses anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and the American public's view of illegal immigration on...

.

2 weeks ago](https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6374208798112)

[New College of Florida

New College to Host Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Michael Shellenberger for Socratic Stage Event at Sarasota Opera House

New College of Florida will host Can Science Save the World? An Evening with Bill Nye and Michael Shellenberger at the Sarasota Opera House on Saturday,...

.

Aug 26, 2024](https://www.ncf.edu/news/new-college-to-host-bill-nye-the-science-guy-and-michael-shellenberger-for-socratic-stage-event-at-sarasota-opera-house/)

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no lnx ggl

Fox News

Michael Shellenberger: Trump is 'enforcing the law' by sending National Guard to LA riots

Public News Founder Michael Shellenberger joins 'America's Newsroom' to discuss President Donald Trump's decision to deploy the National...

.2 weeks ago

Quillette

An Interview with Michael Shellenberger

We've covered a lot of ground—from misinformation and digital IDs to nuclear energy and the challenges of modern journalism...

.Dec 3, 2024

Fox Business

Democrats are the party of 'decivilization,' says Michael Shellenberger

Public News founder Michael Shellenberger discusses anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and the American public's view of illegal immigration on...

.2 weeks ago

New College of Florida

New College to Host Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Michael Shellenberger for Socratic Stage Event at Sarasota Opera House

New College of Florida will host Can Science Save the World? An Evening with Bill Nye and Michael Shellenberger at the Sarasota Opera House on Saturday,...

.Aug 26, 2024

House Judiciary Committee Republicans | (.gov)

The Censorship-Industrial Complex

The hearing, "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," will examine the Committee's role in uncovering the Biden-Harris Administration's unconstitutional censorship...

.Feb 12, 2025

Independent Institute

Book Review: Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Michael Shellenberger

The problem with apocalyptic environmentalism isn't simply that it has egg on its face because of so many inaccurate predictions or that it's simply wrong on...

.Apr 10, 2025

The Breakthrough Institute

No, Offshore Wind Will Not Drive Right Whales Extinct

The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center based in Berkeley, California. Our research focuses on identifying and...

.Jan 24, 2025

NewsNation

Social media community notes help with fact-checking: Michael Shellenberger

Social media community notes help with fact-checking: Michael Shellenberger ... Michael Shellenberger, founder of the Substack “Public,” joins...

.Jan 7, 2025

The Hill

Ukraine, Europe disrespect US; Nuclear arms race incoming?! Michael Shellenberger interview

Rising Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger discusses Ukrainian President Zelensky's position that he's now committed to peace talks a minerals deal...

.Mar 5, 2025

Christian Post

Michael Shellenberger warns decline in religious belief to impact AI's ability to deal with moral questions

Michael Shellenberger warns decline in religious belief to impact AI's ability to deal with moral questions.

.Feb 25, 2025

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an 5 25

Salon Reporter Amanda Marcotte says director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is knowingly cultivating violence from supporters of President Donald Trump by inflating the facts of a federal memo on the role COVID-19 disinformation played in domestic terrorism.

Marcotte says Gabbard declassified the memo and took it to the right-wing punditry circuit, pushing the “flat-out lie” that President Joe Biden was labeling Americans as "terrorists" because they opposed COVID-19 mitigation measures like masks and vaccines. The memo does not say this, and Biden did no such thing, says Marcotte, but by pushing this lie, Gabbard is encouraging the kind of radicalization “that does lead to domestic terrorism.”

“For those who bother to read the 2021 memo, the report isn't surprising, but simply stating the obvious fact that far-right extremists ‘threatened or plotted violence against the healthcare sector and state and local government officials’ in 2020,” Marcotte writes.

READ MORE: Trump gives up the game and tells half of America what he really thinks about them

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

The memo anticipated there could be a secondary round of threats in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 vaccine, but it did not equate the U.S. anti-vaccine movement with terrorism. Rather, the memo was careful to identify members of organized militias and white supremacist groups as using anti-vaccine sentiment as an excuse to foment violent threats.

“The average anti-vaccination MAGA rube is not part of this memo,” Marcotte said. “They may be disease vectors, but no, the FBI did not think they were terrorists.”

But that did not stop Gabbard from appearing on Fox News last week and for "using their First Amendment rights" and to label them a "domestic terror threat."

A footnote on Page 4 of the memo declared, "The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophical embrace of violent tactics may not constitute violent extremism and are constitutionally protected." Yet Gabbard “keeps shamelessly lying about this,” says Marcotte.

READ MORE:'It's happening to me again!' South African president mocks Trump to laughing audience

“She retweeted right-wing pundit Michael Shellenberger'sdeclaration that "the Biden administration viewed millions of Americans as a terrorist threat." She also retweeted Cain insisting that the Biden administration labeled ‘some COVID-19 opponents 'domestic violent extremists,' as if it was their views on COVID-19 alone that drew the label.

Marcotte argues the jingoistic wordplay gives cover to an administration declaring its own war on free speech as Trump moves “to arrest people who have broken no laws, simply because they voice opinions he doesn't like.” She is also encouraging more violent extremism by creating a victim narrative in the MAGA community “that extremists can use to justify violence.”

“Her story is that they are innocent people unjustly targeted by the nefarious Biden administration. Having been recast as victims, any violence they commit now can be narrated as 'self-defense' against the imaginary Democrats coming for their free speech rights,” Marcotte said.

Read the full Salon report here.

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NOTE BOOST AMPLIF

MMA

Right-wing media use Iberian Peninsula power outage to justify Trump's energy agenda

Power outages happen under many circumstances, but this one became a fixation of conservatives attempting an attack on renewable energy technology

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 05/13/25 MMA

Europe has long drawn criticism from the right in the U.S. and abroad for its ambitious net-zero goals. Spain, for example, is a global leader in renewable energy and aims to source 81% of its energy from renewable sources by the end of this decade.

In the U.S., opponents of renewable energy claimed the power outage exposed the irreconcilable shortcomings of wind, solar, and storage batteries and used it to validate President Donald Trump’s hostility toward these technologies and his “drill baby drill” energy agenda of oil and gas expansion. But power outages have also long impacted fossil fuel energy grids, and renewable energy has proved resilient in the face of past extreme weather.

Additionally, the centralized nature of most traditional energy grids, where energy flows from the grid to customers and provides a consistent energy frequency, doesn’t take advantage of the strengths of renewable energy. Institutions like the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (which President Donald Trump recently targeted with layoffs) are researching technology called grid-forming inverters that can prevent power outages in renewable energy systems, and similar projects are being constructed around the world. Bloomberg, [4/30/25; Reuters, 5/6/25; IEEE Spectrum, 4/13/24; S&P Global, 5/5/25; Reuters, 5/5/25; Colorado Public Radio, 5/5/25]}:

4/28/25; Substack, 4/28/25]}:

The Daily Mail, [4/29/25; Twitter/X, 4/21/25]

---

escape The Woke Matrix

A pathological religion is destroying our civilization

Michael Shellenberger

Jun 29, 2023

∙ Paid

iutx bs talk alarmism 10 MIN

emission peaked 50 yrs ago, uk ,declined

90% decline kia from extr weaThter and COSTS?!

GBREEF HIGHST LEVEL OF CORAL

lost all friends and $

smoke fentylal lose legs put back on str; blk ppl do not kia by cops at higher rate; harvard ron fryer 217 to 157 to 58 in largest cities;

fauci wuhan lab racist; hunter biden laptop fbi shd never have launched probe wapo tom cotton

https://www.public.news/p/escape-the-woke-matrix

had the pleasure on Monday of giving a keynote address to the students and faculty of the University of Austin titled “Escape The Woke Matrix.” In it, I argue that Western civilization is being rapidly taken over by a psychopathological religion, and that we must resist it by exposing it for what it is, and re-grounding our institutions in love of humanity, civilization, and freedom.

You can hear the emotion in my voice. The global crackdown on free speech has left me feeling angry and afraid. Despite my emotional state, or perhaps because of it, the students gave me a standing ovation at the end.

---

whale wind BS doku loud piledrivers, break up caLVES NOAA AND ---

300 WHL LEFT?

https://www.public.news/p/facebook-censors-accurate-information

thehill

facebook Censors Accurate Information Linking Wind Energy To Whale Deaths

Facebook also spreads misinformation by "FactCheck.org," which relies on debunked U.S. government sources

Michael Shellenberger

Aug 15, 2023

∙ Paid

457

6338

For the last 20 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his social media company is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the natural environment.

But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast.

Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “FactCheck.org” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources.

The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released anew documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the FactCheck.org article is false.

Share

“Thrown To The Wind” presents powerful new scientific evidence that the wind industry is responsible for the increase in whale deaths and that U.S. government agencies are either covering up the evidence or have failed to do the research that is described in the film.

Facebook last year defended its censorship by saying its “fact-checks” are just “opinion” and thus immune from defamation lawsuits, like the one brought by former ABC News correspondent John Stossel.

But that means that Facebook is spreading disinformation. By “disinformation,” I mean information that the person knows to be false. Facebook knows its “fact checks” are just their “opinion.” Thus, labeling FactCheck.org, which in this case is simply repeating US government misinformation, as a “fact-checker” is disinformation.

And the consequences are serious. According to Facebook, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

Why is that? Why is Facebook censoring accurate information and spreading disinformation? And how can we fight back?

Please subscribe now to support our investigative reporting, our fight against censorship, and our defense of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

Subscribe

Facebook’s Renewable Energy Investments...pix

---

https://www.public.news/p/escape-the-woke-matrix

recent Posts

Pascal Clérotte: Ban on front-runner Marine Le Pen is “nail in the coffin of French democracy”

Mar 31 • Michael Shellenberger and Pascal Clérotte

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Mar 31 • Michael Shellenberger and Matt Goodwin

Roger Pielke, Jr.: “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did”

Mar 26 • Michael Shellenberger and Roger Pielke Jr.

R.R. Reno: “We may be moving to a point where the American right sets the agenda for the future politics of our country."

Mar 24 • Michael Shellenberger

Marco Visscher: The atomic bomb was designed to bomb the world to peace, not to pieces. It's worked fairly well."

Feb 27 • Michael Shellenberger

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Feb 23 • Michael Shellenberger

AI Can't Solve Our Biggest Problems

Feb 19 • Michael Shellenberger

Jonathan Keeperman: “We need to reassert a healthy masculinity”

Feb 16 • Michael

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HHRG-119-JU00-Wstate-TaibbiM-20250212-U2

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20250212/117881/HHRG-119-JU00-Wstate-TaibbiM-20250212-U2.pdf

testimony by Matt Taibbi on Censorship and Free Speech

February 12, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified, Committee Democrats called us “so-called

journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties.

When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two

things: there’s no censorship, but whatever government is doing, it’s for our own good.

I was shocked and thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes

to all my life was pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, who I voted for, talk to

the World Economic Forum:

“It’s really hard to govern,” he said. “The referees we used to have to determine what's a fact

and what isn't a fact have kind of been eviscerated… people self-select where they go for their

news… it's really, really hard, much harder to build consensus…”

He talked about curbing disinformation and added, “our First Amendment stands as a major

block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.”

I defended Kerry when people accused him of “looking French,” but this was beyond Marie

Antoinette. The peasants are “self-selecting” media. What’s next, letting them make up up their

own minds? And you wonder why you lost the last election!

A lack of consensus is inconvenient for politicians, and I’m sure there are times when you’d all

like to “hammer” trust into place. But the First Amendment is designed to protect us from

exactly that decision. Many of you forgot this.

This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have

already adopted draconian laws chipping away at it. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the

most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society. England, a country

whose historical aversion to pure speech freedom is the reason we have a First Amendment,

now has an Online Safety Act empowering government to jail people for nebulous offenses like

“false communication” or causing “psychological harm.”

These laws are totally incompatible with ours. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of

these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because our bureaucrats

still believe in these laws.

Which brings us to USAID. Americans are in an uproar because they learned about over $400

million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to

...Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people.” Her views are almost identical to

Kerry’s.

Bourgault once said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists

or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”

First of all, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government

create “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting one dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476

million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long

list of agencies, which have bought up every part of the news production line: sources, thinktanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” media scoring, and when all else fails,

censorship.

It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to beat the free press into a consensus

machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.

When Bourgault talks about pushing dollars toward the “the good news” Americans know what

that means. It’s you should get the shot, Putin is bad, J6 was an insurrection, don’t question

climate change, and so on.

Meanwhile “Bad content” is defined as “divisive rhetoric,” which often is just a synonym for

:{:{uncomfortable truths:}:

Healthy kids don’t die from Covid, lockdowns were a bad idea, Trump}:

isn’t a Russian agent, and Biden can’t write his name in the ground with a stick. Some of this

country’s highest-paid journalists are still afraid to say these things out loud. It’s pathetic.

Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a

Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship

because we figured we had the better argument.

Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it

on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see

with their own eyes. No wonder your approval ratings are lower than psoriasis.

YOU SOLD US OUT. Shame on you.

---

OMG UFO MACE

Written-Testimony-Shellenberger

---

insta

DAC6nMtxFSE

Not only is Trump responsible for Ohio bomb threats, the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, and January 6, says the media, he's also responsible for the assassination attempts against him. It's bad enough the media incites violence. It's unconscionable to then blame the victim.

30w

97 PP PT 2

shellenberger_testimony

The Censorship-Industrial Complex, Part 2 U.S. and foreign government support for domestic censorship and disinformation, 2016 - 2022 Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government November 30, 2023

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, and members of the Subcommittee thank you for inviting my testimony. Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to this subcommittee about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and Big Tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.

I regret to inform the Subcommittee that the scope, power, and law-breaking of the Censorship Industrial Complex are even worse than we had realized back in March. Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from “The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which show US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people. Many insist that all we identified in the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and the CTIL Files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated their terms of service. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other Big Tech companies are privately owned and free to censor content.

And government officials are free to point out wrong information, they argue. But the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,” and there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that. What’s more, the whistleblower who delivered the CTIL Files to us says that its leader, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016....

---

ny post

wASHINGTON — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi sparred with former President Joe Biden’s onetime “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz during a Tuesday hearing about government censorship on Capitol Hill, ripping the past administration’s content moderation efforts for having undermined Americans’ free speech.

The House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee heard testimony from both about the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was set up under former President Barack Obama to counter foreign disinformation and misinformation — but had begun targeting US social media users under Biden.

“GEC officials were largely concerned with domestic, English-language accounts — people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China or Russia,” Taibbi said about his extensive review of internal Twitter, now X, records in 2023.

“The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech,” he went on. “The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves.

“They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what’s truth,” he concluded.

“We don’t need a truth squad — and that’s exactly what GEC was designed for.”

Taibbi sparred with former President Joe Biden’s onetime “disinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz during a Tuesday hearing about government censorship on Capitol Hill.house.gov

The “Twitter Files” unearthed emails disclosing an immense pressure campaign to censor The Post’s bombshell scoop on Hunter Biden’s emails introducing his father to foreign business patrons and the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins, which was later corroborated as the most likely explanation for the pandemic by Joe Biden’s FBI, Energy Department and CIA.

Lower federal courts slapped the Biden administration with injunctions for having pressured Facebook and other social media companies into throttling engagement or removing posts on the controversial subjects, but the US Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, said the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Benjamin Weingarten, an investigative journalist and columnist at RealClearPolitics, noted that the federal district court judge who first heard the case called it “arguably the most massive attack on free speech in US history.”

6

“The so-called Censorship Industrial Complex is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety but on our national security,” Nina Jankowicz said.house.gov

6

Having dubbed the feds’ effort “digital McCarthyism” during a March 2023 congressional hearing, the Racket News founder now said he had delved back into the “Twitter Files” and found more evidence of big tech content moderation.house.gov

“Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had that same view. Three Supreme Court justices did as well,” Weingarten told members of the subcommittee. “And while it’s been dismissed, that case, the fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court specifically did not rule on the underlying merits — the thousands of pages of discovery which blew the lid open on this entire regime.”

Having dubbed the feds’ effort “digital McCarthyism” during a March 2023 congressional hearing, the Racket News founder now said he had delved back into the “Twitter Files” and found more evidence of big tech content moderators directly engaging with the government-led campaign against disinfo.

In a Feb. 4, 2020, email, one of the Twitter moderators noted that the GEC seeding media reports about Russian influence driving Sen. Bernie Sanders’ popularity during the Democratic primary was “making me worry a little about how good-faith these players will be through the press into 2020.”

6

:{:{“The idea behind GEC in particular was finding a way to propagandize American citizens and encourage acceptance of official policy, the way we’ve always done to foreign populations,” the “Twitter Files” scribe testified}:

.CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images}:

Another earlier in the exchange claimed GEC staffers were pushing “sensationalist claims about epidemics of foreign bots.”

“Although many of the most controversial stories about the GEC involve their funding of commercial media-scoring operations that down-ranked conservative news outlets, I also observed the GEC pressuring Twitter about socialist accounts, left-leaning accounts, and independents, as well as conservatives,” Taibbi said.

“They weren’t looking for misinformation and disinformation,” he added. “They were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience. The idea behind GEC in particular was finding a way to propagandize American citizens and encourage acceptance of official policy, the way we’ve always done to foreign populations.”

6

:{:{Republican critics have dubbed Jankowicz Biden’s “disinformation czar” and frequently derided her efforts as trying to police Americans’ social media posts.}:

:

6

Subcommittee chairman Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) concurred that as vice chairman of the House finance panel, he often sees government agencies using their regulatory pressure as a “cudgel.”house.gov

Jankowicz, who was tapped but later pulled from running a Disinformation Board under Biden, dismissed the entire “premise of this hearing” in her opening statement. She had called October 2020 reports on Hunter’s laptop a “Russian influence op.”

“The so-called Censorship Industrial Complex is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety but on our national security,” she said. “More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stymying critical research that protects our country.”

The founder of the misinfo-targeting American Sunlight Project then went a step further and accused the Trump administration of having committed “far more egregious violations of our Constitution” in recent weeks than “the imagined actions of the Biden administration.”

Republican critics have dubbed her Biden’s “disinformation czar” and frequently derided her efforts as trying to police Americans’ social media posts.

The House Foreign Affairs subcommittee also needled her for posting a TikTok video singing a la Mary Poppins about her campaign.

Taibbi countered that even aside from GEC’s efforts, there were further transgressions by Biden’s FBI and White House — the latter of which had a former New York Times reporter kicked off Twitter.

Subcommittee chairman Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) concurred, saying that as vice chairman of the House finance panel he often sees government agencies using their regulatory pressure as a “cudgel.”

GEC, which was closed down, reportedly went through a “rebranding” effort inside the State Department during the final days of Biden’s term.

---

The Censorship-Industrial Complex | House Judiciary Committee Republicans

YT link The Censorship-Industrial Complex - YouTube

House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday, February 12, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. ET. The hearing, "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," will examine the Committee's role in uncovering the Biden-Harris Administration's unconstitutional censorship campaign and will examine upcoming threats to free speech including from AI and foreign governments.

WITNESSES:

Subcommittees

Committee on the Judiciary (119th Congress)

---

---

yikes

substack and

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

ECONOMY Climate Panic Behind Energy Crisis

Todayville

Published 6 days ago 7 minute read

Climate activists, including members of Extinction Rebellion, participate in a demonstration in front of the Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse on June 30, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

My testimony to U.S. Congress

Michael Shellenberger

I was delighted to be invited to testify before the United States Congress for the seventh time in two years. Below are my oral remarks. All references can be found in my full testimony, which draws on much of what I have published here on Substack over the last 18 months. To read my full testimony, please click here.

:{:{--==}:

mma 12 24

OnThe Story with Martha MacCallum, author Michael Shellenberger claimed that Kennedy will not “ban vaccines or discourage vaccines,” adding that he will be “very constrained” and is “proposing some pretty reasonable measures.” Shellenberger: “I think he obviously made that commitment that he wasn't going to ban vaccines, he wasn’t going to discourage vaccines. I think if he gets through his nomination, I think he is going to be very constrained with what he can do, but he's basically proposing some pretty reasonable measures to have better regulation of all drugs including vaccines.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [11/15/24]

---

Michael Shellenberger

uatx “ivy? chat?

board of trustees

Faculty

staff

board of trustees

board of advisors

Teri Andresen

Civic Leader and Philanthropist

Brent Bellm

CEO, BigCommerce

Niall Ferguson

Historian, The Hoover Institution at Stanford University

plus icon circlegoldeb plus icon

Pano Kanelos

President

Joe Lonsdale

CEO of 8VC, Co-Founder of Palantir

Scott Malkin

Chair, Value Retail

Andrew Trousdale

Researcher and Artist

Bari Weiss

Founder, The Free Press

learn more

CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech

The Chair is intended to advance the study of censorship and the technological, political, economic, and cultural conditions that lead to the suppression of speech. By exposing students to historical and recent manifestations of censorship, the Chair will facilitate the responsible exercise of free speech in a pluralistic society.

Michael Shellenberger is a best-selling author, a publisher of the Twitter files, and a pro-human environmentalist. He has broken a number of major stories, including San Francisco's supervised drug consumption site and cash incentives for homelessness, FBI misinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, climate pseudoscience and climate anxiety, and more. As a leading expert on the suppression of speech who testifies and advises governments worldwide, Michael is uniquely qualified to lead UATX in its studies of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

---

note twit not fox

dirty trick pseudo-event

6 24

mma

in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, right-wing media are doubling down on deceptive messaging around gas prices to attack President Joe Biden — in part by promoting a campaign launched by Americans for Prosperity, the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers' conservative political advocacy group.

//

Right-wing media used OPEC oil cuts to blame Biden for domestic gas price volatility

10/24/22

  1. ### Fox News attacks Biden for “surging” gasoline prices as they fall for 27th consecutive day

07/11/22

  1. ### Fox News accusing the Biden administration of deliberately spiking gas prices represents a cynical narrative escalation

06/16/22

---

===

mma 4 24

google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.

In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation.

When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.”

“Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

When clicked on, the ads lead Google Search users to a video on PragerU’s website titled “Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?” In the video, anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger tells the audience that “pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy would actually cause more harm to the environment than good.” (While all extractive processes have environmental impacts, scientists agree that the consequencesof burning fossil fuels on the climate along with the declining costs of both renewable energy and renewable-energy storage make those cleaner technologies essential to a sustainable energy future.)

Shellenberger is known for spreading misinformation about wind energy and downplaying the impacts of climate change. In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” A 2022 report produced by hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists argued that climate change has increased the intensity — and in some cases the frequency — of extreme weather events.”

Shellenberger has also defended former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before” and “driving them [whales] crazy.” In 2023, he produced a documentary that alleged — again, without concrete evidence — that “government officials have been lying” about the role offshore wind turbine construction has played in causing whale deaths.

The video featuring Shellenberger is one of 30 videos on PragerU’s “Get The Truth About The Climate” playlist.

Other videos on the playlist feature an assortment of well-known climate deniers, including former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin and nuclear energy consultant Patrick Moore, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he co-founded Greenpeace.

In a video titled “Is there really a climate emergency?” Koonin claims that climate change is not settled science, an argument he also detailed in a 2021 book called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Another video on the playlist called “The truth about CO2” features Moore, who claims that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere do not present a danger to humans and that “we're already seeing the positive effects of increased carbon dioxide now.” “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is,” Moore adds.

Video

CitationPragerU ad in Google's search engine, accessed April 4, 2024

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks.

Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms.

Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Since 2021, researchers have demonstrated that Google has failed to follow through on its promise to address climate denial. One study found 100 monetized YouTube videos that seemingly violated Google’s climate change misinformation policy. The videos had accrued more than 18 million views. Despite those seeming policy violations, only eight of the hundreds of climate-denying videos studied were eventually demonetized. Google has also profited significantly from ads placed by fossil fuel companies attempting to “greenwash” their reputations as drivers of the climate crisis.

THE LATEST

  1. ### Google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

04/16/24 11:01

  1. ### Mainstream media gushed over “vocal Trump critic” NH Gov. Chris Sununu, who has now endorsed Trump

04/16/24

  1. ### ABC and NBC nightly news programs ignored report that Trump appeared to fall asleep during his trial

04/16/24 10:37 AM EDT

  1. ### Michigan GOP Chair Pete Hoekstra works for anti-Muslim institute that warned of “Great White Death” from Muslim immigrants

04/16/24 10:02 AM EDT

  1. ### Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

04/16/24 9:49 AM EDT

===-}:

---

mma 1 24 no pix

Fox host Jesse Watters and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger attempted to delegitimize the trusted news wire service AP News, seemingly in response to a recent story from the outlet countering disinformation that Fox regularly pushes about offshore wind projects.

Video

CitationFrom the January 2, 2024, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

On the January 2 edition of Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters claimed that “liberal money is literally getting global warming stories planted on the front page of America's papers.” AP News has received grants from various foundations with a broad array of focuses and philanthropic leanings, which AP has used to hire more journalists and produce better climate change coverage.

But the expansion, during which the news agency hired about 20 climate journalists, was announced in February 2022. Though Watters and Shellenberger targeted the news service’s climate coverage as a whole, they also zeroed in on one December story titled “Contrary to politicians’ claims, offshore wind farms don’t kill whales. Here’s what to know.”

During the segment, Shellenberger, who authors a right-wing Substack called Public, refuted the article by repeating myths about offshore wind turbines killing whales, despite a lack of evidence to support those claims.

Shellenberger alleged AP News is accepting “millions of dollars … to basically do propaganda” on behalf of foundations that have “direct investments in things like those whale-killing wind farms,” presumably because the climate reporting grant came in part from foundations that also support renewable energy development. Shellenberger also called the article “disinformation,” even though the information it presents has been widely confirmed by experts who work with marine mammals and reiterated by several fact checks from a variety of sources.

Despite having produced a documentary attempting to vilify offshore wind projects in 2023, Shellenberger has failed to offer concrete evidence that this development is responsible for the unusual mortality even**t that is affecting whales on the Atlantic coast. Scientists say that while it’s nearly impossible to link the event to a single cause, fishing gear entanglement, vessel collisions, and the changing migration patterns of whale prey due to warming waters could all be contributing to an increase in whale deaths.

Far from indicating a genuine concern about biased reporting, the segment advanced a longstanding and concerted campaign led by Fox News to spread panic about offshore wind energy and hinder the transition away from fossil fuels.

Throughout 2023, Watters helped spearhead the right’s dubious obsession with whale conservation through his early coverage of wind projects in New York and New Jersey.

In reality, the story Shellenberger and Watters are attacking is far from “propaganda.” Not only does it quote both scientists and think tanks that are opposed to offshore wind development, but it also fails to mention that these think tanks have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, as do smaller activist groups involved in the supposed whale conservation effort in the Mid-Atlantic region. When it comes to climate change, Fox won’t settle for anything less than science denial.

related

  1. ### Fox anchor and climate contrarian defend Trump's unhinged comments about whales and offshore wind

10/02/23 5:07 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing figures are using the cancellation of two offshore wind projects to make misleading claims about renewable energy

11/14/23 2:47 PM EST

  1. ### Fox News is touting a dubious new documentary repeating misleading claims about offshore wind link to whale deaths

08/29/23

---

oddly off brand?

San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger laid out a plan to attack the scientific consensus behind gender-affirming care. Some mainstream outlets took the bait.

04/03/24

4 24 mma

Newsweek, The Washington Post, and two of the largest TV station owners in the US fell prey to a PR campaign by anti-trans activists pushing to expand conservative states’ bans

Special PROGRAMSLGBTQ

WRITTEN BY MIA GINGERICH

PUBLISHED 04/03/24

Networks owned by the largest local TV station owners in the U.S., and mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and Newsweek, recently amplified a deeply flawed report by anti-trans activists. The outlets also failed to fact-check its misinformation or provide context for the extremists behind it.

The report was covered widely by anti-trans figures and outlets, and some Republican state legislators are already using the report to call for expanding restrictions on gender-affirming care.

On March 4, anti-woke blogger and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger announced the release of “The WPATH Files,” a collection of leaked forum posts from an internal message board for members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The group is the leading body providing clinical guidance for medical professionals on gender-affirming care, and a frequent target of anti-trans activists.

The report included a loose collection of out-of-context clinical observations paired with inaccurate and editorialized commentary. An independent review from medical news outlet STAT described claims made in the report as false and oversimplified.

Specifically, as discussed by journalist and researcher Erin Reed, the report cites research that comes either from biased sources or is well over a decade old, with newer research refuting the claims. The report makes verifiably false claims about gender-affirming care and the commonality of detransition. Leaked material is inaccurately characterized throughout the report, and at other times, the content was presented without context, allowing readers to misinterpret what was said in the chat logs.

The report wasthe product of behind-the-scenes collaboration between Shellenberger and Genspect, an anti-trans activist group that promotes conversion therapy and bans on transition care for adults. The report’s analysis was written by Mia Hughes, who has an extensive history as an anti-trans writer and acted as a spokesperson for an organization that supports conversion therapy for trans youth.

“The WPATH Files” are a part of a larger strategy by anti-trans extremists to push for broad gender-affirming care bans in blue states

Genspect has shadowed WPATH’s annual conference for the past few years, running its own conference in conjunction and promoting its anti-trans rhetoric to WPATH membership.

Last year, Genspect’s conference featured talks from far-right extremists including James Lindsay — who helped popularize on social media the practice of falsely accusing LGBTQ people of “grooming” — alongside mainstay anti-trans activists like Colin Wright and Chloe Cole.

The conference also featured figures more closely associated with other fringe movements targeting established science, such as anti-vaccine activist Heather Heying and Shellenberger, best known for his skepticism and misinformation around climate science.

Shellenberger, whose most recent book San Fransicko targets progressive policy on homelessness with a similar reliance on misleading and inaccurate information, laid out his plan in a speech at that conference (which Genspect has sincemade private on YouTube).

“The name of my talk is ‘How WPATH ends,’” Shellenberger began, “and the idea here is that the obstacle is the opportunity, so when we think about the things that are getting in the way of us providing the care that people need rather than the care that they’re getting, let's think of that obstacle as the thing that's going to help us to achieve our goal.”

Shellenberger framed trans identity as one of a series of “foundational woke ideologies” alongside efforts to combat climate change and oppose racism. He also asserted repeatedly that trans identity is a mental illness, that gender-affirming care is comparable to lobotomies (a common right-wing trope), and that gender dysphoria is something that is being created and not “a natural thing.”

Shellenberger stated that he wants to end access to all gender-affirming surgeries and that he wants to use the report to target those “who are running for president, who are governors of major liberal states, because the conservatives, the Republican states, are just sort of — it’s happening,” seemingly referring to the sort of gender-affirming care bans in place in many conservative states.

Video

CitationFrom the first day of Genspect's "A Bigger Picture" conference held in Denver, Colorado, streamed on YouTube on November 4, 2023.

At the conference, Shellenberger also introduced the tool with which he hoped to accomplish these goals: the WPATH Files. He described the “obstacle” to which he alluded at the start of his talk, namely that WPATH’s credibility as a professional association replete with a peer-reviewed journal and scientific literature gave it enough authority for major medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics to follow its guidelines on supporting gender-affirming care.

“When WPATH ends,” Shellenberger said, “the basis for these medical mistreatments must come to an end as well.”

Shellenberger said he wants to use his report to earn coverage in news outlets “that think that everybody in this room [at the Genspect conference] is a transphobe,” which he said he hopes will help bring about the end of WPATH and access to gender-affirming care broadly, including by convincing Democrats that gender-affirming care is unscientific — an assertion that goes against a wealth of actual research.

The nation’s largest TV station owner gave the activists behind the report an uncritical platform to push misinformation

Shellenberger’s strategy of targeting outlets outside the far-right appeared to gain some traction, first with NewsNation, which ran an “exclusive” on the report.

NewsNation is the cable network for Nexstar, the largest owner of TV stations in the U.S., covering 68% of households. Launched in 2021, NewsNation billed itself as a supposedly centrist alternative to other cable networks, with Nexstar describing it as “the destination for fact-based, unbiased news.”

Prior to publishing the report on X, Shellenberger gave an interview to NewsNation’s *Elizabeth Vargas Reports

Video

CitationFrom the March 4, 2024, edition of NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports

During his interview, Shellenberger shifted from calling for an end to all gender-affirming care for trans youth to asserting that “the people that are getting these treatments must understand what’s happening to them,” claiming that “the files show very clearly that that’s not what’s happening.”

Video

CitationFrom the March 4, 2024, edition of NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas Reports

The show also interviewed Mia Hughes, describing her simply as the “author of the report” but failing to disclose her long track record as an anti-trans writer and activist. Hughes characterized gender-affirming care as causing sterility, a piece of misinformation often repeated by anti-trans campaigners.

The outlet also interviewed Julia Mason, a pediatrician who belongs to the fringe Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Mason’s group is working to pass anti-trans legislation and its flawed research has been used to justify Texas’ order declaring gender-affirming care child abuse, but the network’s correspondent identified her simply as a “pediatrician in Oregon who has been sounding the alarm on medical transition of minors for years.”

Along with failing to disclose its guests’ background, NewsNation provided no pushback to the claims made in the report or by its authors. The only voice of dissent was a short quote from WPATH President Marci Bowers read by the correspondent at the end of the segment.

This is not the first time Elizabeth Vargas Reports has jumped on shaky claims from biased sources to target trans rights. The show aired similarly uncritical coverage of contested claims about gender-affirming care that were made against a St. Louis hospital last year.

As the report gained traction in other outlets outside the right, coverage failed to provide context or pushback to the Shellenberger’s report

Sinclair, the nation’s fourth largest TV network conglomerate, published an article uncritically quoting the report (with one quote from WPATH) and interviewing Shellenberger through its own program, The National Desk. Sinclair also used its immense roster of local news outlets to distribute the article to websites for local news stations, including affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The article ends by focusing on changes WPATH made to its standards of care two years ago, which were widely mischaracterized by right-wing media to attack the organization.

Newsweek also reported on the report, publishing an article titled “Transgender Hormone Drugs Linked to Cancer” — a headline so misleading it prompted condemnation from the National LGBT Cancer Network.

Additionally, Megan McArdle, a columnist for The Washington Post who previously used a biased anti-trans source to call for compromise between the rights of trans youth and the extremists targeting them, dedicated her March 8 column to Shellenberger’s report.

Following coverage of the report, WPATH’s website was the victim of a ransomware attack, and Shellenberger took the opportunity to announce “victory” and claim the organization had removed the latest standards of care from its website, suggesting his report was responsible. He removed his triumphant posts after his claims were shown to be false.

San Fransicko author Michael Shellenberger laid out a plan to attack the scientific consensus behind gender-affirming care. Some mainstream outlets took the bait.

04/03/24

---

assorted BS ca wildfires

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Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 17 • 6 tweets • 7 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter

Many say climate change caused the deadly fires in Hawaii but it didn’t. What caused the fires was Hawaiian Electric’s failure to clear flammable grasses from around electric wires because its focus, and ratepayer money, was going to renewables.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/wildfire-risk-maui-hawaiian-electric-7beed21e

“Between 2019 and 2022, it invested less than $245,000 on wildfire-specific projects on the island”

“While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”

“Looking back with hindsight, the business opportunities were on the generation side, and the utility was going out for bid with all these big renewable-energy projects,” he said. “But in retrospect, it seems clear, we weren’t as focused on these fire risks as we should have been.”

Same thing happened in California.

Gov. @GavinNewsom pushed the utilities to spend billions on renewables and cut the budget for forest fire prevention.

The result was more forest fires. When they were caught, they blamed climate change.

Image

I have been debunking climate and fire disinformation for three years. The media know better and continue to lie about it.

Image

Image

Why Everything They Say About California Fires — Including That Climate Matters Most — Is Wrong

In 2018, a fire ripped through the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people. It was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history.

Liabilities from wildfires started by its powerlines bankrupted Pacific Gas & Electric, which cut off power to nearly one million homes and businesses last month to prevent wind from triggering and fanning fires.

Many blame climate change.“The reason these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change,” said Leonardo DiCaprio.“This is what climate change looks like,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On Sunday, after President Donald Trump tweeted, “The Governor of California,@GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”

But can the increase in fires in California really be blamed on climate change?

I asked Dr. Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist who has researched the topic for 40 years, if he thought the 2018 Paradise fire could be attributed to climate change.

“It’s almost certainly not climate change,” he said. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state, and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”

Why Everything They Say About California Fires — Including That Climate Matters Most — Is Wrong

“We’ve had some unbelievable fire years the last couple of years,” said Hugh Safford, a forest ecologist with the US Forest Service. “This one has not been nearly as bad yet, even with this outbreak of fires over the last week and a half.”

All of the scientists I interviewed expressed frustration that journalists have failed to distinguish between two distinct types of fires.

“The media haven’t gotten the idea that we have two very different fire problems,” Keeley said. “And so the politicians haven’t been reading about the two very different problems.”

The first is the wind-driven fires on coastal shrubland, or chaparral, where most of the houses are. Think: Malibu and Oakland. Nineteen of the state’s 20 most deadly and costly fires were there.

The second is the forest fires in places like the Sierra Nevadas where there are far fewer people.

Mountain ecosystems have the opposite problem from coastal ones. There are too many fires in the shrublands and too few prescribed burns in the Sierras.

Keeley refers to the Sierra fires as “fuel-dominated” and the shrubland fires as “wind-dominated.”

The on solution to fires in the shrubland is to prevent them and/or harden homes and buildings to them.

Before Europeans arrived, fires burned up woody biomass in forests every 10 to 20 years, preventing the accumulation of (wood) fuel, and burned in the shrublands every 50 to 120 years.

But for the last 100 years, the US Forest Service (USFS) and other agencies put out most fires, resulting in the accumulation of wood fuel. “It’s like the forests have become a really tall version of chaparral,” said Safford.

The result can be fires that burn so hot they sometimes kill the forest, turning it into shrubland.

“I did a paper that found if you looked at Sierra Nevadas you’d want a half-million acres a year burned,” said US Forest Service research ecologist, Malcolm North. But, “over a 10-year period, the Forest Service was treating 28,000 acres and burning 7,000 acres, and so we’re at just seven to eight percent of where you would want to be.”

In 2006, scientists predicted climate change would increase the east-to-west blowing winds, worsening these coastal fires, but in 2011 and again in 2019scientists predicted they would decrease.

“Some will argue that it’s climate change but there is no evidence that it is,” said Keeley. “It’s the fact that somebody ignites a fire during an extreme [wind] event.”

The scientists emphasize that higher temperatures from climate change may be contributing to fire risk in the Sierras. “Fire season has lengthened 50 - 80 days per year,” notes North, “and that definitely has a signature to it from changing climatic conditions.”

But, North adds, “We want to pay particular attention to the fuels. It’s really the one way we’ve got to change fire patterns because we can’t change the climate.”

Keeley published a paper last year that found that all ignition sources of fires had declined except for powerlines.

“Since the year 2000 there’ve been a half-million acres burned due to powerline-ignited fires, which is five times more than we saw in the previous 20 years,” he said.

“Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s associated with climate change.’ But there’s no relationship between climate and these big fire events.”

What then is driving the increase in fires?

“If you recognize that 100% of these [shrubland] fires are started by people, and you add 6 million people [since 2000], that’s a good explanation for why we’re getting more and more of these fires,” said Keeley.

What about the Sierras?

“If you look at the period from 1910 - 1960,” said Keeley, “precipitation is the climate parameter most tied to fires. But since 1960, precipitation has been replaced by temperature, so in the last 50 years, spring and summer and temperatures will explain 50% of the variation from one year to the next. So temperature is important.”

Isn’t that also during the period when the wood fuel was allowed to build due to supression of forest fires?

“Exactly,” said Keeley. “Fuel is one of the confounding factors. It’s the problem in some of the reports done by climatologists who understand climate but don’t necessarily understand the subtleties related to fires.”

So, would we have such hot fires in the Sierras had we not allowed fuel to build-up over the last century?

“That’s a very good question,” said Keeley. “Maybe you wouldn’t.”

He said it was something he might look at. “We have some selected watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas where there have been regular fires. Maybe the next paper we’ll pull out the watersheds that have not had fuel accumulation and look at the climate fire relationship and see if it changes.”

I asked Keeley what he thought of the Twitter spat between Gov. Newsom and President Trump.

“I don’t think the president is wrong about the need to better manage,” said Keeley. “I don’t know if you want to call it ‘mismanaged’ but they’ve been managed in a way that has allowed the fire problem to get worse.”

What’s true of California fires appears true for fires in the rest of the US.

In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled 37 different regions across the US and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”

Of the 10 variables, the scientists explored, “none were as significantly significant… as the anthropogenic variables.”

I asked Keeley if the media’s focus on climate change frustrated him.

“Oh, yes, very much,” he said, laughing. “Climate captures attention. I can even see it in the scientific literature. Some of our most high-profile journals will publish papers that I think are marginal. But because they find climate to be an important driver of some change, they give preference to them. It captures attention.”

Gov. @GavinNewsom lied about his slashing of the budget for forest fire prevention. I have no doubt that the rulers of Hawaii will lie, too.

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 16

YouTube's new policy is that it will censor you if you disagree with World Health Organization. YouTube recognizes that WHO's "guidance" might change. But if it does, it won't be because of debate on YouTube. YouTube isn't a social media platform, it's a propaganda platform.

Imagine if YouTube had been around over the last 200 years. It would have banned criticisms of blood-letting, thalidomide, lobotomies, and sterilizing the mentally ill, all of which were recommended by official health authorities.

Opposition to bad health and medical advice often comes from outside of the health and medical profession or from the fringes. To disallow criticism of the mainstream consensus is a recipe for gross abuses of power and is an attack on free speech, science, and democracy.

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 15

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the environment. But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the role of industrial wind energy in killing whales on the brink of extinction.

Image

Facebook Censors Accurate Information Linking Wind Energy To Whale Deaths Facebook also spreads misinformation by "," which relies on debunked U.S. government sources For the last 20 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his social media company is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the natural environment. But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast. Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “https://t.co/IFNCMsQako” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources. The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released a new documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the https://t.co/IFNCMsQako article is false. “Thrown To The Wind” presents powerful new scientific evidence that the wind industry is responsible for the increase in whale deaths and that U.S. government agencies are either covering up the evidence or have failed to do the research that is described in the film. Facebook last year defended its censorship by saying its “fact-checks” are just “opinion” and thus immune from defamation lawsuits, like the one brought by former ABC News correspondent John Stossel. But that means that Facebook is spreading disinformation. By “disinformation,” I mean information that the person knows to be false. Facebook knows its “fact checks” are just their “opinion.” Thus, labeling https://t.co/NuvsVDtvtc, which in this case is simply repeating US government misinformation, as a “fact-checker” is disinformation. And the consequences are serious. According to Facebook, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.” Why is that? Why is Facebook censoring accurate information and spreading disinformation? And how can we fight back?FactCheck.com

Please subscribe now to fight censorship, save the whales, and read the rest of the article!

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 13

Yesterday marked the 60th known whale death on the East Coast since Dec 1, 2022. This is not normal. The government says it’s not because of the wind industry’s high decibel pile driving & boat traffic in previously pristine waters. They’re lying. And now we have the proof.

The government lied when it said it had done the research proving that the high-decibel pile driving and expanded boat traffic weren’t the cause of rising whale deaths. They hadn’t done the research Well, we did. And the results are incontrovertible. Soon, everyone will see that

The wind industry spent years bribing the US government, scientific organizations, aquariums, and the news media to lie to the American people about their abominable activities, which if allowed to continue, to make the North Atlantic Right Whale extinct.

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 12

For years, the government has insisted that the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast has no relationship to the wind industry's high-decibel pile driving and boat activity. But now, a new documentary, "Thrown To The Wind," based on new research, will challenge that.

We have not released the documentary yet. It's coming soon!

Industrial wind projects “could have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species,” warned a top US government (NOAA) scientist last year. "Population-level effects" include extinction.

Image

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 8

The White House demanded more Covid censorship despite overwhelming evidence — discussed internally by Facebook executives — that censorship increases "vaccine hesitancy." Why, then, did the White House demand it? Because the White House was under pressure from the news media.

We have already seen that Facebook felt the pressure to do more censorship for two reasons: White House threats to its Section 230 liability protection and the need for the White House to pressure Europe to allow "data flows" to the U.S. Today's scoop is different. It shows that Facebook knew that more Covid censoring would increase vaccine hesitancy and that the White House demanded more censorship anyway. But why?

Pressure On Facebook And White House For Greater Censorship Came From News Media As the government’s Covid vaccination campaign flagged in 2021, New York Times and others ramped up demands for more censorship by @galexybrane @lwoodhouse @shellenberger Yesterday Public reported for the first time that Facebook censored content at the request of the White House in order to guarantee White House support in a $1.2 billion battle with the European Union over data privacy. It is a significant discovery because it points to a major and additional point of financial leverage that the US government used to coerce censorship, in addition to widely discussed Section 230 liability protections, which President Biden, directly and indirectly, threatened — if Facebook refused its demands to censor. But it all raises a question: why was the Biden White House so determined to censor Facebook in the first place? Until the Facebook Files, the answer had been that they wanted people to take the vaccine. The White House believed all the anti-vaccine information on Facebook was contributing to “vaccine hesitancy.” But now, the Facebook Files reveal that Facebook executives knew censoring disfavored vaccine views would backfire and explained to White House officials that censoring such views would violate established norms around freedom of speech. But the White House demanded more censorship, anyway. In internal emails, Rosa Birch, Facebook’s Director of Strategic Response, argued that vaccine censorship would “1/ prevent hesitant people from talking through their concerns online and 2/reinforce the notion that there’s a cover-up.” Birch stressed that a large and strong body of research showed the importance of “open dialogue,” access to information, and creating “an open and safe space for people to have vaccine-related conversations.” Birch worried that censorship might “risk pushing [the vaccine hesitant] further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions.” The White House rejected Birch’s evidence-based case against censorship. “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the white house and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine-discouraging content,” Birch wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg in an April 2021 email. Facebook executive Nick Clegg initially attempted to defend his staff. “I countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” wrote Clegg. But he eventually caved in. “Given what is at stake here,” he wrote, “it would also be a good idea if we could regroup to take stock of where we are in our relations with the WH [White House], and our internal methods too.” And so, in direct response to White House pressure, Birch put forward three stronger enforcement options for the demotion or deletion of “vaccine discouraging content.” Listing out the pros and cons of each option, Birch explicitly named satisfying “critics” as a factor in determining which course of action to take. The White House was warned that censoring “vaccine hesitancy” was not the right approach. Why, then, did it push for it anyway?

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Aug 8

Many insist it wasn't illegal for the White House to demand greater censorship by Facebook, but it was. Not only did Biden threaten Facebook's legal (Sec. 230) status, Facebook desperately needed Biden to force Europe to allow data flows into the US, which he did. Quid pro quo.

A lot has come out about Facebook's censorship, so our new scoop may seem like old news, but it's not. What we discovered is that White House exercised a different form of leverage over Facebook, one as powerful, and maybe more so, than threatening its legal existence.

Until now, critics of censorship have focused on Biden's threat to revoke Facebook’s Section 230 liability protection. The new emails reveal a new form of White House leverage: its conditional willingness to stop the EU from demanding Facebook halt data flows to the US.

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Michael Shellenberger - Podcast Episode

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no lnx vid

The slow demise of green energy?

The wheels are starting to fall off the green energy bandwagon

By Kristen Walker Fox News

:{Published November 21, 2023

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Marc Morano: Biden's green energy agenda is in complete collapse

'The Green Fraud' author Marc Morano joins 'Jesse Watters Primetime' to discuss the collapsing green industry.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://video.foxnews.com/v/embed.js?id=6340327348112&w=466&h=263"></script><noscript>Watch the latest video at <a href="https://www.foxnews.com">foxnews.com</a></noscript>

jesse says his ocean view will not be blocked now

OIL IS GREAT, MINERAL RUN OUT, BIGGEST BAILOUT IN HISTORY

arnold S global warming solutionsact virtue signal, subsidies.... 2def 1.5 price is rightgame show

mandates,tax credits, germany bailout offshore wind, 1...trillion transition

how arrogant to think change world economy

cfact protest alliance of fisher]man trans rts activists and ---

50 govsand NJ ~ offshore wind

before to save world have to save ppl 1st

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The wheels are starting to fall off the green energy bandwagon. The rose-colored glasses are clearing up and reality is sinking in. AND OTHER TRITE EXPRESSIONS

The giant push toward a net zero utopia is not practical and has been a complete disservice to the American consumer. Components of the green movement are experiencing major setbacks, namely offshore wind, electric vehicles (EVs), and investments.

Offshore wind projects are struggling to secure financing and stay on track. The biggest blow came last month, when the world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted canceled two major projects off the New Jersey coastline, taking the wind right out of Gov. Phil Murphy’s green energy sails. Ørsted is also suspending work on offshore projects in Maryland and Delaware.

President Biden previously set a goal of ensuring 50% of car purchases are electric by 2030. The White House said EPAs recent tailpipe rules would provide a "clear pathway for a continued rise in EV sales."

The EV market is also losing steam. Sales are slumping and manufacturers are scaling back on production. (Anna Moneymaker/Pool/Getty Images | Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Among the wave of cancellations are projects in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut. Several other projects are on the ropes and a host of companies are paying millions to break their contracts.

BIDEN ADMIN QUIETLY RELEASED STUDY SHOWING GREEN ENERGY RECEIVES FAR MORE SUBSIDIES THAN FOSSIL FUELS

The industry hit another snag recently when Germany-based Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy pulled the plug on its wind turbine blade facility in Portsmouth, Virginia. Siemens Gamesa, one of the world’s leading suppliers, says, "development milestones to establish the facility could not be met."

According to BloombergNEF, at least half of U.S. wind contracts have or are at risk of being terminated. The causes are typically due to skyrocketing inflation, high interest rates, choked supply chains and financial troubles.

Offshore wind is leaving a ‘heavy environmental footprint’ on the East Coast: CFACT’s Craig RuckerVideo

Offshore wind is costly and difficult to implement.

The EV market is also losing steam. Sales are slumping and manufacturers are scaling back on production.

EXPERT WARNS GREEN ENERGY PROJECTS ‘ARE NOT WORTH IT’ AS PRICES SPIRAL ‘OUT OF CONTROL’

Ford Motor Company stands to lose $4.5 billion on its EV business for 2023 and will be delaying many of their EV investments.

General Motors said it was restructuring EV goals, Honda shelved plans to develop affordable EVs with GM, and Hertz said it will slow their rate of purchasing them due to high repair costs. Elon Musk is even considering putting off plans for a $1 billion plant in Mexico.

Nobody wins in this push for electric vehicles besides China: Lisa BootheVideo

Most, if not all, manufacturers are reporting major losses per EV sold. Ford lost $62,000 per vehicle in the third quarter; one luxury electric vehicle company lost an astounding $430,000. Countless others are losing tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle, quarter after quarter.

Car dealers are slashing EV prices. EVs sit on lots nearly twice as long as internal combustion engines. Even industry-leader Tesla has been shaving thousands off their retail prices due to unmet sales expectations.

This kind of loss is not sustainable for any company.

EV MARKET COULD BECOME THE ‘NEXT BIG FLOP’: ECONOMIST

[vid has woman ido not recog snarky onmayor pete and jennifer granholm hard to charge cars, then playclip from nat;l lampoon road trip movie chevy chase yells cites wsj; woman karen calls 911for blocking charger agascar; only chinawins; not scranton but china joe, 2030 mandate 80% of batt china; not good for workers, less parts/labor; send autoworker jobs overseas; hillary joke learn to code; elec infr full brk dn ask ca; joey jones future in 100 or 1k years; rare to find eg og gov tranition; spit in my aface and tell me rain, sen kennedy press on change coal key ona kite; ford prz; social engr; none of the guv biz; tyson quote; 280 mill gascars; avg ev 60K$] uaw holding biden endorse?! has more to do w/ contol, track our movement joey BS tesla isford pinto flames; chargers only urban

ireland 61K more than avg am; epa emission cut as many as2/3 by 20--, war on car, cut x tons emission texas frz ca blackouts china minerals; alliance for automotive innovations; grid resileint, low carbon fuels; legal challenge to govt oveerach end of combust eng put US on top of world; sense doc lost; namesof irish cops lost by thrm;

SHILL: kilmeade radio shill solar wind req3-4x land, mining req, dilure from sun nit debse grind up nature; not gonnahappen, 10% of minerals for energy up to---?, inflation in 2 ways; unrelaibe alt; major bi[part 70-2000a to frack 1 mi undergd; energy indep; biden refusesto frack despite biggest energy crisin on ---yrs; dependence on chinese renewbles

President Biden pushes electric vehicles despite high pricesVideo

The EV market is niche. Those who want one have one. But the rest of America is not convinced they would be better off with an EV on account of a multitude of reliability factors. Nor can they afford the steep price tag.

Consequently, the last few months have seen stock prices drastically dropping in companies across the green spectrum. From wind to solar to EVs to fuel cells, investors are abandoning the "green" energy ship in droves. It might be sinking.

Siemens Energy stock is down 45%; Ørsted, 67%; Power Inc., a hydrogen fuel cell producer, 71%; Charge Point Holdings Inc., an EV charging company, 70%; Blink Charging Co., another EV charging company, 72%; and Nikola Corp., maker of heavy-duty EVs, has gone from $65 a share in mid-2020 to the current price of less than $1 per share.

Green energy agenda is ‘environmental nightmare’: Michael ShellenbergerVideo

A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that such companies are "finding it more difficult to secure financing than at any time in the past decade."

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION

We need to read between the lines here. The green energy revolution is not working, nor is central planning. You cannot force Americans to buy cars they don’t want any more than you can force energy transitions that aren’t viable.

Green energy is wholly inadequate to meet the needs of all Americans, and turns out, is insanely expensive.

Doug Burgum: Green New Deal spending is buried in Biden's 'Inflation Creation Act'Video

GOP DEBATE i’m from town of 300 ppl, pay too much for energy, security 1.2 trillian inflayioncration act subsides china opec for chinopec, sanction russia oil power chinasolar factory w coal and russ gas;

The World Economic Forum says that getting to net zero by 2050 will cost an extra $3.5 trillion a year. The U.S. has already poured hundreds of billions into the effort and continues to keep shoveling. All on the backs of the American taxpayer, to save a mere fraction of temperature. Maybe.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician estimates that even if all fossil fuels were eliminated from the United States, not even 0.2 degrees Celsius would be salvaged.

It’s time to quit throwing other people’s money into these projects and let the market dictate the solutions.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM KRISTEN WALKER

Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, visit www.theamericanconsumer.org or follow us on Twitter @ConsumerPal.

LNX

The wheels are starting to fall off the green energy bandwagon. The rose-colored glasses are clearing up and reality is sinking in.

The giant push toward a net zero utopia is not practical and has been a complete disservice to the American consumer. Components of the green movement are experiencing major setbacks, namely offshore wind, electric vehicles (EVs), and investments.

Offshore wind projects are struggling to secure financing and stay on track. The biggest blow came last month, when the world’s largest offshore wind developer Ørsted canceled two major projects

BIDEN ADMIN QUIETLY RELEASED STUDY SHOWING GREEN ENERGY RECEIVES FAR MORE SUBSIDIES THAN FOSSIL FUELS

The EV market is also losing steam. Sales are slumping and manufacturers are scaling back on production.

EXPERT WARNS GREEN ENERGY PROJECTS ‘ARE NOT WORTH IT’ AS PRICES SPIRAL ‘OUT OF CONTROL’

EV MARKET COULD BECOME THE ‘NEXT BIG FLOP’: ECONOMIST

We need to read between the lines here. The green energy revolution is not working, nor is central planning. You cannot force Americans to buy cars they don’t want any more than you can force energy transitions that aren’t viable.

The World Economic Forum says that getting to net zero by 2050 will cost an extra $3.5 trillion a year. The U.S. has already poured hundreds of billions into the effort and continues to keep shoveling. All on the backs of the American taxpayer, to save a mere fraction of temperature. Maybe.

*www.theamericanconsumer.org

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an 1123

...right-wing media figures and climate deniers have used the cancellation of two major wind projects that were set to be built off the coast of New Jersey to make misleading claims about renewable energy as a whole. In addition to falsely claiming that there is evidence offshore wind projects are killing whales, they are using the project challenges to misleadingly attack the Biden administration’s climate agenda and argue against renewable energy subsidies.

On October 31, Danish global offshore wind developer Orsted announced (https://orsted.com/en/company-announcement-list/2023/10/oersted-ceases-development-of-its-us-offshore-wind-73751) it would be canceling Ocean Wind 1 and 2, citing high inflation, rising interest rates, and a choked supply chain.

Some right-wing media are calling the scrapped projects a “tremendous win (https://x.com/BillSpadea/status/1719628942716350762?s=20)for all New Jerseyans,” even though they would have provided 15,000 jobs (https://www.app.com/story/news/local/2023/11/02/rsted-promised-jobs-but-canceled-wind-projects-whats-next/71407832007/). Ocean Wind 1 and 2 would have also provided2.2 gigawatts (https://renewablesnow.com/news/rsted-stops-22-gw-of-us-offshore-wind-projects-books-large-charges-838502/)of electricity to 1 million homes to help meet the Biden administration’s goal (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/29/fact-sheet-biden-administration-jumpstarts-offshore-wind-energy-projects-to-create-jobs/) of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. It would have also helped New Jersey meet its goal (https://nj.gov/emp/)of reaching 100% clean energy by 2035.

Below are some examples of how bad actors spun the setback to deride renewable energy and omitted important facts and context:

FALSE CLAIM: The project cancellation is proof that offshore wind energy is not economically viable, which some said shows that Biden's clean energy plan is failing.

OnFox & Friends Weekend, frequent guest and climate change denier Marc Morano insisted that the cancellation shows that “the Green New Deal agenda isn’t … sustainable” and “Biden is failing on this green agenda.” “The story isn't as simple as you are hearing from Orsted, the windmill maker. It's not about supply chains — OK, it is a little bit about that. But this is a larger issue. This proves that the Green New Deal agenda isn't even sustainable with hundreds of billions of dollars of federal money this round, with Obama’s round. And what’s happened here is the local politics along the East Coast has had an impact as well. … Biden is failing on this green agenda, and it’s not just the wind. It’s happening in the EV world; it’s happening throughout the entire green agenda. Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, [11/4/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4013318)]

On Fox Business’ The Evening Edit, Forbes Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes insisted that roadblocks facing offshore wind were due to “subsidizing things that don’t work” rather than inflation.Forbes contended that from the beginning, the offshore wind projects “weren't viable at all,” and said that instead of blaming setbacks on inflation, people should blame them on “the incompetence of doing something that makes no financial sense. We have plenty of energy in this country. Get what we have here instead of subsidizing things that don’t work.” Fox Business, The Evening Edit, [11/2/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4013315)]

In a New York Post op-ed, James E. Hanley, who is affiliated with a Koch-connected think tank, wrote of cancelled wind projects that “the renewable-power fantasy is being blown apart.” “If offshore wind had to compete on the free market, we wouldn’t even be talking about it," he wrote. Hanley once wrote an article titled “Green Jobs Are a Cost, Not a Benefit.” New York Post, \11/2/23 (https://nypost.com/2023/11/02/opinion/collapse-of-projects-shows-again-that-wind-power-is-not-affordable/); American Institute for Economic Research, 11/1/21 (https://www.aier.org/article/green-jobs-are-a-cost-not-a-benefit/); DeSmog, accessed [11/6/23 (https://www.desmog.com/american-institute-economic-research/)]

Anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger disputed wind energy isn’t “good for the environment and the economy.”He said: “Experts said wind energy was good for the environment and the economy, but it wasn't. And now, with the cost of wind energy rising, along with industry demands for subsidies, @Orsted (https://twitter.com/Orsted) has abandoned the projects it had planned to build off the coast of New Jersey. Victory!!!” Twitter/X, [11/1/23 (https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1719849041729671438?s=20)]

Fox Digital quoted Daniel Turner of energy group Power The Future, who called offshore wind projects “green dreams.” FoxNews.com wrote: “‘When green dreams run into hard reality, the results are never pretty,’ Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of energy group Power The Future, said in a statement. ‘Wind power receives billions in taxpayer support, yet we see project after project failing.’ ‘In this case, it’s the people of New Jersey left holding the bag,’ Turner said.” FoxNews.com, [11/1/23 (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/developer-axes-two-major-offshore-wind-projects-blow-bidens-green-energy-goals?intcmp=tw_fnc)]

FACT: Experts see long-term growth for offshore wind energy despite setbacks, and renewable energy is booming thanks in part to Biden’s climate policy.

The industry is facing a perfect storm of challenges, some of which are being fueled by the post-pandemic economy and have held up other energy projects as well. Developers first signed fixed-price contracts pre-pandemic and didn’t sufficiently hedge for inflation in costs of steel and other essential materials, as well as rising financing costs due to increased interest rates. Canary Media, \11/2/23 (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/the-us-offshore-wind-industry-faces-a-moment-of-reckoning); E&E News, [5/31/23 (https://www.eenews.net/articles/boom-or-bust-what-inflation-means-for-oil-and-gas)]

Offshore wind is still a nascent technology in the U.S. and is experiencing growing pains, but that doesn’t mean it’s failing.Experts say federal regulators have been slow to approve offshore permits, particularly during the Trump administration, which was accused of slow-walking projects. Investment in domestic manufacturing of components, specialized ships needed to install turbines, and the labor force will likely drive down costs in the long term. E&E News, \11/2/23 (https://www.eenews.net/articles/offshore-wind-is-stumbling-can-biden-save-the-industry/); Inside Climate News, 8/19/19 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19082019/vineyard-wind-offshore-renewable-energy-delay-boem-environmental-cumulative-review-nepa-massachusetts/); Climate Nexus, accessed 11/13/23 (https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/offshore-wind-costs/); Spectrum News, 4/3/23 (https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2023/04/03/the-jones-act--how-a-100-year-old-law-complicates-offshore-wind-projects); Utility Dive, [3/6/23 (https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wind-workers-labor-shortage-skilled-labor-apprentices/644174/)]

The price of offshore wind fell by 60% between 2010 and 2022, even with price spikes. According to the International Energy Agency, “Although there has been a rise in costs in recent years … which has created difficulties in particular for wind power in some advanced economies, these cost reductions have largely followed anticipated learning rates linked to the scaling up of deployment and technology innovation.” International Energy Agency, [10/10/23 (https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/66b8f989-971c-4a8d-82b0-4735834de594/WorldEnergyOutlook2023.pdf)]

A recent report found that with more ambitious targets, offshore wind could supply 25% of U.S. electricity while creating nearly 400,000 new jobs. The report was put out by GridLab; the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy; and Energy Innovation. A GridLab program manager wrote that “the long-term prospects for offshore wind remain promising as a result of improving technology and falling costs," adding: “Today’s prices spikes are like the early days of land-based solar and wind, which after reaching maturity are now America’s cheapest forms of electricity. Establishing a robust domestic offshore wind supply chain now will drive down prices as more turbines are built, and technological advancements will set the industry up for success.” Utility Dive, [8/3/23 (https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-offshore-wind-inflation-supply-chain-jobs-clean-energy-investment-heat-wave-decarbonization/689810/)]

Other offshore wind projects are still moving forward, including the largest one yet. The Interior Department recently approved the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which would power over 900,000 homes and support 1,100 jobs annually once operation begins. The New York Times, [10/31/23 (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/climate/biden-wind-farm-virginia.html)]

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has jump-started investments in clean energy technology. Over a year since the IRA was signed into law, companies have invested more than $350 billion in U.S.-based clean energy projects. In that time, there have also been over 100 new clean-technology manufacturing announcements and nearly $80 billion in private investment. Canary Media, \8/16/23 (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/the-us-climate-law-is-fueling-a-factory-frenzy-heres-the-latest-tally); American Clean Power Association; accessed [11/6/23 (https://cleanpower.org/investing-in-america/)]

FALSE CLAIM: Surveying for offshore wind projects led to a significant spike in whale deaths

Right-wing media have been amplifying (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-touting-dubious-new-documentary-repeating-misleading-claims-about-offshore-wind) and echoing renewable energy opponents who are falsely claiming that offshore wind projects are causing a slew of whale deaths off of the East Coast.Specifically, they have claimed, without evidence, that high-resolution geophysical surveying using sonar to map the ocean floor can be directly linked to the spike in whale deaths. Media Matters, \8/29/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-touting-dubious-new-documentary-repeating-misleading-claims-about-offshore-wind), [10/2/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-anchor-and-climate-contrarian-defend-trumps-unhinged-comments-about-whales-and)]

Right-wing media have been dishonestly pitting conservationists against clean energy advocates on this issue. In some cases, right-wing media have been amplifying offshore wind opponents with direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, framing them as environmentalists. Politico, \7/19/23 (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/19/whales-offshore-wind-farms-00100396); Media Matters, [2/3/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-rapidly-escalating-its-anti-offshore-wind-campaign)]

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo: “I thought the Democrats were interested in environmental issues. You’ve got the whales dead and people are blaming these wind farms.”Fox Business, Mornings With Maria Bartiromo, [11/2/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4013316)]

Fox host Jesse Watters claimed his show saved the whales from Orsted. Watters said, “Primetime has just scored another big victory. The whales have received a stay of execution along with my beach views. We have been telling you for months how Biden's offshore wind projects are destroying the Jersey shore. … Despite billions in giveaways, the windmill still won't work.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [11/1/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4013317)]

Just The News claimed that “conservation groups believe that offshore wind development is driving an increase in whale deaths (https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/conservationists-claim-recent-increase-whale-deaths-driven-offshore-wind) along the East Coast.”Just The News, [11/1/23 (https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/cancellation-nj-offshore-wind-project-great-day-whales-says-county?utm_source=mux&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tw#article)]

Ryan Maue, a White House scientist under then-President Donald Trump who was fired after promoting climate skepticism, said the cancellation was “excellent news to every sea creature.” Twitter/X, \10/31/23 (https://x.com/RyanMaue/status/1719517990822068236?s=20); The Hill, [1/12/21 (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/533913-officials-ousted-from-white-house-after-papers-casting-doubt-on/?rl=1)]

FACT: There is no evidence that offshore wind activities are contributing to the spike in whale deaths on the East Coast.

Scientists say there is no evidence that offshore wind is contributing to whale deaths, but fishing gear entanglement, vessel collisions, and the changing migration patterns of whale prey could be contributing. “Scientists who study whale behavior in general say it is impossible to definitively link the strandings to a single cause given the complexity of the ocean, the dramatic changes the North Atlantic has experienced in recent decades, and how much is still unknown about how these changes might be affecting baleen whales,” reports Yale Environment 360. Yale Environment 360, \3/8/23 (https://e360.yale.edu/features/humpback-whale-strandings-u.s.-east-coast); Factcheck.org, [3/31/23 (https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/no-evidence-offshore-wind-development-killing-whales/)]

Some types of sonar can harm marine life – but those technologies are not used for offshore wind surveying.While military sonar and seismic blasting used for oil and gas exploration can harm whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that sound produced by high-resolution geophysical surveys used by offshore wind energy companies “produce much smaller impact zones because, in general, they have lower noise, higher frequency, and narrower beam-width.” The Guardian, \7/16/16 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/16/us-navy-banned-from-using-sonar-that-harms-dolphins-and-walruses); The Texas Tribune, 1/17/23 (https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/17/texas-gulf-of-mexico-rices-whale/); NOAA, [accessed 11/10/23 (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/new-england-mid-atlantic/marine-life-distress/frequent-questions-offshore-wind-and-whales)]

Scientists say climate change is harming whale populations. Scientists say that rapidly rising ocean temperatures are pushing whales’ prey, such as zooplankton and menhaden, closer to shore, putting whales in closer proximity to major shipping channels and pushing them into areas with fewer regulatory protections. Politico, \7/19/23 (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/19/whales-offshore-wind-farms-00100396); The New York Times, [10/25/22 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/25/north-atlantic-right-whale-population-climate-change/)]

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-touting-dubious-new-documentary-repeating-misleading-claims-about-offshore-wind

no lnx many

Fox News is touting a dubious new documentary repeating misleading claims about offshore wind link to whale deaths

Thrown to the Wind was produced by anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 08/29/23

Fox News is uncritically promoting a new documentary that misleadingly blames offshore wind projects for a spike in whale deaths and strandings on the East Coast, which was produced by an anti-renewable energy activist and features fossil fuel-tied sources.

Since Thrown to the Wind debuted on August 14, producer Michael Shellenberger, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, has appeared on the network 4 times to discuss the documentary that alleges a government cover-up of whale deaths and attacks environmental groups that support offshore wind projects.

Shellenberger’s film follows a fossil fuel-tied conservation group called Save Right Whales Coalition, which despite a lack of concrete evidence, claims that a New Jersey offshore wind project, and offshore wind farms in general, pose a threat to endangered right whales, a species of baleen whale found in the North Atlantic.

Fox’s promotion of the documentary is just the latest instance of the network elevating, as supposed experts, “conservationists” with ties to right-wing think tanks and lawmakers who oppose renewable energy — and sometimes receive fossil fuel money.

Shellenberger claims Thrown to the Wind proves offshore wind farms can be directly linked to whale deaths

Shellenberger wrote in his Substack that the film proves that “government officials have been lying” in claiming an increase in whale deaths is not due to the construction of wind turbines. He wrote that the film “shows that the wind industry’s increased boat traffic is correlated directly with specific whale deaths” and that despite government claims to the contrary, it “exposes the reality that the U.S. government agencies, and the scientists who work for them, either haven’t done the basic mapping and acoustic research to back up their claims, have done the research badly, found what we found, and are covering it up.” [Substack, Public, 8/15/23]

Shellenberger wrote that the documentary demonstrates that turbine-related boat traffic and high-decibel sonar mapping “are killing whales.” He said the film shows, through “acoustic research” and “correlating whale deaths with wind industry vessel traffic,” that “wind industry activities are killing whales.” [Substack, Public, 8/15/23]

Thrown to the Wind’s central claim that high-resolution geophysical surveying using sonar to map the ocean floor can be directly linked to the spike in whale deaths is misleading

Conservation ecologist Douglas Nowacek told FactCheck.org that there is “basically zero chance that those surveys have caused any mortality.” Nowacek, a professor of conservation technology at Duke University, said that much of the surveying is “way out of the range of hearing of baleen whales.” [Factcheck.org, 3/31/23]

Some types of sonar can harm marine life – but those technologies are not used for offshore wind surveying. While military sonar and seismic blasting used for oil and gas exploration harm whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that sound produced by high-resolution geophysical surveys used by offshore wind energy companies “produce much smaller impact zones because, in general, they have lower noise, higher frequency, and narrower beam-width.” [The Guardian, 7/16/16; Texas Tribune, 1/17/23; NOAA, accessed 8/28/23]

Scientists say that fishing gear entanglement, vessel collisions, and the changing migration patterns of whale prey could be contributing to an increase in whale deaths.“Scientists who study whale behavior in general say it is impossible to definitively link the deaths and strandings to a single cause given the complexity of the ocean, the dramatic changes the North Atlantic has experienced in recent decades, and how much is still unknown about how these changes might be affecting baleen whales,” reports Yale Environment 360. [Yale Environment 360, 3/8/23]

A New Jersey-based conservation group has also found stranded whale carcasses that show signs of ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement. Factcheck.org wrote:“According to data from NOAA and the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, a nonprofit that rescues and rehabilitates marine mammals in New Jersey, some recently stranded whales showed signs of strikes and entanglements, although those events could have occurred after death.” [Factcheck.org, 3/31/23]

International shipping is growing, especially in New York and New Jersey, which could lead to more vessels striking whales. In 2022, for the first time in history, the Port of New York and New Jersey broke the 9 million mark for containers shipped. “The New York port has increased the number of containers moved every year since 2017, and in 2022,” CNBC reported. [CNBC, 1/25/23]

Scientists know that climate change is harming whale populations. Scientists say that rapidly rising ocean temperatures are pushing whales’ prey, such as zooplankton and menhaden, closer to shore, putting whales in closer proximity to major shipping channels and pushing them into areas with fewer regulatory protections. [Politico, 7/19/23; The New York Times, 10/25/22]

Fox News is eagerly promoting Thrown to the Wind

Fox host Martha MacCallum said, “I recommend the documentary to everybody,” before interviewing Shellenberger. “I think one of the things that really stands out is that the government did not do adequate studies when it was rushing forward with these so-called green energy projects that are actually appearing to perhaps not be good for the planet,” MacCallum said. [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 8/25/23]

Shellenberger touted the film on Jesse Watters Primetime, claiming it presents “very strong” evidence that high-decibel sounds emitted by surveying ships and construction of offshore wind farms are killing whales and that the government either has not conducted proper research on this topic or is engaged in a cover-up. “Thrown to the Wind looks at how destructive the green energy movement can be,” said Watters. “The government insists that they had done the science to show that that was not what was causing this huge increase in whale deaths,” Shellenberger said. [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 8/21/23]

Shellenberger also pushed the documentary on One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, claiming it uncovered “widespread corruption, including in the U.S. government.” Shellenberger argues that the government is killing whales by using “potentially illegal levels, high-decibel sounds” that separated “mothers from their calves, resulting in starvation.” Shellenberger also claimed that his team is “working with Congress to get hearings and an investigation on this, because we think there is widespread corruption, including in the U.S. government.” [Fox News, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, 8/19/23]

During an interview with Shellenberger, Fox host John Roberts suggested that the Biden administration “could be precipitating an environmental catastrophe” by promoting offshore wind projects and that NOAA is ignoring strong evidence that such projects are killing whales. “So, if your reporting is correct, in its push to quote ‘save the environment by developing alternative forms of energy,’ the Biden administration could be precipitating an environmental catastrophe among this endangered species?” Roberts asked Shellenberger, who used the appearance to accuse Greenpeace and the “conservation movement” of “lying about the science” supposedly linking offshore wind projects to whale deaths. [Fox News, America Reports, 8/18/23]

Fox host Martha MacCallum claimed that offshore wind farms are causing “irreversible damage” to marine life. “So this just keeps happening,” MacCallum said. “Now there are reports that two more humpback whales turned up dead on East Coast beaches, as critics question whether a factor here is the offshore wind farms that are causing irreversible damage to marine life and to the bed of the ocean where they're drilling, mostly to prepare for putting up these windmills,” MacCallum said, before playing a clip from Thrown to the Wind. [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 8/14/23]

Fox News has a history of spreading anti-wind energy narratives

During a recent interview on Fox & Friends, Craig Rucker, co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow blamed whale beachings and strikes on offshore wind construction. “Right now, the Biden administration wants to put up 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind between now and 2030,” Rucker, whose think tank has received funding from fossil fuel companies, claimed. He then added, “I guess they believe the world is going to end in six-and-a-half years, like AOC, from climate change.” Rucker also blamed “sonar blasting” and “pile driving” during the construction and operation of offshore wind turbines for “unprecedented numbers of whales” that “beach themselves along the shores.” Co-host Ainsley Earhardt suggested that environmental activists care about protecting wildlife only when it suits their agenda. “I feel like activists, they want to save the whales, they want to save lobsters, but it kind of depends on whatever their issue is. Sometimes they want to, and in this case, they don't?” Earhardt asked. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/3/23]

Fox host Jesse Watters criticized New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy for extending a tax credit to a Danish offshore wind developer because wind turbines “kill our whales and destroy our fishing industry.” “Murphy is using federal funds to give a billion-dollar tax break to a Danish company to build windmills off the Jersey coast,” Watters said. “The same windmills that kill our whales and destroy the fishing industry. And the view. All because he wants to go green.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/11/23; The Associated Press, 7/6/23]

Fox correspondent Madison Alsworth misleadingly reported that “conservationists” blame offshore wind energy for harming whales, but in reality, most conservation groups support new offshore wind projects. During a February 1 appearance on Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox correspondent Madison Alworth claimed that “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” That same day, on Fox Business’ Varney & Co., Alworth claimed that in addition to the fiscal costs of offshore wind projects, “conservationists” said such projects were “costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.” Meanwhile, major conservation groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace support offshore wind and have singled out Fox for amplifying “baseless claims” about offshore wind farming. [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 2/1/23; Fox Business, Varney & Co, 2/1/23]

During an interview with Patrick Moore, who has falsely claimed to have co-founded Greenpeace, Watters said that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.” “As whales are being massacred by green tech, Greenpeace has nothing to say,” said Moore, who is a climate change denier. “... Why aren't they chaining themselves to windmills demanding they come down? They’re just sitting in their air-conditioned offices, feet up, as the whale population drops?” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 2/1/23]

Former Fox host Tucker Carlson railed against offshore wind projects and whale deaths in three separate segments which featured chyrons like “The Biden whale extinction” and “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.” Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to be killing large numbers of whales.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 1/13/23, 1/30/23, 1/31/23,]

The documentary relies on anti-renewable energy activists, some of whom are backed by fossil fuel money or appear to be climate change skeptics

Thrown to the Wind relies heavily on the work of “environment and energy activist” Lisa Linowes, who has longstanding ties to the fossil industry, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In 2018, Linowes was a senior fellow at TPPF, which for years has been “shaping laws, running influence campaigns and taking legal action in a bid to promote fossil fuels.” Linowes also has ties to the Institute for Energy Research, which has received funding from the Koch network, coal producer Peabody Energy, and the Edison Electric Institute. In 2017,  the Energy and Policy Institute discovered that a letter asking Congress to end the wind production tax credit that had been attributed to Linowes was seemingly written by an IER employee. [Energy and Policy Institute, 12/11/17; Mastersource.org, 8/8/22; The New York Times, 12/4/22; Texas Public Policy Institute, 7/13/18;

Linowes is also a member of Save Right Whales Coalition, which was founded in part by Environmental Progress, Shellenberger’s pro-nuclear nonprofit. Save Right Whales Coalition is a group of East Coast-based organizations that oppose offshore wind projects in the area. Linowes also runs an anti-renewable energy nonprofit called the WindAction Group. [Environmental Progress, 8/13/23]

Linowes has appeared on Fox programs multiple times to attack wind energy in recent years. In 2021, before she joined the Save Right Whales Coalition, Linowes was an expert in a Carlson-produced anti-wind energy documentary in which she claimed that industrial-scale wind development “is not about getting us off fossil fuels.” In June 2022, on Martha MacCallum’s radio show, Linowes claimed that offshore wind turbines could drive right whales to extinction. “These turbines are almost certainly going to stress them and may wipe them off the face of the earth,” she said. However, later in the interview, seemingly contradicting her previous statement, Linowes admitted, “We do not know what the impacts will be on these species.” On Fox Business in March 2023, Linowes called the Bureau of Ocean Management’s attitude toward protecting endangered right whales “cavalier.” [Fox Nation, Tucker Carlson Originals, 10/21/21; Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 3/3/23; Fox Radio, The Untold Story with Martha MacCallum; 6/30/2022]

Another member group of the Save Right Whales Coalition has ties to conservative dark money groups via David Stevenson, a member of former President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team. Protect Our Coast New Jersey “belongs to the American Coalition for Ocean Protection (ACOP), which was founded by David Stevenson, who formerly served on Trump’s EPA transition team. Stevenson also heads the Center for Energy and Environment Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute. Under Stevenson, Acop is fundraising to create a permanent wind energy exclusion zone along the east coast.” [The Guardian, 7/31/23]

Stevenson and the Caesar Rodney Institute have direct ties to the fossil fuel industry. Stevenson, who has publicly questioned the science of climate change, is a policy adviser for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that recently sent thousands of climate-denying textbooks to teachers across the country. As Fast Company detailed, the Caesar Rodney Institute is a “nonprofit that has been backed by the conservative dark money groups Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, along with the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Energy Alliance, a fossil industry group founded by a former Enron executive.” [Fast Company, 3/1/23] [Grist, 2/6/23]

The acoustics expert featured in the documentary has publicly shared debunked climate change theories. Robert W. Rand of the Ocean Mammal Institute publicly supported the false claim that heat from the Earth’s core is a dominant factor influencing how the climate is currently changing. [Twitter/X, 12/30/21, 4/27/23] [USA Today, 2/14/23]

Shellenberger has a track record of spreading misinformation about climate change

In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” Facebook labeled his article as “misleading.”  [Climate Feedback, 6/28/20; Twitter/X, 6/14/23]

Shellenberger has downplayed the extent to which human activities are driving mass extinctions across the globe. Shellenberger has insisted that humans are “not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction.'” Climate Feedback called this a “categorical statement” that “misrepresents the discussion happening in the scientific community.” Professor Gerardo Ceballos of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico explained that in reality, “In the last century, we lost in one year the same number of species that would have been lost in 100 years!We and other scientific groups have also shown that the extinction crisis is more severe because hundreds of millions of populations of animals and plants have disappeared in the last 40 years.” [Climate Feedback, 6/28/20]

Facebook added a “missing context” label to a Shellenberger post about Thrown to the Wind. Shellenberger posted a link on Facebook to a piece in which he wrote that the government was “lying” in its claim that no evidence exists linking whale deaths to “the wind industry’s high-decibel pile driving.” Facebook’s “missing context” label links to a FactCheck.org article that says that there is “no link” between “offshore wind activities” and whale deaths, although scientists “continue to study the potential risks.” [Facebook, 8/13/23; Substack, Public News, 8/15/23; FactCheck.org, 3/31/23]

THE LATEST

Rumble promotes a video suggesting the Jacksonville shooting was a false flag among its selected “editor picks”

08/30/23 3:57 PM EDT

Jesse Watters hosts oil industry-funded scientist to buttress his climate denial and attack green energy

08/30/23 3:08 PM EDT

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Climate deniers

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Related

Misinformation about recent whale deaths dominated discussions of offshore wind energy on Facebook

03/23/23 10:39 AM EDT

Fox News is rapidly escalating its anti-offshore wind campaign

02/03/23 10:54 AM EST

Fox News' Jesse Watters fails to disguise oil-industry funded group as a grassroots “ocean advocate” organization

01/12/23

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kusi san diego  allie wagner fmr gub cand  best sell atr and visionary behind film

Allie Wagner is honored to work in her hometown of San Diego. She joined KUSI as a field producer on the Prep Pigskin Report in 2008. She continued to work in sports and on weekend mornings until joining the Good Morning San Diego weekday team in 2017.

Allie grew up in the community of Ramona. She attended San Diego State University where she received a degree in Journalism. Her first job in the industry was promotions for Clear Channel Radio stations KOGO and Xtra Sports.

Even at the young age of nine years old, Allie knew a career in broadcasting is something she wanted to do. Working on television in her hometown is a dream come true. Through her career she has enjoyed covering Alarm Clock Pep Rallies, the San Diego Padres, the All Star Game, and Comic-Con

[extinct, plowed ahaedm no justif agency corrupted by money and polictic 22 kia 62; stranding used to be rare; indisrial activity public substack .com $ =">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL51l4098KU](=

kusi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL51l4098KU

spiritual%20sep%20mo%20from%20calf;%20sonar%20mapping;%20govt%20did%20not%20do%20res%20or%20did%20and%20not%20give%20coverup%20thus%20congress%20investigate;%20end%20sp%20act%20extinct,%20marine%20mam%20prot%20law;%20the%20sci%20we%20did%20basic%20hydrophone%20polticiciztion%20of%20sci%20biden%20wants%20indistry%20off%20shore;%20env%20gps%20ent%20letter,%20then%20180%20overruled%20own%20sci%20no%20mamesspec/%20NOAA;%20aid%20whales%20--)

spiritual sep mo from calf; sonar mapping; govt did not do res or did and not give coverup thus congress investigate; end sp act extinct, marine mam prot law; the sci we did basic hydrophone polticiciztion of sci biden wants indistry off shore; env gps ent letter, then 180 overruled own sci no mamesspec/ NOAA; aid whales --> extinct, plowed ahaedm no justif agency corrupted by money and polictic 22 kia 62; stranding used to be rare; indisrial activity public substack .com $

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SEEMS EMBELATIC, IMMUNE TO FACT/ REALITY

Right-wing media deny climate change in face of deadly and record-breaking extreme ...

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-deny-climate-change-face-deadly-and-record-breaking-extreme

Media Matters for America

Fox Business host Stuart Varney indulged climate change denier Marc Morano and said climate change is “a good debate.” When discussing extreme ...

as the climate crisis becomes more evident and destructive,even exceeding climate scientists’ earlier predictions, Fox News and other influential right-wing outlets and figures are downplaying the severity of climate-fueled events and pushing dangerous climate denial.

This summer has been marked by a series of record-breaking extreme weather events, illustrative of the rapidly intensifying effects of global warming. Unprecedented heat waves, wildfires, and floods have wreaked havoc across North America. Meanwhile, global sea surface temperatures have reached alarming levels, and the world just experienced its hottest day on record — four days in a row. These events align with scientists' warnings, but the acceleration of warming and the intensity of this summer’s extreme heat suggest that the climate crisis is unfolding faster than expected.

Last month, when smoke from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada polluted the air over major population centers in the U.S., Fox News dismissed the link between the fires and climate change; meanwhile conspiracy theories seeking alternative explanations for Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season flourished online. In response to news that Earth had reached its hottest temperatures ever recorded, bad actors attempted to distract from the unsettling milestone by focusing on CNN’s use of the phrase “hottest day ever.”  As deadly heat continues to scorch parts of the U.S., Asia, and Europe with no end in sight, and with a 1,000-year flood event having left parts of Vermont and New York state underwater, right-wing media cling to talking points that deny climate science.

By flooding the zone with climate denial right when the climate crisis is most evident, right-wing media run cover for Republican decision-makers who are actively obstructing climate action, ward off accountability for the fossil fuel industry, and pollute information systems for those attempting to understand the link between extreme weather and our dependence on fossil fuels. This tactic, like the extreme heat, has no end in sight.

Right-wing media responded to deadly climate change-fueled heat and flooding with denial and delay

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San Francisco Bay Area scientist says he ‘left out the full truth’ to get climate change wildfire study published in prestigious journal

2023/09/08

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A new study by a team of mostly San Francisco Bay Area scientists that found human-caused climate warming has increased the frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires has come into question from the unlikeliest of critics — its own lead author.

Patrick T. Brown, climate team co-director at the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley and a visiting research professor at San Jose State University, said his Aug. 30 paper in the prestigious British journal Nature is scientifically sound and “advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior.”

But Brown this week dropped a bomb on the journal — as well as his study’s co-authors who are staunchly defending the team’s work. In an online article, blog post and social media posts, Brown said he “left out the full truth to get my climate change paper published,” causing almost as much of a stir as the alarming findings themselves.

Brown wrote that the study didn’t look at poor forest management and other factors that are just as, if not more, important to fire behavior because “I knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” He added such bias in climate science “misinforms the public” and “makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

On Thursday, Nature shot back. “When it comes to science, Nature does not have a preferred narrative,” Editor in Chief Magdalena Skipper wrote in a statement to the Bay Area News Group.

She offered some recent examples of Nature articles including one noting various factors that drive wildfire destruction of towns that she argued “do not follow the purported editorial biases alleged by Brown,” who was the lead author in two other studies published by Nature and a third in its affiliated climate change journal.

“We are now carefully considering the implications of his stated actions,” Skipper said of Brown. “Certainly, they reflect poor research practices and are not in line with the standards we set for our journal.” Nature said post-publication review can lead to clarifications or an editorial statement of concern about a paper’s integrity.

Skipper added that peer reviewers had raised questions about variables other than climate change missing from Brown’s study, but the authors argued against including it, a claim Brown has disputed in a social media responses.

Brown said all decisions about shaping the research to appeal to Nature’s editors were his, not his co-authors, at least some of whom he said he gave a head’s up to before publishing his journal critique. The other co-authors are affiliated with the San Jose State’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Irvine and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

Co-author Steven J. Davis, a UC Irvine Earth science professor, said he “wasn’t involved in strategic decisions to exclude factors from the study,” and that Brown’s comments “took me by surprise.” He said “we don’t know whether a different paper would have been rejected.”

“I don’t think he has much evidence to support his strong claims that editors and reviewers are biased,” Davis said. “Keeping the focus narrow is often important to making a project or scientific analysis tractable, which is what I thought we did. I wouldn’t call that ‘leaving out truth’ unless it was intended to mislead — certainly not my goal.”

Co-author Craig Clements, director of San Jose State’s wildfire research Center, said “the scientific work done in this paper is robust, utilizing cutting-edge techniques and tools — most notably artificial intelligence models — and it is an important study that provides crucial data and advances our understanding of wildfire behavior.”

“I recognize journals such as Nature, one of the most respected science publications in the world, have rigorous editorial processes and appreciate the fact that they saw the value of the important science that this study advances,” Clements said.

San Jose State said in a statement that “the study’s lead author expressed his opinion about the peer review process, which has no impact on the validity of the work.”

In the study, the researchers used artificial intelligence to learn the relationship between temperature and wildfires to gain a fresh understanding of how heat influences fire activity. They focused on daily fire growth of 10,000 acres or more in a day, enough to capture extreme fires that expanded quickly, but were frequent enough to study. They looked at 380 extreme-growth fires from 2003 to 2020 and estimated human-caused warming increased frequency of extremely fast-spreading California wildfires by 25%, and that extreme wildfire days would increase by the end of the century even with stringent reduction of emissions.

The paper acknowledged in its findings that “temperature is only one of the dozens of important variables that influences wildfire behavior,” but said it is “most directly related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Brown said he’s turned down interview requests this week from media outlets he felt were eager to cast climate change as a hoax — “that’s not an argument I want to make at all.”

He said he left his faculty job at San Jose State in the spring of 2022 for Breakthrough, cofounded by East Bay author Michael Shellenberger, who has criticized the environmental movement’s leeriness of nuclear energy and ran twice for governor as a Democrat and independent.

The career change, Brown said, gave him freedom to critique the academic system and its publish-or-perish incentives that he says undermine sound science. He said he’s now doing research that considers the impact of climate change in conjunction with proposed reforms to forest management practices over the next several decades.

“I’ve gotten mostly positive feedback” on the critique of academia, Brown said, “but blowback as well.”

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amy w gmail 6 23

over the past few years requests for respectful speech and factual information have been recast as attacks on free speech just as efforts funded by some of the country's largest corporate interests have begun to genuinely erode citizens' First Amendment rights.

If your book contract gets canceled because you help white supremacists break into the Capitol? That's an attack on free speech. A university decides not to host your talk after receiving thousands of complaints from students? Violation of the First Amendment! But the First Amendment never guaranteed reach, nor did it promise us that Americans can say whatever we like without risk of being embarrassed or mocked, trolled or even canceled. What it did promise was that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It seems like a whole lot of conservatives have misplaced their pocket Constitutions, because while they talk about being "forced" (by whom?) to use a person's preferred pronouns as an infringement on free speech, Republican state governments have been rapidly criminalizing protest. While they wring their hands about the chilling of free speech on campus because this or that talk gets canceled, states are passing book bans and universities are getting rid of their entire history departmentslest anyone utter the words "critical race theory." Harassment of those who study disinformation is way up the past year because the word has been recast as censorship. This week, for example, Rep Jim Jordan was demanding emails and meetings with leading disinformation researchers, the latest in a flurry of records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits designed to harass academics who study disinformation. Jordan and his allies are being helped in their crusade by anti-climate-action activists like Michael :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{Shellenberger, who have their own reasons for wanting to muddy the water on what constitutes disinformation, especially as social media platforms fall under increasing pressure to tamp down on the spread of outright falsehoods. In his March testimony to the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Shellenberger—who has moved in his career from PR guy for big green groups to "firebrand" co-founder of ecomodernist thinktank the Breakthrough Institute to champion for nuclear energy to climate skeptic, gubernatorial candidate, solver of the homelessness problem (spoiler alert: he didn't solve it) and now, finally, "journalist" who claims to have broken the Twitter Files story—Shellenberger wrote:

:{:{"}::{The censorship-industrial complex pressures social media platforms to}:

censor content relating to climate change and energy. I speak from experience as someone who has been attacked by an ongoing censor-and-discredit campaign that has been waged against me since I wrote a viral article in June 2020 to announce the publication of my book, Apocalypse Never. In response to my article, multiple think tanks quickly and falsely claimed to have “debunked” its contents. Those fake debunkings became the basis for Facebook to censor my posts, even ones that don’t have to do with climate change, to this day."}:

There's a lot to unpack here. First off, it seems pretty clear that Shellenberger's move to rebrand himself as a journalist is not just about trying sit at the cool kids table—he's trying to secure what he perceives to be the greater First Amendment rights of the press. I'm sure he's probably trying to use it to get access to various public records, emails, etc for free as well (anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request, but if you're not a journalist you might be charged; even if you are a journalist it's likely you'll pay a fee to receive records, but it's generally less). Then, let's talk about how Facebook has always censored ads and sponsored posts related to climate change, for a start, as "political." I don't recall Shellenberger ever having anything to say about that. As for the debunking of his book. I started to make detailed, footnoted corrections of his book and stopped about halfway through because I had more than 50 pages worth of corrections, so it's hard to believe that all of the many debunkings of his work are false. But according to Shellenberger, it is censorship to call something inaccurate. Who's to say what's "information" or "disinformation" after all? The truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Except...we have long-standing systems for coming to collective understandings of truth. The peer-review process, for example, runs academic work through multiple rounds of review before it can be published in an academic journal. And one peer-reviewed study does not a truth make! That study needs to be challenged and replicated. Lots of other studies need to deliver the same or at least very similar results for something to venture into the domain of "fact."

These fragile men perceive any criticism of them as censorship, yet see nothing wrong with coordinated harassment campaigns against academics whose work they don't happen to like. But it's not just ridiculous and hypocritical, it's also dangerous. One of the key steps on the path to authoritarianism is to shake people's faith in experts, to blur the lines around fact, to make reality seem surreal.

The choose-your-own-truth direction that America has taken in recent years shares a lot in common with the beliefs of early colonialists there, who were by and large Calvinists, a particular type of Puritan that scoffed at the need for priests and bishops and embraced instead the idea that each individual should interpret the Bible for themselves.

As the manufactured "culture war" rages on,  it provides cover for America's bend toward authoritarianism. Citizens are being jailed for peaceful protest. At Cop City,protestors were arrested—and even killed—and all:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ 42 were charged with domestic terrorism for sitting in trees. Organizers who arranged bail funds for the arrested protestors werearrested themselves and charged with money laundering and charity fraud. All those who have been arrested in conjunction with the protest are still waiting to see whether racketeering (RICO)charges will be leveled against them for organizing a protest. Yes, those are the laws created to deal with the mob, being applied to protest.

Meanwhile, the Altanta City Council approved the facility despite countless hours of public comment in opposition to it.

Critical infrastructure laws have now been passed in 20 states, with more proposing them all the time. Domestic terrorism charges, which carry a sentencing enhancement that can land people in jail for a decade or more, have become frighteningly common for peaceful, non-violent protests. Climate protestors who put water soluble finger paint on a display case at the National Gallery were charged last week with conspiring to commit an offense against the United States. It's the most straightforward and flagrant violation of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." Anyone who's genuinely concerned about free speech as opposed to securing their own right to comfort or to expand their control of others should be very worried about it.

:{:{}:

}:

ref march test see below

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/shellenberger-testimony.pdf

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2 mentions 1 day 5 23 edgelord technorati sacks VC and

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rogan tiktokescalator boost amplify conspiracy clickbait

see david sacks VC new rep natcon musk twit BS well suited for edgelords

https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/climate-change-conspiracy-theory-about-cataclysmic-changes-earths-magnetic-field-goes-viral

mma 5 23 no vid

joe Rogan’s podcast is fueling a bizarre TikTok conspiracy theory that falsely attributes climate change impacts to cyclical changes in Earth’s magnetic field, seemingly violating the app’s new climate misinformation policy.

The conspiracy theory’s viral spread on the platform highlights TikTok’s persistent climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

Inspired by the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, content creators have latched onto claims made in a pseudoscientific book called The Adam and Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms. (Along with pushing the cataclysmic pole hypothesis, the book claims that Jesus Christ lived in India for nearly 18 years and was abducted by aliens in a “space vehicle” after his crucifixion.)

Between January and April, Media Matters identified seven viral clips from the Joe Rogan Experience episode discussing the conspiracy theory, which garnered over 20 million cumulative views on TikTok. The videos feature clips of Rogan discussing the book with “independent researcher” Jimmy Corsetti, who runs the YouTube channel Bright Insight, and Ben van Kerkwyk, who runs the channel UnchartedX.

Joe Rogan keeps platforming conspiracy theorists and skeptics of human-caused climate change, driving misinformation

In the January 18 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host brought up “the Adam and Eve” theory and asked Corsetti, “How much of that is agreed upon, that there could be a time where the magnetic poles actually shift?”

Corsetti replied that “This is science,” explaining, “The Adam and Eve Story", the theory on that is that it happens in cycles of 6,500 years and that it’s a 90-degree flip, but six days later, around the seventh day, it corrects itself.” He continued to describe “a planet flip, 90 degrees, and that because of it the Earth essentially does a standstill, the sun will be direct — will basically stay in the same spot, causing heating like we’ve never experienced — and that the wind and the waters continue with their momentum, because essentially the wind travels at approximately 1,000 miles an hour at the equator, so the theory is that when that event happens it’s going to be cataclysmic.:

[vid]

corsetti’s nonsensical explanation was widely shared on TikTok, with one viral clip receiving nearly 11 million views.

In reality, NASA reports that pole reversals, when Earth’s North and South Poles swap locations — which “take place over hundreds to thousands of years,” not a mere seven days— have occurred “183 times in the last 83 million years, and at least several hundred times in the past 160 million years.” Notably:

Plant and animal fossils from the period of the last major pole reversal don’t show any big changes. Deep ocean sediment samples indicate glacial activity was stable. In fact, geologic and fossil records from previous reversals show nothing remarkable, such as doomsday events or major extinctions.

Additionally, there's “no evidence” that any magnetic excursion event (periods of “shorter-lived but significant changes in the magnetic field’s intensity”) has impacted the Earth’s climate within the last 2.8 million years. Scientists aren’t sure when the next pole reversal will occur, but a recent study suggests that won’t be anytime soon. And if it is, a doomsday scenario is unlikely.

Corsetti acknowledged this but claimed that scientists “don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Rogan has previously drawn criticism for leveraging his massive reach and influence to amplify climate denial, and his podcast has catered to guests such as Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg, who use cherry-picked and decontextualized talking points to downplay the devastating impacts of climate change and to attack climate solutions. He has also hosted figures who downright deny the fact that fossil fuel consumption is driving climate change, such as Steve Koonin, Jordan Peterson, and Randall Carlson, who has appeared on the podcast at least six times and said thatcarbon dioxide is not driving global warming and that natural factors” are more responsible than humanactions.

In their discussion of The Adam and Eve Story, Rogan and his guests also downplayed the impacts of climate change that millions of people are experiencing and praised Donald Trump for suggesting that the Earth is actually cooling. 

“Right now we should be grateful that it’s nice and cozy because we can live when it’s warm,” Corsetti said.

Rogan then cited  r Carlson, saying, “Global warming’s not scary. It’s global cooling, that’s what’s really scary.” The host further suggested that climate change is “ this narrative that just gets repeated over and over and over and this fearmongering and everyone gets freaked out. It’s not to say that we aren’t polluting, we certainly are, and it’s not to say that we shouldn’t improve, we certainly should, but if the fucking magnetic poles might shift and we might get hit by a giant rock from space, we might have bigger problems.If we’re going to be concentrating on nonsense, which is really par for the course with human beings, we’re going to be concentrating on these things we’re really not going to fix over the short-term, when something might happen that makes all of it a moot point.”   PSEUDO LOMBORGIAN BS

Media Matters also identified two viral clips of this exchange on TikTok with 2 million and 2.6 million views, respectively.

What is The Adam and Eve Story?

The book was written in 1965 by Chan Thomas, who worked in the aerospace industry and claimed to be a psychic. The book was not available to the public until 2013, however, when 57 pages were released by the CIA, and this censorship has captured the imaginations of conspiracy theorists. Since its declassification, The Adam and Eve Story has worked its way into the broader conspiracy theory ecosystem.

Thomas argued that the Earth’s magnetic poles shift every several thousand years, causing cataclysmic events such as tsunamis that destroy civilizations and drastically alter Earth’s geology — one example he used was the flood in the Noah’s Ark narrative in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Chan predicted that such an event would occur in the near future, and some are now framing increasingly extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts as evidence that the next cataclysm is approaching.

A TikTok account for a podcast called No Regulars posted a March 1 video that has been viewed nearly 18 million times in which host Darris Watkins says that the book’s explanation of cataclysmic magnetic pole shifts actually “makes sense” in describing climate change and “explains a lot” because “the Sahara desert used to be green and like Antarctica used to have forests … So now like some places turn cold, some places turn hot.[pix?]

the popularity of these conspiracy theories among TikTok users may indicate one way that climate misinformation is evolving to reach young people.

Climate misinformation disguised as ancient civilization conspiracy theories

At the time Thomas wrote The Adam and Eve Story, the public at large was not informed of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Despite fossil fuel companies being aware of the potential for human-caused global warming as early as the 1950s, people weren’t yet experiencing the ecological effects of increasing temperatures. But when the book was declassified in 2013, it was released into a world grappling with the dire effects of climate change.

While it was not written to provide an alternative explanation for climate change, The Adam and Eve Story provides a framework for interpreting its effects outside of an anthropogenic explanation. This narrative, which shifts blame away from our fossil fuel economy onto planetary forces beyond human control, can serve as climate misinformation.

Rogan’s guests and other proponents of this conspiracy theory purport to be interested in its ramifications for scientific understanding of ancient civilizations, but climate misinformation often serves as a backdrop for their discussions. At one point in their interview, Rogan suggested “that there was incredibly sophisticated technology that existed and … was wiped out. And that we’re talking about a really advanced civilization that lived a long time ago that’s more advanced than we are today but moved in a different direction, like we moved in the direction of combustion engines and electronics and they moved in some other direction but achieved maybe many thousands of years more sophistication in that direction than we have with our internal combustion engines.”

While climate change may not take center stage in these speculations, the implications that humans are not having any influence over our warming planet and that near-apocalyptic events are always inevitable as a result of natural cycles in the Earth’s magnetic field are nonetheless harmful misinformation that lets politicians and fossil fuel companies off the hook for their role in the climate crisis. (Meanwhile, the world’s biggest oil and gas companies just raked in record first-quarter profits.)

Cataclysm narratives as climate sedatives

Narratives that frame climate change as an inevitable disaster caused by forces beyond our control are a key argument of climate denial: If climate change is caused by changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, then there is no point in implementing sweeping action to curtail fossil fuel emissions. In the past, the Earth’s orbit, the sun, and cosmic rays have all similarly been used to provide alternative explanations for climate change.

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels. The only way to avert increasing social, political, and ecological effects of climate change is by transitioning away from a fossil fuel economy.

Despite its appearance as a conspiracy theory about ancient civilizations,The Adam and Eve Story is being used to undermine the scientific consensus regarding the cause of climate change. As TikTok ramps up the enforcement of its new climate misinformation policy, the platform should account for the ways climate denial is often incorporated into seemingly harmless conspiracy theories.

Finally, Spotify still has no clear policy regarding the promotion of climate misinformation on its platform. Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, which was the top podcaston its platform in 2022. As Rogan’s contract is expected to expire in 2023, Spotify will have to decide whether platforming his misinformation and hate speech is worth the profit.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/how-tucker-carlson-was-terrible-and-effective-megaphone-climate-misinformation

mma 5 23 see heated/drilled

Prior to his departure from Fox News on April 24, Tucker Carlson was one of the network’s most prolific purveyors of climate change misinformation. Carlson elevated fringe ideas and conspiracy theories from relative obscurity on the internet to become drum beats for right-wing media. He also dishonestly spun major news events and weaponized his viewers’ most deep-seated prejudices about race and power to push climate denial.

His absence will be a blow to the forces aiming to mock environmental justice, derail climate action, and protect polluting industries and their allies in Washington. But the end of Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show is far from the end of climate change denial on Fox News — his project is sure to be carried on by other Fox personalities who will continue the network’s awful history of climate coverage.

Carlson propelled internet misinformation and obscure conspiracy theories into right-wing media narratives against climate action

One thing that set Carlson apart at Fox was his ability to seemingly jump-start a tidal wave of misinformation. His producers seemingly scoured the internet so he could amplify right-wing grievances, as well as any obscure video or article that could be easily decontextualized to sound absurd or inflammatory. He knew his audience, and he knew exactly how to push their buttons.

Carlson’s response to the deadly Texas winter storm that killed hundreds of people in February 2021 triggered a deluge of misinformation from Fox News. He was the first Fox News host to blame the widespread power outages on wind energy. The reality was that Texas still largely relies on natural gas for power, and this infrastructure wasn’t ready for the extreme cold.

Over the last few years, Carlson helped create a misinformation crisis around climate action and even told his audience that climate activists were going to try to shrink children and force everyone to eat bugs, when there is no evidencethat those things are actually happening.

Fittingly, one of the very last things Carlson did in his final Fox segment was to promote Let Them Eat Bugs.Notably, he said that the chocolate-covered cricket was “delicious.”

Misinformation about frozen windmills was just the tip of the iceberg for Carlson’s attacks on clean energy and climate action

Often portraying climate policies as a means to control the population or create a “permanent caste system,” Carlson regularly injected fearmongering about the clean energy transition into his segments. At the core of his argument was the fossil fuel industry talking point claiming the renewable energy technology was insufficient and that transitioning away from fossil fuels would weaken the U.S. and put Americans “under the complete and total control of people who wish us ill.” In October 2021, Carlson even used his newest venture, Tucker Carlson Originals on Fox Nation, to promote wind energy misinformation in the documentary Blown Away: The People vs. Wind Power. 

Carlson continued to push climate denial even during extreme weather events, when the reality of the climate crisis was most evident

As the science connecting extreme weather to our warming planet has become more conclusive— and with other TV news outlets more frequently reporting on these connections in the aftermath of major disasters — Carlson relentlessly misinformed his audience about these connections and claimed that the media making the link between climate change and extreme weather were captured by the radical left or using the occasion to politicize tragedy.

Even beyond these extreme weather events, Carlson regularly promoted climate denial on his Fox show in order to feed doubt and discredit climate science.

Carlson platformed climate change deniers who influenced his coverage

Carlson used any excuse, such as new climate policies, initiatives, or convenings, to platform some of the most notorious climate deniers and controversial climate contrarians. For example, according to Media Matters’ internal database, from 2019 through the end of Carlson’s show in 2023, he hosted failed politician Michael Shellenberger 21 times, climate change denier Marc Morano 14 times, meteorologist Joe Bastardi 8 times, and fossil fuel shill Bjorn Lomborg 4 times. These guests pushed the “Great Reset” conspiracy theory, cherry-picked statistics to downplay the impacts of extreme weather, or suggested climate activism is a “cult” or a “new religion.”

Michael Shellenberger

Carlson has run with the idea that climate change is like a new religion, which Shellenberger has written about at length.

Marc Morano

Joe Bastardi

Bjorn Lomborg 

In the last several years, Carlson had started to merge his climate denial and defense of fossil fuels with overt racism and white grievance

In response to climate justice and environmental justice becoming more mainstream and being incorporated into policy, Carlson seized on the opportunity to apply his increasingly overt racism to climate and environmental issues. Notably, Carlson has insisted that climate policies, not climate change, hurt marginalized communities. He has often claimed that environmental justice has “nothing to do” with the environment — with the exception of the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which the former Fox host used to stoke more conservative grievances.

Other Fox figures will carry the climate denial torch in Carlson’s absence

Carlson was far from the only Fox News personality to regularly peddle climate change misinformation, and others will continue to carry the torch:

It’s uncertain who will be placed in Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot. But whatever the outcome, one sure thing is that Fox will continue to supplement its climate coverage with racism, bigotry, misogyny, and brain-frying idiocy.

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68 pp basis for benghazi attack?

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/shellenberger-testimony.pdf

The Censorship Industrial Complex U.S. Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation Campaigns, 2016 - 2022 Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government March 9, 2023

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Executive Summary 4

The Censorship Industrial Complex Today 8

Definition and Mission 8

National Science Foundation Funding 8

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Roots 9

Key Organizations 10

Key Individuals 15

The Complex’s Disinformation Campaigns 18

  1. The Trump-Russian Collusion Conspiracy Theory, 2016 - 19 18
  2. Delegitimizing the Covid Lab Leak Theory, 2020 – 2021 22
  3. The Hunter Biden Laptop Conspiracy Theory, 2020–21 22

Ideology, Strategy, And Origins 25

Ideology 25

Strategy 30

Origins 34

Key Events 36

2017 36

New Knowledge runs disinformation campaign against Republican Senate

Candidate in Alabama 36

Former FBI employee web site that falsely accuses ordinary Twitter users of

being Russian bots 38

2018 39

Senate Intelligence Report On Russian Interference 39

2020 40

“Election Integrity Partnership” 40

Aspen Institute Workshop Trains Top Journalists To Pre-Bunk “Hack and Leak” 42

Covid Censorship 45

Lab Leak Theory 45

Mask Skepticism 46

2021 46

DHS Expands Its Censorship Powers 46

Under Pressure From White House, Facebook and Twitter Censor Accurate Vaccine

Information 47

Climate Change and Energy 50

2022 53

U.S. government funds “Disinformation Index” and “News Guard” to drive

advertisers away from disfavored news media 53

Creation of Department Of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance

Board” 54

2023 54

Diresta and Stamos hype “foreign disinformation” threat 55

Recommendations 56

  1. Defund the Censorship Industrial Complex 56
  2. Mandate instant reporting of all communications between government

officials and contractors with social media executives relating to content

moderation 56

  1. Reduce Scope of Section 230 56

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Shellenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 4

Executive Summary

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of

“the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial

complex.” Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the “complex,” or

cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense would

“endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” How? Through “domination

of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the

power of money.” He feared public policy would “become the captive of a

scientific-technological elite.”1

Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are

unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex

run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our

liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this

testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence

of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.

The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative

reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies,

academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively

censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of

issues, including on the origins of COVID2

, COVID vaccines3

, emails relating to

Hunter Biden’s business dealings4

, climate change5

, renewable energy6

, fossil

fuels7

, and many other issues.

I offer some cautions. I do not know how much of the censorship is

coordinated beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not

speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter, and other private

companies to moderate content on their platforms. And I support the right of

governments to communicate with the public, including to dispute inaccurate

and misleading information.

But government officials have been caught repeatedly pushing social

media platforms to censor disfavored users and content. Often, these acts of

censorship threaten the legal protection social media companies need to exist,

Section 230

Shellenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 5]

“If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship,”

notes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, “it raises

serious First Amendment questions. It is axiomatic that the government cannot

do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.”8

Moreover, we know that the U.S. government has funded organizations

that pressure advertisers to boycott news media organizations and social

media platforms that a) refuse to censor and/or b) spread disinformation,

including alleged conspiracy theories.

:{:{The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the}:

Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have

inadequately-disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and

other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies

to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other

universities and think tanks.}:

It is important to understand how these groups function. They are not

publicly engaging with their opponents in an open exchange of ideas. They

aren’t asking for a national debate over the limits of the First Amendment.

Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring,

cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and

even ban the people on these blacklists.

:{Who are the censors? They are a familiar type. :{Overly confident in their}:

ability to discern truth from falsity, good intention from bad intention, the}:

instinct of these hall monitor-types is to complain to the teacher— and, if the

teacher doesn’t comply, to go above them, to the principal. Such an approach

might work in middle school and many elite universities, but it is anathema to

freedom and is an abuse of power.

These organizations and others are also running their own influence

operations, often under the guise of “fact-checking.” The intellectual leaders

of the censorship complex have convinced journalists and social media

executives that accurate information is disinformation, that valid hypotheses

are conspiracy theories, and that greater self-censorship results in more

accurate reporting. NOTE LACK OF EVIDENCE

In many instances, censorship, such as labeling social

[Shellenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 6

media posts, is part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual

information.

The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of

psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. Military during the

Global War on Terror, with highly sophisticated tools from computer science,

including artificial intelligence. The complex’s leaders are driven by the fear

that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative,

and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing. Federal

government officials, agencies, and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS

recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming ordinary Americans

and disfavored public figures.

Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade government

monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from “countering

terrorism” to “countering extremism” to countering simple misinformation.

The government no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or

extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity.

The only predicate it needs is simply the assertion that the opinion you

expressed on social media is wrong.

These efforts extend to influencing and even directing conventional

news media organizations. Since 1971, when the Washington Post and New

York Times elected to publish classified Pentagon papers about the war in

Vietnam, journalists understood that we have a professional obligation to

report on leaked documents whose contents are in the public interest, even

:{when they had been stolen. :{And yet, in 2020, the Aspen Institute and}:

Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to “Break the Pentagon

Papers principle” and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of

“disinformation.”}:

Government-funded censors frequently invoke the prevention of realworld

harm to justify their demands for censorship, but the censors define

harm far more expansively than the Supreme Court does. The censors have

defined harm so broadly, in fact, that they have justified Facebook censoring

accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent “vaccine

hesitancy.” Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading

Shellenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 7]

the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas.

Persuasion by covert means is censorship.

And, increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict information

that “delegitimizes” governmental, industrial, and news media organizations.9

That mandate is so sweeping that it could easily censor criticism of any part of

the status quo from elected officials to institutions to laws. This extreme,

reactionary attitude is, bluntly, un-American.

Congress should immediately cut off funding to the censors and

:{investigate their activities. :{Second, it should mandate instant reporting of all}:

conversations between social media executives, government employees, and

contractors concerning content moderation. Third, Congress should limit the

broad permission given to social media platforms to censor, deplatform, and

spread [GUBMINT PRESUMABLY] propaganda.}:

Whatever Congress does, it is incumbent upon the American people to

wake up to the threat of government censorship via behind-the-scenes

pressure on media corporations. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,”

Eisenhower noted, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and

military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that

security and liberty may prosper together.”

---

p11

Key Organizations

CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,

an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). On January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated “election infrastructure” as “critical infrastructure,” opening up CISA’s mission to censoring alleged “disinformation.”15 Congress created CISA in November 2018 to defend the U.S. from cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign actors (e.g., Russian hackers).16

Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab at the Atlantic Council.

The lab is one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions in the world.17 Atlantic Council DFR Lab created the foreign-facing DisinfoPortal in June 2018, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 organizations to censor election narratives leading up to the 2019 elections in Europe.18 In 2018, Facebook named Atlantic Council, an official partner in “countering disinformation” worldwide.19 US taxpayer funding to the Atlantic Council comes from the Defense Department, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the US Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.20

Graphika:a private network analysis firm. Graphika published a report for the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2018, which claimed to have uncovered “in unusually rich detail the scope of Russia's interference not only in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but also in our day-to-day democratic dialogue.”21 Graphika hired as its director of investigations Ben Nimmo away from DFR lab.22

The Defense Department's Minerva Initiative, which focuses on psychological warfare, and DARPA, both gave grants to Graphika.23 In 2021, the Pentagon awarded nearly $5 million in grants and nearly $2 million in contracts to the organization.24 Last fall, Graphika alleged that cartoons on a fringe website were “suspected Russian actors” that were

p12

Shillenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 11]

Shellenberger Testimony March 9, 2022 p. 12]

“engaged in a renewed effort” to interfere in the 2022 midterm elections.25

The New York Times picked up on the story.26

Moonshot CVE is private firm to redirect right-wing people online away

from radicalism27 but was found to have pushed right-wing people toward an

anarchist leader. “They sent people who were already looking for violence to a

convicted felon with anarchist and anti-Semitic views,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (RVa.)

said to Google’s CEO. “Who is vetting the vetters? We continue to need

more transparency and accountability.”28 Moonshot includes Elizabeth

Neumann, former DHS Asst. Sec. for Counter Terrorism.

FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency

comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI

GEC: Global Engagement Center,an analytical division of the U.S. State

Department which systematically launders domestic censorship by working

through “counter-disinformation” NGOs and foreign firms.

Hamilton 68: A dashboard created with U.S. government funding and

the support of New Knowledge claiming to reveal Russian bots on Twitter but

was mocked by Twitter staff because all or almost all belonged to American

citizens

HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which

states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts

EIP: Election Integrity Project, a partnership between four government

funded censorship organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika,

University of Washington Disinformation Lab, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital

Forensic Research Lab. EIP has served as CISA’s deputized domestic

disinformation flagger

IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm”

headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin

MISP: Malware Information Sharing Platform.Used by cyber security

operatives to share malware, tools around bots, coordinated and inauthentic

ops. “When DFR wanted to apply cybersec tools to misinformation,” said a

government disinformation specialist, “they used MISP.”29

NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, both taxpayer-funded,

are urging advertisers to boycott disfavored publications, and direct

their funding to favored ones The organizations have been caught spreading

disinformation, including that the COVID lab leak theory is a debunked

conspiracy theory, and seeking to discredit publications which accurately

reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, such as the New York Post

Cognitive Security Collaborative and Adversarial Misinformation and

Influence Tactics and Techniques.

These are online platforms for describing

and coordinating disinformation attacks. “It works like other security

operations focused on threat actors,” noted the specialist. “If they have a

threat actor who has launched a coordinated inauthentic information attack,”

said a source, “they would log the threat actor and start mapping the actor

just as they would a cyber attack. They then coordinate social media

takedowns” [removals].30

University of Washington (UW),one of two academic institutions that

DHS worked directly with and had as its partner, to censor information on

social media platforms during the 2020 election.31 It received a $3 million

government grant, shared with Stanford Internet Observatory, from the Biden

Administration in 2021, to continue its “election misinformation” flagging.32

Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).

One of the four members of the

Election Integrity Project (and later the Virality Project) with UW, Graphika, and

DFR. It was created in June 2019 by director Alex Stamos and research

manager Renee DiResta. SIO monitors social media and promotes Internet

censorship. For the 2020 election, as part of its partnership with CISA, SIO had

50 “misinformation” analysts assigned to monitor social media.33 SIO was

originally funded by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Omidyar Network, and

the Charles Koch Foundation.34

Key Individuals

● Graham Brookie, leader of the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. Brookie

served in the Obama White House on the National Security Council.35

● Renee DiResta, Stanford Internet Observatory. DiResta was the research

director for the organization caught creating bot accounts and spreading

disinformation about Alabama Republican Senate Candidate Roy

Moore.36 In her 2018 Senate testimony DiResta advocated “legislation

that defines and criminalizes foreign propaganda” and allowing law

enforcement to “prosecute foreign propaganda.”37 According to

recorded remarks by DiResta’s supervisor at Stanford, Alex Stamos, she

had previously “worked for the CIA.”38

● Jen Easterly, CISA Director. A former military intelligence officer and the

National Security Agency (NSA) deputy director for counterterrorism.

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure,” said

Easterly in November 2021, ”and the most critical infrastructure is our

cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and

disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”39 The month before,

Easterly said during a CISA summit that Chris Krebs's construction of a

“counter-misinformation” complex with the private sector was a high

priority for DHS.40 A U.S. District Court ruled in October of last year that

Easterly could be deposed because of her “first-hand knowledge” of the

CISA “nerve center” around disinformation.41

● Chris Krebs. CISA Director (2018 to 2020). Chair of Aspen Institute

“Commission on Information Disorder,” helped organize DHS’s “whole-of-society”

approach to censorship.42 Krebs administered the federal

side of the 2020 election after DHS effectively nationalized election

security on January 6, 2017, via the declaration of elections as “critical

infrastructure.” Krebs then declared that “misinformation” was an attack

on election security. Krebs said in April 2022 that the Hunter Biden

laptop still looked like Russian disinformation and that what mattered

was that news media did not cover the laptop during the 2020 election

cycle.43 Krebs advocated for censoring critics of government COVID-19

protocols44 and said “misinformation” is the largest threat to election

security.45

● Ben Nimmo, Head of Global Threat Intelligence for Facebook, and thus

one of America’s most important censors. Nimmo was the technical lead

for censorship at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab,

was employed by Graphika in the fall of 2020 46, and worked in NATO

information operations.47 In 2018, Nimmo publicly reported an

anonymous Twitter account, “Ian56”, as a Russian disinformation bot

account because it expressed left-of-center populist anti-war views when

in reality Ian56 was a real person.48 After Nimmo's report, “Ian56” was

reported to the UK government.49

● Kate Starbird, who runs the University of Washington disinformation lab,

has for years been funded primarily by U.S. government agencies to do

social media narrative analytics of political groups, or insurgency

movements, of interest or concern to U.S. military intelligence or

diplomatic equities. Starbird acknowledged that the censorship focus of

CISA and EIP moved from “foreign, inauthentic” social media users to

“domestic, authentic” social media users between 2016 to 2020.50

Starbird is now the head of CISA’s censorship advisory subcommittee.

Alex Stamos was the senior leader at EIP and VP, which served as the

deputized domestic “disinformation” flagger for DHS via Chris Krebs’

CISA. Stamos in 2020 proposed that DHS centralize government

censorship.51 Stamos was the Chief Security Officer of Facebook and led

Facebook's response to alleged Russian disinformation after the 2016

election. Stamos left Facebook, now Meta, in 2018, after reportedly

conflicting with other Facebook executives over how much to censor.52

Stamos says he favors moving away from a free and open Internet

toward a more controlled “cable news network” model. A huge part of

the problem is “large influencers,” said Stamos.53

● Claire Wardle cofounded and directed, First Draft News. a nonprofit

coalition, in June 2015, to build the censorship complex. “In September

2016, our original coalition expanded to become an international Partner

Network of newsrooms, universities, platforms and civil society

organizations.” In 2017, while at the Shorenstein Center for Media,

Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Wardle helped

develop the “Information Disorder Lab,” a framing that Aspen Institute

would embrace. In June 2022, First Draft closed, but its work lives on at

the Information Futures Lab at Brown University’s School of Public

Health.

The Complex’s Disinformation Campaigns

Many of the leaders and participants in today’s censorship industrial ex

have been involved in spreading disinformation, including conspiracy

theories  compl, while discrediting accurate information and alleging that valid

theories were debunked conspiracy theories.

1. The Trump-Russian Collusion Conspiracy Theory, 2016–2019

:{:{The complex’s first major disinformation campaign was the conspiracy}:

theory that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian

government to steal the 2016 election.}:

:{:{There is no evidence that Russia’s social media investments, or its}:

hacking and leaking of emails, had any impact, much less a decisive one, on

the outcome of the 2016 election.54 Most neutral analysts, as well as many}:

Democratic strategists, believe that they did not.55

:{:{Two of the four leading censorship organizations, New Knowledge and}:

Graphika, provided the Senate Intelligence Committee provided the academic

foundation for the claim that the Russians had elected Trump. They pointed to

evidence that ten million people in the U.S. had seen the ads.56}:

“The Russian disinformation operations that affected the 2016 United

States presidential election are by no means over,” wrote DiResta in the New

York Times in December 2018. “Russian interference through social media… is

a chronic, widespread and identifiable condition that we must now

aggressively manage.”57

:{:{Her findings were widely respected and publicized. Former director of}:

national intelligence James Clapper called the evidence that Russia had

influenced the election "staggering." University of Pennsylvania

communication professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson pointed to the evidence to

conclude that Trump would not have been president without the Russians.58}:

But there is no evidence that the Russians had any influence on the

2016 campaign, much less that they won it for Trump.Robert Faris, Hal

Roberts and Yochai Benkler of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and

Society analyzed millions of articles from 2015 to 2018 using network analysis

to measure how audiences paid attention to media coverage, text analysis to

see which sites wrote about what and when, and wrote detailed case studies of

:{the most salient issues in the election. “:{The Russians are there,” wrote Benkler.}:

“They are trying. But in all these cases, American right-wing media did the

heavy lifting to originate and propagate disinformation.”....}:

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picked why? what expertise? baggage?

Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida

On back-to-back nights during Florida’s Hurricane Ian nightmare, Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham cast doubt on climate science

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 09/30/22

In response to Hurricane Ian, Fox News primetime shows sought to mislead viewers about how climate change is affecting hurricanes, using bad faith and often-repeated climate denier talking points.

More than 2.6 million people were without power across the state on Thursday morning, as extreme flooding left many residents trapped in their homes and on top of cars. At a press briefing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Ian a “500-year flooding event” and added, “The impacts of this storm are historic and the damage that has been done is historic. … We've never seen a flood event like this, we've never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.” There were at least 21 confirmed deaths as of Friday morning, but that number is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.

Fox primetime shows recycle debunked or irrelevant talking points on climate

Meanwhile, Fox personalities attempted to gaslight viewers into complacency by describing any hurricane coverage that mentioned climate change as “alarmist.” Fox also cherry-picked information about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes to imply that the two are not related. Climate scientists and media outlets have acknowledged that there is not enough evidence to support the theory that climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes. However, there is evidence suggesting that higher ocean and air temperatures are causing hurricanes and storms to intensify more rapidly instead of weakening as they approach landfall, as happened with Ian. Hurricanes are also absorbing more moisture and dumping more rain on affected areas. Fox ignored this crucial connection or refuted it all together.

On September 27, Tucker Carlson called severity warnings leading up to the storm a “scam” on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But the next day, he called Hurricane Ian “a catastrophe” and a “national disaster,” adding, “People will certainly be killed.” Carlson then tried to use an exchange between CNN’s Don Lemon and Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, to push his agenda. Carlson used Rhome’s reluctance to link climate change to specific events to suggest that for political reasons, the media is more concerned about climate change than actual climate scientists are. However, Rhome clearly agreed that climate change is having an impact on storms, which is consistent with mainstream reporting on the issue. In fact, on September 28, CNN meteorologist Tom Sater reiterated Rhome’s point and added, “Since 1950 there have been seven landfall hurricanes in Florida that were a category 4 or 5 … the first 4 were each in a different decade. The last three — all in the last 5 years.”

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On September 29, Carlson devoted a good chunk of his show to ranting about climate change as well.He was obsessively focused on hurricane frequency, arguing that somehow, a decrease in the numbers of storms would cancel out the plethora of other evidence indicating that the storm events themselves are intensifying. After citing a NOAA research overview highlighting that hurricanes are predicted to become more intense, Carlson went on to insist that “the claim is never proven,” and that “there’s no science behind these claims.” Later in the segment, he implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … they’re products of nature, God is in charge.”

He then discussed Hurricane Ian with Candace Owens, who has a long history of climate change denial. Owens reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.” She also used several other environmental concerns such as the hole in the ozone layer, which has diminished because of the Montreal Protocol, and ocean acidification, which remains a concern due to climate change, to try and argue that “they’ve been wrong over and over and over again.”

Video

CitationFrom the September 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

On September 28 edition of The Ingraham Angle, frequent Fox News guest and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger and host Laura Ingraham told viewers that their personal experiences with extreme weather were untrustworthy and invalid. Ingraham implied that concerns about climate change only exist because people “feel that the ocean is warmer … but a feeling is not fact.” Shellenberger falsely claimed that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.” Guest Mollie Hemmingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, later claimed that “the left” is pushing a “conspiracy theory” that “man-made climate change is the cause of hurricanes. … There’s just no evidence for this theory that people keep holding.” Hemmingway said this despite the fact that no one is claiming that climate change is the primary cause of hurricanes, rather it is one factor making them more dangerous.

Video file

Video CitationFrom the September 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Hemmingway and Shellenberger also latched onto the idea that hurricane frequency is apparently the only metric that should concern the public, glossing over the very real dangers of threats like higher rainfall rates, which is the main factor that drives deaths and damage during a hurricane. They were fixated on the number of hurricanes that have occurred over different periods of time, using various irrelevant data points to unsuccessfully support their climate denial. They also downplayed damage caused by storms by saying that nowadays more people live in the areas most affected by hurricanes. Shellenberger first said that damage caused by hurricanes “has not increased at all” but then claimed that the increase in damage is due to the fact that “there’s more wealth in harm’s way,” going on to claim that the extreme weather events of the last several decades represent “an incredible success story for America,” because, in his telling, they could have been worse. 

Before Ian made landfall, Sean Hannity hosted his favorite climate denier Joe Bastardi to emphasize that hurricane frequency in Florida has not increased. On September 28, Hannity said that the media should not discuss climate change because “this is hurricane season and during hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes like we did a hundred years ago.” Fox News contributor Lara Trump insisted that the Democrats' “marketing arm, the mainstream media” is “now trying to claim that one of the quietest hurricane seasons in 30 years is somehow due to climate change.” Finally, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, who was a guest on the show, said that people should reject the established science of climate change and instead of “worshipping that which is created rather than the creator … get back to the simple things of science and real faith and trust in God.”

The public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

THE LATEST...

Fox News host: “Americans are going to have to start strapping up and exercising their Second Amendment rights”

09/30/22 5:30 PM EDT

Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida

09/30/22 2:52 PM EDT

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IN THIS ARTICLE

Climate deniers

Related

Climate denial and near climate silence has marred national TV news coverage of Hurricane Ian

09/30/22 1:48 PM EDT

Right-wing media manufacture outrage over CNN host Don Lemon discussing relationship between climate change and strengthened hurricanes

09/29/22 1:53 PM EDT

As Hurricane Ian hits Florida, Fox News undermines climate change

09/27/22 11:15 PM EDT

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fox: CALIFORNIA HEADED FOR ‘HUGE PROBLEMS’ WITH ITS POWER GRID,:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ SAYS FORMER REAGAN ECONOMIC ADVISER

daily sieg heil  former soros fdn

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https://oversight.house.gov/

https://oversight.house.gov/subcommittees/environment-117th-congress

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oversight 9 22 refs hansen

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-needs-nuclear-power-11554420097

About WSJ

    Opinion  Commentary

The Climate Needs Nuclear Power

If governors are serious about global warming, they’ll preserve this vital source of clean energy.

By James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger

April 4, 2019

[pix The Diablo Canyon nuclear-power plant in San Luis Obispo, Calif.Photo: Corbis via Getty Images

Many environmentalists have changed their minds about nuclear energy over the past decade. While the share of energy produced by solar and wind has grown rapidly, nuclear remains America’s largest source of clean, zero-emissions electricity. Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power.

But two-thirds of U.S. nuclear plants in the U.S. are at risk of being closed prematurely and replaced by natural-gas generation, which is currently cheaper in many states. If that happens, carbon emissions could increase by an amount equivalent to adding 47 million new cars to the road.

Ideally, the federal government would solve this problem, but between Republican skepticism of climate change and Democratic opposition to nuclear energy, that’s unlikely to happen before many nuclear-plant operators must decide whether to shut down. Thus the job of keeping these beleaguered nuclear plants open falls to state governments.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Pennsylvania are considering proposals to keep their nuclear plants operating. Ohio is at risk of losing two plants that produce 90% of its clean energy. Pennsylvania’s five nuclear plants produce nearly as much electricity as do all of America’s solar panels and farms. Nuclear accounts for 93% of the Keystone State’s clean, zero-emissions electricity. If Pennsylvania and Ohio’s nuclear plants close and are replaced by facilities that burn natural gas, it would be like adding 13.5 million new cars to the roads.

Nuclear plants can be saved through modest subsidies similar to the ones extended by lawmakers in Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York between 2016 and 2018. Those subsidies have been smaller than the federal subsidy that wind-energy generators have received for 27 years. In 2017 New York energy regulators gave nuclear power generators a subsidy of $17.34 per megawatt-hour. They also subsidized wind generators at $23 per megawatt-hour on top of the federal subsidy of $22 per megawatt-hour.

The fossil-fuel lobby’s objections to nuclear power are understandable. The American Petroleum Institute wants to replace Ohio’s and Pennsylvania’s nuclear plants with natural-gas plants because its members stand to benefit. But why do groups that claim to be concerned about the climate oppose nuclear power?

Some Democratic lawmakers in Pennsylvania and environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council are urging state legislators not to subsidize nuclear without increasing subsidies for solar and wind. While combining subsidies for nuclear with subsidies for wind and solar worked to get legislation passed in New York and Illinois in 2016, such an approach risks backfiring in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where state lawmakers are more fiscally conservative and tend to be skeptical of renewables.

Saving nuclear plants won’t be free, but keeping them open will keep electricity prices lower than if natural gas is allowed to dominate. Both Ohio and Pennsylvania still produce large amounts of electricity from coal, which is being replaced by natural gas. If both coal and nuclear plants are replaced by gas, ratepayers will be vulnerable to future price increases at the hands of monopolistic gas generators.

New York and California, meanwhile, are moving ahead with plans to close two nuclear plants. In the Empire State, Westchester County’s Indian Point will close in 2021 and, on the West Coast, San Luis Obispo’s Diablo Canyon will go offline in 2025. California is already set to miss its 2030 target of a 40% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels. If Diablo Canyon closes and half of its output is replaced by natural gas, there’s no way they’ll get there.

It is notable that while three natural-gas plants are being built to succeed Indian Point, local opposition to the construction of solar and wind farms has kept them from being built at anywhere near the rate necessary to replace the nuclear facility’s output.

We’ve been here before. Environmentalists promised that solar and wind would replace output from California’s San Onofre Generating Station, which closed in 2013, and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, which shut down the following year. Instead, they were replaced mostly by natural gas, and emissions rose in both states. At the rate Vermont is building new wind farms, it would take 474 years to match the electricity generation it lost from closing Vermont Yankee.

The problem isn’t only that nuclear plants generate far more electricity. It’s that solar and wind generate it only sporadically, which means they must be backed up by other sources of power 100% of the time. There is great hype about batteries, and using dams as pumped storage. But those solutions remain extremely expensive, which is why whenever nuclear plants close anywhere in the world, they are usually replaced by coal or natural-gas plants—not solar, not wind and not batteries.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The governors of California, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania can take actions to keep their nuclear plants operating. Governors in those states have in recent years urged more action out of Washington to address climate change. They’ll have far more credibility and influence if they first take action in their home states.

Mr. Hansen is a climate scientist and head of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Earth Institute Columbia University. Mr. Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress.

Appeared in the April 5, 2019, print edition as 'The Climate Needs Nuclear Power'.

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Fueling the Climate Crisis: Examining Big Oil’s Prices, Profits, and Pledges

4 hrs no ceo showed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4exyXG-Gg1c&t=32s

09.14.22

Committee Staff Release New Hearing Report: The Role of Public Relations Firms in Preventing Action on Climate Change

Washington, D.C. – At today’s Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee hearing,  Subcommittee Chair Katie Porter (D-Calif.), announced a new Committee Staff Hearing Report titled, The Role of Public Relations Firms in Preventing Action on Climate Change. The report presents select findings and 98 pages of evidentiary documents from the Committee’s investigation into public relations (PR) firms’ work with fossil fuel companies.

116 PP:https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2022.09.14%20Hearing%20Report_PR%20Firms%20Preventing%20Action%20on%20Climate%20Change.pdf

The full Hearing Report is available here: https://bit.ly/3QKLGsH

For decades, the oil and gas industry denied or downplayed climate change and fossil fuels’ role in causing it. As outright climate change denial has become less accepted by the public, the industry has funneled millions of dollars into PR firms to execute subtler and more sophisticated campaigns.

The Hearing Report presents evidence—some of which is being released to the public for the first time—detailing some of the many tactics these PR firms use to misinform the public and block meaningful solutions to climate change. Their strategies generally fall into three categories.

  1. Corporate image promotion. This tactic includes portraying the fossil fuel industry as more environmentally friendly than it is in reality. For example, the Hearing Report presents an in-depth case study describing how PR firm Singer Associates created an entire “community news site” in Richmond, California to spread pro-Chevron propaganda to the communities harmed by its 2012 refinery fire. Singer Associates is using that model again with a new online platform in Texas.
  2. Third-party mobilization.  This tactic includes engineering phony spokespersons or “citizen groups” to advocate for industry interests and defeat genuine climate change policy solutions. For example, the Hearing Report details pro-industry emails sent directly to Committee staff and other policymakers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The email campaign was orchestrated by the Consumer Energy Alliance, an industry front group accused of “astroturfing” on behalf of major extractive industries.
  3. Delegitimization of opposition.  This tactic includes targeting individuals and organizations that oppose the fossil fuel industry and attacking their reputations or credibility. For example, the Hearing Report describes how PR firms deployed multiple attack strategies—“astroturf” groups, “guerilla marketing” teams, and direct interference with activists’ signature collection efforts—to successfully defeat policy initiatives in 2016 and 2018 to limit fracking in Colorado. One of today’s hearing witnesses, Anne Lee Foster (testimony here), described her experience being stalked and harassed while running the 2018 ballot measure campaign.

Chair Porter pointed out in her opening statement that three of the PR firms involved in the investigation declined to respond to the Committee’s invitation to testify:

“We invited the PR Firm Pac/West to testify and help us understand their tactics and why they engaged in them during the Colorado ballot initiative. They declined. We invited Story Partners, another PR firm that was implicated in that Colorado ballot initiative. They declined. We invited Singer Associates to tell us about their fake news web site that was created to improve Chevron’s standing in the community after their negligence caused a massive refinery fire that sent 15,000 community members to the hospital. They declined. At this point, we might ask what these firms are trying to hide. But thanks to documents this committee has obtained and released, we know some of the answers.” 

Tomorrow, the Committee on Oversight and Reform will be holding a hearing to examine Big Oil’s record-breaking profits and their continued funding of climate change disinformation.

Press Contact

Media Contact: Lindsay Gressard

202-225-6065 | cell: 202-740-4715

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sessions tx  $18B subsidy of?

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kos an 9 22

Consider the hearings held on Wednesday and Thursday by two House committees as a flashpoint laying bare the blatant desperation with which conservatives are clinging to Big Oil’s success instead of caring about their constituents or the planet. On Wednesday, the House Natural Resource Committeeheld a hearing about how fossil fuel companies rely on blatantly misleading language and images to boost their profiles. As I’ve reported before, polluters employ a dangerous playbook designed to oppress frontline communities and those concerned with the climate crisis.

The Natural Resource Committee even released a study logging these tactics ahead of the hearing. But critics claim that supporting “the energy sector” amounts to using free speech and securing the country’s energy resources, worsening crisis be damned. Publicists painted Big Oil as having moved on from denying climate change, equating doing the bare minimum with somehow being leaders in the movement.Republicans like Rep. Lauren Boebert bashed a witness who was harassed and stalked for an anti-fracking campaign she participated in in Colorado.If y’all think lawmakers behaved any better the next day, just wait for Clay Higgins to speak up during Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Big Oil’s role in the climate crisis.

Higgins, a noted white supremacist, spent his five minutes talking down to an expert witness wholly more qualified to speak on the topic of the hearing’s subject, which was “Examining Big Oil’s Prices, Profits, and Pledges.” Higgins continually called Raya Salter, Esq. “young lady” and outright screamed at her for standing up to people like him on behalf of frontline communities he’s so blatantly ignored. Salter, who is the Founder and Executive Director of the Energy Justice Law and Policy Center and a member of the New York State Climate Action Council, implored Higgins to instead reckon with his own actions. [twt vid]

at best, Higgins is a climate change skeptic. He’s also entirely bought and paid for by the oil and gas sector—which is the top industry he receives campaign donations from—and was the lone dissenting House vote who wanted fossil fuel imports from Russia to remain despite the country’s invasion of Ukraine. “I want you to search your heart and ask your God what you are doing to the Black and poor people in Louisiana,” Salter pushed back against Higgins.

Higgins had his supporters, such as fellow monster Jim Jordan and Yvette Herrell, and Salter received support from Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whoslammed Higgins’ conduc**t. “For the gentleman from Louisiana and the comfort he felt in yelling at you like that, there’s more than one way to get a point across,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And, frankly, men who treat women like that in public, I fear how they treat women in private.” To add insult to injury, Michael Shellenberger mispronounced Ocasio-Cortez’s name without caring to correct it.

Shellenberger was considered by some Republicans to be the only “minority witness” who thinks climate change actually isn’t that bad and that mass casualty events simply won’t happen. He’s the comfort blanket to Republicans who call environmental concern a “war on gas” and think climate activists are dehumanizing. Once a Democrat in name, he’s now simply a traitor to the human race who finds more comfort in Fox News appearances than in acknowledging reality. Many GOP lawmakers only spoke to Shellenberger when they did have a chance to address the panel.

What’s revealing about these hearings isn’t the information we already know about how bad Big Oil is or the quite literal Black and white divisions between fossil fuel worshippers and those who believe that any higher power wouldn’t want us destroying the planet. It’s that, at the core of this issue, white comfort is one of the biggest hindrances to addressing the climate crisis. I want Higgins to feel uncomfortable when Roishetta Ozane began her moving testimony on her experience surviving multiple disasters in Southwest Louisiana by calling the lawmaker out. Addressing white supremacy is a key component in dismantling it and foundational to creating a truly just transition.

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Casten: Billy Madison' Quotes

"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."—Principal

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{{energy density basic physics:

If the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with

renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of its land would be required, according to the

best-available study. 95 SMIL BS

By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of

land in the United States.

96

A Way Forward

High uncertainties over what will happen over the next 3 to 6 years, and

recognition of fundamental physical and economic realities, suggest a way forward

that emphasizes expanded domestic oil and gas production in the short to medium

term, and nuclear energy along with hydrogen production over the medium to

long-term, with the re-shoring of solar panel, wind turbine, and electric car

manufacturing and materials processing. Such a strategy will help determine whether

the costs of solar, wind, and EVs can come down, or whether they are, for inherently

physical reasons, namely their low power densities and correspondingly high material

intensities, doomed to be too inefficient to substitute for fossil fuels.

Given that the proximate cause of the global energy crisis was Europe's

over-dependence on Russian fuels, we must not repeat that same mistake by

becoming dependent on China for the extraction and processing of the minerals

needed to make solar, wind, and batteries. It is highly unlikely that energy’s use of

total global minerals will rise from 10-20 percent to 50-70 percent, with or without an

energy crisis, given the significant inflationary impact it would have on energy prices.

96 Vaclav Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 247.

95 Vaclav Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 247.}}:

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takes Mandy's place, same BS claim on reduction emissions?

file:///C:/Users/patmc/OneDrive/Documents/MTA/IMAGES/ShellenbergerM-20220915.pdf

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20220915/115114/HHRG-117-GO00-Wstate-ShellenbergerM-20220915.pdf

Good morning Chairwoman Maloney, Environment Subcommittee Chairman Khanna, and Ranking Member Comer, and members of the Committee. I am grateful to you for inviting my testimony. I share this committee’s concern with climate change and misinformation. It is for that reason that I have, for more than 20 years, conducted energy analysis, worked as a journalist, and advocated for renewables, coal-to-natural gas switching, and nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time, I am deeply troubled by the way concern over climate change is being used to repress domestic energy production. The U.S. is failing to produce sufficient quantities of natural gas and oil for ourselves and our allies. The result is the worst energy crisis in 50 years, continuing inflation, and harm to workers and consumers in the U.S. and the Western world. Energy shortages are already resulting in rising social disorder and the toppling of governments, and they are about to get much worse. We should do more to address climate change but in a framework that prioritizes energy abundance, reliability, and security.

Climate change is real and we should seek to reduce carbon emissions. But it’s also the case that U.S. carbon emissions declined 22% between 2005 and 2020, global emissions were flat over the last decade, and weather-related disasters have declined since the beginning of this century. [note no cites] There is no scientific scenario for mass death from climate change. A far more immediate and dangerous threat is insufficient energy supplies due to U.S. government policies and actions aimed at reducing oil and gas production. 

The Biden administration claims to be doing all it can to increase oil and natural gas production but it’s not. It has issued fewer leases for oil and gas production on federal lands than any other administration since World War II. It blocked the expansion of oil refining. It is using environmental regulations to reduce liquified natural gas production and exports. It has encouraged greater production by Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other OPEC nations, rather than in the U.S. And its representatives continue to emphasize that their goal is to end the use of fossil fuels, including the cleanest one, natural gas, thereby undermining private sector investment. If this committee is truly concerned about corporate profits and misinformation, then it must approach the issue fairly. The big tech companies make larger profits than big oil but have for some reason not been called to account. Nor has there been any acknowledgement that the U.S. oil and gas industry effectively subsidized American consumers to the tune of $100 billion per year for most of the...

last 12 years, resulting in many bankruptcies and financial losses. As for

misinformation about climate change and energy, it is rife on all sides, and I question

whether the demands for censorship [of? b/c of?]  by big tech firms are being made in good faith,

or are consistent with the rights protected by the First Amendment.

Efforts by the Biden administration and Congress to increase reliance on

weather dependent renewable energies and electric vehicles (EVs) risks undermining

American industries and helping China. China has more global market share of the

production of renewables, EVs, and their material components than OPEC has over

global oil production. It would be a grave error for the U.S. to sacrifice its hard-won

energy security for dependence on China for energy. While I support the repatriation

of those industries to the U.S., doing so will take decades, not years. Increased costs

tied to higher U.S. labor and environmental standards could further impede their

development. There are also significant underlying physical problems with

renewables, stemming from their energy-dilute, material-intensive nature, that may

not be surmountable. Already we have seen that their weather-dependence, large

land requirements, and large material throughput result in renewables making

electricity significantly more expensive everywhere they are deployed at scale.

The right path forward would increase oil and natural gas production in the

short and medium terms, and increase nuclear production in the medium to long

terms. The U.S. government is, by extending and expanding heavy subsidies for

renewables, expanding control over energy markets, but without a clear vision for the

role of oil, gas, and nuclear.

We should seek a significant expansion of natural gas and oil production,

pipelines, and refineries to provide greater energy security for ourselves, and to

produce in sufficient quantities for our allies. We should seek a significant expansion

of nuclear power to increase energy abundance and security, produce hydrogen, and

one day phase out the use of all fossil fuels. While the latter shouldn’t be our main

focus, particularly now, radical decarbonization can and should be a medium- to

long-term objective within the context of creating abundant, secure, and low-cost

energy supplies to power our remarkable nation and civilization.

...

Climate Risk

Anthropogenic climate change is real and is something that governments, big

oil companies, and other corporations should do much more to address. All else

being equal, we would rather not change global temperatures at all, given that we

have built a civilization of cities, farms, and protected nature areas within a specific

temperature band. My own concern over climate change led me to co-found, in

2002, the New Apollo Project, now the Blue-Green alliance, an environmental-labor

coalition, which successfully advocated for President Barack Obama’s historic

investment in renewables in his 2009 stimulus package

1

; advocate for the transition to

natural gas from coal starting in 2011

2

; and advocate for a significant expansion of

nuclear energy alongside climate scientists Tom Wigley andJames Hansen, since

2013.

3 Since then, I have played an active role in keeping nuclear plants operating in

Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and California.

4

At the same time, climate advocacy grounded in flawed and misleading

science has been self-defeating, since it has repressed natural gas production in the

United States, which has resulted in a recent reversion to dirtier fuels.Between 2005

and 2020, U.S. carbon emissions declined by 21.5 percent, which is 4.5 percentage

points more than what the U.S. promised as part of its United Nations Paris Climate

Change commitments.5 

Emissions also declined by 4.5 percentage points more than

what was promised had Congress passed Waxman-Markey “cap and trade”

legislation, which died in the U.S. Senate, back in 2010.

Of that emissions reduction,

61 percent was due to the shift from coal to natural gas and electricity production,

and the 39 percent reduction that came from intermittent renewables back-stopped

by natural gas,which is required in most situations to provide power when the sun is

[[Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “Waxman Markey Short Summary,” June 2009,

https://www.c2es.org/document/waxman-markey-short-summary/

5 Kate Larsen et al., “Preliminary U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimates for 2020,”

Rhodium Group, January 12, 2021, https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2020/

{{US meets Copenhagen Accord target, but no down payment on Paris Agreement target

Based on preliminary 2020 data, we estimate that net economy-wide US GHG emissions fell by 10.3% in 2020, to 5,160 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent.[[1]](https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2020/#_ftn1) That represents the single largest drop in annual emissions in the post-World War II period, andfar outpaces the record 6.3% drop in emissions in 2009 during the Great Recession. As a result, US emissions drop below 1990 levels for the first time in three decades. Compared to 2005 levels, the US reduced emissions by 21.5%, exceeding its Copenhagen Accord commitment of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 (Figure 9).

Unfortunately, 2020 tells us little about what we can expect to see in 2021 and beyond. It certainly shouldn’t be considered a down payment toward meeting the 2025 US target under the Paris Agreement of 26-28% below 2005 levels. The enormous toll of economic damage and human suffering as a result of the pandemic is no cause for celebration. The vast majority of 2020’s emission reductions were due to decreased economic activity and not from any structural changes that would deliver lasting reductions in the carbon intensity of our economy. If COVID-19 and the resulting recession hadn’t happened, we estimate that US emissions would have declined by only around 3% this year, driven in large part by the decline of coal-fired power generation and to a lesser extent the reduction in heating demand due to warmer winter weather. With growth expected to bounce back in 2021 (most forecasts currently project GDP growth of 3 to 4%), emissions will likely increase as well absent a concerted effort.

[[1]](https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2020/#_ftnref1) Data on emissions and removals from land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) and agriculture for 2019 and 2020 are not available. To estimate net GHG emissions in 2019 and 2020, we assume US LULUCF and agricultural emissions remain flat at 2018 levels.

legit: https://www.influencewatch.org/for-profit/rhodium-group/}}:

4 Uri Berliner, “Why even environmentalists are supporting nuclear power today,” August 30,

2022; Debra Kahn, “The environmental apostate who backed nuclear energy before it was cool,”

Politico, June 8, 2022; James Freeman, “Is this man talking California into nuclear power?” Wall Street

Journal, April 29, 2022.

3 Thom Patterson, Climate change warriors: it’s time to go nuclear,” CNN, November 3, 2013;

“Crossfire: Nuclear Energy: Ralph Nader and Michael Shellenberger are in the Crossfire,” CNN,

November 8, 2013.

2 Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds,”

Washington Post, December 16, 2011; Kevin Begos, “Fracking boom: help or hurt climate change

fight,” Washington Post, April 29, 2013.

]]

...y Short Summary,” June 2009,

https://www.c2es.org/document/waxman-markey-short-summary/

5 Kate Larsen et al., “Preliminary U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimates for 2020,”

Rhodium Group, January 12, 2021, https://rhg.com/research/preliminary-us-emissions-2020/

4 Uri Berliner, “Why even environmentalists are supporting nuclear power today,” August 30,

2022; Debra Kahn, “The environmental apostate who backed nuclear energy before it was cool,”

Politico, June 8, 2022; James Freeman, “Is this man talking California into nuclear power?” Wall Street

Journal, April 29, 2022.

3 Thom Patterson, Climate change warriors: it’s time to go nuclear,” CNN, November 3, 2013;

“Crossfire: Nuclear Energy:Ralph Nader and Michael Shellenberger are in the Crossfire,” CNN,

November 8, 2013.

2 Michael Shellenberger andTed Nordhaus,“A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds,”

Washington Post, December 16, 2011; Kevin Begos, “Fracking boom: help or hurt climate change

fight,” Washington Post, April 29, 2013.

1

...not shining and the wind is not blowing.

But today, thanks to natural gas shortages,

coal-fired electricity increased 22 percent in the U.S. in 2021, as compared to 2020,[no cite]

and will reach an all-time high, globally, this year.

Moreover, widespread alarmism is contributing to anxiety and depression,

particularly among young people, even though most environmental trends are going

in the right direction. Today, 36 percent of Americans surveyed believe climate

change will make Earth uninhabitable for all life and 31 percent believe climate

change will lead to human extinction, claims that are causing severe anxiety in some

children.

And yet neither the IPCC nor any other reputable scientific body makes

such apocalyptic claims. Indeed, the best-available science finds [one paper, no peer rev?]:global carbon

dioxide emissions were flat over the last decade

10

; U.S. landfalling hurricanes have declined since 1900

11

; there is no overall trend in U.S. heat wave frequency or magnitude since 1900

12

; and there is no increase in flooding, decreasing flood mortality, and decreasing flood costs asa proportion of GDParound the world.

13

---

The IPCC has “low confidence” of climate change influence on flood events.Sonia I.

Seneviratne, et al., “Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate,” IPCC, Climate

Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment

Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Shiqiang Du, “Brief communication:

Rethinking the 1998 China floods to prepare for a nonstationary future,” Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.,

19, 715–719, 2019; Muhammed Yaseen et al., “Contemporary Trends in High and Low River Flows in

Upper Indus Basin, Pakistan,” Water Journal, January 24, 2022;Roger Pielke, Jr.“US Flood Damage as

12 U.S. Global Change Research Program, “Chapter Six: Temperature Changes in the United

States,” Fourth National Climate Assessment, 2017;https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/6/

There is evidence that heat waves, temperature extremes, and heavy precipitation are

increasing at a global scale, but heavier rainfall does not necessarily mean more flooding, and IPCC

expresses low to medium confidence in changes to meteorological and hydrological droughts, and to

agricultural and ecological droughts, respectively. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change, Assessment Report 6, Working Group I, 2021.

11 Philip J. Klotzbach et al, “Continental U.S. Hurricane Landfall Frequency and Associated

Damage: Observations and Future Risks,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July 2018.

10 Zeke Hausfather, “Global CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade, new data reveals,”

Carbon Brief, April 11, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Brief

https://www.carbonbrief.org/global-co2-emissions-have-been-flat-for-a-decade-new-data-reveals/

--

...The new updates to global CO2 emissions in the GCP substantially revise scientists’ understanding of global emissions trajectories over the past decade. The new data shows that global CO2 emissions have been flat – if not slightly declining – over the past 10 years.

However, falling land-use emissions have counterbalanced rising fossil CO2 emissions, and there is no guarantee these trends will continue in the future.   ...

China and India lead rapid rise in fossil CO2 emissions

Global fossil CO2 emissions declined rapidly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. While there were hopes that a “green recovery” could help keep emissions down, the world has seen a rapid rebound in fossil CO2 emissions in 2021 as the global economy has recovered. The rebound in global emissions has been led by China and India, who have both already surpassed their previous 2019 record highs.

Speaking at a media press briefing, Dr Glen Peters – research director at the Center for International Climate Research (CICERO) – said the researchers “were expecting some sort of rebound in 2021”, but that it was “bigger than expected”. He added:

---

9 YouGovAmerica, “Nearly two in five Americans say it’s likely climate change will make the

Earth uninhabitable,” April 13-19,

2022,https://today.yougov.com/topics/society/articles-reports/2022/04/22/americans-say-climate-chan

ge-earth-uninhabitable; Jason Plautz, “The Environmental Burden of Gen Z,” Washington Post,

February 3, 2020; Reuters, “One in five UK children report nightmares about climate change,” March

2, 2020; Michael Shellenberger, “Why Climate Alarmism Hurts Us All,” Forbes, December 4, 2019.

8 U.S. EIA, “Annual U.S. coal-fired electricity generation will increase for the first time since

2014,” October 18, 2021; International Energy Agency, “Global coal demand is set to return to its

all-time high in 2022,” July 28, 2022.

7

...

While some extreme weather events are increasing globally, namely heat

waves and extreme precipitation events, data collected by EM-DAT in Belgium, the

main source for data on global disasters, show that weather-related disasters declined

by at least 10 percent between 2000 to 2021.

14 The reason for this is because

EM-DAT, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the

U.S. National Climate Assessment, and every other reputable scientific body

measures disasters as deaths and economic costs relative to GDP, both of which have

been declining as societies have become more resilient and less vulnerable.

15

Again, all things being equal, we should want to reduce temperatures and

emissions as much as possible. But we should also acknowledge the progress that

has been made protecting ourselves, and our ecosystems, from the consequences of

higher temperatures. Deaths globally from natural disasters declined from an average

of 550,000 per year in 1920, when the global human population was less than 2

billion, to 8,200 in 2020.

16 We prevent flooding through flood management. We

survive droughts through water storage, water recycling, and desalination. And we

prevent high-intensity fires through forest management, such as through selective

mechanical cutting and prescriptive burns.

17

Energy Security

Having established that climate change is a matter of public concern, but not

an apocalyptic threat, we should place it within a broader framework within which to

think about energy. The security of energy supplies, and reducing energy prices, are

urgent priorities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows the serious danger of nations

17 Michael Shellenberger, “Forests that survive megafires prove good management trumps

climate change,” Forbes, September 13, 2020.

16 Munich Re, “Natural Catastrophes in 2020,” January 2021,

https://www.munichre.com/content/dam/munichre/mrwebsiteslaunches/natcat-2021/2020_Jahresuebe

rsicht_Welt_e.pdf/_jcr_content/renditions/original./2020_Jahresuebersicht_Welt_e.pdf; Hannah Ritchie

and Max Roser, “Natural Disasters,” Our World in Data, accessed September 14, 2022; Giuseppe

Formetta et al., “Empirical evidence of declining global vulnerability to climate related hazards,”

Global Environmental Change, July 2019.

15 Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Natural Disasters,” Our World in Data, accessed September

14, 2022. As the authors of a major 2019 paper note, “Improved protection against hazards has

counter-balanced the effects of increasing exposure on disaster risk, with the global average

2007–2016 multi-hazard human mortality and loss rates dropping of about 6.5 and nearly 5 times as

compared to the period 1980–1989, respectively.” Giuseppe Formetta et al., “Empirical evidence of

declining global vulnerability to climate related hazards,” Global Environ

....

becoming overly dependent on hostile foreign powers for their energy supply.

Europe not only became over-dependent on natural gas, it over-invested in

weather-dependent renewables, which cannot replace fossil fuels, and under-invested

in nuclear. People think Europe depends on Russia for energy because it lacks its

own, but 15 years ago Europe exported more natural gas than Russia did before its

invasion of Ukraine. Now, Russia exports three times more gas than Europe

produces.

18

Why? Because European policymakers in the grip of environmental alarmism

blocked fracking.

---

19 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former secretary

general of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen both blamed Russia for funding the war on

natural gas in Europe. “Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and

disinformation operations,” said Rasmussen in 2014, “engaged actively with so-called

nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale

gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas.”

20 That same year, former

Secretary of State Clinton said “phony environmental groups” funded by Russia led

the campaign against fracking in Europe.

21

The crisis in Europe makes clear that climate change cannot be our sole

concern when it comes to developing energy policy, that energy independence must

be understood as a national security priority, and that energy as the lifeblood of the

economy, the master resource unlike any other commodity, must be cheap, reliable,

and abundant, if the United States is going to insure its future prosperity. Moreover,

it’s clear that the U.S. must do much more to supply its energy-poor allies in Europe

and Asia, who we are treaty-obligated to protect militarily. Had those allies been

more energy-independent of Russia, Ukraine would have been significantly less

vulnerable to attack, since Russia would have suffered even greater consequences for

its aggression.

And, indeed, today there is a broad bipartisan consensus that the U.S. must

export much more natural gas to Europe. The Washington Post reported on

September 11, 2022, that the Biden administration is reviewing efforts to increase

liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe. “The administration officials emphasized that

the White House has for months been seeking any possible way to increase natural

gas exports to Europe.” Said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “We’re doing

everything we can on the LNG front to be helpful.” And, indeed, U.S. LNG exports

[cites wsj]

...

have increased significantly, with over twice the amount of LNG going to Europe this

year over the same period of time last year.

22

But by the time Biden had announced the Task Force to reduce Europe’s

dependence on Russian fossil fuels, in March, the additional flows of U.S. LNG to

Europe had already occurred.

23 The reason was because the U.S. LNG industry

created a new model of exports which allowed for ships to change their destinations

in real-time based on changing market demands, which is a break from how Qatar

and other LNG exporters had managed LNG exports. It was thanks to this model that

the U.S. was able to supply natural gas to Brazil in 2021 after its drought reduced

hydroelectricity production. Reallocation of LNG exports had already been occurring

since Europe’s energy crisis began in the summer of 2021, six months before Russia’s

invasion of Ukraine. The US increased LNG exports to Europe by 0.8 billion cubic feet

per day (Bcfpd) in January and February 2022 as compared to January and February

  1. Nothing that the Biden administration has done was responsible for the shift of

U.S. LNG to Europe.

24

The Biden administration claims that it is limited in what it can do when in

reality it could do much more to expand natural gas production and exports. It’s true

that it takes roughly three years to build an LNG export terminal and two years to get

it approved by government regulators. But Biden could, if necessary, invoke the

Defense Production Act to expedite the permitting of LNG export terminals,

pipelines, and drilling. The regulation of new LNG terminals could occur concurrently

with their construction. Expedited regulation might reduce obstacles in the way of

expanding the size of liquefaction units, or trains. And Biden could announce trade

agreements with other nations to supply them with LNG, which would incentivize

natural gas production domestically.

It’s true that the U.S. is already the largest LNG exporter in the world, but

recent increases were underway before Biden took office and are a tiny fraction of

what the U.S. could be producing.

---

25 U.S. natural gas production will increase from

95.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in October 2021 to 97.5 Bcf/d by December

2022, a record high.

26 U.S. exports increased by 12 percent in the first half of 2022.

26 US EIA, “EIA forecasts U.S. natural gas production will establish a new monthly record high

in 2022,” December 16, 2021.

25 US EIA, “The United States became the world’s largest LNG exporter in the first half of

2022,” July 25, 2022.

24 Scott Disavino, “Could the US ship more LNG to Europe?” March 25, 2022.

23 White House, “US and EU announce task force to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian

fossil fuels,” March 25, 2022; US EIA, “U.S. liquefied natural gas export capacity will be world’s largest

by end of 2022, December 9, 2021.

22 Jeff Stein, “White House alarm ri...

But the largest U.S. natural gas producer, EQT, calculates that the U.S. could produce

four times more LNG, 569 billion cubic meters (Bcm) per year.

27 The U.S. government

estimates that the United States has 464 Tcf of proved reserves and 2,460 Tcf of

technically recoverable reserves of dry natural gas.

28 As such, the U.S. could export an

amount of natural gas (60 bcfd) that would be equivalent to the oil production of

Saudi Arabia, calculates EQT.

Not only is the Biden administration not taking the extraordinary measures it

could take to produce and export more natural gas, it is actively preventing the

expansion of natural gas production and exports. On September 8, three days before

The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration was doing all it could to

expand LNG exports, Treasury Secretary Yellen reaffirmed in Detroit the commitment

by the Biden administration to end the use of fossil fuels.

29 Two days earlier, the

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a request from LNG exporter

Cheniere Energy, which accounts for half of US LNG exports, to exempt two turbines

at its Gulf Coast terminals from a pollution rule, which means Cheniere may have to

reduce exports of LNG in order to install new pollution control equipment. Cheniere

said that the installation of the new pollution controls could take years.

30

The Biden administration has issued fewer leases for oil and gas production on

federal lands and off-shore areas, which produce one-quarter of all US production,

than any other administration since World War II. The Interior Department distributed

just 203 leases — just 126,228 acres — for oil and gas development during President

Biden’s first 19 months in office. By contrast, former presidents Obama and Trump

approved 10 times as many leases during the same period. And no president since

Richard Nixon has leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres during his first 19 months in

office.

31

It’s true that the recently-passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) requires the

Interior Department to offer a minimum of 60 million offshore acres and 2 million

acres of federal lands to oil and gas producers, annually, in order for the

administration to issue permits to wind and solar developers, but the Biden

---

31 Timothy Puko, Federal oil leases slow to trickle under Biden,” Wall Street Journal,

...

administration, or future administrations, could simply offer for lease federal lands

unlikely to have much oil and gas on them. And, further reducing the incentive to

expand production, IRA increased royalty fees on drilling.

American Oil Policy

The Biden administration has similarly blocked expanded oil production,

refining, and exports, even though many American allies are being forced to burn

more fuel oil from petroleum given natural gas shortages. Japan’s imports of fuel oil

are at a four-year high because it can be used to generate electricity in the face of

natural gas shortages, while Bangladeshi and Taiwanese purchases of fuel oil have

doubled.

32

Instead of expanding oil production to help meet U.S. and global demand, the

Biden administration is urging oil companies to export less. In late August, Energy

Secretary Jennifer Granholm urged U.S. oil refiners to export less. “Given the historic

level of U.S. refined product exports, I again urge you to focus in the near term on

building inventories in the United States, rather than selling down current stocks and

further increasing exports,” she wrote. “It is our hope that companies will proactively

address this need. If that is not the case, the Administration will need to consider

additional Federal requirements or other emergency measures.”

33

Since taking office, President Biden and his Administration have followed

through on Biden’s campaign promise, made in September 2019, to “end fossil

fuel.”

34

In January 2021, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone oil pipeline from

Canada to the United States.

35

In March 2021, the Biden Administration revoked a

permit for a massive expansion of a refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands,

36 and in May 2021, shut the refinery down.[repeated fails, rained chemicals during flaring]

37

In May 2022, the Biden Administration scrapped three

major off-shore oil and gas lease sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

38

38 “U.S. scraps three offshore oil and gas drilling auctions,” Reuters, May 12, 2022.

37 Laura Sanicola, “U.S. halts operations at Caribbean oil refinery after breakdowns,” Reuters,

May 14, 2021.

36 Valerie Volcovici, Biden White House blocks Virgin Islands refinery expansion permit over

pollution concerns,” Reuters, March 25, 2021.

35 Rod Nickel, “Biden revokes KXL permit in blow to Canada's oil sector,” Reuters, January 20,

2021.

34 Steve Peoples, “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel,” Associated Press,

September 6, 2019.

33 “Granholm to Europe: Tough Luck,” Wall Street Journal,August 24, 2022.

32 “Dirty-oil hoarding for winter begins in Asia as gas woes deepen,” Bloomberg, September

...[p13]

appears warranted given that: China has, since 2020, been importing oil from

Venezuela, in direct violation of U.S. sanctions;

47 Chinese and Indian imports of Russian oil have almost entirely offset western cuts;

48 and China has said it would not respect the proposed G7 price cap.

49

The Biden administration’s posture has confused the public since June. “Are

you telling me you want them drilling for more oil?” CNN host John Berman asked

Secretary Granholm in mid-June. “You want the refineries putting out more gasoline

in five or ten years?” Said Granholm, “What we’re saying is today we need that

supply increased. Of course, in five or ten years — actually in the immediate — we

are also pressing on the accelerator, if you will, to move toward clean energy, so that

we don’t have to be under the thumb of petro-dictators like Putin, or at the whim of

the volatility of fossil fuels. Ultimately America will be most secure when we can rely

on our own clean domestic production of energy through solar, through wind —”

Said CNN’s Berman, “But that’s the problem for these companies. These companies

are saying, ‘You’re asking me to do more now, invest more now, when, in fact 5 or 10

years from now, we don’t think that demand will be there, and the administration

doesn’t even necessarily want it to be there.’”

50

I have discovered something similar. A senior executive at a major U.S. bank

that finances oil and gas exploration told me in June, “If you were an oil company,

why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding refining capacity

if you thought the federal government or investors would shut you down in the next

few years?”

All of this raises a question for this committee. Is your concern really with the

high profits of American corporations? If so, then why have you not held hearings

demanding lower profits by high-tech companies such as Meta (Facebook), Apple,

and Google? Their earnings last year were $39 billion, $30 billion, and $76 billion,

respectively, as compared to $23 billion, $21 billion, and $16 billion for Exxon, Shell,

and Chevron, respectively.

And does your concern only extend to profitable years or

unprofitable ones? From 2010 to 2020, U.S. shale frackers lost $300 billion.From

2002 to 2012, industry leader Chesapeake never had positive cash flow and lost $30

billion. From mid-2012 to mid-2017, the 60 largest fracking companies lost an

---

50 John Berman and Secretary Jennifer Granholm, CNN, June 15, 2022.

49 Reuters, “China foreign ministry urges dialogue, not price cap, on Russian oil,” September 5,

2022.

48 Andy Lin et al, “India and China undercut Russia’s oil sanctions pain,” Financial Times,

September 7, 2022.

47 Chen Aizhu et al., “Chinese defence firm has taken over lifting Venezuelan oil for deb

offset,” Reuters, August 26, 2022.

Shellenberger Testimony p...

average of $9 billion every quarter. From 2006 to 2014, they lost $80 billion. Even

when oil was $100 a barrel, in 2014, they lost $20 billion.

The economic benefit to American consumers for the losses of the oil and gas

industry were enormous. From 2010 to 2020, lower energy prices thanks to cheaper

natural gas from fracking resulted in $100 billion being added to the U.S. economy

every year, for a total benefit of $1 trillion between 2010 and 2020.

“The real story to be written,” noted a Bloomberg reporter, “is about the massive subsidy to

consumers from everyone who financed Chesapeake and all the companies that lost

money fracking last decade.”

53 The fracking revolution showed how energy security,

economic growth, and environmental progress go hand-in-hand. The same cheap

natural gas that drove American prosperity is also what allowed for the low-cost

replacement of coal and the decline in carbon emissions by nearly 22 percent

between 2005 and 2020.

But now, the decline in oil prices appears to be coming to an end, and neither

the Biden administration nor Congress have a plan for dealing with it. A growing

number of states are seeing the price of gasoline increase; 15 reported an increase in

the last week, which is more than three times the number that saw gains at the end of

the prior week. Nymex gasoline futures have been increasing, which suggests an

increase in gasoline costs is coming. The worst price spikes have been in California,

which has the most expensive gasoline in the U.S. at $5.42 per gallon. This is

straining low-income consumers especially, who have also been hurt by electricity

prices that rose seven times faster than in the rest of the U.S. over the last decade,

due to our heavy use of weather-dependent renewables.

Misinformation

Now would be a good time for the Biden Administration and Congress to host

an open and honest conversation about how to deal with our energy future. Yet some

members of the administration and Congress appear to be more interested in

scapegoating oil and gas companies for behaviors that are entirely predictable given

the policy environment within which Congress has asked them to work. “We have

---

54 Sophie Caronello, “Pumpprice declines in US show signs of coming to an end,” Bloomberg,

September 13, 2022.

53 David Wallace-Wells, “Hardly anyone talks about how fracking was an extraordinary

boondoggle,” New York Times, July 27, 2022.

52 Robert M. Ames, “The Arithmetic of Shale Gas,” SSRN, June 26, 2012; Ed Hirs, “The

arithmetic of Fracking,” Forbes, Feb 21, 2020.

51 David Wallace-Wells, “Hardly anyone talks about how fracking was an extraordinary

...

tried to expand production and processing capacity throughout the years, but

constantly get sued by environmental groups or the government,” said the oil and

gas banker I spoke to in June. “Now that the consequences of that come to roost, we

get blamed for ‘price gouging’?”

As troubling are the efforts by the Biden administration and some members of

Congress to label as “misinformation” opinions with which they disagree, and to

demand that the Big Tech companies censor them. In April, the Biden Administration

proposed a “disinformation bureau” to be housed at the Department of Homeland

Security. Then, in June, Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said,

“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again

to spread disinformation,” pointing to those who criticized the failure of

weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021.

55

But many of those criticisms were factual. Over the last decade in Texas,

investors spent over $53 billion on weather-dependent energy sources, mostly wind

turbines, which alongside frozen fossil fuel plants were largely unavailable during the

cold snap in February.

That was only partly because of the cold and mostly because

of low wind speeds.

McCarthy claimed that the critics of renewables are funded by “dark money”

fossil fuel companies, which she compared to Big Tobacco, but offered zero evidence

for this claim. Instead, she demanded that Google, Twitter, and Facebook censor

views with which she disagrees. “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she

said, because criticizing renewables is “equally dangerous to denial because we have

to move fast.”

 Notably, McCarthy’s interview with Axios was sponsored by 3M, a

major supplier to the solar industry that has lobbied directly for climate and energy

legislation that would benefit 3M.

I would like to know if this committee is headed in a similar direction. Is it the

intention of this Committee, at the time of the worst energy crisis in 50 years, to shut

down public debate, or widen it? In its press release, the Committee wrote that this

---

59 “About 3M Solar Energy,”

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/power-generation-us/solutions/solar-energy/, accessed September

14, 2022; “Bills lobbied by 3M, 2021,” Open Secrets,

https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?cycle=2021&id=D000021800 , accessed

September 14, 2022.

58 Ben Geman, “Top Biden Aide prods big tech to crack down on climate change

misinformation,” Axios, June 9, 2022.

57 Michael Shellenberger, “Testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Energy

and Natural Resources,” March 11, 2021,

https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/B3F496B5-ADF4-457F-94C8-4257680DCB32

56 Powering Texas, accessed September 14, 2022,

https://poweringtexas.com/#revenue-generator

55 Ben Geman, “Top Biden Aide prods big tech to crack down on climate change

misinformation,” Axios, June 9, 2022

...

hearing “is part of the Committee’s investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s

long-running campaign to spread disinformation about climate change and

greenwash its role in causing global warming.”

However, as the committee also noted, thebig oil companies have long

acknowledged that fossil fuels contribute to climate change, to which the Committee

appears to be coping with by widening the scope of what counts as “disinformation,”

noting that the big oil companies “refused to stop spending money to block climate

action.” Is the suggestion here that disagreement over policy now constitutes

“misinformation” that Big Tech companies should censor? If not, then what is the

committee seeking to achieve with this line of argumentation?

If the concern is genuinely with misinformation, then the committee should

expand its scope to the claims of the Biden administration and renewable energy

advocates. On June 21, Biden claimed, “We need more refining capacity,” and said,

“This idea that [oil and gas companies] don’t have oil to drill and to bring up is simply

not true.” In fact, as noted, Biden’s EPA killed a refinery on May 14 and killed a one

million acre oil and gas lease in Alaska on May 12, and has issued fewer leases than

any other president since Truman. If Biden and his aides are going to demand that

Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies censor “misinformation,” those

companies should start by censoring Biden’s claim that he has issued sufficient oil and

gas licenses. He hasn’t. If he had, he wouldn’t have needed to request that Saudi

Arabia and Venezuela increase production.

If we are going to ask Facebook and Twitter to censor misinformation, they

would need tocensor Biden’s claim that he killed the Alaska oil and gas lease due to

“lack of industry interest.” “Citing a 'lack of industry interest' is nothing more than

fantasy from an administration that shuns U.S. energy production,” responded Sen.

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). "I can say with full certainty, based on conversations as

recently as last night, that Alaska's industry does have interest in lease sales in Cook

Inlet. To claim otherwise is simply false, not to mention stunningly short-sighted.”

61

But is it really the intention of this committee to get into the job of policing

political debates in society, or demand that big tech play that role? Doing so would

seem to be a significant drift of mission at a time of the worst energy crisis in 50

years.

---

61 Sarah Cook et al, “Biden Administration cancels Alaska oil and gas lease sale,” CBS News,

May 18, 2022.

60 House Committee on Oversight and Reform, “Chairs Maloney, Khanna to Hold Hearing on

Big Oil’s Profits and Climate Disinformation,” September 12, 2022,

https://oversight.house.gov/news/press-releases/chairs-maloney-khanna-to-hold-hearing-on-big-oil-s-p

...

electricity supply because wind speeds in cold snaps are so low. It is for that reason

that grid operators do not rely on wind turbines to provide more than trace amounts

of power during those periods. And, indeed, while wind turbines north of Texas

functioned more or less as intended, during the cold snap, they produced very little

power for their grids.

While the switch from nickel-cadmium to lithium-ion batteries allowed for the

proliferation of cell phones, laptops, and other electric appliances, it has not allowed

and will not allow for the cheap storage of the grid’s electricity. One of the largest

lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only

store enough power for about twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours.

69

And storage does not easily solve the problem of long-term, seasonal

variability. In January and February of this year, Germany’s renewables produced just

two-thirds of the electricity they produced in January and February of 2020, despite a

four percent increase in solar panel and wind turbine capacity, simply because of

annual variability of wind and sun.

70 Germany has only been able to manage the

seasonal fluctuations from intermittent renewables by maintaining a large and diverse

fleet of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Germany added 150 percent of

its total capacity in coal, natural gas, and nuclear in the form of new wind and solar

capacity, which was part of why Germany’s electricity prices have risen to the highest

levels in Europe.

71

One study by a group of climate and energy scientists found that when taking

into account continent-wide weather and seasonal variation, for the United States to

be powered by solar and wind, while using batteries to ensure reliable power, the

battery storage required would raise the cost to more than $23 trillion.

72

Most proponents of variable renewable energy thus look elsewhere for storage

solutions. The most influential proposal for 100 percent renewable energy in the U.S.

was created by a Stanford professor who relied on the conversion of existing

72 Matthew Shaner, “Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the

United States,” Energy and Environmental Science 11, no. 4 (2018): 914–925,

https://doi.org/10.1039/c7ee03029k.

71 Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE,”Net installed electricity generation capacity

in Germany” and ”Electricity Price Statistics”. Eurostat. Accessed March 7, 2021.

70 Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, ”Net electricity generation capacity in

Germany," Eurostat, accessed March 7, 2021; Kerstine Appunn, "What's New in Germany's Renewable

Energy Act 2021," Clean Energy Wire, last modified January 6, 2021,

69 Julian Spector, “California’s big battery experiment: a turning point for energy storage?”

Guardian, September 15, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com. In 2018, according to the US Energy

Information Agency, 134 million residential electricity accounts used about 11,000 kilowatt-hours per

year, or 1.25 kilowatts on average throughout the year.

68 Bill Magness, “Review of February 2021 Extreme Cold Weather Event,” Presentation before

the Texas House Joint Committee on State Affairs and Energy Resources ERCOT, February 25, 2021,

http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/226271/Texas_Legislature_Hearings_2-25-2021.pdf

...

hydroelectric dams into giant batteries.

73 But in 2017, scientists writing in the

Proceedings of the National Academies of Science observed that the 100 percent

renewable proposal rested upon the assumption that we can increase the amount of

power from U.S. hydroelectric dams ten-fold when, according to the Department of

Energy, the real potential is just one percent of that.Without all that additional

hydropower, the 100 percent renewables proposal does not work on its own terms.

[[

not saying: polar vortex caused by AGW, turbines not weatherized to save $; 6X loss LNG

no lnx

https://www.texastribune.org**/2021/04**/28/texas-power-outage-wind/

WINTER STORM 2021

Wind power a smaller contributor to Texas electricity crisis than initially estimated, ERCOT analysis shows

An updated analysis of the Texas power crisis shows lost natural gas power generation was the most significant component of the February outages.

BY ERIN DOUGLAS APRIL 28, 2021

An updated analysis of February’s Texas power crisis by experts at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shows that lost wind power generation was a small component of the huge losses in electric generation that plunged much of the state into darkness during the severe cold weather.

While Texas Republicans were quick to blame renewable energy during the storm — and have continued to target renewable energy for reform during this year’s legislative session — a recently updated report on the causes of generator outages during the week of Feb. 14 show that the most significant cause of the low power supply to the grid came from natural gas plants shutting down or reducing electricity production due to cold weather, equipment failures and natural gas shortages.

In ERCOT’s first preliminary report on the causes of the power crisis, released in early April, the grid operator included a chart thatappeared to show power generation losses from wind as just slightly smaller than natural gas generation losses that week. But that analysis used the capacity of the state’s wind turbines to generate electricity, not what wind turbines would have actually generated if not for the outages.

Wind power feeds into the grid depending on weather conditions, and renewable energy sources typically have much higher potential to generate electricity than what is actually produced on a day-to-day basis; sometimes renewable power generates a lot and at other times none or very little. ERCOT uses detailed weather forecasts to estimate how much wind and solar power will be available to the grid.

In the updated analysis included in a Wednesday ERCOT meeting, the grid operator calculated that natural gas power losses were several times that of wind generation lost during the power crisis — for example, at 8 a.m. on Feb. 16, about 4,000 megawatts of wind were lost due to the storm, compared to 25,000 megawatts of natural gas, according to data provided by ERCOT.

(First) In ERCOT’s first preliminary report on the causes of the power crisis, the grid operator included a chart that appeared to show power generation losses from wind as slightly smaller than natural gas generation losses. (Last) But in an updated analysis using what would have been produced by wind and solar if the storm hadn't happened, rather than using the overall generating capacity of renewables, natural gas power losses were several times that of wind generation outages. Credit: Electric Reliability Council of Texas

More than 100 people died in the Texas power crisis, which could become the most expensive disaster in state history as the costs continue to be tallied.]]

California is a world leader when it comes to renewables and has a major

network of dams but hasn’t converted them into batteries because you need the right

kind of dams and reservoirs, and even then, it’s an expensive retrofit. In addition,

there are many other uses for the water that accumulates behind dams, namely

irrigation and water supply for cities. Without large-scale ways to back up solar

energy, California has had to curtail electricity coming from solar farms when it’s

extremely sunny, or pay neighboring states to take it, in order to avoid adding too

much energy on the grid during hours of peak solar production.

Germany will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure

by 2025, according to energy analysts at Bloomberg,

and Germany generated 37.5 percent of its electricity from wind and solar in 2020, as compared to the 70 percent

France generates from nuclear.

Had Germany invested the $580 billion it’s spending

on renewables and their grid upgrades into new nuclear power plants instead, it

could be generating 100 percent of its electricity from zero-emission sources and

---

77 Fridolin Pflugmann et al., “Energy Transition Index,” McKinsey & Company, November 2019,

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/electric-power-and-natural-gas/our-insights/germanys-energy-tran

sition-at-a-crossroads; BP Energy Economics, “BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019, 68th

Edition,” BP, June 2019, accessed January 16, 2020, https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/businesssites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-rep

ort.pdf.

76 William Wilkes et al., “Germany’s failed climate goals a wakeup call for governments

everywhere,” Bloomberg, August 15, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com;

Mark Nelson et al.,”With Nuclear Instead of Renewables, California & Germany Would Already

Have 100 percent Clean Electricity,”Environmental Progress, September 11, 2018,

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/9/11/california-and-germany-decarbonization-with-alt

ernative-energy-investments.

75

Ivan Penn, “California invested heavily in solar power. Now there’s so much that other states

are sometimes paid to take it,” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2017, https://www.latimes.com.

74 Christopher Clack et al., “Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100

percent wind, water, and solar,”PNAS 114, no. 26 (2017): 6722–6727,

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1610381114; Chris Mooney, “A bitter scientific debate just erupted over

the future of America’s power grid,” Washington Post, June 19, 2017,

https://www.washingtonpost.com.

73 Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, Bethany A. Frew, “Stabilizing the grid

with 100% renewables 2050,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dec.

...[p 20]

have sufficient zero-carbon electricity to power all of its cars and light trucks (if

electrified) by 2025, as well.

From this information we can gain a clearer picture of electric reliability,

resiliency, and affordability. What tends to make electric grids more reliable, resilient,

and affordable is the generation of electricity by a few large, efficient plants with the

minimal amount necessary of wires and storage. What tends to make grids less

reliant, resilient, and affordable is significantly increasing the number of power plants,

wires, storage mechanisms, people, and organizations required for operating them.

As a result, places with heavy renewables penetration are reaching their limits.

On August 30, five days after California regulators passed a bill banning the sale of

internal combustion engines by 2035, the state’s grid operator urged residents to not

charge their electric vehicles from 4 pm to 9 pm for fear of blackouts.

The amount of zero-carbon electricity California generated has declined by 10 percent over the

last decade, because of less hydroelectricity from drought, and the 2011 closure of

San Onofre nuclear plant, which was 9 percent of the state’s total electricity

generation.

To generate sufficient electricity to fuel 30 million electric cars and

trucks, California will need nine nuclear power plants the size of its last nuclear plant,

Diablo Canyon, and that assumes no increase in population, and no increase in

electricity use, including for cooking and heating, even though the state is trying to

encourage the latter.

The impact of variable renewable energy sources on electricity prices can be

seen in the more than two-dozen states that have had in place renewable energy

mandates. “Cumulatively,” wrote the authors of aUniversity of Chicago report on the

impact of variable renewables on electricity prices, “consumers in the twenty-nine

states studied paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the

absence of the policy.” The study authors concluded that higher variability was the

81 Of California's 30,398,249 motor vehicles, just 1.9% (563,070) are electric. The California

Energy Commission calculates that the state will require 4.6 GW (minimum) of electricity to fuel 7.5

million EVs. Hence, to power 29 million more EVs it will need a minimum of roughly 17 GW of

additional power and perhaps much more. California Energy Commission, “Report Shows California

Needs 1.2 Million Electric Vehicle Chargers by 2030,” June 9, 2021

80 California Energy Commission, “California Electrical Energy Generation,” April 2022,

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/california-electricalenergy-generation

79 California Air Resources Board, “California moves to accelerate to 100% new zero-emission

vehicle sales by 2035,” CARB, August 25, 2022;

Caiso, “Excessive heat starting tomorrow will stress energy grid, August 30, 2022.

78 Mark Nelson and Madison Czerwinski, “With Nuclear Instead of Renewables, California and

Germany Would Already Have 100 percent Clean Electricity,” Environmental Progress, September 11,

...

main driver of higher costs.

Like food, energy cost increases are regressive, and so

higher electricity costs impose a higher burden on lower-income American

consumers.

New research makes clear that far higher material demands for solar panels,

wind turbines, and electric cars raise serious questions about their ability to substitute

for fossil fuels. Solar and wind energy projects require roughly 300 percent more

copper and 700 percent more rare earths than fossil fuels, per unit of energy. Wind,

solar, and batteries require 1,000 percent more steel, concrete and glass; 300 percent

more copper; and 4,200 percent, 2,500 percent, 1,900 percent, and 700 percent

more lithium, graphite, nickel, and rare earths, respectively, than fossil fuels, to

produce the same amount of energy, according to International Energy Agency, and

other analysts.

Last week, 40 CEOs of European metal companies warned of the “existential

threat” to their industries due to energy shortages and the "extra raw materials

needed to shift away from fossil fuels.” They noted that “50 percent of the EU’s

aluminum and zinc capacity has already been forced offline due to the

crisis….Producers face electricity and gas costs over ten times higher than last year,

far exceeding the sales price for their products. We know from experience that once a

plant is closed it very often becomes a permanent situation, as re-opening implies

significant uncertainty and cost.”

China’s share of the global market for renewables and EV minerals is already

twice OPEC’s share of the global oil market. The U.S. is dependent on imports for 100

percent of 17 renewables and EV-critical minerals; for 28 others, imports account for

more than 50 percent of domestic demand. China already dominates solar and

battery production. Minerals are 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost to produce

---

84 Eurometaux, “RE: Europe’s non-ferrous metals producers call for emergency EU action to

prevent permanent deindustrialisation from spiralling electricity and gas prices,” September 5, 2022.

https://eurometaux.eu/media/qnhn5k30/non-ferrous-metals-ceo-letter-on-energy-crisis-06-09-2022.pdf

83

IEA, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” 2021,

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions; Mark Mills, “The

“Energy Transition” Delusion: A Reality Reset,” Manhattan Institute, August 30, 2022

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/the-energy-transition-delusion,

82 Michael Greenstone et al., Do Renewable Portfolio Standards Deliver? (Chicago: Energy Policy

Institute at the University of Chicago, 2019); “Renewable Portfolio Standards Reduce Carbon

Emissions—But, at a High Cost,” Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, April 22, 2019,

https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/renewable-portfolio-standards-reduce-carbon-emissions-but-at-a-hig...

solar panels and lithium batteries.

85 China produces 95 percent of the world’s

polysilicon, solar wafer, and ingots and 80 percent of all components for solar panels.

And it is home to the 10 top suppliers of solar panel manufacturing equipment.

86

---

Meanwhile, the capital costs of solar, wind, and batteries have been rising

since 2017 and are going to rise much more. Energy today only uses 10 percent to 20

percent of total global minerals. The IEA says its share must rise to 50-70 percent for

the world to transition to renewables, which would be prohibitively inflationary.

And there are human rights concerns and environmental concerns with

renewables. The Associated Press reported on August 9 that rare earth mining in

Myanmar is resulting in “environmental destruction, the theft of land from villagers,

and funneling money to brutal militias, including Myanmar’s secretive military

government."

88 On August 17, AP reported that U.S. government scientists have

concluded that the expansion of wind energy would reduce the golden eagle

population by half.

As troubling is evidence that cost declines of solar panels stem in large

measure from the involuntary labor of a persecuted Muslim minority, the Uighurs, in

Xinjiang province. In January 2021, the U.S. State Department deemed China’s

treatment of the Uighurs to be genocide.

Ninety-five percent of the global solar panel market contains Xinjiang silicon. While the Inflation Reduction Act creates

incentives to bring solar manufacturing to the U.S. and Europe, doing so would

significantly increase prices, given higher labor and environmental standards.

---

91 Aitor Hernzández-Moralies, et al, “Fears over China’s Muslim forced labor loom over Europe’s

solar panels,” Politico, February 11, 2021.

90 Austin Ramzey, “U.S. Declaration of China’s ‘Genocide’ in Xinjiang Explained,” New York

Times, January 20, 2021. Ana Swanson and Chris Buckley, “Chinese Solar Companies Tied to Use of

Forced Labor,” New York Times,January 8 (Updated January 28), 2021.

89 Matthew Brown, “Wind energy boom and golden eagles collide in the US West, Associated

Press, August 17, 2022.

88 Dake Kang, et al., “'The Sacrifice Zone': Myanmar bears cost of green energy,” Associated

Press, August 9, 2022.

87

IEA, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” 2021,

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions; Mark Mills, “The

“Energy Transition” Delusion: A Reality Reset,” Manhattan Institute, August 30, 2022

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/the-energy-transition-delusion,

86

IEA, “Special Report on Solar Supply Chains,” p. 9, 2022.

85

IEA, “The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions,” 2021,

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions; Mark Mills, “The

“Energy Transition” Delusion: A Reality Reset,” Manhattan Institute, August 30, 2022

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/the-energy-transiti...

---

The underlying problem is that sunlight and wind are energy-dilute and thus

demand 300 times or more land than natural gas or nuclear plants.

The result is

growing resistance to the large land use impacts both of renewable energy projects

and with the long new transmission lines they will require. In 2021, 31 communities

rejected wind projects, adding to the 323 U.S. communities since 2015 that have

rejected or restricted wind projects.

A federal judge in 2020 blocked a transmission

line proposed to be built straight through whooping crane habitat in Nebraska.

Notably, transmission lines are the number one cause of mortality among whooping

cranes.

If the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with

renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of its land would be required, according to the

best-available study. 95 SMIL BS

By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of

land in the United States.

96

A Way Forward

High uncertainties over what will happen over the next 3 to 6 years, and

recognition of fundamental physical and economic realities, suggest a way forward

that emphasizes expanded domestic oil and gas production in the short to medium

term, and nuclear energy along with hydrogen production over the medium to

long-term, with the re-shoring of solar panel, wind turbine, and electric car

manufacturing and materials processing. Such a strategy will help determine whether

the costs of solar, wind, and EVs can come down, or whether they are, for inherently

physical reasons, namely their low power densities and correspondingly high material

intensities, doomed to be too inefficient to substitute for fossil fuels.

Given that the proximate cause of the global energy crisis was Europe's

over-dependence on Russian fuels, we must not repeat that same mistake by

becoming dependent on China for the extraction and processing of the minerals

needed to make solar, wind, and batteries. It is highly unlikely that energy’s use of

total global minerals will rise from 10-20 percent to 50-70 percent, with or without an

energy crisis, given the significant inflationary impact it would have on energy prices.

96 Vaclav Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 247.

95 Vaclav Smil, Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses (Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 247.

94 Thomas V. Stehn, “Whooping Crane Collisions with Power Lines: an issue paper,” Geography, 2008.

93 Robert Bryce, “Renewable Rejection Database,”

https://robertbryce.com/renewable-rejection-database/, accessed September 13, 2022.

92 Power density slide deck, Environmental Progress,

https://environmentalprogress.org/power-density-slide-deck, accessed September 14, 2022.

...

Governments have always played a heavy role in shaping energy markets

given that they determine, through regulatory permitting, how much oil, natural gas,

and gasoline can be produced.And now, with the continued subsidies of renewables

guaranteed by the Inflation Reduction Act, governments will increasingly be forced to

subsidize all forms of electricity generation, including natural gas generators, which

have already started going bankrupt due to renewables subsidies, as well as nuclear

plants.

If the West is to protect itself, and compete globally with Russia and China, it

must compete with Russia and China on energy. Nuclear power plants must be the

backbone of a high-energy West. Russia’s ability to make Europe dependent upon its

natural gas required that it expand nuclear energy domestically so it could export

more gas. With the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, the U.S. is far better off than

Europe and Asia, but our own energy security means nothing if our allies are insecure.

An organization of Western nations to expand nuclear plant building and oil

and gas production is essential to building the overall strength of the West to

compete with Russia and China. Such a high-energy Western alliance would attract

rather than alienate non-aligned nations in Asia, Latin American, and Africa. Some

worry that more energy exports will make energy more expensive domestically, but

that need not be the case. Piped natural gas within the United States will remain

cheaper than LNG sent to Europe, providing the U.S. with a long-term economic

competitive advantage over European allies.

Expanded LNG exports would mean the U.S. would have surplus energy

above ground already flowing through our pipelines, allowing the U.S. to respond to

high prices rapidly, without having to permit, drill, or connect wells to get supply to

market, which can take up to 18 months. This would reduce price volatility and

insulate the US from price shocks from unforeseen geopolitical events.

Nuclear plants are among the most reliable components of America’s power

grids, and provide over half of America’s zero-carbon power. Nuclear plants operate

as a national fleet at 94 percent annual capacity factor, thanks to tightly

choreographed refueling operations that barely interrupt eighteen-month continuous

uptime at most facilities.

97 The hardening required of nuclear plants first in response

to 9/11 and then in response to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 has further

ensured their contribution to reliability, resiliency, and affordability. [UKRAINE]

98

98 U.S. N.R.C., "Post-Fukushima Safety Enhancements," Nuclear Regulatory Commission,

accessed March 8, 2021,

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/post-fukushima-safety-enhancements.html

97 Office of Nuclear Energy, Department of Energy, “Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy

Source and It’s Not Even Close,” April 22, 2020,

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close

[nb // BS on NEAR ca blackouts]

Although Texas lost one of four of its nuclear reactors after cold water affected

a sensor, automatically shutting down the reactor, it returned to service within 36

hours, and thus in time to help end the power cuts. Meanwhile, nuclear reactors in

other cold snap states, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota,

Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan, operated normally.

99

Nuclear’s future will likely look like nuclear’s past, given the national security

issues surrounding the dual-use nature of nuclear energy, and the capital-intensive

nature of nuclear power plant projects. Research over decades shows that the

cheapest nuclear plants are large, standardized, and built by the same construction

teams over multiple decades, thus requiring a long-term, bipartisan, and national

commitment.100

In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government chose two national

champions,Westinghouse and General Electric, to promote two competing designs.

One obvious national champion would be a consortium of Westinghouse, Bechtel,

and Southern Company, given their experience building AP-1000s in Georgia.

Another might be a partnership with either the French, Japanese, or South Koreans,

all of whom have strong experience building nuclear plants and view nuclear energy

as essential to their national security.

The future of transportation remains open. It may be that electric vehicles are

the future or it may be that hydrogen-fuel cell vehicles will predominate, which have

long held major advantages over electric vehicles. The move from ICEs to hydrogen

fuel cells is more consistent with the trend of past energy transitions than going from

ICEs to EVs, which are material-intensive, heavy, and much worse for the environment

than internal combustion engines. Hydrogen fuel cells are more expensive now but,

over time, will become cost-competitive with gasoline, argued analysts with the

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. The electrochemical process of

combining hydrogen gas with oxygen is potentially 20% to 30% more efficient than

today’s gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines (ICEs). Hydrogen enthusiasts

overly hyped the technology in the past, but that may mean that they were early,

rather than wrong. A short-to-medium term commitment to natural gas (CH4) could

be a pathway to creating hydrogen (H2) first from gas and then eventually from water

(H20), improving the economics of nuclear energy during non-peak hours.101

101 Jesse Ausubel,“Renewable and Nuclear Heresies,” International Journal of Nuclear

Governance, Economy, and Ecology, November 2007;

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/HeresiesFinal.pdf

Jesse Ausubel and Cesare Marchetti, “The Future of Transport,” The Industrial Physicist, IIASA,

2001, https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/13557/1/The%20Evolution%20of%20Transport.pdf

100 Michel Berthélemy et al., “Nuclear reactors' construction costs: The role of lead-time,

standardization and technological progress,” Energy Policy, 2015.

99 EIA, “Electricity Data Browser: Hourly Electric Grid Monitor,” EIA.gov, accessed March 08,

2021, https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboarD

---

It is in this context, grounded in energy security, first physical principles, and

thus sound economics, that we can consider the long-term trend of radical

decarbonization. Part of the trouble with climate alarmism is that it encourages

short-term thinking around what is a long-term problem. Radical decarbonization is

possible but it is easier to imagine in a context that involves a significant expansion of

nuclear energy and natural gas, and the phase out of coal before the phase out of oil,

occurs. We have already seen how natural gas can quickly and cheaply replace coal.

Replacing oil will be more difficult, given the superior energy densities of petroleum

over either electric vehicles or hydrogen.

Much of the misinformation [ABOVE THE SAID NO EXXON KNEW; ]that has come from large energy firms, including

the oil and gas majors, has been a reaction to the poorly thought-through vision of

phasing out natural gas and nuclear to achieve 100 percent renewables and electric

vehicles. Such a vision was never warranted by the basic physics of energy

production. Instead of seeking to stamp out disconfirmatory information, I encourage

Congress to widen the debate to include a broader set of perspectives, [ALL THE ABOVE BS = FF NUKES]particularly

those that foresee a wider, not narrower, vision for natural gas and nuclear[end]

---

he says mostly in poor hoods

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/10/clear-the-air-of-diesel-generators-that-power-californias-shadow-grid/

---

The oil refinery is based on the island of St. Croix, home to more than 50,000 people. Its previous owner was Hovensa LLC, a joint venture of New York-based Hess Corp. and Petróleos de Venezuela SA. At the time, the refinery was among the 10 largest in the world and also struggled with polluting events, paying a $5.4 million penalty one year for violating the Clean Air Act.

In 2012, Hovensa LLC announced it was closing the refinery in a hit to the tiny island given that some 2,000 people worked there. It was the U.S. territory’s largest private employer and generated some $60 million a year in revenue for the government.

The complex kept operating solely as an oil storage terminal for nearly a decade until Limetree restarted the refinery in February of this year following permission from the Trump administration, announcing it was capable of processing some 200,000 barrels a day. Limetree, which is now run by EIG Global Energy Partners, had bought the terminal and refinery in 2016 for $190 million.

---

https://naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/2022.09.14%20Hearing%20Report_PR%20Firms%20Preventing%20Action%20on%20Climate%20Change.pdf

rept

---

https://energynow.com/2022/09/commentary-anti-energy-nihilism-behind-economic-crisis-michael-shellenberger/

no lnx pix grf

COMMENTARY: Anti-Energy Nihilism Behind Economic Crisis – Michael Shellenberger

September 7, 2022 EnergyNow Media

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Is it a coincidence that the people who said Western civilization was unsustainable are making it so?

More From Michael Shellenberger

[pix Greta Thunberg (center) and climate protesters in the U.S. (left) and UK (right).]

Progressives say that, by restricting fossil energy production, they are defending civilization from climate change, which they say is causing heatwaves, droughts, and flooding.President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refuse to significantly expand natural gas production to aid energy-hungry allies in Europe. The European Commission rejected a plan to help poor nations build fertilizer factories to overcome food shortages. And last week, California banned the sale of gasoline-powered cars and trucks in the state by 2035.

And yet each of those policies risks undermining civilization far more than climate change. European steel, glass, and fertilizer manufacturers are shutting down production due to high natural gas prices resulting from shortages. Lack of food and energy is pushing both rich and poor nations closer to the kind of social unrest that brought down the government of Sri Lanka in July. And last week, just days after California banned gas vehicles, the state’s electrical grid operator urged residents to not charge their electrical vehicles due to the high risk of blackouts.

Climate change is real, and something we should limit as much as possible, but there is no increasing trend in U.S. heat wave frequency or magnitude, flooding in Pakistan declined from 1981 to 2016, and droughts are not increasing in severity or frequency in Europe. Far scarier are the charts of skyrocketing fertilizer and electricity prices due to Russia’s restriction and now halting of natural gas flows into Europe.

It’s not all bad news. European nations have successfully stored a significant amount of natural gas and should be able to keep most of their citizens warm through the winter. And California’s legislature last week voted to keep our last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, on-line, after previously trying to shut it down.

But Europe cannot fully replace the natural gas it is losing from Russia, nations are still failing to produce sufficient fertilizer to avert hundreds of millions of additional hunger-related deaths, and California is producing too little reliable electricity to charge the fewer than 2% of its vehicles that are electric today, and has no plan to significantly expand reliable power to charge a 100% all-electric fleet in the future.

Worse, politicians, activists, and journalists in the West are doubling down on the same failed policies, even though they are undermining their own stated objectives. Greta Thunberg last month denounced nuclear power, even though the closure of nuclear plants in her native Sweden is resulting in the burning of oil for electricity. Greenpeace Germany last week came out in support of burning more coal, rather than keeping the nation’s nuclear plants on-line. And Germany and Belgium both still intend to shut down their nuclear plants.

As for California, while it took a good step forward in keeping Diablo Canyon on-line, it only did so after three years of blackouts in a row, and record-high levels of electricity consumption. Meanwhile, lawmakers have yet to confront the fact that the state will need the equivalent of 10 full-size nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon if it is to provide power for 30 million cars and trucks.

Why is that? Why are the people who say they want to save civilization actively undermining it?

Why Civilized People Undermine Civilization

Environmental trends are improving. Why, then, do people think things are getting worse?

The main reason policymakers are pursuing pro-scarcity policies is because they, along with most of the public, believe the environment is getting worse, not better. The share of Americans who say the state of the environment is fair or poor rose from 49% to 61% between 2015 and 2022. Movies and television reinforce this perception. In David Cronenberg’s new film, “Crimes of the Future,” industrial waste, such as from microplastics, has become so prevalent that people’s bodies start evolving so they can eat it.

But almost every major environmental trend is improving. Lead, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide pollutants declined 99%, 91%, and 61% between 1980 and 2018, according to the U.S. EPA. It’s true carbon emissions are rising again. But that’s because natural gas shortages are forcing nations to burn more coal, which is twice as polluting. Carbon emissions globally were flat over the last decade and declined 22% in the U.S. from 2005 and 2020. And there is little evidence that microplastics actually harm human health, something Cronenberg himself acknowledged.

Why, then, do people think things are getting worse?

In part because the news media have a bias toward bad news, and because scientists who study the environment are funded when they hype problems, not solutions. But this can’t be the whole explanation because scientists and journalists hype apparent progress, such the declining cost of solar panels, when it fits with theirideological agendas. Why do our intellectual elites favor doom and gloom when it comes to nature?

Part of the answer lies in power. Making people afraid is a way to gain control over them. Everybody likes feeling powerful, particularly journalists, who are not very powerful, trusted, or well-liked, at a social level, in comparison to other groups. And let’s face it: not that many people are afraid of God any more. They are, however, increasingly afraid of Nature.

GLJ

Apocalyptic environmentalism today provides psychological comfort to secular Western people who have gradually abandoned traditional religions. For over a century, sociologists and psychologists have documented rising rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among educated, secular, and urban people. They point to a broad set of factors including urbanization, rising loneliness, and the decline of traditional religious beliefs.

A large body of research finds that people who lack a strong belief system suffer from lower psychological well-being, including higher levels of anxiety and depression. People who struggle with questions of ultimate meaning, such as their purpose in living, are unhappier. Some people refer to this condition as nihilism, which is the idea that life is meaningless, that humans are little different from other animals, and that there is no real purpose to life, other than mindless, instinctual procreation.

Such nihilism grew in influence after World War II among leading scholars in Europe and the United States. “Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning,” noted a historian. Elites turned to science for answers, but it turned out to be a dead end. “Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect,” continued the historian, “but that leads inevitably to technology and, ultimately, to the bomb” and, one might add, apocalyptic climate change, in the view of elites.

Western elites, whose grandparents felt guilty for having been born sinners against God, came to feel they had been born sinners against Nature. Nietzsche famously argued that guilt came from powerful people turning their will-to-punish inward, as a mechanism for reducing social violence, and allowing for peaceful civilizations. Today, powerful people are turning their will-to-punish outward, as a mechanism for undermining the energetic foundations of civilization.

Why, then, are the people who claim to most want to save civilization undermining it? Because they have convinced themselves that it is killing Nature, their new god.

Love Your Civilization

[pix  Heather Hoff, co-founder of Mothers for Nuclear,in the control room at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo, California.]

If the worst energy crisis in 50 years isn’t enough to shake the faith of anti-energy nihilists like Thunberg and Greenpeace, it’s unlikely anything else can, or will. Their worldviews, identities, and personal brands are locked into the demonization of nuclear and the sacralization of renewables. They can’t waver from their anti-civilization fanaticism for fear of undermining their base of popular and financial support.

But policymakers must be elected by a constituency broader than apocalyptic and nihilistic elites, and worsening energy and food shortages make them vulnerable. The next test of their dogmatism comes this November, when voters in the U.S. will have an opportunity to rebuke their pro-scarcity agenda. Other tests in Europe will come shortly after. We are very likely headed for a period of significant political disruption, including widespread protests and chaos, in response to global energy and food shortages, recession, and austerity in the face of rising public debt.

In such an environment, many in the West will take a closer look at environmental trends and note that they aren’t what they imagined. Natural disasters, measured by IPCC and every other scientific body as deaths and economic costs, are becoming less, not more, frequent. Even if climate change is worsening extreme weather events, such as heat waves, droughts, and flooding, rising human resilience thanks to economic growth is increasing faster, reducing deaths and damages, and thus what counts as a disaster.

The success of our efforts saving nuclear power plants around the world point a way forward. It’s true that it took three years of blackouts in a row to finally motivate California Governor Gavin Newsom to reverse his plan to shutter Diablo Canyon. But it occurred against a backdrop of successful public education and advocacy by my colleagues and me since 2016. The next obvious demand is to simply add more nuclear reactors to existing plant sites. Diablo Canyon, for instance, has room for four more.

In other words, apocalyptic environmentalists won’t change, but governments, and government policies, will. In the context of high energy prices, high interest rates, and the need to cut public spending, policymakers will be forced to scale back the massive subsidies being given to renewables, and lower energy prices through the greater use of natural gas and nuclear. And African governments will expand fossil fuel and fertilizer production with the help of Russia and China, if Europe and the U.S. continue to refuse to help.

Advocates of abundance, not advocates of scarcity, will increasingly be seen as the true defenders of civilization. The public, journalists, and policymakers will increasingly see climate change as a long-term challenge that requires maturity and calm rationality, not a hysterical adolescent panic. Voters will demand and governments will deliver more fertilizers, air conditioners, and water infrastructure to deal with heat waves, floods, and droughts. And Western elites will eventually realize that the path to decarbonization lies not in Chinese-made renewables and electric cars but rather in homemade nuclear, natural gas, and hydrogen.

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lnx

Climate change is real, and something we should limit as much as possible, but there is no increasing trend in U.S. heat wave frequency or magnitude, flooding in Pakistan declined from 1981 to 2016, and droughts are not increasing in severity or frequency in Europe. Far scarier are the charts of skyrocketing fertilizer and electricity prices due to Russia’s restriction and now halting of natural gas flows into Europe.

:{:{}:

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ref BC OF GLACIER LOSS?! drought?

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}:

Abstract

The Upper Indus Basin (UIB) features the high mountain ranges of the Hindukush, Karakoram and Himalaya (HKH). The snow and glacier meltwater contribution feeds 10 major river basins downstream including Astore, Gilgit, Hunza, Jhelum, Kabul, Shyok and Shigar. Climate change is likely to fluctuate the runoff generated from such river basins concerning high and low streamflows. Widening the lens of focus, the present study examines the magnitude and timing of high flows variability as well as trends variability in low streamflows using Sen’s slope and the Mann-Kendall test in UIB from 1981 to 2016. The results revealed that the trend in the magnitude of the high flows decreased at most of the sub-basins including the Jhelum, Indus and Kabul River basins. Significantly increased high flows were observed in the glacier regime of UIB at Shigar and Shyok while decreased flows were predominant in Hunza River at Daniyor Bridge. A similar proclivity of predominantly reduced flows was observed in nival and rainfall regimes in terms of significant negative trends in the Jhelum, Kunhar, Neelum and Poonch River basins. The timing of the high flows has not changed radically as magnitude at all gauging stations. For the low flows, decreasing significant trends were detected in the annual flows as well as in other extremes of low flows (1-day, 7-day, 15-day). The more profound and decreasing pattern of low flows was observed in summer at most of the gauging stations; however, such stations exhibited increased low flows in autumn, winter and spring. The decrease in low flows indicates the extension of dry periods particularly in summer. The high-water demand in summer will be compromised due to consistently reducing summer flows; the lower the water availability, the lower will be the crop yield and electricity generation. View Full-Text

Keywords: Upper Indus Basin; streamflows; flow extremes; high and low flows; Mann-Kendall; Jhelum River basin; Kabul River basin; significant trends; climate change

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ref

Key Finding 1

Annual average temperature over the contiguous United States has increased by 1.2°F (0.7°C) for the period 1986–2016 relative to 1901–1960 and by 1.8°F (1.0°C) based on a linear regression for the period 1895–2016 (very high confidence). Surface and satellite data are consistent in their depiction of rapid warming since 1979 (high confidence). Paleo-temperature evidence shows that recent decades are the warmest of the past 1,500 years (medium confidence).

...

6.2.2 Temperature Extremes

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)

Bindoff, N. L., P. A. Stott, K. M. AchutaRao, M. R. Allen, N. Gillett, D. Gutzler, K. Hansingo, G. Hegerl, Y. Hu, S. Jain, I. I. Mokhov, J. Overland, J. Perlwitz, R. Sebbari, and X. Zhang, 2013: Detection and attribution of climate change: From global to regional. T.F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, and P.M. Midgley, Eds., Cambridge University Press, 867–952.URL ↩

:{" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 0px !important;">:{:{:{ concluded that it is very likely that human influence has contributed to the observed changes in frequency and intensity of temperature extremes on the global scale since the mid-20th century. The combined influence of anthropogenic and natural forcings was also detectable (medium confidence) over large subregions of North America (e.g., Zwiers et al. 2011;}:

Zwiers, F. W., X. B. Zhang, and Y. Feng, 2011: Anthropogenic influence on long return period daily temperature extremes at regional scales. *Journal of Climate*, 24, 881–892, doi:10.1175/2010jcli3908.1. ↩

:{" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 0px !important;">:{:{:{ Min et al. 2013}:

Min, S.-K., X. Zhang, F. Zwiers, H. Shiogama, Y.-S. Tung, and M. Wehner, 2013: Multimodel detection and attribution of extreme temperature changes. *Journal of Climate*, 26, 7430–7451, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00551.1. ↩

:{" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 0px !important;">:{:{:{ ). In general, however, results for the contiguous United States are not as compelling as for global land areas, in part because detection of changes in U.S. regional temperature extremes is affected by extreme temperature in the 1930s.}:

Peterson, T. C. et al., 2013: Monitoring and understanding changes in heat waves, cold waves, floods and droughts in the United States: State of knowledge. *Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society*, 94, 821–834, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00066.1. ↩

" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; border-bottom: 0px !important;"> ...Such statements reveal that both natural and anthropogenic factors influence the severity of extreme temperature events. Nearly every modern analysis of current extreme hot and cold events reveals some degree of attributable human influence.}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:

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}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:}:

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ref looks legit 2020 but only w eur and says rain# not enough for longrange analysis?

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.6719

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kos an 9 22

Consider the hearings held on Wednesday and Thursday by two House committees as a flashpoint laying bare the blatant desperation with which conservatives are clinging to Big Oil’s success instead of caring about their constituents or the planet. On Wednesday, the House Natural Resource Committeeheld a hearing about how fossil fuel companies rely on blatantly misleading language and images to boost their profiles. As I’ve reported before, polluters employ a dangerous playbook designed to oppress frontline communities and those concerned with the climate crisis.

The Natural Resource Committee even released a study logging these tactics ahead of the hearing. But critics claim that supporting “the energy sector” amounts to using free speech and securing the country’s energy resources, worsening crisis be damned. Publicists painted Big Oil as having moved on from denying climate change, equating doing the bare minimum with somehow being leaders in the movement. Republicans like Rep. Lauren Boebert bashed a witness who was harassed and stalked for an anti-fracking campaign she participated in in Colorado. If y’all think lawmakers behaved any better the next day, just wait for Clay Higgins to speak up during Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Big Oil’s role in the climate crisis.

Higgins, a noted white supremacist, spent his five minutes talking down to an expert witness wholly more qualified to speak on the topic of the hearing’s subject, which was “Examining Big Oil’s Prices, Profits, and Pledges.” Higgins continually called Raya Salter, Esq. “young lady” and outright screamed at her for standing up to people like him on behalf of frontline communities he’s so blatantly ignored. Salter, who is the Founder and Executive Director of the Energy Justice Law and Policy Center and a member of the New York State Climate Action Council, implored Higgins to instead reckon with his own actions. [twt vid]

at best, Higgins is a climate change skeptic. He’s also entirely bought and paid for by the oil and gas sector—which is the top industry he receives campaign donations from—and was the lone dissenting House vote who wanted fossil fuel imports from Russia to remain despite the country’s invasion of Ukraine. “I want you to search your heart and ask your God what you are doing to the Black and poor people in Louisiana,” Salter pushed back against Higgins.

Higgins had his supporters, such as fellow monster Jim Jordan and Yvette Herrell, and Salter received support from Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who slammed Higgins’ conduct. “For the gentleman from Louisiana and the comfort he felt in yelling at you like that, there’s more than one way to get a point across,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And, frankly, men who treat women like that in public, I fear how they treat women in private.” To add insult to injury, Michael Shellenberger mispronounced Ocasio-Cortez’s name without caring to correct it.

Shellenberger was considered by some Republicans to be the only “minority witness” who thinks climate change actually isn’t that bad and that mass casualty events simply won’t happen. He’s the comfort blanket to Republicans who call environmental concern a “war on gas” and think climate activists are dehumanizing. Once a Democrat in name, he’s now simply a traitor to the human race who finds more comfort in Fox News appearances than in acknowledging reality. Many GOP lawmakers only spoke to Shellenberger when they did have a chance to address the panel.

What’s revealing about these hearings isn’t the information we already know about how bad Big Oil is or the quite literal Black and white divisions between fossil fuel worshippers and those who believe that any higher power wouldn’t want us destroying the planet. It’s that, at the core of this issue, white comfort is one of the biggest hindrances to addressing the climate crisis. I want Higgins to feel uncomfortable when Roishetta Ozane began her moving testimony on her experience surviving multiple disasters in Southwest Louisiana by calling the lawmaker out. Addressing white supremacy is a key component in dismantling it and foundational to creating a truly just transition.

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yahoo news posts fox BS video

California is experiencing 'self-inflicted' energy wounds following green new deal policies

Thu, September 8, 2022

ClimateDepot.com publisher Marc Morano on how California is experiencing the consequences for the attack on energy

//

WSJ editorial board: California's blackouts are a result of 'man-made climate policies', 'not climate change'

They blamed Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom's green policies for the energy shortages

Joe Silverstein

California is experiencing 'self-inflicted' energy wounds following green new deal policies

ClimateDepot.com publisher Marc Morano on how California is experiencing the consequences for the attack on energy

The Wall Street Journal editorial board criticized California Governor Gavin Newsom's climate change policies Wednesday, arguing they are causing the state's energy shortages.

"Californians narrowly averted rolling blackouts on Tuesday, but the threat looms all week amid an unpleasant but not unusual heat wave," the editors wrote in an opinion titled "Gavin Newsom's Dirty Energy Secret."

"This ought to be a warning about how the government force-fed green energy transition is endangering grid reliability, but Democrats and the media can’t break out of their climate-change conformity to think clearly, or think at all," they continued.

[SEXTON RIPS EU PRESIDENT FOR TELLING PEOPLE THEY NEED TO REDUCE THEIR ELECTRICITY USAGE TO ‘FLATTEN THE CURVE’

California does not have enough energy to supply consumers' demand and has asked people to reduce using their air conditioning, powering their homes and even charging their electric cars during heat waves. This past week, California's electric grid operator issued an "energy emergency alert 3," its highest alert level.

"Democrats blame climate change for the state’s week-long warnings to conserve power, but California’s climate hasn’t suddenly changed," the Journal's editors wrote. "What has drastically changed in recent years is California’s electric generation."

"Solar and wind power have rapidly expanded thanks to rich government subsidies along with the state’s renewables mandate," the editors wrote.

They noted that these subsidies have made it more difficult for gas and nuclear generators to make money and, hence, caused the closure of said facilities.

ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST WARNS OF ‘DIRE’ ELECTRICITY CRISIS IN CALIFORNIA: ‘INCOMPETENCE PILED ON IDEOLOGY’

"[T]he result is that the state often lacks sufficient power when the sun goes down," they wrote.

The editors noted that California must "rely on imports from other states in the evenings" and that "these imports are becoming less dependable since California’s neighbors are also losing base-load generators owing to their own renewable buildouts."

"During heat waves that span the Southwest like the one this week, California must resort to emergency measures to reduce electricity demand," they wrote.

The editors warned that "what starts in California rarely stays in California," and "Americans everywhere will soon be soaked with higher prices for power that is becoming less reliable."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"The grid problems that Californians are enduring will grow and spread as supersized green-energy subsidies and mandates spread their harmful incentives throughput the U.S. economy in coming years. The culprit is the left’s climate policies, not climate change," they concluded.

Joe Silverstein is a production assistant for Fox News Digital.

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ref shill

Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger issued a warning about the dangers California may see what with several counties enduring blackouts and the state facing electricity shortages. On "America Reports,"sandra smith /roberts]  https://www.foxnews.com/shows/america-reports Wednesday, Shellenberger argued California's leadership was operating out of "incompetence piled on ideology," as electricity shortages come following Governor Gavin Newsom's electric vehicle push.

CALIFORNIA HEADED FOR ‘HUGE PROBLEMS’ WITH ITS POWER GRID,:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{ SAYS FORMER REAGAN ECONOMIC ADVISER

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: The message that gets sent when you're on the verge of blackouts, when you have electricity shortages, is that you better not buy an electric car if you want to get to work or go to the grocery store. This is very serious. People die during blackouts. You don't have enough of air conditioning. You have potential catastrophic failures of essential parts of the electrical grid. So we're dealing with sort of incompetence piled on ideology here in California. It's really like a developing economy here where you don't have reliable electricity. The cost of electricity in California went up seven times more than they did in the rest of the United States over the last decade. And yet they still can't maintain our power grid. So it's a very dire situation. It's very serious. And I think the most disturbing part of it is that California has been held up as the model for the rest of the United States by President Biden. 

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https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-we-will-save-california?s=r

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https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/video/michael-shellenberger-how-progressives-threaten-cities

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https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/10/27/former-soros-activist-explains-how-progressive-policies-ruined-san-francisco/

10/21

there’s a crisis in San Francisco. Homelessness has skyrocketed and drug use is rampant. 

Michael Shellenberger moved to San Francisco in 1993 to work on liberal causes, and even spent time working for George Soros’ foundation. He advocated the decriminalization of drugs and promoted drug treatment programs. But, Shellenberger says, he began to worry when he saw the number of drug overdose deaths in America rise from 17,000 in 2000 to more than 70,000 by 2017.

“Clearly, we are in the midst of a massive drug crisis,” Shellenberger says, “and it felt like nobody was offering a particularly clear explanation of it or offering very good solutions.”

Out of frustration over the problems he was seeing in San Francisco and other liberal cities, Shellenberger became determined to diagnose the problems driving the homeless crisis and find solutions. He presents the result of his research and investigation in his new book “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.”

[Want to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle? Want to know the most important stories of the day for conservatives? Need news you can trust? Subscribe to The Daily Signal’s email newsletter. ]

Shellenberger joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss how the left’s “victim” ideology has harmed West Coast cities and what can be done to save those communities from complete ruin. 

We also cover these stories:

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.

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calls himself trad liberal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDWXBUQ-Sys

175 | Michael Shellenberger: How Progressives Failed America’s Cities

19,253 viewsNov 11, 2021

The Realignment

66K subscribers

Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, returns to The Realignment to argue that progressive governance has failed on its own terms to address, why he still considers himself a “liberal” even though many on the right are inclined to agree with his critiques, how to address homelessness and housing shortages, and more...

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-shellenberger-centrist-california-governor-election-gavin-newsom_n_624a6134e4b098174502afe4

no lnx

Why Michael Shellenberger, A Centrist, Is Challenging California Gov. Gavin Newsom

Shellenberger, an author who was a registered Democrat until last year, faces an uphill campaign in California's nonpartisan, top-two primary system.

Daniel Marans

Apr. 4, 2022, 10:00 AM EDT | Updated Apr. 4, 2022

Michael Shellenberger and his wife Helen Lee, a sociologist, at their home in Berkeley, California. He believes that other Newsom challengers are hampered by their ties to the GOP.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) defeated a conservative campaign to recall him in September by nearly 24 percentage points.

But with the Golden State struggling to address a rise in violent crime and outdoor homeless encampments in major cities, Newsom critic Michael Shellenberger, a centrist author and nonprofit leader, sees an opening to succeed where previous challengers have failed.

“I’m just heartbroken by the human tragedy on our streets and sidewalks and highways and parks,” Shellenberger told HuffPost. “It’s completely unnecessary.”

Running for governor, Shellenberger explained, is “just a logical evolution of my advocacy to reform our policies on drugs, mental illness, housing, energy, and education.”

A Berkeley resident and founder of the advocacy group Environmental Progress, Shellenberger has authored two books that aim to puncture left-leaning pieties from the perspective of a moderate liberal who shares some of the left’s overarching goals.

Shellenberger’s newer tome, “San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities,” is a critique of the “housing first” and harm reduction approaches to homelessness that he believes have at once failed to improve the living standards of unsheltered people in California and actively undermined the quality of life in the communities where those people live.

Shellenberger proposes as an alternative that the state scale up its capacity to provide safe, indoor shelter beds to those living on the street, but also practice a kind of “tough love” with people suffering from drug addiction in the interest of forcing them out of outdoor encampments and into treatment facilities or shelters. He also envisions consolidating the state’s maze of city, county and state-level mental-health service agencies into a single entity he calls “CalPsych” that would efficiently deploy resources to the state’s trouble spots.

“The Beatles were wrong: love is not all you need,” said Shellenberger, summarizing his critique of the activist left. “You also need hard work and discipline and rules and civilization.”

Rather than a Republican-leaning state, Shellenberger cites the Netherlands, where he conducted research for “San Fransicko,” as his policy model.

“My goal is that we look more like Amsterdam, not more like Houston,” he said.

Republicans have long lambasted Newsom as a naive opportunist who is too beholden to left-wing experts and activist groups to adequately address the state’s homelessness crisis and other problems.

In a deeply Democratic state, however, Newsom has benefited from the conservatism of his adversaries. A key reason he was able to easily dispatch the 2021 recall effort was that he could credibly depict his main rival, right-wing radio host Larry Elder, as a Donald Trump acolyte who was too extreme for California.

What makes Shellenberger’s candidacy potentially unique is that he lacks the ideological baggage of Elder, or even state Sen. Brian Dahle, a conservative Republican and farmer who is also challenging Newsom in the state’s nonpartisan “jungle” primary on June 7. Shellenberger instead is closer in character to figures like New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), a moderate critic of certain left-wing dogmas.

Shellenberger supports abortion rights, gun safety regulation, the $15 minimum wage, universal health care, collective bargaining rights, and alternatives to incarceration for drug-related violations of the law.

Shellenberger said he was a registered Democrat until April 2021, when he switched to “no party preference” — California’s term for independent voters. He was a vocal proponent of recalling Newsom, but supported the candidacy of former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a moderate Republican whose vote total among recall supporters was dwarfed by Elder’s.

“California is a tarnished jewel,” Shellenberger said. “The threats to it are very severe. But on the flip side, we have everything it takes for us to regain our former glory.”

“There’s no reason that we can’t, but I do think you need to have a bit more of a liberal view” than Republicans are offering, he added.

“My goal is that we look more like Amsterdam, not more like Houston.”

Shellenberger focuses his criticism of Newsom — and the activist left that he believes is too influential in Newsom’s administration — on the ways that the governor has approached housing, crime, education, energy and environmental policy.

Shellenberger maintains that better and more effective policing requires more funding, not less. He opposes affirmative action and public-school teacher tenure, and supports a combination of denser urban housing and greater suburban development.

He is also an outspoken critic of some environmentalists’ opposition to nuclear energy and what he sees as their unwarranted pessimism, which were the subjects of his 2020 book, “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.”

“I oppose the attacks on civilization — whether they’re coming from the extreme left in the form of radical ‘woke-ism,’ which wants to have different rights for different people based on whether they’re victims or oppressors, or the attacks from the right, which have attempted to delegitimize our electoral system and regularly invent wild conspiracy theories,” he said.

Without the backing of either major political party, Shellenberger faces an uphill climb in his bid to unseat Newsom. Newsom had a $25-million campaign war chest at the end of 2021.

Shellenberger got a late start, deciding to run only after Faulconer ruled out a bid.

Thanks to the relative dearth of big-name candidates though, Shellenberger hopes to come in second in California’s nonpartisan, top-two primaries, and then consolidate the support of centrist and conservative voters ahead of the general election in November. He already has the backing of some prominent figures in the state’s influential technology industry, including WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who have contributed the legal maximum to his campaign.

What’s more, Shellenberger sees signs that the tide is turning on left-wing policies in California. For example, voters ousted three of San Francisco’s left-wing school board members in February, and the effort to recall left-wing San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin this June appears to be picking up steam.

And in Los Angeles, the mayoral race has been dominated by debates over how to handle the city’s homelessness crisis. In that contest, Rep. Karen Bass (D), a progressive, has rankled some progressive activists with her tough-on-crime rhetoric as she seeks to neutralize the candidacy of real estate billionaire Rick Caruso, who is running on a more conventional, center-right platform.

Shellenberger sees a nonpartisan centrist coalition emerging in California that he is poised to tap.

“The real hope here is that I’m somebody that can try to bring folks together around a pretty common-sense agenda of universal [mental-health care], of a shelter-first approach to homelessness, and of greater parental choice in education, along with high standards to make sure that disadvantaged kids also get the education they need,” he said.

Shellenberger’s candidacy is the first test of the electoral appeal of a heterodox contingent of public intellectuals and media personalities that journalist Bari Weiss — a friend of Shellenberger’s — dubbed the “intellectual dark web.”

To wit, he plans to rely on both mainstream media outlets and less-conventional sources of news and commentary. Shellenberger was the featured guest on Thursday’s episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where he got the chance to speak about his candidacy for nearly three hours to Rogan’s estimated audience of about 11 million listeners. (Shellenberger does not share Rogan’s skepticism of the relative benefits of COVID-19 vaccines.)

Shellenberger acknowledges, however, that his brainy style and preference for policy discussion may require some adjustment as he hits the campaign trail.

“I’ve created a lot of prose,” he said, referring to his books and articles. “And now we need to turn it into poetry.”

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The Worst Possible Candidate for Governor

BY AMY WESTERVELT – 30 MAR 2022 – Today a new episode of The Joe Rogan Experience drops featuring climate delay grifter extraordinaire Michael Shellenberger, who apparently is now running for governor. The phrase "high on his own supply" comes to mind.

At any rate, it reminded me of a piece I commissioned for Drilled over a year ago from investigative journalist Paul Thacker on Shellenberger and the Breakthrough Institute he co-founded, and why the media continuously gives both unearned credit. Niether Shellenberger nor his co-founder Ted Nordhause would talk to Paul because he'd written pieces that were critical of them in the past, but I didn't think we could ethically run the story without speaking to them both, so I did. Spent about two hours on each conversation and came away feeling like Shellenberger was unstable and Nordhaus was nowhere near as smart as he clearly thought he was. At the time, I opted not to run the piece. Neither Shellenberger nor BTI seemed that powerful, so it felt more like gossip than like information the public needed to hear.

Now the math has changed. If Shellenberger was on Rogan for three hours spouting his particular brand of cherry-picked data and debate-me bro nonsense as part of his campaign for governor, I think the public—and Californians in particular—need to know what they're dealing with here.  The piece is below, and there will be a bonus podcast episode tomorrow with my interview with Shellenberger for subscribers. You can upgrade to a paid subscription via the button below if you're not already.

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via drilled

https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/the-new-denial-is-delay-at-the-breakthrough?s=r

the New Denial Is Delay

How an attempt to revolutionize the environmental movement became a push to delay action on climate change.

By Paul D. Thacker

In October 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the founders of a scrappy Bay Area think tank called The Breakthrough Institute, published “The Death of Environmentalism,” an essay that argued the environmental movement had failed. To knock back critics, the duo constantly underlined their environmental credentials and years of experience providing public relations advice to green groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

Seeking to define themselves as different from run-of-the-mill climate skeptics, Shellenberger told a reporter around that time, “We’re not like Bjorn Lomborg or whatever.” Lomborg, of course, is the Danish climate contrarian best known for the fact-challenged book Cool It and, more recently, False Alarm.

A few years after seeking to differentiate the Breakthrough Institute from Lomborg, Shellenberger joinedthe Danish writer on a panel at Brown University, where both urged more tempered rhetoric on climate change. As reported by the Brown Daily Herald, Shellenberger argued that climate change experts dismissed him and Lomborg because policy experts did not allow for their “alternative voices.”

[janus forum pix]

More than a decade later, Shellenberger has left the Breakthrough Institute, but little else has changed. Both Shellenberger and Lomborg have released new books—as in the past, experts immediately savaged them. In a review at Yale 360, Pacific Institute emeritus president Peter Gleick wrote, “Bad science and bad arguments abound in 'Apocalypse Never' by Michael Shellenberger.” Taking a pickaxe to Lomborg’s book False Alarm, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the New York Times, “This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. It’s nominally about air pollution. It’s really about mind pollution.”

--

A decade after the Breakthrough Institute burst on the scene firing shots at Big Green, Shellenberger followed Sierra Club president Mike Brune onto the stage for Brainstorm Green, Fortune Magazine’s 2014 conference for environmental leaders. After opening remarks from Brune, dressed the part of an environmental nonprofit boss in boring suit and tie, Shellenberger stepped up to the podium in slacks and a fitted shirt—uniform-ready to host an inspiring Ted Talk.

He then proceeded to berate Brune for failing to offer real solutions to climate change.

By this point, Shellenberger no longer felt the need to namecheck his environmental roots before launching a missile at Big Green. He recounted how, in contrast to Brune and his ineffective Sierra Club, he and Breakthrough co-founder Ted Nordhaus had successfully lobbied for the New Apollo Project, a coalition advocating for cleantech and renewable energy. Shellenberger added that the New Apollo later convinced the Obama administration to put $150 billion into a stimulus bill.

After leaving the podium, Shellenberger sat down next to Brune to continue the debate. Brune then punched back, “We operate differently from your Breakthrough Institute. We are not a think tank; we are a group that gets results...on the ground.”

With a grin and a shrug,Shellenberger quipped, “We had pretty good results with the stimulus, actually.”

The sparring was vintage Breakthrough: tiny, Left Coast think tank smacks down Big Environment for sclerotic thinking and green solutions less palatable than last week’s stale, organic, whole grain muffins. Also standard: Shellenberger’s Apollo parable relied on a string of selective facts, loudly paraded onto stage for political theater.

Started in the early 2000s, the Apollo Alliance banded together dozens of labor unions and green groups in a coalition that advocated for federal funding to advance technologies and create jobs for clean energy. Members included everyone from the NAACP, SEIU, Greenpeace, Tides Foundation, League of Conservation Voters, and the AFL-CIO. Anyone who was anyone began adopting Apollo-like rhetoric, including Bill Clinton, and The Nationeditor and publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel. Not surprisingly, a founding board member of Apollo was the Sierra Club’s executive director, which makes it odd that Shellenberger would try to seize sole credit for the coalition’s purported success, let alone use it against Brune.

In reality, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were two of the many, many people that helped get the coalition off the ground. And in 2005, nearly a decade before that public spat with Brune, Shellenbergerannounced that he had left Apollo over disagreements with members. In a recent interview with Drilled,Shellenberger put it more bluntly: “I was shitcanned from Apollo over ‘Death of Environmentalism.’”

Despite that happening more than fifteen years ago, Shellenberger still references his time with the Apollo Alliance when plugging his tale as a hero to save the planet from climate change. In January 2020, for example, when he testified before the House Science Committee, Shellenberger noted “In 2003 I co-founded the Apollo Alliance to advocate for a Green New Deal, which we called a ‘New Apollo Project.’” He added that Obama’s stimulus (passed in 2009) funded many Apollo proposals for renewables, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles.

In speaking with Drilled, Shellenberger claimed to have had a hand in that stimulus as well, after meeting with Obama’s policy team. “And the Obama people, they got it right away,” Shellenberger said. “And then the rest is history. They basically were like, ‘Yeah, we want to do a big investment in clean energy.’ And that was the stimulus investment.”

A recently retired Hill staffer, who did not want his name in the media, said he worked for decades on appropriations for the House but never heard of the Breakthrough Institute. He wondered how Shellenberger—or anyone—could claim personal credit for passing billions of dollars in renewable energy policy with just one or two meetings, when the Hill is swarming with professional lobbyists working around the clock.

“He’s constantly reinventing his story to build the appearance of power and access,” said Kert Davies, who spent 13 years at Greenpeace examining energy policy, before founding the Climate Investigations Center in 2013. Davies said he first met Shellenberger in the early 2000s, when Shellenberger was vying to get a communications contract with Greenpeace.  “He takes credit for things [that happened] years after he was boosted from the Apollo Alliance. He can say whatever he wants, and it’s all vapor because the organization is now gone.”

“They aren’t players up here on the Hill,” a Democratic Committee staffer said of The Breakthrough Institute. This staffer has spent almost two decades in Congress working on environmental and climate change policy but is not authorized to speak to the media. “They spend most of their time shooting spitballs at mainstream environmental organizations and that makes them a bright, shiny object to some journalists.”

Nonetheless, when Nordhaus and Shellenberger flew from California to Washington in 2009 to discuss climate policy, NPR interviewed them outside the Senate Dirksen Office Building, and reported their funder Peter Teague’s claims that President Obama had adopted Breakthrough’s “language and visionary rhetoric.”

--

Jockeying to position themselves as the smart, thoughtful adults on environmental policy is core to the Breakthrough model, and to Shellenberger's approach post-Breakthrough as well, along with constant bashing of “Big Environment.” In 2005, after Greenpeace created the website Exxon Secrets to track the oil company’s funding for climate change disinformation, Mother Jones published a sprawling investigationdetailing how Exxon was throwing buckets of cash at forty organizations that attacked the scientific consensus on climate.

Senators then sent Exxon a letter demanding that they cease paying for the “effective climate change denial myth” and Britain’s Royal Society called on Exxon to stop financing American groups that “misinformed the public about climate change.”

[royal soc ltr]

In response, Nordhaus and Shellenberger penned a 2007 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Look who's in denial about global warming now”) that belittled Mother Jones for investigating Exxon’s finances and Greenpeace for creating Exxon Secrets. “The truth is that global warming deniers have had little impact on public attitudes,” the duo wrote.

Eight years after this Nordhaus-Shellenberger op-ed, Inside Climate News, The Los Angeles Times, and The Columbia School of Journalism published another large-scale investigation of what Exxon knew about climate change and the company’s subsequent deception. Once again Shellenberger defended Exxon.

Shellenberger’s denial that Exxon suppressed or spun what it knew about climate change back in the 1970s was even  referenced by mainstream climate denialists. In his climate denier bible, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, CFACT communications director Marc Morano cites Michael Shellenberger as proof that Exxon in “many cases advocated for climate policy” and that if the company did spend on denial it was “a drop in the bucket compared to green money.”

[exxon knew myth grfx]

From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change]

Both Shellenberger and Morano are lifelong comms experts who now claim to be reporting on these issues as “journalists.” In the documentary Purple Mountains, Morano says, “I come at these issues as an investigative journalist.” On the website of his new organization Environmental Progress, Shellenberger'sbio reads, “Michael is a leading environmental journalist who has broken major stories.” These stories Shellenberger cites are posts at his Forbes blog, not pieces that go through the usual processes of reporting, editing, and fact-checking that constitute journalism.

In another troubling example of Breakthrough’s ties to climate denial, a member of their board is Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute. Four years back, 19 Senators took to the Senate floor in a week-long eventto denounce the Manhattan Institute and other fossil fuel-funded groups that deny climate science and stymie legislation. Today, the Manhattan Institute still lobbies against climate policy and spends much of its time putting out reports that poke holes in renewable energy technology.

According to Exxon Secrets, the Manhattan Institute has received $1.39 million from Exxon since 1992, with $75,000 donated in 2018, the last year for which records are available.

Beltway insiders may dismiss their influence on policy, but since launching the Breakthrough Institute in 2003, Nordhaus and Shellenberger have generated gigawatts of media buzz along with a pile of disapproval, taller than a West Virginia coal mountain. Scientists and environmentalists have noted the duo’s penchant for portraying the fossil fuel industry as a tiny corporate Goliath picked on by David, the environmental giant.

But Breakthrough’s comparisons of  international green groups with oil companies and industry groups make for poor math, said Robert J. Brulle, a Visiting Professor of Environment and Society at Brown University.  When Brulle looked at the money spent on lobbying  for climate change in America for one year, he found that environmental groups made up only 3.30% of all funding, with various industry sectors spending the rest.

Their counterintuitive narratives, headlined with sparkly buzzwords and backfilled with selective facts, make sense when you remember that Nordhaus and Shellenberger forged their expertise in public relations.

In the tech-crazed, libertarian San Francisco of the early 2000s, Breakthrough’s ideology perhaps made sense to those who saw the environmental movement as stuck in the past, unwilling to embrace necessary technology, and too resistant to corporate solutions. This has caused a few moments of public embarrassment for Breakthrough such as promoting fracking as a “clean energy” alternative. Today, Breakthrough eagerly embraces nuclear and solar energy, and cheerleads for GMO agriculture, as preferred technologies to electrify and feed the world. Shellenberger, meanwhile, is all in on nuclear—part of the difference of opinion that drove him out of Breakthrough in the first place.

Over the years, Breakthrough also began defending oil companies and cozying up to climate contrarians. Denying that they traffic in climate denial, while constantly ending up in the same room with contrarians and climate denialists, is a common dilemma for the Breakthrough crowd, as are spine twisting arguments to soften human impacts on the planet and hype technology solutions. It’s a subtle, more modern version of denial and catnip to some journalists. When celebrated data cruncher Nate Silver relaunched his 538 website in 2014, for example, one of his first hires was Breakthrough Fellow Roger Pielke Jr.

A professor of science policy at the University of Colorado, Pielke Jr. has a long track record of contrarian writing on climate change and receiving invites to promote his views at congressional hearings from Republicans, who deny the science of climate change. The deceased, famed climate science policy scholar Stephen Schneider once referred to Pielke Jr. as a “self-aggrandizer who sets up straw men, knocks them down, and takes credit for being the honest broker to explain the mess.”

It only took Pielke Jr. a brief time as a 538 contributor to live up to Schneider’s claim. In a baffling article, Pielke Jr. diminished the effect climate change has on damages caused by hurricanes, blasting Silver with a category 5 level shit storm. When Silver then appeared on “The Daily Show” to discuss the new launch of 538, Jon Stewart jabbed, “You are taking a rash of shit in a week and a half like no one I've seen in a long time."

After Silver commissioned a response by an MIT scientist that largely debunked the analysis by Pielke Jr., he later left 538. Rushing to protect their Senior Fellow, the Breakthrough’s Alex Trembath then posted a blog arguing that the science actually agreed with Pielke Jr.

Since that event, scientists have now begun to cite climate change as the cause for specific natural disasters, and have published research explaining how climate change has likely increased hurricane wind speeds and the amount of rain hurricanes dump on cities. A few months ago, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that human-caused global warming is making larger hurricanes more common.

But in his book Apocalypse Never, Shellenberger resurrects Pielke Jr’s old work to breathe new life into claims that climate change is not making natural disasters worse. In his classic debate-me-bro style, Shellenberger argues that the United Nation’s definition of “natural disaster” means that technically climate change is making extreme weather, not natural disasters, worse.

These Talmudic quibbles might be lost on Americans whose homes and possessions have been destroyed in climate fueled forest fires out West, or whose communities on the East coast have been drowned by hurricanes made more powerful by global warming.

Michael Shelleberger often relies on the debate-me-bro routine when called out for misstatements. As catastrophic fires began torching the West coast, media outlets began running stories that linked these fires with climate change. Nonetheless, Shellenberger hopped on Fox News to shout that “forest management,” not climate change was fanning the flames—a neat trick, and the same meme President Trump deployed at a Las Vegas campaign rally to shift the public’s attention from climate change. But to Shellenberger “because we’ve focused on other things like building renewables” the western United States is now going up in smoke.

When someone then tweeted that he was wrong, he challenged that person to a debate. Yes, seriously.

For both Shellenberger and Nordhaus, GMOs are part of the technology fix for climate. Nordhaus described Breakthrough’s take on ecomodernismas “you can either minimize the impact of humans on nature or harmonize human societies with nature—we don’t think you can do both, and we focus on the former.” Intensive agriculture, they agree, reduces the amount of land required to grow food, although Nordhaus is a bit more measured in his support.

“If you don't want to turn the entire planet into a gigantic farm, you're gonna have to continue to figure out how to produce food more intensively,” Nordhaus said. “But obviously I think some of the GMO stuff gets oversimplified by advocates, too.”

In 2015, before Shellenberger’s departure from the organization, Breakthrough released another sparkly, tectonic shifting declaration titled “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” that bedazzled reporters. To help generate buzz, they unveiled the declaration on a splashy website that documented coverage of the manifesto in multiple media outlets. In reality, the document rehashed arguments that as humans sculpt the planet, the Earth has entered a new era. But the manifesto also added some spicy Breakthrough reasoning: human impacts are a benefit, not a deficit.

The ideological binding of The Breakthrough Institute’s 2015 “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” started coming unglued within months, when  Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger hopped a plane to England for an event on restoring science to environmentalism. Here, they planned to sell the declaration to British reporters. The press conference was hosted by conservative MP Owen Paterson, a UK climate denier who almost halved the UK’s climate preparedness budget when he was environmental secretary.

When announcing the press conference, Paterson called on the public to abandon the “relentless pessimism of the environmental movement” and warned in a Telegraph op-ed that “the Green Blob still infests the official bureaucracy with its influence.” Other conference panelists included Mark Lynas, a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, and Matt Ridley, a British science writer noted for climate denial screeds.

When critics argued that the event provided a platform for climate denialists, DesmogBlog reported that Shellenberger dismissed detractors with “Fuck you all, we’re going to go to the press conference.” Audience members still complained that Breakthrough had chosen to associate with climate denialists and anti-environmentalists.

Nordhaus explained this strategy as sort of a means to an end in a recent interview with Drilled. “I've given talks to groups of climate skeptics, climate deniers—you know, real climate deniers,” he said. “You can have a variety of viewpoints on this question without having to put a tin foil hat on. And the thing is, you get to the end of those talks and if you go, ‘OK, so who supports nuclear energy?’ Everybody in the room supports nuclear energy.”

In late 2015, Shellenberger left the Breakthrough Institute to start Environmental Progress, which focuses on nuclear energy. A video at the organization’s website shows Shellenberger clad in a yellow t-shirt giving a Ted Talk. The summer after starting his group, Shellenberger partnered with employees of the nuclear energy industry to lead the March for Environmental Hope, which was billed as the “first-ever pro-nuclear march.” Attendees—which included a half dozen Exelon employees, who flew in from jobs working at nuclear reactors scattered across the country—held protests outside the Bay area offices of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We support our employees’ efforts to advocate on environmental and climate-related issues that are important to them,” said a spokesperson from Exelon. “However, this was a voluntary employee activity and not part of an organized campaign. All participants attended voluntarily and were not asked to represent the company or its views.”

Months later, Shellenberger led a pro-nuclear march in Chicago that was said to be inspired by the Civil Rights March on Washington, the Stonewall Riots, and Gandhi’s Salt March. Counter protestors denounced Environmental Progress as “astroturf.”

When not writing for the Environmental Progress website, Shellenberger sometimes amplifies his views on Spiked, a British website funded in part by the Koch Brothers that trafficks in climate denial. He also runs a blog at Forbes where he ridicules climate policy while advocating for nuclear energy. In one example at Forbes, he cited studies by Ed Calabrese, a professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as proof that fears of nuclear radiation are overblown. Shellenberger’s story picked up on a theme first introduced by the Breakthrough Institute where they interviewed Calabrese about his research.

As reported last year by The Los Angeles Times and HuffPost, Calabrese has long excited the tobacco, chemical, and nuclear industries with research called “hormesis” that argues tiny amounts of pollution and radiation are actually good for people. Public health experts have dismissed Calabrese’s hormesis studies as a type of religion, although Trump officials have shown interest.

“Shellenberger is a propagandist,” said Paul Dorfman, Founder and Chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and Honorary Senior Research Associate at the University College London. Dorfman said that while some experts can make a case for nuclear energy that he disagrees with, Shellenberger is not one of them. “He’s not a scientist. He just comes up with stuff.” Dismissing the hormesis theory as “quasi science” and “tosh” Dorfman said there is no safe dose of radiation. “This is a fact. And all the regulatory bodies know this.”

“My impression is that [Shellenberger] is sincere in his views that nuclear power needs to play a larger role in combating climate change,” said David Lochbaum, a former safety instructor at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who has retired from the Union of Concerned Scientists. However,  Lochbaum noted by email: “Few technologies have a risk/reward scheme such that one bad day at one place can outweigh decades of good days.” He added that, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, “Japan is re-learning this lesson.”

To promote his book, Shellenberger added another piece to the canon of environmental apologist lit, a post on his Forbes blog entitled “On behalf of environmentalists, I apologize for the climate scare.” The post was removed a day or two later, which Shellenberger decried as censorship, and then used to promote his book. However, Forbes confirmed with Drilledthat they pulled the post not because of any opinions Shellenberger espoused but because in blatantly trying to sell his book in the post, he had violated the site’s guidelines about self-promotion.

Nonetheless, blogging at Forbes remains critical to Shellenberger’s profile. They are the only stories he can point to when he describes himself as a “leading environmental journalist.”

“We flood the American public with a tsunami of crap every day in the media,” said Gary Schwitzer, an adjunct professor at U of Minnesota School of Public Health, and Publisher of Health News Review. He said Forbes is particularly terrible because it hosts fringe contributors with undeclared industry ties, and who write dreck. This is harmful, Schwitzer said, because it distracts the public from real news. “That’s what really pisses me off.”

“In some ways, it's just like a fabulous performance art piece that he's doing right now,” Nordhaus told Drilled of Shellenberger’s campaign to promote his book. “It’s like Andy Kaufman doing environmentalism in a way that environmentalists could sort of see how dogmatic it gets. How sort of shrill it gets, and how angry it gets. How kind of dark and conspiratorial it gets.”

Despite attempts to create space between themselves and Shellenberger, Breakthrough has also helped to prop him up. Penning a tepid analysis of the recent books by Shellenberger and Lomborg, Breakthrough’s Alex Trembath wrote that each author “wisely rejects some of the more outlandish environmental orthodoxies,” and added, “In place of catastrophism, each book offers optimism.” Trembath’s review appeared in National Review, long a venue for climate denial and disinformation.

“Breakthrough does not put out high quality work,” said Robert Brulle of Brown University. “In fact, they distort research. What they do is work the refs, which is the media. And the media needs to be more discriminating.”

“If there’s one thing these guys are good at, it is getting the media to move a story for them,” said Kert Davies of Climate Investigations. Complimenting Breakthrough’s skills in public relations, Davies said their counterintuitive “man bites dog” message gives Breakthrough an advantage over environmental organizations, which keep selling the same tired story.

“They are good at PR,” he said. “It’s where they came from. They’re good PR guys pretending to be experts.

Emily Gertz edited this piece. Amy Westervelt contributed additional reporting.

===

===

jeez covid fail, add to venn list

mma uses for evidence of fkery:

shill twt

Conversation

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

Why are they even talking about climate right now?

There is no scientific basis for predicting millions of deaths from climate change

But Coronavirus could kill 10 million or more IN NEXT ~12 MONTHS

People are deeply confused about the science here

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

I turned in my expert comments to IPCC today, but could hardly see why given what is happening

People are confused

There has always been strong evidence that a virus could kill millions

There has never been strong evidence that temp increase of 2-4 degrees could

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

Bravo to

@jaketapper

for asking about grossly hypocritical opposition to fracking for natural gas by

@BernieSanders

Natural gas reduced emissions 11 times more than solar energy and 50 percent more than wind energy in the U.S.

6:34 PM · Mar 15, 2020·TweetDeck

28

Retweets

125

Likes

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

Replying to

@ShellenbergerMD

@jaketapper

and

@BernieSanders

Many experts have compared climate change to virus epidemics like coronavirus over the years

There's no comparison.

Experts have near-unanimously over the decades have ranked disease epidemics as far, far more dangerous and catastrophic than climate change is likely to be

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

In his 2008 “Global Catastrophes and Trends,” Vaclav Smil doesn’t even include climate change in his chart of “fatal discontinuities, which estimates fatalities & probabilities, with megawars, influenza, volcanoes, tsunamis, and asteroids ranked from most lethal to least

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

After decades of alarmism about nuclear energy, overpopulation, rainforest destruction, species extinction, and the climate, it's understandable that many were skeptical of covid-19 alarmism

At first, I was skeptical, too, & only cancelled a Europe trip at the last minute.

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

But they were never the same for experts

Viruses kill people outright

Climate change magnifies other risks

It is an indirect background factor

There will never be death attribution to climate change like there is when lungs stop working from covid-19

People should know that

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

Can climate change make viruses worse?

Maybe.

There are certainly stories one could tell about it doing so

But you don't need climate change to get disease epidemic risks like covid-19

We certainly didn't need it for Spanish Flu, which killed 20-50M, more than WWI

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

Similarly, you don't need climate change to get the bad fires in Amazon, California, or Australia

Human development in the form of roads and housing, and fire suppression allowing for the build-up of wood fuel, are sufficient factors for hotter fires & more acres burned

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

Climate change and viruses aren't comparable

It's like comparing climate change and weather events like hurricanes, cyclones, and forest fires

Climate is a background factor not a direct factor

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

What covid-19 and natural disasters have in common is that our response to them matters greatly

Competency matters

Death rates and economic damage from extreme weather events dropped 80-90% during the last 40 years, due to more competent preparedness

We need same for disease

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

·

Mar 15, 2020

It is notable to me that South Korea did some of the best early response to covid-19 [NICE PIVOT]

It's a country I have spent a lot of time in over last few years, and admire greatly, for its work making nuclear plants safer and more efficient

Same with Korean trains. Clean, reliable, cheap

Relevant people

Michael Shellenberger

@ShellenbergerMD

Next Governor of California : Cal Peace :: Bestselling author, “Apocalypse Never” "San Fransicko" :: Time “Hero of Environment" :: MD = my initials. Not a doc

Jake Tapper

@jaketapper

Dad; husband; anchor of

@TheLeadCNN

&

@CNNSOTU

, plus coming on

@CNNplus

@TapperBookClub

; Author of

@TheOutpostbook

,

@TheHellfireClub

, and The

@Devil_May_Dance

Bernie Sanders

@BernieSanders

U.S. Senator for Vermont. Not me, us.

Trending now

What’s happening

War in Ukraine

---

BAK BAK some)

==

see brkthru shill-enberger

i'm not selling out, I'm buying in!

see lomborg shuffle (clintel covid fight covid not carbon)

820 aha: this is variant last stage of fallback strategy: 1) not real  2) real but not anthro  3)  agw but too expensive to fix (wreck gnp) 4: we can afford to fix it, but we must be smart/targeted w/ $  4a we can't really afford to fix big global warming, but we can do smaller green humanitarian stuff that will make some ppl's lives better and might let us move incrementally to fix climate [and BTW the worst effect/chaos in in far future if ever]

4th phase denialism to DELAYISM

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/kremlin-praises-fox-news-fox-personalities-desperately-try-link-environmental-groups

as Russia’s foreign minister praises Fox News coverage of war in Ukraine, the network has exploited the crisis to villainize the environmental movement, capitalizing on the global economic sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s invasion to recycle previously debunked claims that Russia is secretly funding  “green campaigns” against oil drilling and fracking in the U.S.

Fox hosts and personalities took their cues from a March 10 letter from Republican members of the House Energy Committee asking three environmental groups – the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club – to provide evidence of any financial support from Russia. Yet, as the Washington Post Fact Checker explains, the “bogus” allegations in the letter are remnants of a 2017 scandal concocted by Republicans to distract from an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Here are some examples of Fox pushing this lie:

Fox personalities have been criticized for pro-Kremlin commentary – and the Kremlin itself has noticed, as exposed by minister Sergey Lavrov's remarks about Fox and a recently reported memo from the Russian government that directed the country’s media outlets to promote as many clips of Fox News star Tucker Carlson as possible. (The Kremlin’s propaganda and Carlson’s own rhetoric have remarkable similarities.) The narratives parroted by Fox to earn this praise – from blaming Joe Biden for rising gas prices to suggestions the war in Ukraine is pushed by elitist self interests – are baseless and incendiary. Their recent push of easily debunked anti-environmental conspiracies are no different.

The allegations stem from whether the aforementioned environmental groups received donations from the Sea Change Foundation, an environmental philanthropy group run by billionaire Nat Simons. In 2015, a baseless report from the GOP lobbyist-led front group Environmental Policy Alliance accused the law firm that set up a Bermuda-based company financing Sea Change of having extremely vague ties to an adviser to Putin. The firm refuted these allegations as “completely false and irresponsible,” saying, “We can state categorically that at no point did this philanthropic organization receive or expend funds from Russian sources or Russian-connected sources.” In fact, the sole source of the foundation’s funding is the Simons family. Despite the appearance of Kremlin-linked donations being obliterated, that did not stop 2017 House GOP members from requesting an investigation, and now recycling the debunked claims.

The network’s hosts and guests – primarily recently promoted prime-time stars Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld – are also conflating a separate online article from Fox that quotes “experts” like the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano noting that “Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe.” (Carafano has been a vocal critic of climate science and recently co-authored a piece describing the Biden administration’s climate policies as a “titanic disaster in waiting.”) The article’s so-called “experts” also included right-wing media’s favorite climate contrarian, Michael Shellenberger, a notorious natural gas advocate who’s pushed lies about the cost and efficiency of renewable energy.  

The Republicans point to a 2017 national intelligence report that highlighted a Russian state news channel, RT America, that ran “anti-fracking programming,” and was trying to expand its U.S. audience. Not only did the report not provide any evidence that the channel had been successful, but as of March 4, RT America announced it was “ceasing production.” It is simply preposterous to believe that over a decade of fracking commentary was driven by the network prior to its dissolution.

Some efforts against European drilling and fracking have been linked to Kremlin propaganda designed to increase dependency on Russian oil exports, but with each reshaping of the conspiracy theory, there has been no evidence of any similarly funded successful campaign in the United States.

---

---

ref 1

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-funding-environmental-groups-europe-united-state

no lnx pix [vid?]

RUSSIA Published March 15, 2022

Russia duped Europe into energy dependence by funding 'rabid environmental groups': experts

Expert James Carafano: 'Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe'

By Emma Colton | Fox News

[soc med]

[Biden engaged in 'war on American energy,' finally banned Russia oil over bad news cycle, House rep says

NEW

You can now listen to Fox News articles! BeyondWords]

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent. As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community. 

"The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE: LIVE UPDATES]

Back in June 2014, just months after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, European leaders sounded off that Russia was using disinformation operations with environmental groups to steer countries away from fracking in favor of Russian oil.

"I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas," Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark and then-secretary-general of NATO, said, according to the Guardian.

NATO’s press office passed the remarks off as Rasmussen’s personal views, but one NATO official sounded the alarm that Russia’s grip on Europe was tightening.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEMAND ANSWERS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS OVER ALLEGATION OF COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA

"We don't go into the details of discussions among allied leaders, but Russia has been using a mix of hard and soft power in its attempt to recreate a sphere of influence, including through a campaign of disinformation on many issues, including energy. In general, the potential for Russia using energy supplies as a means of putting pressure on European nations is a matter of concern. No country should use supply and pricing terms as tools of coercion," the NATO official told the Guardian in 2014.

Environmental groups have meanwhile feverishly denied any ties to Russia.

"The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at NATO HQ," Greenpeace told the Guardian in 2014.

By 2016, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria had all banned fracking, either temporarily or permanently. Russia’s power over European energy grew large by 2022, providing roughly 40% of the continent’s natural gas supply. Lithuania, for example, gets 83% of its oil imports from Russia, Poland gets 58% and Finland 80%, The Hill reported. [DENMARK?]

"You're not really an independent nation if you depend on foreign countries so heavily for your energy supplies," Michael Shellenberger, the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never," told Fox News earlier this month.

EUROPE'S GREEN ENERGY POLICIES STRENGTHENED PUTIN, MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER SAYS

Shellenberger said that 15 years ago, "Europe produced more natural gas than Russia," but that all changed as "Russia increased its natural gas production and Europe reduced it."

"Europe decided not to frack in large part in response to climate activists," Shellenberger told Fox News. "We now think there is strong evidence suggesting [the climate activists] were supported directly through financing from Russia." 

REPUBLICANS CALL ON YELLEN TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER RUSSIAN MONEY FINANCED USA GREEN GROUPS

In the U.S., Republican Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber sent a letter to then-Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin in 2017 arguing that Russia’s goal is to "suppress the widespread adoption of fracking in Europe and the U.S." by funding such environmental groups.

The two Republicans even cited former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who complained during a private 2014 speech about "phony environmental groups" pushing an anti-fracking agenda.

"We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia," Clinton said, according to excerpts leaked by WikiLeaks in 2016.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are now holding three environmental groups’ feet to the fire.

The Republicans, led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, are demanding that the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club disclose their ties to a San Francisco-based nongovernmental organization that Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly uses to wield power over American energy production.

[PIX: Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting in Moscow, Russia.

]

"Provided the public reporting of Putin's dark money influence in Europe and the concerns surrounding similar efforts in the United States, we write today to explore your connections with Sea Change," the Republicans wrote in the letter to the three groups last week. "Any action by President Putin, the Russian government, or Putin's allies to undermine American energy security must be addressed."

The three groups denied any ties in a previous comment to Fox News, describing the accusations as "completely false," "rooted in a smear campaign," and a phony "conspiracy theory."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

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"It is vital to our national security to know if Vladimir Putin, the Russian government, or Putin’s allies are meddling with America’s energy affordability and security. If the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, or Sierra Club have nothing to hide, then we look forward to seeing the evidence they provide by March 25th," House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican leader McMorris Rodgers told Fox News Digital. 

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ref {note many lnx are just to fox category/tag]

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-demand-answers-environmental-groups-collusion-russia

no lnx vid [interestingly on 3 22 pix of ukraine devastation]

REPUBLICANS Published March 10, 2022

House Republicans demand answers from environmental groups over allegation of collusion with Russia

The group's reportedly have ties to the Sea Change Foundation based in San Francisco

Kyle MorrisBy Kyle Morris | Fox News

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Vladimir Putin is laughing at the Biden administration: Charlie Hurt]

Fox News contributor tells Laura Ingraham that Vladimir Putin is sitting back laughing at the Biden administration.

[NEW

You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Listen to this article BeyondWords]

House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are calling on certain environmental groups to disclose their ties to a non-governmental organization which is, according to the committee, reportedly used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to make an impact on American energy production.

Three environmental groups – the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club – reportedly have ties to the San Francisco-based NGO environmental organization called the Sea Change Foundation, according to Republicans on the committee.

MARYLAND GOV. LARRY HOGAN WORKING ON ‘EMERGENCY SUSPENSION’ OF STATE GAS TAX]

In a letter sent to each of the three groups, Republicans inquired about the funding the groups have received from Sea Change since 2006 and called for disclosure of whether the groups "are aware of concerns that Sea Change may be a conduit for Russian funding."

"Provided the public reporting of Putin's dark money influence in Europe and the concerns surrounding similar efforts in the United States, we write today to explore your connections with Sea Change," the Republicans stated in the letter. "Any action by President Putin, the Russian government, or Putin's allies to undermine American energy security must be addressed."

In addition, the Republicans asked the groups if they have received funds or took a particular action after a request "from the Russian government or anyone connected with the Russian government."

All three of the groups, according to Republicans on the committee, were identified as top recipients of Sea Change grants since 2006. The letter was signed by more than 20 Congressional Republicans, including Energy and Commerce Committee Republican leader Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Wash., and ranking member Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich.

"If the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club have nothing to hide, then we look forward to seeing the evidence by March 25," a spokesperson for Energy and Commerce Republicans told Fox News.

In a response shared with Fox News, Bob Deans, the director of strategic engagement for the NRDC, suggested the "allegations are false" and are "rooted in a smear campaign."

"We receive no funding from the governments of Russia or China," Deans said. "We answer to our independent leadership, and we don’t do the bidding of any government – foreign or otherwise – in our work to advocate for commonsense environmental protections in the public interest. These allegations are rooted in a smear campaign orchestrated nearly a decade ago by fossil fuel interests and a right-wing think tank. They only serve then, as now, as a distraction."

Similarly, a statement provided to Fox News from the LCV said the "story is completely false and has been put to rest for years."

"We have no connections to Russia, or China, and have been an effective advocate for environmental protection for over 50 years," the group stated. "These false and poorly researched allegations are rooted in a nearly 10-year-old right-wing think tank and fossil fuel industry-funded smear campaign that gets revived every few years to serve as a distraction."

Natali Sevriukova reacts next to her house following a rocket attack the city of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022.]

In a statement shared with Fox News, Melinda Pierce, Sierra Club's legislative director, concluded the allegation of collusion is a "false conspiracy theory."

"This false conspiracy theory, invented by the same deceitful front groups paid to do polluters' and big tobacco’s dirty work, has been repeatedly debunked over its nearly 10-year existence," Pierce said. "The Sierra Club has no connections to Russia or China, and proudly fights for clean energy and climate action because this is what our planet requires, our families deserve, and what the overwhelming majority of Americans across the country demand."

Fox News did not receive an immediate response from the Sea Change Foundation.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Gasoline prices in America hit a record high this week amid Russia’s continued invasion into Ukraine and the announcement that the United States would suspend purchases of Russian oil. As of Thursday, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline reached $4.318, according to AAA data. Prices surpassed the $4 mark Sunday for the first time in 14 years.

The Republican members have requested a response to their questions by March 25.

Kyle Morris covers politics for Fox News. On Twitter: @RealKyleMorris.

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https://www.foxnews.com/world/europes-green-energy-policies-strengthened-putin-michael-shellenberger-says

ref to ?

no lnx [vid in bathrobe?]

DIGITAL ORIGINALS [VULNERABILITY PT??]

Published March 9, 2022

Europe's green energy policies strengthened Putin, Michael Shellenberger says

Europe's dependency on Russian energy empowers Putin in Ukraine conflict, Shellenberger says

By William Spruance , William Spruance | Fox News

Europe's green energy policies empowered Russian President Vladimir Putin and stripped Western countries of their ability to sanction Moscow effectively, according to the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never."

"You're not really an independent nation if you depend on foreign countries so heavily for your energy supplies," Michael Shellenberger told Fox News. He said European nations have become increasingly dependent on Russia for energy in recent years as they have adopted green policy initiatives.

The continent imports nearly 40% of its gas from Russia, according to the Associated Press. It consumes nearly five times as much oil as it produces, and Russia produces nearly four times as much oil as it consumes, according to British Petroleum.

Europe's dependency on Russian energy limits its ability to take actions such as imposing economic sanctions against Russia in response to the conflict in Ukraine, according to Shellenberger.

UKRAINE CONFLICT ‘HEIGHTENS THE RISK’ OF CHINESE-AMERICAN WAR, PROFESSOR SAYS]

"Fifteen years ago, Europe produced more natural gas than Russia," Shellenberger said. "Today, Russia exports three times more natural gas to Europe than Europe produces."

"That's due both to the fact that Russia increased its natural gas production and Europe reduced it," he added.

a

Green energy policies have made Europe dependent on Russia

"Europe decided not to frack in large part in response to climate activists," Shellenberger told Fox News. "We now think there is strong evidence suggesting [the climate activists] were supported directly through financing from Russia." 

Moscow intelligence agencies, for example, secretly supported European environmental groups in campaigns against fracking in order to keep the European Union dependent on Russian exports, according to a 2018 congressional report.

But environmental activist groups do not disclose their donors, so any benefactors of Russia’s donations remain unknown, according to Shellenberger. WHO DOES NOT DISCLOSE DONORS]

Additionally, Europeans became more reliant on Russian energy because of nuclear energy policies.

Putin "expanded nuclear power at home so that he could export more natural gas abroad rather than use it for electricity production," Shellenberger said. "Europe shut down its nuclear plants and declined to build new ones."

Russia's nuclear power capacity has increased by 33% since 2002, according to the World Nuclear Association. Germany's nuclear capacity has decreased by over 80% in that time period.

"That has proven to be catastrophic as the continent became increasingly dependent on Russia for energy imports," Shellenberger told Fox News.

Shellenberger described rising oil costs and foreign dependencies as "the worst energy crisis since 1973."

"I think the chances are very high that it's going to result in a global recession," Shellenberger told Fox News. "When oil prices reach these levels, they tend to trigger recessions." NOT ALARMIST AT ALL, LAST RECESSIONS CAUSED BY TRUMP COVID FAIL AND ENRON DEREG]

DataTrek Research co-founder Nicholas Colas recently told Barron's: "History shows that a 100% increase in oil prices over a year usually triggers a recession (1990, 2000, 2008). We’re not quite there yet, but we are getting closer by the day.

Crude oil reached $130 per barrel Sunday evening, according to CNBC. A year ago, it was $63.81.

Shellenberger said oil prices could hit $200 per barrel. [WELL QUALIFIED TO PREDICT]

European reliance on Russian energy leaves Western countries with little leverage against Putin in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, according to Shellenberger.

President Biden announced on Tuesday a ban on U.S. imports of Russia oil. Last year, the U.S. imported 7% of its petroleum from Russia, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

"Our hearts are with the Ukrainians," Shellenberger said. "We would love to be able to punish the Russians and stop importing their energy, but efforts to do that will make energy more expensive." [AND THUS NOT A SACRIFICE WOTH MAKING TO SAVED DEMOC TRUMP AND PUTIN TRYING TO DESTROY YOU TRAITOROUS FECK]

"It was always predictable," Shellenberger said of the energy crisis and European dependence on Russian energy. "This was all very apparent to people that were rational thinkers on energy."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Prosperity, sovereignty and energy independence are all interconnected, according to Shellenberger.

"There is no low-energy rich nation, just as there is no high-energy poor nation," [NIGERIA? VENEZUELA? IS RUSSIA RICH?] he said.

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"I hope it’s a wake-up call," Shellenberger told Fox News. "At best, we can hope to avoid a global recession, but that's going to require a significant expansion of energy supplies in the United States and Europe as quickly as we can." 

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replay of 2017 munchkin BS randy weber lamar :

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-yellen-investigate-russian-money-usa-green-groups

no lnx vid

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Published March 12, 2022

Republicans call on Yellen to investigate whether Russian money financed USA green groups

Republican Study Committee sends letter to Treasury Secretary to investigate

By Marisa Schultz | Fox News

Facebook..[soc med]

[Putin is 'committed to taking and controlling' Ukraine: Expert

Center for Strategic and International Studies Chair Anthony Cordesman says Russia appears to be reorganizing its military strategy.]

EXCLUSIVE: The head of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) has called on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to launch an investigation into whether Russia secretly funded U.S. green groups that advocate against domestic oil and gas production.

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., led a letter to Yellen Friday that cites a 2015 Washington Free Beacon report that suggested the California-based Sea Change Foundation may allegedly be a conduit for Russian oil interests in funneling money to groups like the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club and the Center for American Progress. 

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., is chair of the Republican Study Committee.

"Russia spent millions promoting anti-energy policies and politicians in the U.S.," Banks said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "Now, thanks to Biden’s war on domestic energy, U.S. oil production has dropped 10%, pushing up prices and enriching and emboldening Putin before he invaded Ukraine."

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEMAND ANSWERS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS OVER ALLEGATION OF COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA]

Banks continued: "Unlike the Russia hoax, Putin’s malign influence on our energy sector is real and deserves further investigation."

RSC Letter to Treasury on R... by Fox News

The Treasury Department did not immediately reply to email requests for comment on whether it would investigate.

Banks' letter coincides with a similar effort from House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans who are calling on certain environmental groups to disclose their ties to a non-governmental organization which is, according to the committee, reportedly used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to make an impact on American energy production.

GAS PRICES FUELING COMING DEMOCRATIC BLOODBATH IN MIDTERMS, REPUBLICANS SAY]

Three environmental groups – the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Sierra Club – reportedly have ties to the San Francisco-based NGO environmental organization called the Sea Change Foundation, according to Republicans on the committee.

In a letter sent to each of the three groups, Republicans inquired about the funding the groups have received from Sea Change since 2006 and called for disclosure of whether the groups "are aware of concerns that Sea Change may be a conduit for Russian funding."

The Center for American Progress said the allegations have been "thoroughly debunked," citing a 2018 article in which Sea Change founders Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons say they have received no funding from outside sources and the foundation's $500 million in grants for climate and clean energy were based on their family money.

"In the midst of a serious national security crisis, this is a disgusting disinformation campaign by unpatriotic Republican extremists who have been actively cheering on Putin throughout the Trump years, and who are now masking that disgrace with lies that have been thoroughly debunked," Center for American Progress said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Sea Change told Fox News Digital that it has no connection to Russia or Russian funds and wants to put to rest the allegations. A statement from co-Founders and co-Directors, Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons, restates their 2018 position.

"All funding to Klein (now Sea Change Foundation International) has been exclusively from philanthropic contributions by Bermuda-based family trusts of which, I [Nat Simons], my children, and family-related philanthropic organizations are the only beneficiaries," the statement said. "I wish to clarify that press reports speculating that Klein has received funding from outside sources are factually incorrect and have no basis. Neither Klein nor Sea Change Foundation has ever solicited or accepted contributions from non-family related sources."

Similarly, LCV, NRDC and Sierra Club have pushed back hard against these GOP allegations in previous statements to Fox News Digital.

The NRDC said the "allegations are false" and are "rooted in a smear campaign." [SAME QUOTE FROM 2017?]

"We receive no funding from the governments of Russia or China," Bob Deans, the director of strategic engagement for the NRDC, said. "We answer to our independent leadership, and we don’t do the bidding of any government – foreign or otherwise – in our work to advocate for commonsense environmental protections in the public interest. These allegations are rooted in a smear campaign orchestrated nearly a decade ago by fossil fuel interests and a right-wing think tank. They only serve then, as now, as a distraction."

A statement provided to Fox News from the LCV said the "story is completely false and has been put to rest for years."

"We have no connections to Russia, or China, and have been an effective advocate for environmental protection for over 50 years," the group stated. "These false and poorly researched allegations are rooted in a nearly 10-year-old right-wing think tank and fossil fuel industry-funded smear campaign that gets revived every few years to serve as a distraction."

In a statement shared with Fox News, Melinda Pierce, Sierra Club's legislative director, concluded the allegation of collusion is a "false conspiracy theory."

[Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law legislation that could punish journalists with up to 15 years in prison for reporting so-called "fake" news about his military invasion of Ukraine.    ]   

"This false conspiracy theory, invented by the same deceitful front groups paid to do polluters' and big tobacco’s dirty work, has been repeatedly debunked over its nearly 10-year existence," Pierce said. "The Sierra Club has no connections to Russia or China, and proudly fights for clean energy and climate action because this is what our planet requires, our families deserve, and what the overwhelming majority of Americans across the country demand."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The Republican Study Committee is the largest group of conservatives in the House. They've been hitting Biden hard for his domestic energy policies they say stifle domestic oil and gas production and led to the U.S. buying Russian oil to fund Putin's war against Ukraine. 

Biden announced this week the U.S. will stop importing Russian oil products and said "it's simply not true" that his administration is holding back domestic energy production.

Fox News' Kyle Morris contributed to this report.

Marisa Schultz is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to marisa.schultz@fox.com or @marisa.schultz.

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REF

https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/7/20/top-climate-change-donors-pull-back-the-curtain-on-their-past-and-future-giving

No lnx doc ltr

Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons have run the Sea Change Foundation, one of the biggest funders of climate and clean energy work, for over a decade with almost no public profile. The foundation has been a powerful, low-key friend to green groups, and at times, a target for conservatives.

Now, for the first time, the couple are publicizing details about their philanthropy, including confirming more than $500 million in grants for climate and clean energy initiatives to date. That figure makes Nat and Laura among the all-time top living donors in this space. 

In a statement released to Inside Philanthropy, Nat Simons also stated that Klein Ltd.—a Bermuda-based entity that contributed to Sea Change and has drawn speculation about foreign funding of environmentalists—is directed solely by him and funded exclusively by Simons family wealth. Klein has been renamed Sea Change Foundation International, and will continue as a Bermuda-based philanthropy that shares the mission of the couple’s stateside foundation.

“I wish to clarify that press reports speculating that Klein has received funding from outside sources are factually incorrect and have no basis. Neither Klein nor Sea Change Foundation has ever solicited or accepted contributions from non-family related sources,” Simons said (see the full statement below).

Rather, the couple said, Klein is entirely derived from a large trust in Bermuda whose beneficiaries were Nat Simons’ father Jim Simons, his family members, and charitable entities. As previously reported in the Paradise Papers investigation, Jim Simons had a massive trust that had grown to billions of dollars, and in 2010 was divided up into Simons family “sub-trusts.” All of Klein's funding comes from that restructuring, the couple said.

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The announcement is a move toward more transparency for the couple’s philanthropy, but also, particularly based on what we know about the size of the family’s offshore wealth, indicates substantially more climate grantmaking on the way. The Simonses said they intend to give between $50 million and $75 million per year toward climate mitigation and clean energy work for the foreseeable future. For context, the country’s largest climate funder, the Hewlett Foundation, gave $128 million to the cause in 2017.

Nat Simons is a member of the philanthropically active Simons clan—son of billionaire hedge fund wizard and major Democratic donor Jim Simons, who runs a top science foundation with his wife Marilyn Simons. Three Simons children have their own philanthropies, with Liz Simons, Audrey Cappell, and Nat Simons taking on climate change, human rights, and other issues. Nat and Laura Baxter-Simons recently joined others in the family in signing on to the Giving Pledge.

While they each have become forces in the various issues they fund, the family has also been touched by controversy over how the country’s richest people manage and deploy their tremendous wealth, including in ways that keep both assets and giving out of the public eye. This move marks a notable shift for a couple that, whether they wanted to or not, have become key figures in the country’s climate fight.

What is Sea Change?

The Sea Change Foundation does pretty much one thing—gives big funding to nonprofits working on climate change and clean energy. The foundation makes large grants, and has been known to give millions to individual groups in a given year. It's working with outside consultants and a two-person board, but nonetheless channels large amounts in a uniquely focused manner.

Sea Change launched in 2006, and according to Nat Simons, has given around $500 million to date, at a rate that’s increasing. “Due to the urgency of the issue and the momentum generated by the Paris Climate Accord, Sea Change Foundation has recently materially increased its annual grant budget as it continues to focus its efforts on this issue,” he said in the statement. 

The strategies it's backed are not unlike what you’d see in a center-left foundation like Hewlett or Packard—a lot of working with industry and utilities, supporting expansion of renewables, and energy efficiency. One major recipient is the country’s leading funding collaborative for climate change work, The Energy Foundation, which in the latest year of reporting received $19.5 million from Sea Change. 

A big theme for Sea Change is collaboration. One recent initiative was participating with 17 other foundations and individuals in support of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, to phase out hydrofluorocarbons while making energy efficiency improvements. The foundation is also backing the Global Climate Action Summit in September, hosted by California Gov. Jerry Brown.

As far as who’s guiding their funding, Simons revealed that Sea Change has a team of consultants called Tempest Advisors (see the full roster on a new website), which is led by longtime philanthropy and nonprofit leader Tom Steinbach, formerly of Hewlett, and Brigid McCormack, former executive director of the Audubon California.

So Sea Change moves a lot of money on climate change, which is still a relatively small sliver of American philanthropy overall (as we’ve often criticized).

But given the fairly mainstream climate solutions it’s backing, you might wonder why Sea Change Foundation has become a bogeyman among the right. And why did two GOP congressmen go so far as to call for an investigation based in part on its activity?

Klein Controversy

The controversy stems from two contributions to Sea Change around 2011 totaling $23 million, from Klein Ltd., the Bermuda-based entity. The remaining $315 million-plus deposited into Sea Change over its decade or so of existence came from U.S.-based funds belonging to Nat and Laura—who've made their own wealth through the Meritage Group, a San Francisco-based hedge fund—and a couple of deposits from Jim Simons.

Speculation about that $23 million has ricocheted mostly around conservative media for years. Specifically, voices on the right have claimed that Sea Change is a conduit for Russian funding of the U.S. environmental movement. And despite the lack of evidence behind it, the theory has taken on a life of its own.

Claims about Sea Change and Russia cite a dubious 2014 report from the Environmental Policy Alliance, a front group run by notorious communications firm Berman & Company to discredit environmental groups. The report hinges on Russian business connections of employees at a Bermuda law firm that provides financial services, including for Klein, declaring that this “raises serious questions.” A sort of telephone game of tweets, blog posts and op-eds have followed, often misleading or vastly overstating the report’s shaky premise. The theory was resurfaced in 2017 by GOP Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber, who used it as a reason to request an investigation by the U.S. Treasury.

While we’re first in line to encourage scrutiny of philanthropy, there’s little to this theory, and its originators are highly suspect. Sea Change, the law firm, and green groups singled out have all flatly denied it, repeatedly.

Because Klein (now Sea Change Foundation International) is based in Bermuda, it's not possible to track its activities through tax filings, like U.S. foundations (more on this later). But given what we know about Simons trusts in Bermuda, it makes a lot of sense that Klein has turned out to be merely a chunk of the family’s now well-documented offshore wealth.

The Origin of Sea Change Foundation International

Along with earlier revelations around the Panama Papers, the huge leak last fall of documents known as the Paradise Papers, and the sweeping investigative reporting that followed, opened the public’s eyes to how the ultra-wealthy manage money through offshore accounts. It also shed particular light on the wealth of the Simons family, and why it stands to reason that Klein was funded by a portion of that wealth.

One major story from the leak revolved around Jim Simons, who showed up as the main beneficiary of a massive offshore pot of money known as the Lord Jim Trust, which had been accumulating capital since the 1970s when it was set up as a gift by a non-U.S. citizen friend.

As the New York Times and other outlets reported, the trust had built up a large tax liability were it to ever pay out to the Simons family, so in 2010, it was restructured and divided up for charitable purposes. A little over half of the sum went into a new philanthropic entity of Jim Simons’ called Simons Foundation International, which has been reported as having $8 billion in assets, more than twice that of his New York-based Simons Foundation. The remaining portion was divided among Bermuda-based trusts for the three children.

The entirety of the assets in what was previously called Klein, established in 2011, comes from the restructuring of the Lord Jim Trust, Nat Simons told Inside Philanthropy. And that’s now Sea Change Foundation International, with all grants past and future focusing on climate change, they said. The Simonses declined to disclose the size of Sea Change Foundation International’s assets. They also said they see no reason to move Sea Change Foundation International out of Bermuda at this time, and expect it to focus mainly on international grantmaking.

As far as we know, U.S. donors establishing philanthropic entities in Bermuda is not super-common, but it’s not without precedent. When Chuck Feeney established Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982, he set it up in Bermuda to operate anonymously and to “maximize the foundation’s endowment.” It wasn’t until 1997 that the funder ceased anonymity, and extensively documented its spending-down process in the public eye.

According to Michael Pfeifer, an international income tax and trust and estates lawyer who participated in drafting of tax rules for overseas trusts, there are potential benefits to keeping such a philanthropic entity offshore, rather than moving it to the States. While each investment is different, and rules governing them are highly complex, generally speaking, Pfeifer said, advantages to a donor could include less reporting, a greater range of charitable objectives allowed, and avoiding financial penalties in moving the money.

Wealth and Transparency

It's hard to say whether the Simonses’ effort to shine some light on their giving will stem unfounded accusations, but Sea Change’s story does say a lot about overall concerns over wealth and philanthropy in this moment, and the related problems of opacity in the sector.

The revelation of a U.S. family’s billions of dollars based on an island in the Atlantic is certainly staggering in its own way, regardless of how you feel about the philanthropic causes they're going to support. The influence of wealth, especially what we don’t know about it, is a growing concern for many Americans. And the allegations that have followed the foundation, far-fetched as they may be, at least partially result from the fact that there was so little on record about it for so long.

Of course, Sea Change was far from alone in its desire to stay out of the public eye. As personal wealth and the philanthropic sector continue to surge, donors are becoming more savvy about moving money in non-transparent ways, especially through the use of donor-advised funds. As a result, philanthropy is becoming even less transparent in a number of ways—and minimally, transparency is necessary for the sector to function democratically.

In that sense, Sea Change is taking steps in the right direction.

Even more important, though, is the message that Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons are sending to other wealthy donors by publicly stepping up their giving on climate change, which is that the situation is urgent and that those who can give more need to do so.

As we've noted in the past, even billionaires who've signed the Giving Pledge and publicly called climate change an existential threat are giving only a sliver of what they could—at a moment when humanity is running out of time to implement solutions to save civilization as we know it, and as many green groups complain that they need more resources.

The clock is ticking on climate change, and larger-scale climate philanthropy is essential—now.

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ref?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/04/why-renewables-cant-save-the-climate/

no lnx

Sep 4, 2019,

41,425 views

Why Renewables Can't Save the Climate

Michael Shellenberger Contributor

Energy

I write about energy and the environment.

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This article is more than 2 years old.

While Democrats advocate renewables, wind and solar industries are in crisis.

While Democrats advocate renewables, wind and solar industries are in crisis. BLOOMBERG

Democratic presidential candidates may disagree on a lot, but they all agree that the solution to climate change is the expansion of renewable energy, particularly solar and wind.

Some candidates see a role for nuclear. Sen. Cory Booker and businessman Andrew Yang have called for new plants, while former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg want to maintain existing plants.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris haven’t taken a position on nuclear, while Sen. Bernie Sanders favors closing existing plants.

PROMOTED

But the centerpiece of all the Democratic candidates is renewables, upon which the candidates propose spending trillions. 

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Doing so, they all claim, will be good for the economy and the natural environment, including by preventing climate change.

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But around the world, renewables are in crisis because they are making electricity more expensive, subsidies are expiring, and projects are being blocked by wildlife conservationists and local communities.

In Germany, the world leader in renewables, just 35 wind turbines were installed this year. The country needs to install 1,400 per year to meet its climate change targets.

“While climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing with wind power to the Sustainability Summit in New York,” wrote Die Welt, “the German wind power industry is sailing into the doldrums.”

The halting of wind deployment in Germany has resulted in the industry shedding 25,000 jobs over the last year.

It’s not clear Germany can handle much more wind. Its electricity grid operator increasingly has to cut off electricity from industrial wind farms on windy, low-demand days, to avoid blow-outs.

The same is happening in California. The grid operator increasingly must pay neighboring states to take the state’s excess solar electricity, and cut off power coming from solar farms, on sunny, low-demand days.

Experts say the deployment of industrial wind energy in the United States is likely to stall when the key wind energy subsidy, known as the production tax credit or PTC, expires on December 31 of this year.

Renewables advocates say that costs will eventually come down [ALREADY HAVE], subsidies will be renewed, and state mandates will kick in enough to save the industrial wind and solar industries.

But those efforts are unlikely to be successful enough politically to make much difference to the economics of renewables.

In Ohio, lawmakers recently scaled back renewable energy mandates due to their high cost, choosing to instead to subsidize nuclear plants.[DOES NOT DISCLOSE HIS ACTIONS/FUNDERS?]

Around the world, renewables are making electricity more expensive, despite years of promises by advocates that prices would come down.[NP ACTUAL #?]

“German electricity consumers will again have to pay higher subsidies to producers of green electricity in the next two years,” reported Die Welt last month. [DOES NOT MEAN BILLS WENT UP?]

In Australia, the “increasing regularity with which wholesale power prices are sinking below $0 during sunny and windy days is being more than canceled out by more frequent high prices, defying expectations of a softening in levels overall,” noted The Australian Financial Review on Sunday.

“While I am an advocate for renewable energy, my motivation is driven by economics, not by warm and fuzzy feelings,” a renewable industry leader emailed me recently to say.

“I’ve drawn out the long term macroeconomics and come to the conclusions that you do. Essentially, the math doesn’t pencil out for wind, solar, and water,” he said.

The University of Chicago found earlier this year that renewable energy mandates "significantly increase average retail electricity prices.”

Thanks to the heavy deployment of renewables, electricity prices in California between 2011 and 2018 rose seven times more (28%) than they did in the rest of the country (5%), while electricity prices have risen 50% in Germany since 2006.

Today, Germany spends nearly twice as much for electricity that produces 10 times more carbon emissions than France. Just 14% of Germany’s energy and 35% of its electricity in 2018 came from renewables. And Germany’s carbon emissions haven’t declined significantly since 2009. [NO # CITE? SHUT NUKE FORVED TEMP COAL INCREASE?]

Many of the best wind sites have already been taken in the US and Europe, leaving developers with places that offer weaker wind, and further from major cities and industrial centers.

Some renewables advocates claim hopefully that construction of transmission lines will make wind energy more viable in windy states like Kansas and Nebraska, but environmental opposition in those places is growing.

In Nebraska, local residents and conservationists have filed a lawsuit to block the local utility from building a transmission line that will cut through 95% of the migratory flyway of the endangered whooping crane.

Despite much fanfare, the whooping crane has struggled mightily to recover from extinction, and the main cause of whooping crane death from humans is transmission lines.

In Australia, a former Green Party head denounced a proposed wind farm for threatening the extinction of endangered bird species. “Wind turbines kill birds,” wrote conservationist Bob Brown. “Multiple species of international migratory, endangered and critically endangered shorebirds use the wetlands… For which of these species will the wind farm be the thousandth cut?”

The wind industry has long denied that it has much impact by pointing out that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines.

But house cats can’t and don’t kill the large, slow-to-reproduce endangered and high-conservation value species like bald eagles, whooping cranes, and the European red kite, a raptor.

Dealing with environmental lawsuits and grassroots resistance is expensive. Industrial wind and solar developers have to hire lawyers, public relations specialists, and scientists willing to testify that this or that project poses only a modest threat to endangered birds and bats.

The evidence is mounting that industrial wind farms are having significant impacts. In 2017, leading bat scientists warned that if wind turbines continued to expand, they would make the hoary bat extinct.

Germany’s leading technology assessment research institute published a study last October concluding that industrial wind turbines are causing a “loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year” which “could be relevant for population stability.”

The news media in Germany is finally covering the issue. Geo magazine, the National Geographic of Germany, published a cover story about the threat wind turbines pose to the endangered European red kite.

Germany’s industrial wind developers say endangered species protections are an “absolute planning obstacle” and are seeking to be exempt from prohibitions on killing them.

And like Germany and the US, Australia will face more trouble in the future given the difficulty of building long new transmission lines.

Germany gets nearly as much of its renewable electricity from solar as it does from biomass, which a growing body of science suggests is actually more polluting and carbon-intensive than fossil fuels.

There was a natural experiment globally, just like there was between Germany and France. Between 1965 and 2018 the world spent $2.1 trillion to get 31% more electricity from nuclear than it got for the $2.6 trillion it spent on solar and wind.

Nuclear is the only energy source that has proven capable of fully replacing fossil fuels at low-cost in wealthy nations. [WHY STALLED DESPITE MASSIVE SUBSIDIES?]

While hydro-electric dams can sometimes play that role, they are limited to nations with powerful rivers, many of which have already been dammed.

The underlying problem with solar and wind is that they are too unreliable and energy-dilute. Solar and wind farms require between 400 and 750 times more land than nuclear and natural gas plants.

As we approach the limits of renewables, it seems inevitable that, over time, Democratic politicians will increasingly point to nuclear energy as the centerpiece of their plans for saving the climate, not solar panels and wind turbines.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger is the best-selling author of San Fransicko (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins 2020), a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and Green Book Award Winner. He is Founder and President of Environmental Progress, an independent and nonprofit research organization based in Berkeley, California.

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some links:

....

doing so, they all claim, will be good for the economy and the natural environment, including by preventing climate change.

But around the world, renewables are in crisis because they are making electricity more expensive, subsidies are expiring, and projects are being blocked by wildlife conservationists and local communities.

In Germany, the world leader in renewables, just 35 wind turbines were installed this year. The country needs to install 1,400 per year to meet its climate change targets.

“While climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing with wind power to the Sustainability Summit in New York,” wrote Die Welt, “the German wind power industry is sailing into the doldrums.”

The halting of wind deployment in Germany has resulted in the industry shedding 25,000 jobs over the last year.

It’s not clear Germany can handle much more wind. Its electricity grid operator increasingly has to cut off electricity from industrial wind farms on windy, low-demand days, to avoid blow-outs.

The same is happening in California. The grid operator increasingly must pay neighboring states to take the state’s excess solar electricity, and cut off power coming from solar farms, on sunny, low-demand days.

Experts say the deployment of industrial wind energy in the United States is likely to stall when the key wind energy subsidy, known as the production tax credit or PTC, expires on December 31 of this year.

Renewables advocates say that costs will eventually come down, subsidies will be renewed, and state mandates will kick in enough to save the industrial wind and solar industries.

But those efforts are unlikely to be successful enough politically to make much difference to the economics of renewables.

In Ohio, lawmakers recently scaled back renewable energy mandates due to their high cost, choosing to instead to subsidize nuclear plants.

Around the world, renewables are making electricity more expensive, despite years of promises by advocates that prices would come down.

“German electricity consumers will again have to pay higher subsidies to producers of green electricity in the next two years,” reported Die Welt last month.

In Australia, the “increasing regularity with which wholesale power prices are sinking below $0 during sunny and windy days is being more than canceled out by more frequent high prices, defying expectations of a softening in levels overall,” noted The Australian Financial Review on Sunday.

“While I am an advocate for renewable energy, my motivation is driven by economics, not by warm and fuzzy feelings,” a renewable industry leader emailed me recently to say. 

“I’ve drawn out the long term macroeconomics and come to the conclusions that you do. Essentially, the math doesn’t pencil out for wind, solar, and water,” he said.

The University of Chicago found earlier this year that renewable energy mandates "significantly increase average retail electricity prices.”

Thanks to the heavy deployment of renewables, electricity prices in California between 2011 and 2018 rose seven times more (28%) than they did in the rest of the country (5%), while electricity prices have risen 50% in Germany since 2006.

Today, Germany spends nearly twice as much for electricity that produces 10 times more carbon emissions than France. Just 14% of Germany’s energy and 35% of its electricity in 2018 came from renewables. And Germany’s carbon emissions haven’t declined significantly since 2009. 

Many of the best wind sites have already been taken in the US and Europe, leaving developers with places that offer weaker wind, and further from major cities and industrial centers.

Some renewables advocates claim hopefully that construction of transmission lines will make wind energy more viable in windy states like Kansas and Nebraska, but environmental opposition in those places is growing.

In Nebraska, local residents and conservationists have filed a lawsuit to block the local utility from building a transmission line that will cut through 95% of the migratory flyway of the endangered whooping crane.

Despite much fanfare, the whooping crane has struggled mightily to recover from extinction, and the main cause of whooping crane death from humans is transmission lines.

In Australia, a former Green Party head denounced a proposed wind farm for threatening the extinction of endangered bird species. “Wind turbines kill birds,” wrote conservationist Bob Brown. “Multiple species of international migratory, endangered and critically endangered shorebirds use the wetlands… For which of these species will the wind farm be the thousandth cut?”

The wind industry has long denied that it has much impact by pointing out that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. 

But house cats can’t and don’t kill the large, slow-to-reproduce endangered and high-conservation value species like bald eagles, whooping cranes, and the European red kite, a raptor. 

Dealing with environmental lawsuits and grassroots resistance is expensive. Industrial wind and solar developers have to hire lawyers, public relations specialists, and scientists willing to testify that this or that project poses only a modest threat to endangered birds and bats.

The evidence is mounting that industrial wind farms are having significant impacts. In 2017, leading bat scientists warned that if wind turbines continued to expand, they would make the hoary bat extinct.

Germany’s leading technology assessment research institute published a studylast October concluding that industrial wind turbines are causing a “loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year” which “could be relevant for population stability.”

The news media in Germany is finally covering the issue. Geo magazine, the National Geographic of Germany, published a cover story about the threat wind turbines pose to the endangered European red kite. 

Germany’s industrial wind developers say endangered species protections are an “absolute planning obstacle” and are seeking to be exempt from prohibitions on killing them.

And like Germany and the US, Australia will face more trouble in the future given the difficulty of building long new transmission lines. 

Germany gets nearly as much of its renewable electricity from solar as it does from biomass, which a growing body of science suggests is actually more polluting and carbon-intensive than fossil fuels. 

There was a natural experiment globally, just like there was between Germany and France. Between 1965 and 2018 the world spent $2.1 trillion to get 31% more electricity from nuclear than it got for the $2.6 trillion it spent on solar and wind. 

Nuclear is the only energy source that has proven capable of fully replacing fossil fuels at low-cost in wealthy nations. 

While hydro-electric dams can sometimes play that role, they are limited to nations with powerful rivers, many of which have already been dammed.

The underlying problem with solar and wind is that they are too unreliable and energy-dilute. Solar and wind farms require between 400 and 750 times more land than nuclear and natural gas plants.

As we approach the limits of renewables, it seems inevitable that, over time, Democratic politicians will increasingly point to nuclear energy as the centerpiece of their plans for saving the climate, not solar panels and wind turbines.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/ [track #]

---

// blame greta

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/fox-host-jesse-watters-suggests-russians-are-funding-green-energy-campaigns-scare

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simone de beauvoir has got your #:

15 pp

https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/America_Misled.pdf

First published in October 2019. For more information, visit https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/ Graphic design: Wendy Cook Cite as: Cook, J., Supran, G., Lewandowsky, S., Oreskes, N., & Maibach, E., (2019). America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Available at https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/america-misled/

How the fossil fuel industry polluted the information landscape

Key points 1. Internal corporate documents show that the fossil fuel industry has known about the reality of human-caused climate change for decades. Its response was to actively orchestrate and fund denial and disinformation so as to stifle action and protect its status quo business operations. 2. As the scientific consensus on climate change emerged and strengthened, the industry and its political allies attacked the consensus and exaggerated the uncertainties. 3. The fossil fuel industry offered no consistent alternative explanation for why the climate was changing—the goal was merely to undermine support for action. 4. The strategy, tactics, infrastructure, and rhetorical arguments and techniques used by fossil fuel interests to challenge the scientific evidence of climate change—including cherry picking, fake experts, and conspiracy theories—come straight out of the tobacco industry’s playbook for delaying tobacco control. These key points reflect the position of experts studying climate denial and the history of fossil fuel interests, based on thousands of pages of documented evidence.

...

Contradictory contrarianism The most common denialist arguments have been shown to contain fatal assumptions or fallacies26. Climate deniers do not offer any rational explanation for why our climate is changing. Rather, denialist arguments are incoherent and often contradictory27. For example, deniers will seize on snowfall to claim that global warming is a hoax, while at the same time claiming that an extreme event such as a drought or wildfire cannot be attributed to climate change. This is incoherent because either extreme events can be a signal of climate change or they cannot be. Climate denial lacks consistency because it is not about scientific evidence—it is about how to continue business as usual in the face of climate disruption. Climate deniers reject climate science because they are averse to proposed or perceived solutions to climate change28.

...

Common Fallacies

Climate denial arguments can be summarized by the five techniques of science denial (summarized with the acronym FLICC): fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectation, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories29,30.

Fake Experts

Logical Fallacies

Impossible Expectations

Cherry Picking

Conspiracy Theories

Promoting dissenting non-experts as highly qualified while not having published any actual climate research and/or received any relevant education. Logically flawed arguments that lead to false conclusions. Common logical fallacies are red herrings, non sequiturs, and false dichotomies. Demanding unrealistic standards of certainty before acting on the science. A technique practised by the tobacco industry. Selectively choosing data that supports a desired conclusion that differs from the conclusion arising from all the available data32. Proposing a secret plan among a number of people, generally to implement a nefarious scheme such as conspiring to hide a truth or perpetuate misinformation. Climate deniers are more likely to be conspiracy theorists33

nice graphics throughout eg]

Deconstructing Denial

Figure 7 shows deconstructions of some of the most common myths about climate change. Determining the misleading techniques of a climate myth requires outlining the argument structure: listing any premises (starting assumptions) and the conclusion. This allows one to ascertain whether any premises are false, and/or whether the argument is logically invalid. Figure 7:

Deconstruction of common climate myths.

MYTH “Cold weather disproves global warming.” Premise 1 CHERRY PICKING

IMPOSSIBLE EXPECTATIONS Some place is cold. Premise 2 No place can experience cold during global warming. Conclusion Global warming isn’t happening.

Cherry Picking: Ignores that most of the globe is warm. Impossible Expectations: Global warming doesn’t mean cold events don’t happen, just that they’re less likely to happen. MYTH “Global warming stopped in 1998.”

SLOTHFUL INDUCTION

CHERRY PICKING Premise 1 The temperature trend since 1998 is statistically insignificant. Conclusion Global warming isn’t happening. Slothful Induction: Ignores other temperature records and measures of heat imbalance showing a significant warming trend. Cherry Picking: Trends over short periods do not lead to conclusions about

...

Conclusion Disinformation about climate change has a straightforward purpose—to block action on climate change. In America, it has largely succeeded, with policies to mitigate climate change stymied or delayed for decades. Meanwhile, climate change has intensified, causing impacts such as intensified extreme weather events, rising sea level, harmful effects on human health, and much more. Climate denial has seriously hurt the American people. The damage, deaths, and harm to people will continue to worsen if we don’t expose and discredit denial. This is not the first time that corporations prioritizing profits over people have caused great harm. The tobacco industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars disinforming the public about the health impacts of smoking in order to undermine tobacco control34,35. The World Health Organization estimates that six million people die every year from preventable tobacco-caused disease. Drawing on the tobacco industry’s playbook, fossil fuel companies have done the same on climate change, spending hundreds of millions of dollars confusing the public and delaying life-saving action. Their legacy is the death, destruction, and injustices of irreversible global warming. Big Oil is the new Big Tobacco.

===

kos

tag  TAG https://www.dailykos.com/tags/Shellenberger

With COP Closing, Deniers Beclown Themselves, Then Cry ‘I’ve Been Cancelled!’ When People Laugh

The disinformation around this year’s climate negotiations got off to a stupid start, got slightly funny and gross there for a minute, and then just gross as a TERF called climate reporters biased. But not to worry, it’s still getting stupider, and...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Nov 12, 2021

disinformation around this year’s climate negotiations got off to a stupid start, gotslightly funny and gross there for a minute, and then just gross as a TERF called climate reporters biased. But not to worry, it’s still getting stupider, and more offensive!

On the stupid front, a member of the new denial PR pop-up CAR26 that we warned about last week tweeted on Monday that she was “chased” out of COP26, and had to do an interview while “hiding in the disabled loos.” But it turns out no one chased her out of COP26, she was just asked to leave a private meeting room at a side event, presumably because it was about to be used for, you know, a meeting.

“Anti-climate actors rely on a reactionary dynamic with ‘mainstream’ institutions, media, or experts,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) disinformation expert Jennie King told DeSmog, “and cultivate their brand, especially on social media, around being ‘cancelled’ or outcast by perceived elites.”

This dynamic is absolutely unmistakable across the deniersphere, to the extent that it even entices people who try to distance themselves from it, like “honest broker” author Roger Pielke Jr. While he’s long attempted to portray himself as sitting squarely within the consensus, and expresses support for a carbon tax, he’s also done plenty of work that’s immediately used by the sorts of people who cry persecution when they lock themselves in a bathroom, like alleging that Democrats have corrupted climate science.

And deniers return the favor by supporting him, for example with a new 20-page report published by GWPF detailing how, due to persecution, his university office is tiny and filled with boxes from his shuttered projects. Based on an interview with Donna LaFramboise, who’s past works have centered on smearing the IPCC, it’s built on the idea that the tenured professor who once complained about being silencedin the Wall Street Journal has been, as King described of the bathroom-dweller, “‘cancelled’ or outcast by perceived elites.”

:{(On Tuesday, }a COP26 event:{ honored the lives of the 1,000+ }:environmental activists murdered:{ since the }:Paris Agreement in 2015:{, a third of whom were from indigenous communities. But everyone should really feel very sorry for Pielke, because his office is very small and doesn’t even have any windows!)}:

While most may not be moved by such a harrowing tale of being told you’re wrong, refusing to admit it, and facing consequences for your toxic actions, one person who did praise Pielke yesterday was Michael Shellenberger. Also on the anti-elitist kick, Shellenberger tweeted a link to his new substack post a couple dozen times as well, so we took the bait and gave “Why Wokeism Is A Religion” a read. And surprisingly, we were glad we did!

Because for years now, Shellenberger has slowly been evolving beyond his brand as the liberal presenting hard truths in the name of a stronger and more successful progressive movement, and despite naming his post-Breakthrough spin-off “Environmental Progress,” he is moving fully into the reactionary, alt-right space. This undoubtedly confirms it.

Shellenberger’s new “taxonomy” of the “woke religion” is a project with fellow anti-woke-ist Peter Boghossian, who recently quit Portland State University after getting blowback for writing fake academic papers and in an apparent preemptive self-cancellation, as announced on the substack of fellow preemptive self-canceller Bari Weiss.

Similar to the TERFs and trans disinfo we talked about last Thursday, this “woke religion taxonomy” links racism, climate change, trans people, crime, mental illness, and drug and homelessness issues by suggesting each has an “original sin” (history) committed by “guilty devils,” (white capitalists, mostly) perpetuated by “myths” (sociology) and impacting “sacred victims” (actual victims of racism)  who “the elect” (((elite))) protect with “supernatural beliefs” (facts) and by outlawing “taboo facts” (alternative facts) and “taboo speech” (hate speech), and can only be improved through “purifying rituals” (reducing emissions, being respectful of people's identities by using their pronouns) and by embracing “purifying speech” of words and phrases as outlandish as “Black,” “Renewables,” and “Trans women are women.”

Seriously, those are the actual examples!  

Somehow, though, that’s not even the most disgusting content coming from a supposed ally of climate action yesterday. While the Republican plan to export natural gas as a climate cure would lead to a catastrophic 3.1°C of warming, apparently even that is too much climate action for so-called skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. 

In this week's Wall Street Journal column, Lomborg argues that a "reasonable alternative" to the COP26 talks is to allow for 3.5°C (6.3°F) of warming. But just the differencebetween 1.5°C and 2·°C of warming is significant, with upward of 1 billion additional people who would be at risk of dying from extreme heat if they spend a summer day outside at 2°C (and half the world population is at risk at 4°C). Allowing fossil fuels to pollute us toto 3.5°C would put at least 275 million people’s homes under water, including entire island nations (and Louisiana communities) that will be submerged by sea level rise after just 2°C of warming, literally committing cultural genocide.

Experts were quick to debunk Lomborg's claims, for example pointing out that if you look at the updated version of the study he cites to justify that genocide, it now matches the Paris goals.

While the antics of obvious anti-climate activists hiding in bathrooms may be an entertaining distraction, it seems these days the real danger is coming from those “honest brokers” pretending to offer “reasonable” advice.

Shellenberger’s ‘California Peace Plan’ Is Funding Police To Be Meaner to People Without Housing

Yesterday we discussed PR professional, nuclear advocate and anti-renewable Republican tool Michael Shellenberger’s newest workstream: the housing, mental health and addiction issues that are totally harshing his California mellow. As a professional...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Jun 10, 2021

Shellenberger’s New Schtick Is A 'Peace Campaign’ To Bring His Centrist Denial to Housing Issues

It’s pretty obvious that deniers have no qualms about jumping from one subject to the next, with a pattern of behavior that remains remarkably stable despite the dramatically different academic fields they seek to colonize. Yesterday we touched on...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Jun 9, 2021 at 6:24 am PDT

2comments

5recommends

Denier in Disguise: Michael Shellenberger’s Very Serious Interview with E&E News

As we mentioned recently in regard to a certain “Obama scientist,” deniers who pretend they’re Serious-Thinking Democrats, yet built up a public persona using conservative media as a venue for criticizing environmentalists, are increasingly common now...

ClimateDenierRoundup

May 20, 2021 at 6:02 am PDT

2comments

10recommends

Mike Shellenberger Works Climate Denial Media Circuit To Sell Misleading Book, “Apocalypse Never"

We first mentioned nuclear power-lover and renewable-hating former environmentalist Michael Shellenberger back in 2015, when he accused the Pope of blasphemy (among other things). By 2018 his anti-renewable schtick was catching on with the...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Jul 8, 2020 at 6:09 am PDT

5comments

6recommends

Nohate.jpg

Is it possible to go too far when discussing climate change? (poll)

Interesting article by Michael Shellenberger in Forbes. I was not previously familiar with him, but he says this about himself: Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing. I...

EvanJellicoe

Dec 10, 2019 at 9:00 am PST

105comments

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Pro-Polluter Milloy Continues Quest to Make EPA As Toxic as He Is, By Hook or By Crook

Yesterday Politico’s Morning Energy reported that the EPA posted nominations for its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, kicking off a public comment period that ends July 12th. As we covered last week, Politico recently reported that major GOP...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Jun 13, 2018 at 7:10 am PDT

1comments

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No, Solar and Wind Aren’t Raising Electricity Prices

A pair of recent Forbes op-eds by nuclear fanboy Michael Shellenberger claiming that wind and solar raise electricity prices has gotten praise from exactly the sort of people one would expect an anti-renewable screed to get. While Shellenberger isn’t a...

ClimateDenierRoundup

Apr 27, 2018 at 6:46 am PDT

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Four Inconvenient Truths About Global Warming

This is the third of four parts of the Introduction to Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin 2007). To read more about the book,

Michael Shellenberger

Nov 21, 2007 at 8:52 am PST

0comments

0recommends

Break Through from the Nightmare to the Dream

Ted and I will be serializing the Introduction to our new book, Break Through, here at the DailyKos over the next week. This is part two of ...

Michael Shellenberger

Nov 19, 2007 at 4:47 pm PST

2comments

7recommends

Tim Kaine - Dem's new voice??? Here's why

JoieDe

Jan 22, 2006 at 1:19 pm PST

52comments

12

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sadly can't grab substack headlines url but anti homeless, SF, gavin san fran sicko bk pro musk ~ UN...

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/archive?sort=community

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1/22 gmail ltr to editor fresno

The letter writer of “‘Group think’ does not equal science” (Letters 1/11/22) encourages readers to embrace global warming denial writers Marc Morano and Michael Shellenberger.  He also says, “People who get their paycheck to generate information falsely presented as science to support a foregone conclusion are not doing scientific research and it is fraudulent.”

Interestingly, this statement – which is very cleverly misused/abused here – is one of the main talking points of climate scientists.

Proof of abuse:  the Heartland Institute, which helps lead the charge to reject the scientific consensus on climate change (and bankrolls a local climate change denial website), gives glowing accolades to Marc Morano, a former Republican aide, Rush Limbaugh reporter/producer, and founder of another climate change denial website.

The Heartland Institute, however, wrote the book on generating falsely presented information to support a foregone conclusion, as it worked with tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s to attempt to discredit the health risks of secondhand smoke and lobby against smoking bans.   It currently represents the Petro-Chemical Industry by using the same playbook.

Marc Morano has been quoted saying, “We should kick (climate change) scientists when they’re down.  They deserve to be publicly flogged”.

Seven academic reviewers and one editor from the “Climate Feedback” Media Bias/ Fact Check site reviewed a 2020 Forbes article written by Michael Shellenberger and concluded that he “mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change.”

Marc Morano and Michael Shellenberger = pretty suspect spokespersons.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now, Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “​​the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’s all driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight. The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeade claiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.” 

During an interview with U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, host Steve Hilton did a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with the Green New Deal and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest. This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

===

ref do i have it? 2018

https://skepticalscience.com/latest-weak-attacks-evs-solar.html

ref peter gleick bk review no lnx

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/07/review-bad-science-and-bad-arguments-abound-in-apocalypse-never/

think, if you will, of the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets in “Romeo and Juliet.” Or of the 1863-1891 classic American feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, warring families in West Virginia and Kentucky.

In the decades-old tensions involving environmental science, population, resource dynamics, and ecology, it’s the Malthusians and the Cornucopians. Subscribing to the wisdom of English economist Thomas Malthus, Malthusians express concerns that exponential human population growth and economic demands will outrun global resources needed to support people, undermining long-term sustainability. Cornucopians, in contrast – with their nod to the cornucopia or “horn of plenty” of Greek mythology – hold that technological advances can sustain societal needs and that unbounded economic growth and increased population are positive, giving rise to more good ideas.

Review

The historical tensions and intellectual debates between Malthusians and Cornucopians are now more than two centuries old and have evolved. In recent years, the public conversation around critical global crises like human-caused climate change, deforestation and species extinction, population pressures, and new and worsening public health threats has grown louder, harsher, and increasingly ideological. As the sciences have improved, the deep complexity and connections among these problems have also become more apparent, as have urgent calls to address them through local, national, and global actions.

A recent entry in this debate is Michael Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (HarperCollins Publishers, 2020). Shellenberger explains in his introduction that he seeks to counter and dismiss what he considers irrational, overwrought arguments of pending Malthusian catastrophes; instead, he seeks to promote the Cornucopian view that environmental problems can be eliminated if we’d just pursue aggressive economic growth, simple technological advances, and increased tapping of abundant natural resources. In doing so, he echoes previous efforts of authors like Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and Bjørn Lomborg.

Climate dialogue seen as ‘out of control’

Shellenberger self-describes as an environmentalist activist and a bringer of facts and science to counter “exaggeration, alarmism, and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism.” He decided to write this book because he believes “the conversation about climate change and the environment has, in the last few years, spiraled out of control.”

Voices of reason and clear analyses in the contentious debates about how to tackle our global problems are welcome. Unfortunately, the book is deeply and fatally flawed. At the simplest level, it is a polemic based on a strawman argument: To Shellenberger, scientists, “educated elite,” “activist journalists,” and high-profile environmental activists believe incorrectly that the end of the world is coming and yet refuse to support the only solutions that he thinks will work – nuclear energy and uninhibited economic growth.

‘What is new in here isn’t right, and what is right isn’t new.’

But even if the author properly understood the complexity and nature of global challenges, which he does not, and got the science right, which he did not, a fatal flaw in his argument is the traditional Cornucopian oversimplification of his solutions – reliance on economic growth and silver-bullet technology. As the great American journalist and humorist H. L. Mencken said, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” Mencken also warned against those who know precisely what is right and what is wrong, a warning especially worth hearing in the highly complex and uncertain worlds of global climate, pandemics, and environmental change.

… yet bad science, strawman arguments, cherry-picking facts, and ad hominem attacks on scientists, media, others

But the problems in the book go much deeper. The author wanders from topic to topic, jumping from personal anecdote to polemical arguments to data and numbers carefully chosen to support his views, making it difficult for the reader to follow his threads. The most serious flaw, however, is that he assumes a position and seeks data and facts to fit that position rather than, as science demands, using data and facts to develop, test, and refine a theory. As a result, the book suffers from logical fallacies, arguments based on emotion and ideology, the setting up and knocking down of strawman arguments, and the selective cherry-picking and misuse of facts, all interspersed with simple mistakes and misrepresentations of science. Distressingly, this is also an angry book, riddled with ugly ad hominem attacks on scientists, environmental advocates, and the media.

I provide just a few examples of these flaws here – a comprehensive catalog would require its own book. In short, what is new in here isn’t right, and what is right isn’t new.

Two Cornucopian ideas lie at the heart of this book: The first idea is that there are no real “limits to growth” and environmental problems are the result of poverty and will be solved by having everyone get richer. This idea isn’t original and has long been debunked by others (for a few examples see here, here, here, and here).

View that nuclear alone can address needs

The second idea – and the focus of much of Shellenberger’s past writings – is that climate and energy problems can and should be solved solely by nuclear power. He writes, “Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat,” and, “Only nuclear energy can power our high-energy human civilization while reducing humankind’s environmental footprint.” (“Apocalypse Never” – hereafter “AN” – pp. 153 and 278) The many economic, environmental, political, and social arguments levied against nuclear are simply dismissed as having no merit, for example: “As for nuclear waste, it is the best and safest kind of waste produced from electricity production. It has never hurt anyone and there is no reason to think it ever will.” (AN, p. 152) His passionate belief that nuclear is the only answer to our energy and climate problems (maybe along with a mega-dam on the Congo River in Africa) is matched by the corollary that renewable energy alternatives – he calls them “unreliables” (AN, p. 176) – are bad because he asserts they are small scale, intermittent, and their economic, environmental, political, and social problems disqualifying.

The argument that poverty and environmental threats are intertwined is both correct and not new. It lies at the heart of international development efforts, including the early United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the current Sustainable Development Goals, which state:

The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected. (emphasis added)

Similarly, mainstream experts in environmental science and environmental economics have long acknowledged that all energy options have complex sets of environmental advantages and disadvantages. The fields of energy risk assessment, integrated environmental systems analysis, and ecological economics have addressed them for decades.

Using the facade of ‘strawman arguments’

Shellenberger regularly sets up other strawman arguments and then knocks them down. [A strawman argument is an effort to refute an argument that hasn’t been made by replacing your opponent’s actual argument with a different one.] One of the most prevalent strawman arguments in the climate debate is that scientists claim climate change “causes” extreme events, when in fact, climate scientists make careful distinctions between “causality” and “influence” – two very different things. This area, called “attribution science,” is one of the most exciting aspects of climate research today.

Shellenberger sets up the strawman argument that people are incorrectly claiming recent extreme events (like forest fires, floods, heat waves, and droughts) were caused by climate change, and then he debunks this strawman. “Many blamed climate change for wildfires that ravaged California” (AN, p.2) and “the fires would have occurred even had Australia’s climate not warmed.” (AN p. 21) He misrepresents how the media reported on the fires, describing a New York Times story on the 2019 Amazon fires: “As for the Amazon, The New York Times reported, correctly, that the ‘fires were not caused by climate change.’” But here Shellenberger is cherry-picking a quote: If you look at the actual article he cites, the journalist makes clear the “influence” of climate change just two sentences later:

These fires were not caused by climate change. They were, by and large, set by humans. However, climate change can make fires worse. Fires can burn hotter and spread more quickly under warmer and drier conditions. (emphasis added)

He also misunderstands or misrepresents the extensive and growing literature on the links between climate change and extreme events, saying “But climate change so far has not resulted in increases in the frequency or intensity of many types of extreme weather” (AN, p. 15) citing out-of-date research, including a workshop from 15 years ago. In fact, a large and growing body of literature already shows strong links between climate change and extreme events, including hurricanes, heat deaths, flooding, decreasing ice, and more (see, for a few examples, here, here, and here), and this literature has been expanding rapidly. For instance, in 2019, the American Meteorological Society, or AMS, published a summary – produced annually – with 21 peer-reviewed analyses of extreme weather in 2018 including the research of 121 scientists from 13 countries. The severe Four Corners drought in the U.S., intense heat waves on the Iberian peninsula and in northeast Asia, exceptional precipitation in the mid-Atlantic states, and record-low sea ice in the Bering Sea were all examples of extreme weather events “made more likely by human-caused climate change.” As Jeff Rosenfeld, the editor-in-chief of the AMS series, noted, “We’ve now published more than 100 of these attribution studies in this AMS series and can see how powerful this science is getting. Attribution studies increasingly yield useful, nuanced conclusions that embrace real-world complexity,” Rosenfeld wrote. “They collectively make an ever starker statement about the human influence on extreme weather.”

Another example of a serious conceptual confusion is his chapter dismissing the threat of species extinctions. The chapter is full of misunderstandings of extinction rates, ecosystem and biological functions, confusions about timescales, and misuses of data. For example, Shellenberger confuses the concept of species “richness” with “biodiversity” and makes the astounding claim that

Around the world, the biodiversity of islands has actually doubled on average, thanks to the migration of ‘invasive species.’ The introduction of new plant species has outnumbered plant extinctions one hundred fold. (AN, p. 66)

By this odd logic, if an island had 10 species of native birds found only there and they went extinct, but 20 other invasive bird species established themselves, the island’s “biodiversity” would double. This error results from a misunderstanding of the study he cites, which properly notes that simply assessing species numbers (richness not biodiversity) on islands ignores the critical issues of biodiversity raised by invasive species, including the disruption of endemic species interactions, weakening of ecosystem stability, alteration of ecosystem functions, and increasing homogenization of flora and fauna.

Another set of classic logical fallacies is the misuse, misrepresentation, and selective use of evidence. Shellenberger sees himself as the white knight bringing science and facts to emotional arguments. “Every fact, claim, and argument in this book is based on the best-available science … Apocalypse Never defends mainstream science from those who deny it on the political Right and Left.” (AN, p. xiii) But often, his arguments are based on inappropriate use of evidence, outdated or cherry-picked science, misunderstandings or misrepresentation, or just outright errors.

One of the most common flaws is his confusing use of the terms “can,” “could,” “will,” “will likely,” and so on. These grammatical choices usually reflect classic Cornucopian optimism and the advantage of telling the audience a positive story, rather than one based on the actual evidence. For example, he claims:

When it comes to food production, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concludes that crop yields will increase significantly, under a wide range of climate scenarios. (AN, p. 6, emphasis added)

What great news, if only we knew for sure it were true and under all plausible climate scenarios. But in fact, this is a misrepresentation of the 2018 FAO report cited, which looks at possible futures and actually says:

Climate change already has negative effects on crop yields, livestock production and fisheries, particularly in low- and middle- income countries. Such impacts are likely to become even stronger later in this century. (emphasis added)

Unaddressed climate change, which is associated, inter alia, with unsustainable agricultural practices, is likely to lead to more land and water use, disproportionately affecting poor people and exacerbating inequalities within and between countries. This carries negative implications for both food availability and food access.

There are many other examples where his optimism (things “will” happen) overrides the scientific evidence and uncertainties about the future.

Misrepresenting what scientists actually say or said

Shellenberger’s discussion of nuclear energy and risk also misrepresents what scientists say. He states “mixing up reactors and bombs was, as we say, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists” (AN, p. 242), but to support this claim he offers the work of Drs. Paul and Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren in their 1977 book Ecoscience. Shellenberger quotes their factual statement that “A large reactor’s inventory of long-lived radioactivity is more than one thousand times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” (Ecoscience, p. 445) But he then falsely says they are implying reactors can explode like bombs: “The implication was wrong. Nuclear reactors cannot detonate like bombs.” (AN, p. 242) Shellenberger was eager to set up the strawman that “Malthusian environmentalists” don’t know the difference between nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs, but in the paragraph right before the statement he quoted, Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren (the latter trained in part as a nuclear physicist, by the way) literally write: “It is physically impossible for an LWR [light-water reactor] or any thermal-neutron reactor to blow up like a nuclear bomb.” (Ecoscience, p. 444)

This is just one of a series of misrepresentations of the works of the Ehrlichs and Holdren. Just a few paragraphs later, for instance, he says “Holdren and the Ehrlichs had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine.” (AN, p. 242) This is the exact opposite of what they have long argued. To quote Dr. Holdren: “What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy, but that we are running out of environment – that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil, and biota to absorb” the environmental, social, and health impacts of burning fossil fuels. (emphasis added)

Another example of the confusions running through Shellenberger’s narratives is the section “Greed Saved the Whales, Not Greenpeace.” His argument is that cheap oil, epitomized by the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, saved the whales: “The discovery of the Drake Well led to widespread production of petroleum-based kerosene… thus saving the whales.” (AN, p. 111) Just a page later, however, he acknowledges “But then, whaling came back, and in a big way. Between 1904 and 1978, whalers killed one million whales, nearly three times more than had been harvested before.” He then claims that cheap vegetable oils (ironically in the form of palm oil from deforestation in the Congo) saved the whales, but then again has to acknowledge that massive whale kills continued.

What finally led to today’s almost near moratorium on whale hunts? Not just changes in market forces, not changes in energy sources, not “greed” and the growth in wealth and prosperity as he argues, but the change in public opinion pushed by environmental groups and the public. And oddly, his last sentence in this chapter acknowledges this: “When it comes to protecting the environment by moving to superior alternatives, public attitudes and political action matter” (AN, p. 125) – exactly the point of environmental advocacy groups like Greenpeace that worked to change public opinion.

Scientific uncertainty is not the same as ‘We don’t know’

Shellenberger misunderstands the concept of “uncertainty” in science, making the classic mistake of thinking about uncertainty in the colloquial sense of “We don’t know” rather than the way scientists use it to present “a range of possibilities.” In his discussion about catastrophic tipping points like loss of ice sheets, forest and species die back in the Amazon, and changes in ocean circulation, he says (AN, p. 25):

The high level of uncertainty on each, and a complexity that is greater than the sum of its parts, make many tipping point scenarios unscientific … there is no scientific evidence that one would be more probable or catastrophic than other potentially catastrophic scenarios, including an asteroid impact, super-volcanoes, or an unusually deadly influenza pandemic.

This is both wrong and hardly comforting. First, high levels of uncertainty are not “unscientific” and second, while most of the climate assessments of the IPCC and others generally do not assess the risk of global catastrophes like these, they do not rule them out, especially if we are too slow to act. The late climate scientist Dr. Stephen Schneider, in a critique of this same argument made by another Cornucopian, addressed the critical importance of looking at extreme risk probabilities at the “fat tail” of probability distributions and said:

It is precisely because the responsible scientific community cannot rule out such catastrophic outcomes at a high level of confidence that climate mitigation policies are seriously proposed.

Thus, when scientists discuss possible catastrophic climate risks, they are not being “apocalyptic” – they are responsibly identifying risks that must be evaluated and discussed in the context of science, economics, public policy, and public health.

Another classic logical fallacy is to try to discredit an opponent’s argument by attacking the person and her or his motives, rather than the argument – hence the Latin “ad hominem” (“against the man”). Ad hominem attacks are pervasive in this book and detract from its tone and the content. Shellenberger attacks “apocalyptic environmentalists” as “oblivious, or worse, unconcerned” about poverty (AN, p. 35) or for opposing a massive dam on the Congo river. (AN, p. 276) He attacks the finances of leading environmental groups and leaders like the late David Brower, arguing they have taken donations from fossil fuel companies to “greenwash the closure of nuclear plants.” (AN, p. 205) And he attacks the motives, reputations, and science of many individual environmental and geophysical scientists whose work contradicts his arguments.

Do media and environmental scientists have the opposite of a ‘love for humanity’?

But Shellenberger has a special level of animosity for the press:

News media, editors, and journalists might consider whether their constant sensationalizing of environmental problems is consistent with their professional commitment to fairness and accuracy, and their personal commitment to being a positive force in the world. While I am skeptical that stealth environmental activists working as journalists are likely to change how they do their reporting, I am hopeful that competition from outside traditional news media institutions, made possible by social media, will inject new competitiveness into environmental journalism and raise standards (AN, p. 277-278)

In the most disturbing examples of vicious personal attacks, he paints broad categories of people who disagree with him as motivated by a hatred of humanity:

When we hear activists, journalists, IPCC scientists, and others claim climate change will be apocalyptic unless we make immediate, radical changes, including massive reductions in energy consumption, we might consider whether they are motivated by love for humanity or something closer to its opposite (AN, p. 275, emphasis added). We must fight against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself. (AN, p. 274) (emphasis added).

He argues in his closing sections that people worried about environmental disasters are playing out “a kind of subconscious fantasy for people who dislike civilization” (AN, p. 270) and suggests that people who oppose the solutions he prefers do so because they long for the destruction of civilization – a nasty attack on the motives of all those working in this field.

Finally, the book is riddled with a variety of simple errors. Any book with as many numbers, citations, and claims is at risk of having some mistakes, of course. But the number and scope of them here is problematic. A comprehensive catalog is well beyond the scope of this review, but one example is a massive misstatement of the amount of water required to produce energy. He says “And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.” (AN, p. 118) As shown by the actual numbers from the reference he cites, however, the difference is a factor of around two or less, not 25 to 50. And in an important omission, he fails to note that key renewable energy sources such as wind and solar photovoltaics require far less water per unit of electricity produced than all fossil fuel and nuclear thermal plants. In his discussion about climate change and extreme events, he leaves out extensive peer-reviewed evidence (like this 2015 paper, among many others) showing how fire seasons have gotten much longer as a result of rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns. He claims, twice (AN pp. 211 and 241), that nuclear power plants produce “zero pollution” – an inaccurate and unnecessary exaggeration.

A common shared goal for ‘a better future’

Shellenberger no doubt believes in, and supports, the goal of a better future. So do environmental scientists, activists, and any decent human. The disagreements we hear lie in different perceptions of the root causes of our crises and the choice of solutions to move our current world to that better future. But ideological polemics, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of science, and angry ad hominem attacks on others working in the field do nothing to move us in the right direction.

There is uncertainty about the best path forward. Those who believe the evidence shows our current path crosses dangerous planetary limits and may lead to severe environmental and social disruption can’t prove an apocalyptic future will happen – they’re arguing we must do what we can to avoid it. But neither can Cornucopians prove that narrow technological solutions and unconstrained economic growth will avoid those catastrophic futures. The imbalance of these viewpoints is key however: if Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place. If Cornucopians are wrong, apocalyptic outcomes are indeed a real possibility.

Where does that leave us? Identifying, publicizing, and working to avoid future environmental and social disasters is vitally important. I’ve worked at the intersection of science and policy on issues of climate change, freshwater resources, and environmental conflicts for more than 40 years, and the good news is that positive, effective solutions exist. We know how to provide safe water and sanitation to the billions who still lack it. We know we must now work to both cut greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the severity of climate change and at the same time work to adapt to the impacts we can no longer avoid. We know how to improve agricultural efficiency to both grow enough food for everyone and to get it to hungry mouths.

What we lack are adequate efforts to prioritize solutions, fix governmental and institutional failures, motivate policymakers, and, sadly, talk rationally to each other about moving forward quickly and effectively. This book fails to contribute to those much-needed efforts.

Dr. Peter H. Gleick is president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow, and winner of the 2018 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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apr 2022

https://prospect.org/culture/books/homelessness-meets-cluelessness-shellenberger-review/

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americans love people who find redemption by acknowledging their sins, see the light, and change their lives. Michael Shellenberger claims to have once been a progressive, but that the failure of so-called progressive cities (particularly San Francisco) to solve the crisis of homelessness turned him into a conservative. Now he’s become an evangelist for conservatism. San Fransicko is his confession.

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Despite its many endnotes, this is not a scholarly book. The author distorts and misuses facts when it suits his arguments. San Fransicko is a tirade against permissiveness—cities that allow homeless people to live and sleep on sidewalks, in parks and tent encampments in residential neighborhoods and business districts, polluting those spaces with drug needles, urine, feces, empty bottles of alcohol, and unkempt people unmoored from reality.

Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not primarily the result of poverty and the shortage of affordable housing. It is, he claims, really a problem of mental illness and substance abuse. He blames what he calls “pathological altruism”—progressive municipal officials and do-gooders who refuse to enforce vagrancy laws that would bring order and civility to urban streets.

Shellenberger made a name for himself as a critic of the environmental movement for its opposition to nuclear power and fracking. In 2016, he started Environmental Progress, which launched campaigns to keep nuclear power plants in operation, testified in Congress in favor of nuclear energy, and worked with the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobby group. In a TED Talk, Shellenberger argued that switching to renewable energy sources like solar power and wind is destroying the environment. In 2018, his unsuccessful campaign for California governor garnered only 31,692 votes. Three years later, he backed Kevin Faulconer, San Diego’s Republican former mayor, in his failed bid to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom. Then on March 10, he announced that he’s running as an independent candidate against Newsom.

NO BIG CITY IN AMERICA—whether governed by conservatives, liberals, or progressives—has solved its housing crisis. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report, “In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a worker earning the federal or prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at fair market rent by working a standard 40-hour work week.”

Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially at the bottom half of the labor market. According to a report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 2019 (the latest data available) more than 80 percent of renters earning less than $25,000 paid more than 30 percent of their incomes just to put a roof over their heads. Most paid more than half of their income for rent. Even 70 percent of renters earning between $25,000 and $34,999, and nearly 50 percent of renters earning between $35,000 and $49,999, paid more than 30 percent of household income for rent.

More from Peter Dreier

Before the COVID pandemic, more than a quarter of all unhoused Americans lived in California, which has 12 percent of the nation’s population. Almost three-quarters of the state’s homeless people—and 73 percent of San Francisco’s 8,124 homeless residents—are unsheltered, a higher share than in any other state.

California has the nation’s highest “housing wage”—the income needed to afford a typical apartment. The typical monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in California is $2,030, so a family needs to earn $39.03 per hour to avoid paying more than 30 percent of its income for rent. In San Francisco, that wage is $68.33.

Typical of Shellenberger’s disingenuousness, he writes that “Palo Alto and Beverly Hills have mild climates and expensive housing but don’t have San Francisco’s homeless problem.” But both are wealthy suburbs with few low-income residents who are likely to fall into homelessness.

Contrary to Shellenberger’s argument, a recent Harvard report found direct correlation between median rents and the size of the homeless population.

Expand

Source: “The State of the Nation’s Housing,” Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

The combination of low wages and rising rents leads many working people to wind up sleeping in their cars, on friends’ couches, on the streets, or in shelters. A recent survey I co-authored of over 10,000 grocery workers in Southern California, the Seattle area, and Colorado discovered that 14 percent had been homeless during the previous year; even 9 percent of full-time workers suffered that fate.

AMERICA’S HOMELESS CRISIS is not primarily a problem of personal pathology. The initial surge of homelessness in the 1980s resulted from the combination of closing the nation’s mental hospitals (without providing the promised funding for community-based treatment settings) and the Reagan administration’s cuts in federal funding for low-income housing. When more low-rent housing was available, including many rooming houses since lost to gentrification, even people on society’s margins could afford a roof over their heads.

Contrary to Shellenberger’s argument, San Francisco, like most California cities, has been run by business-friendly Democrats, not progressives. Since the late 1970s, San Francisco has only had one progressive mayor—Art Agnos, who served from 1988 to 1992.

Most cities have pursued a strategy of promoting construction of new office buildings and hotels, often via tax breaks, to encourage high-tech, finance, insurance, health care, and tourism businesses. The huge influx of highly paid employees, along with many low-wage workers, exacerbates the widening income divide. These cities also prioritize new luxury housing, hoping that the increase in supply will trickle down to help low-income renters find decent apartments.

But that approach never works. Instead, rents trickle up, as owners of existing properties raise rents closer to the levels of the newly built apartments. Landlords evict lower-income renters, many of whom wind up on the streets or in cramped and overcrowded quarters. A 2019 report found that 70 percent of San Francisco’s homeless people once had a home in the city.

The only way to create new housing that secretaries, garment workers, day care workers, janitors, nurses, schoolteachers, and hotel housekeepers can afford is to provide government subsidies to builders, homebuyers, and tenants. Cities don’t have that kind of money and Congress has not come close to restoring the federal HUD budget to pre-Reagan levels. Today, only one-quarter of households eligible for federal rental assistance receive it, due to funding limitations. Unlike food stamps, housing assistance—such as subsidized apartment buildings or housing vouchers—is not an entitlement. It is more like a lottery. In most cities, there are long waiting lists for housing aid—so long that many cities have stopped accepting applications. Most poor families are at the mercy of the private rental market.

Shellenberger refuses to acknowledge that mental illness and addiction are often caused or at least made worse by being homeless.

Shellenberger seems unaware of various state laws that preempt California cities’ ability to address their housing crises. He decries California’s “high taxes,” but doesn’t even mention Proposition 13, a 1978 ballot measure that dramatically limited local governments’ ability to raise property taxes on homeowners, landlords, and businesses, depriving municipalities of revenues they need for basic municipal services, let alone subsidies for affordable housing.

Nor does Shellenberger mention the Ellis Act, a 1985 state law, sponsored by the real estate industry, that allows landlords to evict tenants in order to remove housing units from the rental market. As California’s housing market has heated up, speculators have abused the law by purchasing and then demolishing older buildings in order to build newer, expensive market-rate projects. Under the law, San Francisco has lost 4,576 rent-controlled units, while Los Angeles, with almost five times as many residents, has lost 27,000. For years, housing activists have tried without success to get the state legislature to repeal the Ellis Act.

Even more glaring is Shellenberger’s failure to mention the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Act, another real estate industry–backed law, that prohibits cities from regulating rents when a unit becomes vacant. This creates a perverse incentive for landlords to evict tenants, often by illegal means, including harassment, so they can raise rents on new tenants. The result: a steadily declining number of apartments covered by rent regulation in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities.

Progressives have successfully pushed some cities to adopt inclusionary zoning laws and linkage policies to require developers to help mitigate the cost of rising rents caused by market-rate development, but these are Band-Aids, not fundamental solutions. In contrast, a coalition of Los Angeles labor, housing, and social service activists recently launched a campaign to increase taxes on real estate transactions over $5 million. This would raise over $800 million a year to fund permanent affordable housing and to provide emergency relief for renters at risk of eviction. The measure will go into effect if more than half of voters approve it on the November ballot.

SHELLENBERGER CLAIMS THAT “homelessness exploded” in California around 2009 after the state stopped making housing assistance conditional on sobriety. But he ignores the reality that California, like the rest of the country, was then reeling from the biggest housing crash since the Depression—a catastrophe caused by banks’ reckless and illegal behavior. Many middle-class and low-income people lost their homes.

Echoing Reagan, Shellenberger argues that most homeless people are homeless by choice. He thinks the poor, homeless, or addicted should make better choices. And progressives should stop making excuses for them by blaming their plight on broader economic and social forces.

Shellenberger condemns “housing first” approaches that offer homeless people a secure roof over their heads, without requiring them to first get sober or get treatment for mental illness. He wants local police to arrest homeless people who use drugs, abuse alcohol, and beg on the streets. In fact, a growing number of cities have recently begun removing homeless people from encampments and other public spaces in response to complaints from business groups and local residents.

When San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a crackdown on street crime and drug dealing last December, Shellenberger claimed vindication. He even urges California to create a new agency, Cal-Psych, which would institutionalize people who live on the streets. To make his case, Shellenberger claims that European countries have moved away from progressive “harm reduction” approaches to utilizing arrests and mandatory treatment in dealing with homeless people, but he gets that wrong, too, as Maia Szalavitz and others have shown. Coerced treatment and criminalization don’t work, said Laura Thomas of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “We don’t have enough services, we don’t have enough housing, we don’t have enough shelter beds.”

Shellenberger ignores the evidence that people with addictions and mental illness are more likely to improve their situations when they have unconditional access to stable housing. For example, that approach has cut chronic homelessness among military veterans by about half. Of course, “housing first” is easier to adopt in cities without sky-high rents, such as Houston, where the approach has been successful.

For the 32 percent of unhoused Californians who are chronically homeless, and whose plight is exacerbated by disabilities, the solution is stable housing with wraparound support services, according to a just-released study by the California Budget & Policy Center. In recent years, Los Angeles has moved about 9,000 homeless people into hotel rooms, but the overall homeless numbers didn’t decline because an even larger number of people fell into homelessness after getting evicted. The same is true in San Francisco, where the head of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing pointed out that for every person who exits homelessness, three fall into it.

Shellenberger refuses to acknowledge that mental illness and addiction are often caused or at least made worse by being homeless. Losing your job, getting evicted, and winding up homeless and living on the streets, or moved from shelter to shelter, are traumatizing experiences.

Similarly, as one research team recently found, “the association between homelessness and drug use is bidirectional, and homelessness itself plays a role in drug use and overdose risk.” Consider West Virginia, which ranks first in drug overdose deaths and is ground zero in the opioid crisis. That state has one of the nation’s lowest rates of homelessness, mostly because housing is inexpensive (the typical monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $771), and a housing wage of $14.83.

Religious zealots are not persuaded by facts and rational arguments. Shellenberger had a conversion experience and now he wants to convert liberals and progressives to atone for their sins. Shellenberger, meanwhile, has violated one of the most important commandments: “Thou shalt not lie.”

This article has been updated to reflect that Shellenberger has worked with the Nuclear Energy Institute but not directly as an employee.

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aug 13 note = pro frack

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/un-war-on-fertilizer-began-in-sri

the  United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) describes itself as “the global authority that sets the environmental agenda… and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.” Through its “Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food” program launched in 2014, the UNEP advocates that nations “steer away from the prevailing focus on per hectare productivity.”

But today the world is in its worst food crisis since 2008. The number of people suffering acute food insecurity increased by 25% since January 2022 to 345 million, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Why, then, is the UNEP trying to steer nations away from fertilizers that increase food production?

The UNEP’s Acting Director in 2019 said the reason was humankind’s “long-term interference with the Earth’s nitrogen balance.” In October of that year, the UNEP hosted a meeting in the capital of Sri Lanka, Colombo and issued a “road map” to push nations to cut nitrogen pollution in half.

But the Netherlands proves that nations can slash nitrogen pollution from livestock by 70% while also increasing meat production. Same for crops. Since the early 1960s, the Netherlands has doubled its yields while using the same amount of fertilizer. While rich nations produce 70 percent higher yields than poor nations, they use just 54 percent more nitrogen.

One month after the Colombo meeting in 2019, which generated significant media attention in Sri Lanka, voters in that nation elected an anti-fertilizer president, H.E. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who claimed, without scientific evidence, that synthetic fertilizers were causing kidney diseases. In April 2021, he banned fertilizer imports.

In June, 2021, two months after the fertilizer ban, Sri Lanka hosted a UN-sponsored “Food System Dialogue” aimed at influencing the UN’s broader anti-fertilizer agenda for the world. “Sri Lanka’s inaugural Food System Dialogue is part of a series of national and provincial dialogues conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture ahead of the 2021 UN Food System Summit set to take place in New York later this year.”

In his statement to the UN Food System Summit in New York in September, Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa repeated his claim that “chemical fertilizers… led to adverse health and environmental impacts.” He said, “My Government took the bold step to restrict imports of these harmful substances earlier this year,” and blamed farmers for resisting his fertilizer ban, saying that “changing the mindset of farmers long accustomed to using chemical fertiliser has proven challenging.”

In fact, the fertilizer ban was causing a crash in agricultural production. After the fertilizer ban, 85% of Sri Lankan farmers experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20%, prices rose 50 percent, and the nation had to import $450 million worth of the grain. In Rajanganaya, where farmers operate on just a hectare (2.5 acres), of land on average, families reported producing half their normal crop harvest.

There were other factors behind the government’s fall, but those factors affected many other nations and none fell. Covid lockdowns hurt tourism. The government borrowed too much. Oil prices rose. All were factors and none were decisive. What made the difference was Sri Lanka’s ban on fertilizers.

Hardest hit was tea. It had generated $1.3 billion in exports annually and provided71% of the nation’s food imports before 2021. After the fertilizer ban, tea production crashed 18%, reaching its lowest level in 23 years. The government’s devastating ban on fertilizer thus destroyed the ability of Sri Lanka to pay for food, fuel, and service its debt.

The UN justifies its anti-fertilizer agenda on the same basis as the Sri Lankan government: cost savings. UN documents claim that its goal for nations to “Halve Nitrogen Waste” would save nations “$100 billion annually.” But the same document promotes a “circular economy,” which is aeuphemism used by Green parties in Europe to refer to economic “de-growth” based on making food and energy production less productive. [OR REFERS TO COMPOSTING?!]

UNEP isn’t the only UN agency promoting an anti-fertilizer agenda. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2018 launched the “Scaling Up Agroecology” Initiative. It is not a research initiative, it is an advocacy initiative. It claims “agroecological systems are vital… for addressing poverty, hunger, and climate change.” In fact, agroecology, which doesn’t use synthetic fertilizer, reduces food production, and thus increases poverty and hunger.

Now, the UNEP is seeking to move nations away from modern fertilizers through “the International Nitrogen Management System (INMS)” under the guise of science. It calls INMS a “science support process” as part of an “Inter-Convention Nitrogen Coordination Mechanism (INCOM).”

What’s going on? Why is the United Nations promoting a kind of food production proven to reduce yields, raise prices, and topple governments? And what can be done to stop it?

The UN’s War on Development ...paywall

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9 22 ggl rec

Green Dogma Behind Fall Of Sri Lanka

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com › green-dogma...

Jul 10, 2022 — Sri Lanka has fallen. Protesters breached the official residences of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and President, who have fled to undisclosed ...

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com › un-war-on-fe...

Aug 13, 2022 — UN Environment Programme launched its anti-fertilizer efforts from Sri Lanka in 2019. Michael Shellenberger. Aug ...

Michael Shellenberger on Twitter: "The uprisings in Sri Lanka ...

https://twitter.com › ShellenbergerMD › status

Jul 10, 2022 — The uprisings in Sri Lanka & Netherlands seem unrelated but they're both reactions to governing green elites trying to destroy modern farming by ...

https://twitter.com › ShellenbergerMD › status

Western environmentalists including Michael Pollan and Frances Moore Lappé, have promoted Vandana Shiva, architect of Sri Lanka's disaster, for decades.

When Sri Lanka Banned Synthetic Fertilizers, the Country ...

https://reason.com › ... › Oil › Oil prices

Sep 7, 2022 — The president resigned and fled the country. It turns out that we need chemical fertilizers. Environmental writer Michael Shellenberger says if ...

That narrative (affiliating the collapse of Sri Lanka with ESG ...

https://news.ycombinator.com › item

Fair point, I'm not trying to defend ESG (there's all sorts of issues with it), but authors from abroad (like Michael Shellenberger who you link to) are ...

A food, energy, and financial crisis has brought down Sri ...

https://rattibha.com › thread

The World Economic Forum and others promoted organics in Sri Lanka. ... Vandana Shiva celebrated Sri Lanka's ban on chemical fertilizers and its move to ...

COMMENTARY: Anti-Energy Nihilism Behind Economic Crisis

https://energynow.com › 2022/09 › commentary-anti-e...

More From Michael Shellenberger ... both rich and poor nations closer to the kind of social unrest that brought down the government of Sri Lanka in July.

Ted Nordhaus | The Breakthrough Institute

https://thebreakthrough.org › people › ted-nordhaus

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of ... Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, "How Sri Lanka's Shift to Organic Farming Left It ...

Michael Shellenberger | Facebook

https://et-ee.facebook.com › ... › Autor

Michael Shellenberger, Albany, CA. 3893 meeldimist · 154 inimest räägivad ... U.N. War On Fertilizer Began in Sri Lanka·michaelshellenberger.substack.com.

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oversight 9 22 refs hansen

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-needs-nuclear-power-11554420097

About WSJ

    Opinion  Commentary

The Climate Needs Nuclear Power

If governors are serious about global warming, they’ll preserve this vital source of clean energy.

By James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger

April 4, 2019

[pix The Diablo Canyon nuclear-power plant in San Luis Obispo, Calif.Photo: Corbis via Getty Images

Many environmentalists have changed their minds about nuclear energy over the past decade. While the share of energy produced by solar and wind has grown rapidly, nuclear remains America’s largest source of clean, zero-emissions electricity. Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power.

But two-thirds of U.S. nuclear plants in the U.S. are at risk of being closed prematurely and replaced by natural-gas generation, which is currently cheaper in many states. If that happens, carbon emissions could increase by an amount equivalent to adding 47 million new cars to the road.

Ideally, the federal government would solve this problem, but between Republican skepticism of climate change and Democratic opposition to nuclear energy, that’s unlikely to happen before many nuclear-plant operators must decide whether to shut down. Thus the job of keeping these beleaguered nuclear plants open falls to state governments.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Pennsylvania are considering proposals to keep their nuclear plants operating. Ohio is at risk of losing two plants that produce 90% of its clean energy. Pennsylvania’s five nuclear plants produce nearly as much electricity as do all of America’s solar panels and farms. Nuclear accounts for 93% of the Keystone State’s clean, zero-emissions electricity. If Pennsylvania and Ohio’s nuclear plants close and are replaced by facilities that burn natural gas, it would be like adding 13.5 million new cars to the roads.

Nuclear plants can be saved through modest subsidies similar to the ones extended by lawmakers in Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York between 2016 and 2018. Those subsidies have been smaller than the federal subsidy that wind-energy generators have received for 27 years. In 2017 New York energy regulators gave nuclear power generators a subsidy of $17.34 per megawatt-hour. They also subsidized wind generators at $23 per megawatt-hour on top of the federal subsidy of $22 per megawatt-hour.

The fossil-fuel lobby’s objections to nuclear power are understandable. The American Petroleum Institute wants to replace Ohio’s and Pennsylvania’s nuclear plants with natural-gas plants because its members stand to benefit. But why do groups that claim to be concerned about the climate oppose nuclear power?

Some Democratic lawmakers in Pennsylvania and environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council are urging state legislators not to subsidize nuclear without increasing subsidies for solar and wind. While combining subsidies for nuclear with subsidies for wind and solar worked to get legislation passed in New York and Illinois in 2016, such an approach risks backfiring in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where state lawmakers are more fiscally conservative and tend to be skeptical of renewables.

Saving nuclear plants won’t be free, but keeping them open will keep electricity prices lower than if natural gas is allowed to dominate. Both Ohio and Pennsylvania still produce large amounts of electricity from coal, which is being replaced by natural gas. If both coal and nuclear plants are replaced by gas, ratepayers will be vulnerable to future price increases at the hands of monopolistic gas generators.

New York and California, meanwhile, are moving ahead with plans to close two nuclear plants. In the Empire State, Westchester County’s Indian Point will close in 2021 and, on the West Coast, San Luis Obispo’s Diablo Canyon will go offline in 2025. California is already set to miss its 2030 target of a 40% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels. If Diablo Canyon closes and half of its output is replaced by natural gas, there’s no way they’ll get there.

It is notable that while three natural-gas plants are being built to succeed Indian Point, local opposition to the construction of solar and wind farms has kept them from being built at anywhere near the rate necessary to replace the nuclear facility’s output.

We’ve been here before. Environmentalists promised that solar and wind would replace output from California’s San Onofre Generating Station, which closed in 2013, and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, which shut down the following year. Instead, they were replaced mostly by natural gas, and emissions rose in both states. At the rate Vermont is building new wind farms, it would take 474 years to match the electricity generation it lost from closing Vermont Yankee.

The problem isn’t only that nuclear plants generate far more electricity. It’s that solar and wind generate it only sporadically, which means they must be backed up by other sources of power 100% of the time. There is great hype about batteries, and using dams as pumped storage. But those solutions remain extremely expensive, which is why whenever nuclear plants close anywhere in the world, they are usually replaced by coal or natural-gas plants—not solar, not wind and not batteries.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The governors of California, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania can take actions to keep their nuclear plants operating. Governors in those states have in recent years urged more action out of Washington to address climate change. They’ll have far more credibility and influence if they first take action in their home states.

Mr. Hansen is a climate scientist and head of Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Earth Institute Columbia University. Mr. Shellenberger is president of Environmental Progress.

Appeared in the April 5, 2019, print edition as 'The Climate Needs Nuclear Power'.

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How low can they go? Hansen, Shellenberger shilling for Exelon

Nuclear Monitor Issue:

#822

4553

21/04/2016

Michael Mariotte − President of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service

Article

While some potential legal challenges remain, the approval of the Exelon-Pepco merger by the Washington, D.C. Public Service Commission means that Exelon is now not only the largest nuclear powered utility in the U.S., it is the largest electric utility period. And with that steady stream of regulated, and non-nuclear, Pepco money filling its coffers, you'd think that Exelon's continuing "threats" to close up to three of its Illinois reactor sites unless it obtains more bailouts from beleaguered Illinois taxpayers and ratepayers would fall on deaf ears. Or maybe Exelon is now trying to achieve "too big to fail" status?

That Exelon's "threats" to close these reactors are considered by the utility – and its backers – threats at all is an indication of how perverse the discussion in Illinois is (and really, wherever Exelon operates, where such threats to close reactors without bailouts are commonplace). After all, these reactors (the single reactor at Clinton and the two-unit Quad Cities) are demonstrably uneconomic – they just can't compete with gas or wind, or solar for that matter. They also are aging and increasingly unsafe; the two Fukushima-clones at Quad Cities especially so, although Clinton too has a weak GE pressure suppression containment system.

And, given the large amount of wind power available to the region, and the potential for large amounts of solar power if Exelon didn't keep trying to shoot it down, they aren't needed for power supply reasons, nor to ensure low carbon emissions. Whatever of their power actually needs to be replaced, and it's not like Illinois is facing imminent power shortages, can be done so economically and quickly with renewables, efficiency and storage.

Enter the pro-nuke "environmentalists"

Enter the pro-nuke "environmentalists". Specifically, renowned climate scientist Dr. James Hansen and industry-oriented Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute came to Illinois in early April to weigh in on the Exelon bailout debate.1 And no, they didn't support renewables or other clean energy technologies. They didn't question whether the nation's largest electric utility really needs to gouge Illinoisans for another $300 million to keep aging, money-losing reactors open. Their message was pretty simple: in an open letter to Illinois legislators they, and several dozen others (most of whom are long-standing nuclear advocates) urged them to "do everything in your power to keep all of Illinois's nuclear power plants running for their full lifetimes."

Sometimes Dr. Hansen just makes you wonder if he isn't undertaking some bizarre experiment to see how far he can undermine his own credibility before it all blows up in his face. Back in November 2013 he and three colleagues wrote an open letter to us nuclear opponents urging us to reconsider nuclear power.2 It's worth going back and reading some of that letter:

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"As climate and energy scientists concerned with global climate change, we are writing to urge you to advocate the development and deployment of safer nuclear energy systems," the letter began. It added, "We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem."

And this: "We understand that today's nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer."

Note the emphasis: Hansen is clearly talking about "safer" nuclear reactors. To be precise, he was seeking environmentalist support for development and deployment of Generation IV reactors. Which, to date, do not exist.

NIRS and Civil Society Institute organized a response, signed by 300+ organizations, to Hansen's letter explaining our continued opposition to nuclear power as a climate response and calling for a public debate on the issue.3 We never received a reply.

Now jump ahead to December 2015, just four months ago. Shortly before the Paris COP-21 climate talks, Hansen et. al. issued a new missive:

"Nuclear power, particularly next-generation nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where spent fuel is reprocessed), is uniquely scalable, and environmentally advantageous. Over the past 50 years, nuclear power stations – by offsetting fossil fuel combustion – have avoided the emission of an estimated 60bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. Nuclear energy can power whole civilizations, and produce waste streams that are trivial compared to the waste produced by fossil fuel combustion. There are technical means to dispose of this small amount of waste safely. However, nuclear does pose unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards. Most importantly for climate, nuclear produces no CO2 during power generation."

While there is much to dispute in this paragraph, again note the emphasis on safety and "next-generation nuclear power" and continued acknowledgement of nuclear's "unique safety and proliferation concerns."

Fukushima-clone Quad Cities, which began operation in 1972, and Clinton, which began operation in 1987, clearly do not fall under the "safer" or "next-generation" nuclear memes. By endorsing not only their continued operation, but their continued operation enabled by forcing the people of Illinois to further line Exelon's pockets, Hansen has made a mockery of his earlier safety concerns and exposed himself as no different than any other Exelon-paid-for Nuclear Matters spokesperson.

Over the credibility cliff

But it gets worse, because by allying himself with the Breakthrough Institute's Shellenberger, Hansen has gone a step even further, a step right over the credibility cliff. Because as Midwest Energy News reported: "Shellenberger described next-generation technology as farther away from viability than he had previously hoped, and urged more focus on the nation's existing reactors. "How much safer could they be?" he said. "If you have nuclear plants that don't hurt anyone, keep running them."4

In other words, Shellenberger dismisses Hansen's support of Generation IV reactors in one phrase and argues in essence that because Fukushima hasn't happened yet at Quad Cities, well, hell, it never will; keep them running. But Fukushima did, in fact, happen. And there were supposed to have been lessons learned from that disaster. One of those is to be highly skeptical of GE Mark I nuclear reactor designs that are essentially identical to Fukushima, and that have been highly controversial even since their inception in the 1960s.

Thus, Hansen and Shellenberger (and the rest of the letter's signers, most of whom probably know little about the actual situation in Illinois)are now dismissing any pretense of caring about nuclear safety. For what? To enable Exelon, the largest electric utility in the nation, to gouge Illinoisans for another $300 million to keep open three aging, uneconomic and unsafe nuclear reactors, because of their low carbon emissions.

Arguing for environmentalists to consider Generation IV reactor technology was one thing. For many reasons, we rejected that approach and explained in detail why we did so, but at least it was a fair challenge. But actively working to prevent the shutdown of three reactors of 1960s nuclear technology under the pretense that it would matter for the climate is a leap too far. I hate to say it, but it is a leap so far that it brings into question Hansen's credibility on the far more important issues of his climate science generally. I have long trusted Hansen on climate issues; now, I am nervous about that. If he can be so wrong in Illinois, and so far removed from his own previous statements on nuclear safety, and seems willing to sell himself to the nation's largest, and quite possibly greediest, electric utility, well, how can I trust his other work?

I have been telling myself – and others – as Hansen's pro-nuclear statements have become more and more strident and outlandish over the past few years that, well, Hansen is a climate expert, not an energy expert, and there is a big difference between the two. That's still true, of course. But I'm having my doubts. Could some of his climate statements – that I'm not expert enough to evaluate the way I am expert enough to evaluate his nuclear statements – be as far removed from reality as his Illinois positions? Fortunately, there are a lot of other climate experts out there. I'll start listening more closely to them. And there are lots of real energy experts out there, but I already know them and I'll continue to listen to them. As for Hansen, I probably won't listen to him anymore on either subject.

As for Illinois, closing Clinton and Quad Cities would not only save its citizens' money and reduce the daily risk these dangerous reactors pose, it would help usher in substantial new clean energy investment, something the state desperately could use. That would be the kind of win-win situation – for the state and the climate, if not for Exelon – that the legislature hopefully will recognize.

Michael Mariotte regularly writes at the GreenWorld blog, www.safeenergy.org

References:

1. http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/04/05/climate-scientist-james-hansen-s...

2. www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-le...

3. http://safeenergy.org/2014/01/09/the-grassroots-response-to-dr-james-han...

4. http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/04/05/climate-scientist-james-hansen-s..

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