Words matter. These are the best Michael Shellenberger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Neither solar nor wind are actually substitutes for coal or natural gas or oil.
Why are the people who are most alarmist about climate change so opposed to the technologies that are solving it? One possibility is that they truly believe nuclear and natural gas are as dangerous as climate change.
Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality.
Most people think of solar and wind as new energy sources. In fact, they are two of our oldest.
Renewables require the use of vastly more land, longer and less-utilized transmission lines, and large amounts of storage whether from lithium batteries, new dams, compressed air caverns.
The main problem with biofuels – the land required – stems from their low power density.
Like many environmental documentaries, ‘Planet of Humans’ endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy.
The idea that we’re going to replace oil and natural gas with solar and wind, and nothing else, is a hallucinatory delusion.
Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn’t because they don’t know how to report critically on energy – they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources – but rather because they don’t want to.
Recognizing nuclear as renewable, and saving Diablo Canyon, would be a bold move for Governor Newsom. It would upset his traditional anti-nuclear environmental allies.
There are major groups, including the Sierra Club, that support efforts to deprive poor countries of energy.
In reality, Chernobyl proves why nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. In the worst nuclear power accidents, relatively small amounts of particulate matter escape, harming only a handful of people.
When climate goes away as an apocalyptic concern, something else will emerge. No doubt about it.
Dealing with environmental lawsuits and grassroots resistance is expensive. Industrial wind and solar developers have to hire lawyers, public relations specialists, and scientists willing to testify that this or that project poses only a modest threat to endangered birds and bats.
Environmentalism, apocalyptic environmentalism in particular, has become the dominant religion of supposedly secular people in the West.
Nuclear is the largest source of clean, carbon-free power in rich nations, and the science shows it is the safest way to make reliable electricity.
In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy.
If solar and wind farms are needed to protect the natural environment, why do they so often destroy it?
Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing.
Wind energy threatens golden eagles, bald eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks, Swainson’s hawks, American kestrels, white-tailed kites, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons, among many others.
Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.
Sunlight and wind are inherently unreliable and energy-dilute. As such, adding solar panels and wind turbines to the grid in large quantities increases the cost of generating electricity, locks in fossil fuels, and increases the environmental footprint of energy production.
Before progressives were apocalyptic about climate change they were apocalyptic about nuclear energy. Then, after the Cold War ended, and the threat of nuclear war declined radically, they found a new vehicle for their secular apocalypse in the form of climate change.
It was only with the rise of capitalism and the need for workers to be freer, more mobile, and prosperous, that societies were able to undermine pagan morality and the ancient institution of slavery.
Now that Europe has developed through deforestation and fossil fuel use it is telling Brazil not to develop through deforestation and fossil fuel use. Bolsonaro is the backlash against such hypocrisy.
We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, without question. There is nothing automatic about adaptation. But it’s clear that there is simply no science that supports claims that rising sea levels threaten civilization much less the apocalypse.
In many countries, wind turbines pose the single greatest threat to bats after habitat loss and white-nose syndrome.
The nature of nuclear weapons makes it impossible to either ban the bomb or wipe out an enemy’s arsenal. Nuclear deterrence was unavoidable.
You cannot power the world on wind and solar.
Nuclear is just a huge part of moving towards a cleaner electrical system.
The underlying problem with solar and wind is that they are too unreliable and energy-dilute.
The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.
If you think modernity is mostly to blame for pollution, visit Africa where people still burn wood and dung as an energy source.
Solar makes electricity expensive for two inherently physical reasons. Sunlight is dilute, requiring 10 to 15 times as much materials and mining, and up to 5,000 times more land, than non-renewables. And sunlight is unreliable, which reduces the value of solar as it becomes a larger part of energy supplies.
Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.
Climate change has completely overshadowed the conservation concerns that used to be so important to the Democratic Party.
Nuclear is the only energy source that has proven capable of fully replacing fossil fuels at low-cost in wealthy nations. While hydro-electric dams can sometimes play that role, they are limited to nations with powerful rivers, many of which have already been dammed.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them.
The producers of ‘Chernobyl’ should tell the truth: the accident demonstrates the relative safety, not danger, of nuclear power.
There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.
The burden of higher cost electricity and benefits of renewable energy subsidies fall unevenly on Californians.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalism at legacy publications.
While some wars are planned, others result from each side retaliating in ways it views as proportionate but viewed by the other side as disproportionate.
I believe Forbes is an important outlet for broadening environmental journalism beyond the overwhelmingly alarmist approach taken by most reporters, and look forward to contributing heterodoxical pieces on energy and the environment in the future.
Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else – not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering – can do that.
It’s when the conservationists became environmentalists that everything went bad. It stopped being about the environment. It became about controlling society.
The flip side of renewables’ low energy density is their low return on energy invested.
The industrial revolution in England was only made possible through intensified agriculture and the use of coal for manufacturing, which delivered far more energy for far less labor.
Privately, many climate and energy experts admit that the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to decarbonize energy supplies is with nuclear power.
There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.
