Michael Shellenberger: Fighting the Good Fight

Photo by Emma Watson on Unsplash

Last night I came across some Tweets by Michael Shellenbergsr regarding some misinformation promulgated by the New York Times regarding redwoods in California being destroyed as a result of climate change. What Shellenberger stated was that Times and one of their writers didn't just exaggerate the truth but printed outright falsehoods.

Naturally this made me curious as to what had been said. Here's the misinformation from MS's Dec 11 Tweets: The New York Times is claiming in a long, front-page story today that recent fires killed "countless ancient redwoods" in California

The claim is false and should be immediately corrected

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The reason Shellenberger gets so incensed about these things is that later in his career as an environmentalist he kept running into young people who had no confidence about the future, who weren't even going to start families because the world was coming to an end due to climate change.

"As a lifelong environmental activist I am horrified that some young people say they may not have children because of climate change," he writes. "The truth is that *most* trends relating to climate change & the environment are headed in the right direction!" 

The title of his book is Apocalypse Never.  

The sad part is that if you do not agree that the world is at the edge of collapse, you are the problem. The story of Chicken Little ought to teach us that maybe the Chicken Littles of the world might have things mixed up and overblown.

According to Shellenberger: No scientist or journalist has presented evidence for a single ancient redwood tree killed by this summer's fires

So how do they get away with declaring it?

Shellenberger is all for protecting our world and human life. For some reason the fear narrative has gained more traction than the many positive stories. For example, how many times have you heard that we can't feed our massive global population. Someone two centuries ago wrote that two billion was earth's maximum capacity. In 1970 The Population Bomb was required reading in one of my classes. But according to the Apocalypse Never Slide Deck, we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people.

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Another battle that Shellenberger has become involved in is the push for solar energy over nuclear energy. Once again, the narrative is "Nuclear = Bad, Sun and Wind = Good." But are the facts are seldom put on the table. The straight up full story never gets fairly discussed. Kids are taught in school to fear nuclear power and that carbon based fuels are bad. Sun power is pure.... But at what cost? Everything in life has trade offs. 

Here are recent Tweets from Shellenberger, who has much more to say on this issue.

Solar panels - create good jobs in China, not US - increased Calif. electric prices 7x more than rest of US - needs 300x land than nuclear - violates rights of indigenous - makes big $ for mega-banks

California saw its electricity rates rise 6x more than the rest of the U.S. between 2011 and 2019, due principally to the deployment of renewables and enabling equipment.

8:21 AM · Dec 3, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

Consider the largest new solar farm in the United States. It will create just six permanent jobs, each earning $43,000 per year. By contrast, an average two-reactor nuclear plant employs 1,200 people.

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You can follow Mike Shellenberger on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD 

Related Links

He Who Controls the Narrative Controls the People

Purchase Apocalypse Never on Amazon

Scary Thoughts: A Collision of Worldviews

Disclaimer: The author of this blog does not receive any remuneration or benefit 
from promoting this book or any other books on this blog other than my own.

Global Warming Is Not the End of the World Says Says a Longtime Voice of the Green Movement

A few years ago I was surprised by a survey which showed the extent to which Climate Change had become the number one issue on peoples' list of concerns. I know that it's been talked about for decades and in the 90s some projected that the ice caps would be melted by now and all coastal cities underwater.

This past week I saw a Tweet from Michael Shellenberger regarding an opinion piece he'd written for Forbes which he intended as an apology to all the people whom his environmental activism had terrified. When I went to copy it for sharing here, Forbes had removed it. Did Forbes cave in to Cancel Culture?

That's what John Robson says in the National Post. The piece is titled Forbes falls to cancel culture as it erases environmentalist's mea culpa. Robson begins, "It’s big news when somebody prominent apologizes for being badly wrong on a major public matter, promises to do better going forward and urges others to do the same, right? Unless the person commits heresy like, say, Michael Shellenberger."

Robson lays out an in depth list of Shellenberger's Progressive credentials, just so those who know him not might see what a big deal this is.

One reason a lot of people want to put a gag on Shellenberger might be that the Democracts have all been piling on to this end of the world scenario, which will enable them to take drastic action should they acquire. the reigns of power. As I have written elsewhere, he who controls the narrative controls the people. The Green agenda would appear to no longer be about truth but about control.

This is what Reason is suggesting in it's latest barb by Nick Gillespie, 'Climate Change Is Real, But It's Not the End of the World': Michael Shellenberger. The Gillespie story puts the political angle front and center at the outset: "If there's one consistent message coming from activists and politicians pushing the Green New Deal and massive new subsidies for renewable energy it's that if we don't take radical action now, life on Earth as we know it will soon be irreversibly destroyed. Greta Thunberg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden all have claimed that we have less than a dozen years left in which to save the planet."

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Photo by RawFilm on Unsplash

The trigger for this media firestorm is Shellenberger's new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,  in which he argues that science doesn't support doomsayers' claims.

Here are some facts that he underscores in the book, facts which have been repeated so often they've been accepted with the same legitimacy at the earth being round and 93 million miles from the sun.

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
• Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

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It's easy to see why Shellenberger's message is controversial. If deforestation and deaths from extreme weather are declining, it weakens the motivations to dish out boatloads of dollars to enviro-groups whose primary function is to save Planer Earth.

This is precisely what Michael Crichton's disputed State of Fear was about. Fighting for a cause, even if the facts don't support the existence of the problem, is good business. The more you fan the flames of fear, the more people open their wallets. Fear moves people to action, which is why both the major political machines (Dems and GOP) are so fond of it as a fundraising tool.

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When I read about the dust-up at Forbes, it did enter my mind that Shellenberger's opinion piece may have been pulled because he was promoting his new book. It's a foggy matter, since someone decided to publish it initially. I recall a similar incident back in the 90s when an article was pulled from the magazine because of a sit-in in the publication's lobby in NYC.

How interesting that the center of the controversy takes place where the Media Messages are crafted. Ibsen's An Enemy of the People centered around a small town's newspaper. Orwell's 1984 likewise primarily revolves around The Ministry of Truth.