Tag Archive for: Michael Shellenberger

Brilliant Political Orphans

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For the millions of Americans who over the years have been impressed with Tulsi Gabbard’s courage and authenticity, even if not in agreement with all of her positions on some important issues, her decision to denounce the Democratic Party was a welcome development.

What’s not to like in this statement: “I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”

Gabbard characterized the Democratic Party as standing for “a government of, by, and for the powerful elite.” Gabbard is now a political orphan, and she’s not alone.

There is an emerging group of politicians and public intellectuals who agree on key economic and social issues, yet cannot find a home in either major political party. Their ideology, while embracing the libertarian ideal of limited government, stops short of embracing the Libertarian Party as an alternative.

An example of a rising politician and well established intellectual who fits this profile is Michael Shellenberger, a Californian who has twice ran for governor and is the author of two books. Shellenberger’s first book, “Apocalypse Never,” published in 2020, makes a strong case that there is not a climate “crisis,” and that policies to supposedly mitigate it are doing more harm than good. His second book, “San Fransicko,” published a year later, indicts progressive politicians for choosing policies that have only aggravated the homeless crisis.

Shellenberger offers comprehensive research and commentary on both woke politics and climate politics. He reports on the growing catastrophe caused by systematic divestment out of conventional energy – natural gas, oil, and nuclear – at the same time as he has produced valuable investigations into the destructive impact of homeless policies that don’t recognize and treat pervasive mental illness but instead invest literally billions in providing expensive housing with no behavioral conditions for occupancy.

One of Shellenberger’s most recent essays, published on his Substack account, is called “The Quiet Desperation of Woke Fanatics.” It is a convincing and unflattering description of the psychology of climate activists and woke activists. Referencing Eric Hoffer’s classic book “The True Believer,” published in 1951, Shellenberger describes the mentality of the woke and the climate activists:

“They are frustrated, needy, and lonely. They are in the grip of nihilism and wounded, narcissistically. They are spiritual seekers and creative failures. They have both a strong need to feel special, and powerful, but also to lose themselves in the group. They are people who desperately want to get away from having to deal with themselves and the confrontation with inner demons required for personal growth.”

These emotionally unstable fanatics are the people being opportunistically used to drive the agenda of Democrats and Republicans alike. This alienated minority has been mainstreamed and legitimized by every established American institution to further the agenda of what Gabbard so aptly describes as “a government of, by, and for the powerful elite.” Catering to their intricate demands requires new laws and regulations which drive small businesses under, enable corporate consolidation, raise the cost of living, and undermine social cohesion. No wonder so many people have lost trust in American institutions. No wonder we have so many political orphans.

Another political orphan is Joel Kotkin, a prolific writer who has quietly leveraged his initial expertise on urban geography and demographics to become a respected analyst covering global political and economic trends. Kotkin, who like Shellenberger and Gabbard was once a Democrat, claims that “our society is being reduced to a feudal state.” In his 2020 book “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism,” he warns “the middle-class is becoming one of property-less serfs, while the ‘expert’ class of the clerisy and the tech oligarchs take over.”

While Kotkin was one of the first to describe what’s coming as “feudal,” a critical differentiating issue for him regards urban planning. Kotkin, along with economist Randal O’Toole (the “Anti-Planner”), correctly identifies environmentalist inspired “urban containment,” where “greenbelts” or “urban service boundaries” are imposed to limit the expansion of cities, as a primary reason for a housing shortage and unaffordable homes.

America’s Kaleidoscopic, Multi-Ethnic Political Orphanage

Ruy Teixeira is an American political scientist who made a name for himself in 2002 with a book he co-wrote, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” An accurate summary of Teixeira’s argument reduces to this: Republicans are racist against nonwhites, who are demographically destined to become a voting majority, therefore Democrats will inevitably become the dominant political party in America. Twenty years later, Democrats cling to Teixeria’s theory more than ever, which is why, according to Gabbard (herself of Samoan descent), they “racialize every issue and stoke anti-white racism.”

A dazzling repudiation of Teixeria’s condescending prediction is found in Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37 year old Ohio native of Indian descent who has made a fortune as founder of several successful technology and biotech companies. Turning to politics, Ramaswamy’s two most recent books have self-explanatory titles: “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” published in 2021, and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” published this year.

One of Ramaswamy’s biggest targets of late is the ESG criteria (Environmental, Social, Governance) that is impelling corporations to incorporate woke ideology and climate activism into their products, their marketing, and their investments. Critical of everything from internal “racial equity audits” to external divestment in combustible fuels, Ramaswamy maintains that the ESG movement is the opposite of the “free market” it purports to merely harness, and sees it instead as an authoritarian power grab.

A few days ago, Ruy Teixeira published a new essay titled “A Three Point Plan To Fix the Democrats and Their Coalition.” Perhaps finally recognizing that even industrial scale race baiting isn’t turning out to be enough to turn America into a one-party state, Texiera’s three points are (1) Move to the Center on Cultural Issues, (2) Promote an Abundance Agenda, and (3) Embrace Patriotism and Liberal Nationalism. These are good suggestions, but the Democrats will never be able to fulfil them in ways that voters will find meaningful.

To illustrate this, consider the most prohibitively difficult of Teixeira’s three points, to “promote an abundance agenda.” It is impossible to achieve that goal without recognizing that “renewables” are at least fifty years away from replacing coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. To reiterate a cold fact that never loses its relevance, if everyone on earth consumed half as much energy, per capita, as Americans consume, global energy production would have to more than double. Wind and solar power today provides less than three percent of total energy produced worldwide. So-called renewable energy production cannot be expanded quickly enough to meet the legitimate demands of nations around the world whose citizens aspire to prosperity, and for it to ever achieve the necessary scale would cause environmental havoc.

A proponent of fossil fuel, who just published a book aptly named “Fossil Future,” is writer and philosopher Alex Epstein. Only starting from the premise that fossil fuels are a nonnegotiable necessity, Epstein goes on to argue that fossil fuels have provided the abundant and affordable energy that has enabled civilization to thrive, and that more fossil fuel development is necessary to ensure “human flourishing” into the future.

Epstein is right. Along with a growing number of climate and energy realists – Judith Curry, Kenneth Haapala, Bjorn Lomborg, Steve Milloy, Jo Nova,  Anthony Watts, Gregory Wrightstone, to name a few – Epstein argues that “the media’s designated experts have made wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years,” and “the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come.”

These noteworthy individuals, along with thousands of other politicians and intellectuals, and millions of American voters, have become alienated from the Democratic Party. But what about the Republicans? Can the GOP offer these people a home?

The answer is, unfortunately, not yet. First, the Republican Party has to be purged of RINOs like Mitt Romney. Matt Taibbi, an investigative journalist of extraordinary integrity who has evolved, like Shellenberger, from a progressive idealist to a political orphan, aptly described Romney in his 2012 expose for Rolling Stone titled “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” If the story of the Democrats is how they moved from a center-left party of the working man to a party controlled by neolibs and neocons, the story of the Romney Republicans is that they have been neolibs and neocons all along.

Mitt Romney, and every other Republican politician of his ilk, never saw an ESG rule they didn’t like, nor a climate emergency mandate they didn’t support. Until the Romney Republicans are either gone or are reduced to a compliant minority in a party that has decisively overcome these anti-human, corporatist creeds, that are written and enforced to benefit a powerful elite, RINO Republicans will only create more political orphans, not attract them.

Which brings us to Trump, and Trumpism, or MAGA, a phenomenon bigger than Trump himself. Tom Klingenstein, chairman of the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech in August 2022 titled “Trump’s Virtues.” In his remarks, he states, “you cannot fight a war until you know you are in one,” and gives Trump credit for making that clear to Americans.

Klingenstein’s speech defending Trump (transcript) deserves careful scrutiny by any political orphan that is afraid of America’s drift towards authoritarianism camouflaged with woke and climate emergency rhetoric. The civil war in the Republican Party between the Romney RINOs and the MAGA movement is one in which both contenders may alienate America’s brilliant political orphans, but it is not something for them to watch with indifference. The premises of the MAGA movement share too much with the premises they also support to be dismissed.

The very recent ascendancy of political orphans like Gabbard, Shellenberger, Kotkin, Ramaswamy, and Epstein, is something to be encouraged. They are speaking for what is indeed a silent majority of Americans, silenced by the media, by their professors and teachers, by a saturation bombardment of woke corporate messaging, and by politicians that are either completely in the grip of woke ideology and climate activism, or too cowardly to resist. These rising stars and countless others who will join them will not be silenced, and they will channel the sentiments and answer the prayers of Americans who have had no voice and no champions.

How the America’s movement of political orphans grows, what shape it will take, and who or what it will align itself with, shall be most interesting. If they coalesce into a united movement, it will inevitably grow to rival America’s ruling elites in political power.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

“Apocalypse Never” Takes Direct Aim at Consensus Climate Alarmism

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An important new book by Michael Shellenberger, “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” attempts to counter the common belief that climate change poses an imminent and existential threat to humanity and the planet. At 285 pages, this is a relatively short and very readable book, but it covers a lot of ground. And with an additional 125 pages containing over 1,000 footnotes, Shellenberger’s arguments are well documented.

The book should be required reading for politicians. It should also be required reading for Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and the handful of other online communications titans who exercise almost total control over what what facts and opinions make their way into public discourse. Needless to say, this book also belongs in the hands of climate activist journalists, for whom a sixteen year old truant is an oracle with unassailable credibility, while contrarian scientists and economists are only targets for smear campaigns.

Needless to say, Shellenberger’s book has attracted furious rebuttals- this one in the Yale Climate Review is typical – but it is unlikely many of these critics read the book all the way through, or read it with an open mind. One of Shellenberger’s primary points is that while climate change is occurring, it is not the biggest global environmental threat, and that policies undertaken to “fight climate change” are causing some of the most harm to the environment. So-called “renewable energy” is a prime example of this.

To debunk the supposed environmental benefits of renewable energy, Shellenberger makes frequent reference to the concept of power density. In this analysis, nuclear energy comes out on top, generating the most power in the least amount of space. This is considered in terms of the footprint of the generating plant, as well as the area required for mineral extraction of the raw materials with which to make them, the distribution grid, and the subsequent waste storage. Following nuclear is hydroelectricity, then fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources bring up the distant rear. In order, they are solar, wind, and biofuel/biomass. But it isn’t just the extreme amounts of land consumed by renewables, that’s just part of the problem.

Because renewables supply intermittent power, backup has to be provided either in the form of grid-scale batteries or natural gas power plants. Shellenberger exposes the links between fossil fuel interests and the pro-renewable-but-anti-nuclear lobby, and makes a convincing case that there is a synergy between the two. By blocking nuclear power, which offers a continuous supply of electricity, expansion of quick-start natural gas power plants are necessary to fill in during nights and winter when the sun is down and the wind falters.

In a section that constitutes a goldmine for political foes of California’s aristocratic families headed by the Brown, Getty, Newsom, and Pelosi clans, Shellenberger spells out exactly how this clique used its influence to protect their oil and gas interests at the same time as they have steadily worked to eliminate nuclear power. This is a scandal ripe for further investigation.

Renewables don’t just consume land and cause increased use of fossil fuel to provide the necessary backup power, they’re killing wildlife. Lots of wildlife. Defenders of wind power make the stunningly deceptive claim that “house cats kill more birds than windmills.” This knowingly ignores the fact that cats don’t kill the endangered raptors, they kill the common sparrow. Windmills, on the other hand, are slaughtering raptors at alarming rates, along with bats and insects. In all three cases, this is no joke. Any competent ecologist will explain the threat of extinction posed by windmills to these species, as well as how essential their survival is to ecosystem health.

To dwell on Shellenberger’s takedown of renewables would not do justice to the rest of his book. One of his primary themes is the land use impact of various policy choices, not only in the context of renewables but also with respect to agriculture and livestock. He explains that adopting modern agricultural practices are a more significant variable, by an order of magnitude, than climate change in affecting crop yields. He explains the potential of indoor agriculture, aquaculture, along with mechanized agriculture to dramatically reduce the land required for global food production. He even cites studies that find “industrial beef” requires “fourteen to nineteen times less land than pasture beef.”

This point, that “renewable” energy and “sustainable” agriculture are causing far more harm than benefit to the environment, is lost on the climate activist lobby. Shellenberger devotes a chapter in his book to explaining how the IPCC has become politicized, and that the “summary for policymakers” they release often misrepresent the source reports to highlight worst case scenarios. These hyped summaries are then selectively quoted by activist journalists and agenda-driven politicians to exaggerate the IPCC findings even more. Pursuant to this message, no price is too great. If climate change is going to destroy the planet any day now, it doesn’t matter if the forests burn to fuel cooking fires, or windmills and solar farms destroy habitats and species.

For those of us who already are convinced that climate change is not an existential threat, but a manageable one that may take its place among a host of other serious challenges, no further discussion is required. Politicians are corrupt, business investors are opportunistic, scientists are politicized, socialists exploit the climate agenda, and ordinary people find meaning in the climate crusade that previous generations found in religion and patriotism. Enough said.

Something else Shellenberger highlights, however, bears special emphasis. He makes a case for big infrastructure. Not only nuclear power plants, but also hydropower and power grids. He describing the plight of Africans for whom reliable supplies of water and energy would completely transform their lives. Big infrastructure in Africa would enable prosperity, political stability, and space efficient agriculture. It would eliminate the need to forage for wood or hunt game. It would take pressure off nature preserves. It would allow African nations to acquire the development and demographic trajectory already either achieved or well underway in the rest of the world; a stabilizing population, female emancipation, lower infant mortality, higher life expectancy, increased literacy, better public health, urbanization. Instead, Shellenberger writes, “sustainable” development aid rarely funds infrastructure in Africa.

An example of a project that attracts almost universal condemnation from the global environmentalist is the Grand Inga Dam complex on the Congo River. If completed, these hydroelectric dams would generate far more power than the Three Gorges Dam in China; possibly exceeding 40 gigawatts of continuous electricity. Overall, Africa’s hydroelectric potential has barely been tapped. Africa also lacks a reliable electricity grid, or a natural gas pipeline network. With the exception of South Africa, there are no nuclear power plants in Africa.

The economic and environmental benefits of big infrastructure in Africa would not only accrue to Africans, greatly improving their standard of living and quality of life. It is also an opportunity that American investors and civil engineering firms ought to seize, with the full support of the U.S. government. Not only would this extend American influence in Africa, and offer remunerative opportunities to American businesses, it would be a way to revive America’s nuclear power and civil engineering industries. Moreover, it would preclude other nations, most notably China and Russia, from stepping in to fill the vacuum.

America’s response to the “climate crisis,” set to go into overdrive if Biden becomes president next year, makes all of life’s essentials less affordable, especially for low income Americans, and it diminishes America’s ability to do good in the rest of the world. Virtually all climate skeptics attempt to stress this moral foundation, from the irrepressible Marc Morano to the more nuanced “lukewarmist” experts such as economist Bjorn Lomborg or scientist Judith Curry, but face an overwhelming political and cultural momentum that marginalizes their voice. The consensus enforcers may have a tough time shoving Shellenberger into that box.

Shellenberger, who acknowledges climate change is a problem, just not an existential crisis, has impeccable credentials as an environmentalist. He has spent his entire life fighting for environmental causes and was one of the early “ecomodernists,” a school of thought that sought ways to decouple economic growth from environmental destruction, and promoted practical and optimistic solutions. Shellenberger’s earlier book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility,” co-written with fellow environmentalist Ted Norhaus, earned him the distinction of becoming one of  Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment 2008.”

To answer the deep need for meaning that apocalyptic environmentalism offers, Shellenberger concludes his book with a discussion of environmental humanism. As he puts it, “we need to go beyond rationalism and re-embrace humanism, which affirms humankind’s specialness, against Malthusian and apocalyptic environmentalists who condemn human civilization and humanity itself… we must ground ourselves first in our commitment to the transcendent moral purpose of universal human flourishing and environmental progress, and then in rationality.”

This environmental humanist agenda that prioritizes love for humanity is a direct challenge to climate alarmists, who must now answer the question, as Shellenberger writes “are they motivated by love for humanity or something closer to its opposite.” To emphasize his point, Shellenberger notes that saving the African Gorillas, or, for that matter, the California Condor, was not something we did because we needed the Gorillas, or the Condors, to further our material needs. We saved them because we love them. Surely we can find a way, in the beliefs and crusades that animate us, to do the same for our fellow humans.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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