Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award winner, was at the U.S. Congress today to testify for the seventh time in two years that climate alarmism is not based on science and there is no climate emergency that warrants destroying our energy security and prosperity. The bestselling author, who has been called an “environmental guru“, “climate guru”, “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy” and “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement, made oral remarks which are reproduced in full below. References can be found in his full testimony, which draws on what he has published on his Substack over the last 18 months.
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 prioritises 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. 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 emphasise 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 subsidised 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 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) risk 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 decarbonisation 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.
You can subscribe to Michael Shellenberger’s Substack here and read his full testimony here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Fortunately, at least where I live, the ARC conference barely registered with sceptics on the ground. We retain our sense of purpose and support each other in maintaining this. The other factor that Jennifer Marohasy reported was the virtual absence of any recognition of the importance of the scientific endeavour and its achievements (contrasted with the deathly scientism of recent times).
We are still being far too reasonable when the opposite side are happy to kill ppl with their experimental jabs and want us to freeze to death. I sometimes think if Toby was around in the 1930s he’d have tried to appeal to Hitler/Stalin’s better angels. Love Tobes but feel like he’s still living under the old paradigm.
Yeah, would have loved to have listened to a pre-war Weekly Sceptic podcast:
Nick: “Hitler seems to have plans for world domination. An evil bast*rd. What do you think?”
Toby: “Well, he could just be saying these things to be part of a group. And it’s not what he really thinks privately.”
Followed by a post-war one:
Nick: “Well that didn’t end well. And the slaughter of the Jews? Clearly his plans were more malevolent than we could have imagined. I don’t know, what do you think?”
Toby: “Cock up!!”
In the excellent video ‘Are all wars Bankers wars’….WW2 was really about the hyper inflation and Germany being independent of central banks. Some of Churchill’s quotes allude to that but could be open to interpretation.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/what-price-british-values-now/
Role Norfolk at TCW with a robust look at where we true Brits are now in the battle for survival.
“Civilised restraint in Britain is breaking down. When the free exchange of ideas is persecuted even in universities, diversity turns from a claimed strength to a clear challenge, particularly when some ideologues – from world-savers to soul-savers – are absolutist and believe they have a higher authority than the secular State to sanction property destruction and violence against persons. So much for ‘respect and tolerance’.”
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/double-standards-and-the-thin-blue-line/
An excellent examination of the virtual collapse of our police forces.
“As we remember the fallen during this sombre weekend, it will be worth reflecting on what the country they gave their lives for has become.”
Good read. Thanks for the link.
Comment on the text: I’m meanwhile convinced that the FPTP voting system is pretty much the only one which makes any sense. Each MP was directly elected by his constituents which means all of them have a democratic mandate. It’s not the parties which got elected but each individual member of parliament.
Alternate systems usually like to call them themselves proportional representation to suggest a somehow higher democratic legitimacy but the question is proportional representation of what? Certainly not of the opinions of the voters themselves, as these never get to express them in public.
With PR, party leaders decide on policiy proposoals which sometimes get voted on by party members. Party leaders also decide on lists of candidate MPs and all voters are usually allowed to do is to select one of the canned candidate lists based on one of the canned policy proposals.
This gets worse once actual government have to be formed: These will almost always need to be coalition governments. Hence, no party will ever be able to actually implement the policies it had proposed, only the subset of that which is not fundamentally incompatible with the proposals of some coaltion partner. The outcome is usually muddle on just like before, possibly with a few faces changed. And that’s probably exactly the intended outcome: Parties can do whatever they’re most comfortable with, usually Do nothing and get paid princely for that. Voters who are not happy with this are to be dealt with by the security forces because they’re all far right extremists, anyway.
IMHO, parliamentarism has a host of problems as system of government, but I’ll ignore that here as this text is more than long enough already.
I highly doubt the counter revolution to the collectivist tyranny we are being subjected to will come from a conference of high minded people, however well intentioned. Less still one with Michael Gove in it.
Yes Gove is an utter creep, bereft of intelligence or moral character, the commander in chief of lock down. He showed us there not only is he a huge fool, but a very evil one also. Note he also jumps on the eco loon band wagon whilst fully aware it’s a scam. Hell is too good for such ppl.
And Jimmy Car made a bit of a jibe against us refuseniks. I get the dark humour and free speech, nobody has darker humour than me, but there is plenty to take the piss out of from the other collectivist side. Remember Family Guy bigging up the mRNA, they need to do another sketch of sports stars collapsing!
Sounds underwhelming! Peter Hitchens may have energised it somewhat. Better yet, a dose of the late Christopher via AI of course.
A point he kept driving home in 2020 was….If you give the state too much power, you rarely get it back without a fight.
Good article.
Woke is Maoism –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6rk1mYiOAw
The central issue is here and it’s to do with the money creation process –
https://archive.is/9MQg6
Quote
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Editor, FT
I watched all the speeches and panel events and I thought they were all pretty good and not, on the whole, downbeat. Yes there was a tedious suggestion repeated over and over that, as J Sorel puts it above: “attendees should cultivate individual virtues” – the sort of wooly rubbish I can’t be doing with, but it was a good start in trying to get some intellectual underpinning for the anti-woke fight-back.
It remains though absolutely true that political activity on the ground is very spasmodic and I have tried and failed to get things going locally on a few occasions. My conclusion is that our side is too old and we will unfortunately have to wait for a younger generation to take up the fight. Sadly, we all know that by then it will be too late to save old England, but perhaps something even better will emerge.
I’m afraid that we will have to await the figure who will save us. Maybe Trump with Veraswammy will inject the juice into the battle in the US, but so much damage has been done to Europe, and continues to be done to Europe we need someone of the stature of a Martin Luther, to face this lot down and begin the reformation. I can’t see it in the next generation, but maybe the one after..? My time will be gone. I just pray it doesn’t wreck my childrens lives in the meantime.
Nobody will come to save us, we each have to take responsibility for ourselves & our families. Our actions may on their own be tiny & seemingly insignificant, but the more of us who make those small acts of resistance adds up to a significant number. They know that, they know that there are more of us than them, why the heck do they keep the population terrorised, fearful & cowed? It’s all about suppressing resistance & maintaining control.
You cannot control the actions of others, but you can control how you act.
Peaceful civil disobedience is our way through this war, which many of us will not live to see the end of. It could be years, decades away but if we each don’t resist, who will?
I have my doubts that the best way to counter the pernicious creep of WEF and globalists of all sorts is with a globalist movement of our own.
There are lots of local groups around the globe building local structures parallel to the national ones. We cannot change the current structures from within as they’re too corrupted. Alternative structures which benefit locals will gain support slowly but the corrupted structures will wither over time.
Nothing is going to happen overnight & if we try to play them at their own game, on their playing field, we’ll lose.
So instead of wasting energies fighting, channel those energies into building.
I don’t think we can survive along side of these control freaks, they will eventually come for us. We need more radical action that is beyond writing to the corrupt MP.
Building parallel structures has absolutely nothing to do with writing to your MP. Look out for your local community assembly. Join it. Contribute. Do what you are able.
The only person who is going to come to your rescue is you.
The People’s Health Alliance, The People’s Food & Farming Alliance, World Council for Health are just 3 parallel structures which have been developed from the ground up as alternatives to corrupt systems.
If you want to fight back against woke globalism, then inviting Gove to speak is the equivalent of ushering in the horse at Troy.
“we can put the fate of the Taiwan Strait and the menace of TikTok on ice for now”
If Taiwan goes the western world will face a major setback from which it might not recover in time to defend itself when the state – on -state offensive begins, and not even when terrorists get organised. The proportion of high grade chips produced in Taiwant is critical to the west.
As to Tic Toc, its dismissal by the author s he sort of answer Tory monisters have given, along the lines of “oh, its only foam or fluff and of no consequence”. They say it about BLM and Wokeism. Some of them still say it about Islam and demonstrations in the streets.
They are wrong and so is the author ofn dismissing such issues. Social media and demonstrations are the building blocls of undermining confidence in the west among its citizens.
The fact Gove was there shows it was far too oriented to the political class or elite. Where was Farage. As to comedians, where was Dominic Frisby.
Don’t be fooled. Farage is the other side of the fake binary. The antithesis to their thesis. He’s there to channel and assuage articulate, conservative-leaning dissent.
I think the problem western civilisation is facing is the problem with left brain/right brain ‘thinking’. Dr Ian McGilchrist has some insight into this dichotomy which I am only just beginning to appreciate. Our problems started 3 or 4 centuries ago with the rise of science and the rational, materialistic, mechanistic view of nature and the universe. We are all cogs in a machine that can be dissected and re-engineered to achieve perfection (left brain). But consciousness, soul and God, anything subjective and unquantifiable (right brain thinking), was ignored and forgotten because there are no equations or formula that can adequately explain these ethereal phenomena. The pursuit of scientific dominance of nature and humanity is our undoing. We need a little bit more self-reflection and awareness of transcendental values in life to balance the scientific, materialistic achievements that science has obviously brought us. No one wants to revert to the stone age, apart from Greta.
Glad to see this mentioned. McGilchrist’s steer is that we ought to be guided by spiritual ideation. He is right on, and has clearly influenced Peterson.
Here he talks with Peterson –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcthCcEHmAc
“The attendees at ARC are not the defenders of a moral consensus, but the enemies of an existing one”…..So what was the jab pushing, fake Brexiteer ‘Gove’ doing there!
I’ve heard tell that JP is merely controlled opposition and the fact that this conference was more of a damp squib than the spark of the fight-back seems to support that view. Peterson is a perfectly capable orator so why waste this chance to ignite and inspire? And the inclusion of Michael Gove? WTF? He’s part of the problem surely, hanging around on the periphery of government with his over-moist lips, waiting for the next train crash. What a pity.
Having Michael Gove speaking at this conference voids any credibility that it might have had as a vector of positive change or effective opposition to the spreading evil of world governance. He already sold his soul to the devil
First the end destination must be defined.
Where are they going?
What will society look like if they get what they want?
Only when they know their end goal will they know in what direction to go and begin to plan how to get there.