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.
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Oh, I see, here we go again with a story designed to put the wind up people. I wonder what the cost of shooting down a balloon with an F16 is these days.
Another non- newsworthy event.
Well the missile costs about $380 000 for starters.
$380,000 Dollars? That’s an awful lot of balloons!
I’m all for having some light relief or another subject to talk about but this story just takes the biscuit. Are we all meant to forget the fact it’s the Pentagon that’s behind this entire plandemic shitshow and subsequent toxic death shots? Give me strength!
https://rumble.com/v295j18-rfk-jr-the-pentagon-and-the-national-security-agency-ran-the-entire-pandemi.html
Isn’t it interesting that of all the places aliens could make an appearance, they chose the US? Not Congo, not Paraguay, not Turkmenistan, but the US, probably the most trigger happy of all the places they could chose.
Talk about bad luck.
“Talk about bad luck.”
Not half Stewart. Definitely shows a lack of forward planning on the part of the ET’s. Once the Pentagon get Spock on the job and the remains of the UFO have been combed through I an sure all will become clear.
So they haven’t ruled out UFOs? If it is a UFO that travelled many miles to get here with presumably advanced technology, then how come it couldn’t escape the clutches of an F16??
Maybe this is the start of an ‘alien invasion’!
Agree with ‘huxleypiggles’.
From the ‘Hitchhikers Guide’, re the vi’hurgs…
Maybe thats what we’ve got…
Hope so. I have H E L P spelled out with bedsheets in my back garden.
Funnily enough a commenter over at TCW is doing exactly the same thing.
Anything that is:
An Object
Flying
and Unidentified
is by definition a UFO
How do you say “UFO” in Chinese?
Do aliens cause global warming? The data say Yes.
time to read again Dr Roy Spencer’s spoof article that mocked correlation and causation – and the climate worriers thought he was serious about the aliens – read it here and smile:
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/04/do-aliens-cause-global-warming-the-data-say-yes/
Squirrels
Do you think the US is expecting bad news? On Ukraine, perhaps.
Must be the UFOs causing all the excess deaths then?
One should keep in mind that UFO means Unidentified Flying Object. Which means the real story is something like Gung-ho US F16 pilots shoot at flying things because they have no idea what they are. Let’s hope a few climate rescuer private jets were among them.
If you can’t scare people enough with a pandemic then scare them by hinting at an invasion of extra-testicles. Apparently, these hyper-intelligent beings are smart enough to fly across the universe, then they reveal themselves almost exclusively to the U.S. military who shoot them down. They sound really smart. And to think they call us conspiracy theorists. The only space travel going on here is the journey between biden’s ears.
Extra-testicles? Is that your way of saying the story is a load of bollocks? Or could it be an alien civilisation has watched our reaction to a virus, taken pity on us and have decided to replenish our supply.
Oh I love that last sentence.
If only the Yanks had been as good at shooting things down on 9/11.
Well if aliens were to invade I’m sure they’d be intelligent enough to know by now that their best bet is to just walk in via the Mexican border. Stick a mask on and you’d have no bother. Nah, I smell red herring..
Or jump in a dhingy in the Channel and wait for their RNLI taxi service to drop them at a convenient Border Force depot before onward transportation to a Four Star Hotel at our expense.
Following the unprovoked destruction of the US Air Force by Alpha Centauri terrorists, NATO refuses to negotiate, saying that to “appease aggressors” only encourages them. In late news, Detroit has suffered a total communication failure, following that of Salt Lake City half an hour ago…
If the little green men are looking for signs of intelligent life, they will be sorely disappointed.
Laurence Fox on Twitter: “Not long now. https://t.co/0ZV3NdhBY8” / Twitter
One of my all time favourite jokes is The best proof that there’s intelligent life on other planets is that nobody ever visited us.
Well they definitely wouldn’t want to harvest our blood now if most of the human race are walking spike protein-producing factories with abnormal erythrocytes. If they try then maybe the mRNA might be the death of them, like bacteria in the film….Either way, I’m really hoping we have confirmation of alien beings existing before I pop my clogs. Otherwise being brought up on a wealth of Sci-Fi shows/movies seems like a total anticlimax to me.
Look carefully at the first footage on the “asteroid”.
Tell me if you see anything unusual around it as it falls snd then explodes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11744137/Astonishing-moment-asteroid-explodes-Channel-creating-fireball.html
I see a small light thingy. As if the meteorite is being shot at before it explodes. It could just be a spark/debris from the meteorite perhaps…Any astronomers in the house?
*asteroid* I mean.
Yes it seems to move around it then runs towards it really fast just as it explodes! I’m glad I’m not the only one who saw it. Makes me wonder if it was shot at to detonate it as well.
But what moves that fast?
https://youtu.be/_eJq6DcIEzM
Im seeing it called a meteoroid.
All the meteors I have seen have moved considerably faster than the object shown. That one looks like it is being slowed by air resistance which is pretty unlikely for a large chunk of rock. It looks more like an aircraft being downed.
Edit – According to the American Meteor Society, meteorites usually hit the Earth’s atmosphere going around 160,000 MPH. Meteors enter the atmosphere at speeds ranging from 11 km/sec (25,000 mph), to 72 km/sec (160,000 mph!)
Downed satellite?
“All the meteors I have seen have moved considerably faster than the object shown”
Exactly what I was thinking.
Let us not forget that the Yanks knew about it for several days when they declined (or failed) to shoot it down. They must have assessed that it was not much of a threat to their military installations, so what changed? Was there something in the sea that they didn’t want it to see?
I guess pointing the finger at China makes a change from blaming the Big Bad Putin.
What’s the betting they’re the USA’s own spy balloons
Looks like Hunter Biden is handing the ciggies around at the Pentagon
“We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” said Mr VanHerck.
Is the reason because they are not the balloons, perhaps? You gotta admire the militwawy. Also, VanHerck goes from being a General to a Mr is just a few sentences. Was he perhaps demobbed after his amazing insights?
High altitude (weather) ballon parachute. There are hundreds launched every year.
‘Course there are. Launched by China, just of the US coast.
So all they’re going to find in the remains are meteorological instruments, then, if that’s true.
.
First one shot down was obviously Chinese spy equipment.
The rest are probably weather, research, or hobbyist launched from the US by US citizens, easily available and quite popular, see The-Rocketman.com
Lyin’ Biden – too ashamed to acknowledge further Chinese (drone) surveillance – is now blaming aliens instead of Donald Trump.
“No joke!”
Well, the answer’s obvious, innit?
Wot we clearly need to do is get Bill Gates, George Soros, that bloke running PayPal and all the rest of the WEF oligarchs to direct the world’s response to this alien attack, whilst the rest of us go and hide in caves, giving up on using gas, electricity, cars, houses, fertilisers, etc., all of which signals our presence to the aliens.
.
Billy will be working on a “vaccine” to defeat the aliens as I type this.