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.
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I confess, I am equally frustrated that everyone carries around with them a way of accessing the entirety of human knowledge, and so few bother doing anything more than watching kitty video’s or asking their friends what they are doing.
Puppy videos are better.
Thanks to Joanna Gray for exposing this shocking truth. All these years I had just assumed that young people were even more adept than us old folks at using the internet as the vast, wondrous library it is, so it comes as a real shock to me that most young ones have no interest at all in that.
One small English quibble: it’s “reams”, not “reems”.
Really nteresting article. I think you are on to something here. Most people will default to ‘lazy’, given the chance and lack of stimuli.
I will be looking at my teenage children’s usage with this in mind.
One more reason to be glad that I’ll be dead soon.
When I wrote my PhD, I could only use hardcopy sources and I went through a LOT of books and journals to do it. The internet existed, but it was nothing like the resource it is now. When I quit teaching, half my students were using the internet to write their essays for them (and being caught out because the results didn’t sound like them. Thus I would type in what they’d written et voila! Source found and student got a b@ll@cking). To find they’re not even doing that much is depressing. I am reading academic papers, doing research, watching documentaries, listening to interviews… It’s all there for them. Why aren’t they seizing on it? What has changed in education that they no longer have the urge to learn even when it’s easy?
Stupid is as stupid does (or does not); the answer my be that the younger generation has become more and more stupid.
Ah yes.
But that’s just with Bliar’s genius stroke of increasing university attendance to 50% of yoof.
(In other words ensuring a cohort of students of below 50% IQ, as many kids can’t or don’twant to do that. And the appointment of “University Professors” who would be lucky to have been laboratory assistants back when I was at University.).
Now, we learn that our Uniparty (Labia,branch) chums look to ensure 70% of kiddies go to University. The outcome should be exciting.
Maybe forcibly jabbing children with 72 needles has something to do with it…
What do they eat in Scotland? Fascinating question.
Technology is great and we should ofcourse use it. —–But today Technology is using the people.———– In a very short period of time we have gone from no phones to where I now see young people waiting for the school bus or walking along the road all glued to their phones. I see young mums pushing their buggies with one hand on the phone and paying no attention at all to their baby. —————I think we have to class this now as some kind of phycological disorder.
It is tied up with changes to the family structure and lone parents and grandparents needing to provide 365 day support to their children and grandchildren in order to keep them dependant and home for as long as possible so they will never be lonely.
Jordan Peterson does a good analysis on this subject.
Yes, plus pots of extra benefit money for life, if they can get their sproggies declared “mentally disabled” under one or more of the hundreds of categories.
Going to a hospital appointment the other day I was carrying my current read, D Day, by Antony Beevor. “Good book? What’s it about?” Asks the nurse. “Er, D day”‘ I reply. “What’s that then?” She said.
It’s hopeless, isn’t it?