The Myths We’re Told About Climate Change | Michael Shellenberger
theepochtimes.com
American Thought Leaders
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Nov-08-2025
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Recently, Bill Gates very publicly pivoted on climate change, rejecting “doomsday” predictions and calling for a more pragmatic, human-centered approach.
Is that a sign that the era of climate alarmism is coming to a close?
That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder of Public.news and the nonprofit Environmental Progress.
From rising sea levels to surging forest fires to dying polar bears to disappearing coral reefs, much of what we’ve been told about climate change is not true, he says.
The rising sea level narrative, for example, rests entirely on computer models that were manipulated to produce the desired outcome, Shellenberger says.
“It’s clear that the activist scientists were manipulating models to show an acceleration in sea level rise when the only long-term, reliable source of data, which is called tide gauge data ... shows no acceleration from the 1850s on,” he says.
How is data cherry-picked or skewed to create misleading narratives when it comes to climate change? What’s behind the sudden embrace of nuclear energy—after it had been demonized for decades? How might it be related to the global AI race?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Michael Shellenberger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Michael Shellenberger:
Jan, great to be back with you.
Mr. Jekielek:
So Michael, is the era of climate extremists destroying priceless works of art now over?
Mr. Shellenberger:
That’s a really interesting question. It feels like it’s coming to an end. I mean, we still see, as you mentioned, vandalism most recently against Stonehenge. Those protesters got let off the hook by the courts for what they did. In terms of legitimacy, climate extremism has lost a lot of legitimacy over the last five or six years. The most obvious part of that is that Bill Gates recently said that we really shouldn’t look at climate separate from human welfare, separate from how we’re doing at a human level.
And on those metrics we’re doing well. We are more resilient to extreme weather events. The number of disasters has gone down because the number of deaths and the cost of disasters has gone down. So fewer people are dying from hurricanes and floods and all the other things that were supposed to hurt us.
And then I think most dramatically, others finally understand that there was manipulation going on with a lot of other data, you know, including your organization, which was censored by Facebook for sharing accurate information about the fact that there’s been no decline in sea ice in the Arctic for 20 years.
And then we’ve also seen now it’s clear that the activist scientists were manipulating models to show an acceleration in sea level rise when the only long-term reliable source of data, which is called tide gauge data, just measuring the tides, shows no acceleration from the 1850s on. And that doesn’t mean that the climate isn’t changing. You know, I think the planet is changing. It doesn’t mean that humans don’t have an influence. I think we do have an influence.
But the size of that influence, I think, for me, is even less than maybe I thought a few years ago. I was reporting, even after I wrote Apocalypse Never, my book from 2020 on environmental alarmism, I was still repeating the ostensible scientific view that sea levels were rising and that the rise was accelerating. I don’t think I can say that anymore. It’s part of the reason I wrote those recent pieces. But then when you just go through all the other metrics, there’s just not really any case to be made.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to touch on one other thing. I went to a roundtable of basically energy experts that Real Clear Politics [RCP] organized here in DC recently. But as it went around, I thought to myself, wait a second, all these people are talking about right now is how we are going to get enough energy into these AI data centers? It’s an existential crisis.
And I thought to myself, wait a sec, is net zero dead? Is degrowth actually dead? I asked that question, and essentially, what everybody would tell me is there’s no more talk about net zero. And so this information that you’re bringing forth kind of contradicts conventional wisdom as measured by Bill Gates.
Mr. Shellenberger:
You know, I would say he kind of represents the left end of the conventional wisdom. And so his announcement is coming at a time, as you rightly point out, that the main focus of policymakers, probably in both parties, certainly in the Republicans, but probably also in the Democratic Party too, is just getting enough energy to power the data centers. And we see we need more electricity. Electricity prices have been going up largely in response to renewables and these renewable policies, but there’s also just rising demand. And I think that’s just a huge factor that is changing the conversation.
But it’s a lot of things. There are a lot of people who have been pointing out for years that the data is just not there for an alarmist case, you know. And not only that, but actually the system, the so-called energy system, is doing a pretty good job on its own of decarbonizing. There’s so much more abundant natural gas, some of it not even being tapped. So I think in the United States, by the way, the conversation has completely changed. And now we’re a pro-energy growth country.
In Europe, it hasn’t. So the British are still not tapping into their natural gas reserves that they have. They’re still trying to do a lot of wind, which is making electricity expensive. Germany is in a state of degrowth and deindustrialization. In some ways, it’s just committing suicide as a nation through its energy policies. But I think that’s where things are headed. I think where the Left is going to have to go toward more abundant energy production. And that’s going to be from things like natural gas and nuclear that were verboten just a few years ago.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, you know, this is another thing that I heard at that roundtable. It’s clear that nuclear is going to be sort of full steam ahead, you know, quite literally, I suppose. But, you know, you actually did your work in your book, Apocalypse Never. This is actually how we met, looking at all these questions, but it’s very interesting that you were saying that your own research hadn’t told you how far it had gone, how far this manipulation actually went. I find that quite astonishing.
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes. I just published another interview with Judith Curry, who’s a climate scientist, atmospheric scientist, Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech, with kind of unquestionable credentials, you know, thinks humans are having an impact on the climate. I asked her, so what percentage did she think humans were responsible for both our land use changes, which is also underestimated probably, as well as our carbon emissions.
And she said, you know, probably 50 percent. You know, the conventional wisdom is that humans are 100 percent responsible for all the warming. She said probably somewhere around 50 percent. The other thing that I thought was interesting is that, you know, we were headed into, you know, she thinks that we would be headed into a cooling period if we were not contributing greenhouse gases to warming the planet.
And then the third most kind of, you know, jarring part of this is that, you know, and it’s not controversial at all, actually, is that warming is much better than cooling. And so, you know, just as a simple matter of deaths from cold significantly outnumber deaths from heat. Those three things, that there’s still a lot of natural variability in this complicated planetary system that we have, we don’t totally understand. It’s hard to measure it exactly. That really, we might be cooling now if it weren’t for our interventions of our unintended effects of warming, and that warming can be good.
And so all else being equal, it’s literally the opposite of pessimism. You'd kind of be on the side of like, wow, we kind of lucked out in a variety of ways. This is not a reason for any apocalyptic thinking. And therefore, all of the apocalyptic thinking is really motivated by other things, including, based, you know, I think the heart of it is a kind of Malthusian anti-human. Humans are bad. They are a cancer on the earth. There are too many of them.
Everybody knows that story because we teach it to our kids, and it’s like a staple of Hollywood movies and television, but that’s kind of what motivated a lot of it. And even the sea, I look at the sea level scientists that I think were involved in mischief. There’s certainly more truth in climate change than there is in, say, transgenderism, but they just exaggerated it to such an extent that it really became the opposite of what it is, which is something that, you know, that it’s not the end of the world. It’s not entirely from humans. And it’s certainly better, to the extent to which we’re going to have some impact on the planet, it’s certainly better to be in the direction of warming than cooling.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, in your interview with Judith Curry, which I perused, that was kind of the most striking thing was just simply her assertion. The most important thing to know is that global warming isn’t actually bad, it isn’t actually dangerous. And somehow yet we have, as you point out in your recent piece, there are all sorts of people that have been driven to mental illness, to being extreme, as I mentioned at the beginning, of destroying priceless works of art that are caught in this kind of social contingence of climate alarmism, while in reality, it’s actually something that’s at least neutral, if not positive.
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes, and that means you have to look for different causes. Certainly, scientists who are motivated misled people, but people were inclined to be catastrophic in ways that they weren’t in the past. I mean, I always point out one of the other pieces of data, you know, because we have this big heat spell. We basically had higher, faster sea level rise from the 20s to the 50s than we did from the 50s to the 80s.
And then we’ve had a faster rise since the 90s, but not significantly faster than that period from the 20s to the 50s. That’s also accompanied by a spike in heat waves in the 30s.I went back and just for fun, I read all of the New York Times coverage of the heatwaves in the 1930s.
And Jan, what was so interesting about it is how relaxed they were. I mean, they had, you know, hundreds of people dying in heatwaves, like in buildings. And the New York Times was, people were kind of downplaying it, you know. I mean, you’re in the midst of the Great Depression, right? You know, it’s the 1930s. It’s, you know, there’s, you know, it’s also the Dust Bowl period, right? So people, you know, it’s bad times, and they’re kind of like, well, yeah, the heat wave is like the least of it.
Whereas, I think that it really has to do with a lot of different things, obviously, for it to be such a big phenomenon, by wanting to promote certain things like renewables or financializing carbon emissions through carbon markets, the United Nations, and there’s the power trips, the attention for Greta Thunberg or the United Nations Secretary-General or the President or, you know, former President or other politicians. They’re sort of, they get some narcissistic rewards.
And then you can’t help but notice that it’s an apocalyptic discourse, which sociologists and historians have studied for hundreds of years, a millenarian end of the world. We have a lot of psychological studies of the kind of people attracted to those cults, you know, those apocalyptic cults. These are sort of lost souls, people that are really kind of a lot of failed artists. You know, I noticed that that’s kind of a category of folks involved in those, you know, those vandalism protests.
But, you know, people used to have, you know, in the United States, mostly a Christian belief system. And it had a story about original sin and then the end of times, the revelations. When people stop believing in that, they don’t really stop needing a kind of cosmological explanation of things. It sort of emerges organically through the culture, that sort of apocalyptic story. It was a time of anxiety, as the Cold War was over.
Previously, we had a stand-in apocalyptic event in the form of the risk of nuclear war. When that goes away at the end of communism is when you, in the early 90s, that’s when you see climate change emerging as an apocalyptic story. So, you know, to sum it all up, I would just say I think the climate alarmism was a kind of, you know, a generalized anxiety disorder among, you know, college-educated elites who were trying to sort of virtue signal, feel good about themselves, give their lives purpose and meaning. It’s not to downplay the financial interests or the kind of power tripping by various people, just a disordered psychological or spiritual response from people that have lost their faith.
Mr. Jekielek:
And there’s this other element of very deliberate manipulation, which is something that you highlight in this recent work that you’ve done. And you alluded to it a little bit earlier when you were talking about how trends change over time. So if you pick a very specific time and you avoid mentioning the context of that, you can make something look really dramatic and problematic that actually isn’t. But can you trace for me some of the major ways in which you can see this deliberate manipulation actually happening?
Mr. Shellenberger:
Even if you’re not interested in climate change, watching people that are very dogmatic about something, people that are in their own dream world sort of manipulate things. Because I think that those scientists that manipulate the data or manipulate their studies to show certain things, I think they really are apocalyptic. Like they really think that the world is going to come to an end, but then they look at their data and their data doesn’t show that. So then they have to mess with it.
So in terms of the sea level rise, really you just have this one set of data from tide gauges around the world. And when it just doesn’t matter how you, you know, you’ve got to do some corrections and whatnot. But basically, anybody that looks at that body of data says we can’t see a long-term acceleration. You can pick periods of acceleration and deceleration 1920 to 1950, 1990 to today. But then when you just go and say, oh, but then you didn’t see that during these other decades.
Well, then it’s not a long-term trend. And climate change is just long-term weather. It’s a period of time, usually 30, 60, 120 years. And so if you’re seeing natural variability over 30-year cycles, well, then you can’t say that that’s a trend of increased or of increased acceleration of sea level rise. You know, sea level has been rising since at least the 19th century. That was also when we started studying it.
But then what they do is they say, OK, well, then we have to go find other measures. So they'll then use other measures. They love satellite data. That requires a lot of assumptions. Then there are all these other indirect measures like salt marshes or coral. They’re indirect. You have to ask yourself, why are you even using indirect measures if you have a direct measure in the form of tide gauge data? And the answer is because they can’t show an acceleration otherwise. That’s the real answer.
I made public my email debate with the main guy. His name is Robert Kopp. He’s at Rutgers University, a very famous Left-wing university. You can see him when I sort of call him out on this. For example, they‘ll put it all in these models and then they’ll say, oh, the models, you know, they show an acceleration and you kind of go, well, but if you read the papers about the models, the modelers say, depending on the assumptions, we can show sea level deceleration or linearity or acceleration.
So they’re just different model outputs. And then they just, you know, there’s so much going on in these studies. I mean, you’re talking like hundreds or thousands of studies that then get boiled down into a single report for the United Nations IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] that then gets boiled down to a summary for policymakers, which then becomes press releases, which then becomes the statements by the scientists, all of which filter you up into a more apocalyptic or alarmist direction.
But most people just miss the fact that, and they say irresponsibly IPCC says high confidence in acceleration. Well, you can’t have high confidence. You can’t have any confidence in any direction at all because you can show acceleration, deceleration, or linearity. So that’s just one thing. That’s just sea level rise. And by the way, that’s the one that I’m somewhat proud of that investigation because that was one where like the headlines in nowhere show the story I’m telling you. It still hasn’t been picked up yet properly. I think it will be.
But whereas like on the Arctic sea ice, on the island atolls, the islands are supposed to be underwater. We have seen headlines that directly say scientific papers, headlines. There was no way to show whether polar bear populations have increased or decreased. Now the main scientific group says they bury it though, that there’s been an increase. So some of it is cherry-picking. It’s kind of maybe the main thing, model manipulation, and then kind of burying it, like the EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] on heat waves, which should be fixing this under Trump.
But the old EPA hides this,and I’m not making this up. I don’t know that they’re deliberately, I can’t prove they’re deliberately hiding it. But if you just Google EPA and heat waves, you get the heat waves from 1960. You don’t get this huge, the one from the whole 20th century, we get this huge spike in the 1930s. And so you’re kind of like, why are you, well, we all know why they’re doing that because they want to give the alarmist presentation.
Cherry-picking is probably the right single word to describe what they’re doing, but also some model manipulation, and then just hiding a lot of these other findings so that you kind of, most people that don’t want to spend a lot of time reading these documents, most of them end up never seeing.
Mr. Jekielek:
Michael, it just really reminds me of this whole approach of, you know, what they call activist journalism, where you have a kind of a predetermined vision of how things are supposed to be the correct way. And then you kind of contort whatever things you find to fit that reality, which is kind of, you know, the other word for that I use is propaganda and kind of truth independent, truth-independent propaganda. This is what it reminds me of what you’re describing.
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes. I think that traditionally, when people do propaganda, like government officials, they’re deliberately trying to do something. You know, they’re trying to, they’re kind of, they’re conscious of it. I think in a lot of these cases, they’re sort of barely conscious of it. You know, they have very elaborate justifications every time. Well, you know, the tide gauge data, we shouldn’t just use tide gauge data. You know, there has to be other data, and everybody kind of nods along, and there’s no like, you know, they never are quite consciously saying we have to do this, but there’s some, clearly they’re dealing with this problem of the data not showing what they want it to say, or the polar bear data, or the heat wave data.
They just kind of, well, they make up some word salad about why they’re justified in burying it or hiding it or whatever. They always have some reason. They only are, they’re always basing what they’re saying based on the activist journalists. you know, and the activist journalists are basing what they’re saying on the activist scientists. They’re the kind of two groups that really work together to do it.
But yes, the spirit of actually debunking things was sort of demonized by journalists who call it climate denialism or climate skepticism. Anybody who did climate denialism is like Holocaust denial. The phrase is supposed to remind people of skepticism. I mean, skepticism should have entirely positive connotations because skepticism is what science is. And so they just use these kinds of bullying tactics.
And it’s like the way that all this stuff cancels culture, censorship, they’re always sort of, they’re getting really into the weeds where people stop paying attention. That’s where a lot of the mischief occurs. I think there’s a lot of intimidation of the technical and scientific side of these things, but you don’t actually have to know a lot of other details about what they’re doing to just know that if you just get to the core empirical data, then there’s really no basis for them introducing this other indirect forms of data, short-term data, or this elaborate modeling exercises.
Mr. Jekielek:
So is this the same thing that happens when it comes to catastrophic weather or hurricanes and damage? I mean, on the one hand, there just isn’t an increase in these factors that I’m aware of. On the other hand, the reporting tells you there’s this dramatic increase and that that’s evidence of this, you know, the apocalyptic vision or the evidence that it’s an existential issue and so forth. Or was this just simply misrepresenting reality? Which is it?
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes, it’s very similar. I think the extreme weather has a lot of similarities to the sea level rise manipulations. Let’s take the biggest one by far as hurricanes. If you properly measure hurricanes over 100, 150 years, there’s been no increase in landfalling hurricanes during that time. Like full stop. There’s just no trend. I think I’ve seen some people actually produce a slightly declining trend, but basically no trend in landfalling hurricanes.
Now, we do have new ways to measure hurricanes, which is with satellite data. So if you don’t adjust the data to account for better detection of hurricanes and you don’t do landfalling hurricanes, for example, if you do all hurricanes, because of course, then you can show an increase because the satellites are better at detecting hurricanes offshore now, obviously, than just, you know, like, is there a hurricane out there?
So one of the, there’s actually two graphs I point out, one by Financial Times, one by the New York Times that do two different manipulations. The Financial Times doesn’t correct for the change of technology to measure hurricanes. So it’s completely irresponsible. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s misinformation, or disinformation, depending on what they understood. The New York Times then does the time series trick. So you don’t have a long enough period of time to show a trend.
In other cases, it’s sort of somewhat different on the fires. It’s multiple things because the total amount of land that’s on fire has declined. So you can’t say that climate change has caused an increase in the amount of land on fire. But even on that, Jan, it’s also even that’s almost a misleading piece of data because fire is not necessarily bad. A lot of our forests need fire. Fire clears out the underbrush. It often allows the seeds to be able to germinate. And so it’s not like even fires are bad. It might be that we should have more fires, right? In some places, it depends.
But then the other one is the high-intensity fires. And this is the craziest one. And I was absolutely pilloried for saying this at the time. And now I look back and think I didn’t say it even strongly enough. All of the increase of high-intensity fires, all of it can be explained by poor forest management. You just allow woody debris to accumulate and you’re going to get these big bonfires in the forest that are bad in the sense that they burn the crowns of the trees and destroy the whole tree as opposed to these low-level, less hot fires that are natural and good and positive in terms of burning out the undergrowth. So all of it is about forest management.
And then they would say, well, you can’t say that there’s not some role of climate change. And I guess what I would say is, yeah, slightly warmer weather, you could say, added some kind of unmeasurable additional heat, but it’s so small and irrelevant compared to the accumulation of wood fuel that adding it as a cause, and it’s all through modeling is the other thing, they can’t show it. That’s your first sign that there’s some mischief that they’re doing because you have to ask, well, why are we modeling it at all if we have real-world data?
Mr. Jekielek:
And then there’s this other piece. I noticed you mentioned it in your piece, which is coral declines, right? And you mentioned that the Great Barrier Reef is sort of blooming like never before, or at least in recent history. How does coral fit into this? Another big one, right?
Mr. Shellenberger:
Anybody that was, you know, old enough to remember all the things we were worried about, you’re worried about a big coral die-off on the Great Barrier Reef. And every year there were new headlines about the corals just getting worse, it’s just getting worse and worse. There was just one headline. And then in 2022, they said it’s a record coral.
By the way, Facebook banned that accurate story in 2020. They banned one of the most respected Australian researchers of coral, Peter Ridd, in 2022. In 2023, Facebook relented because they had two years of data showing record. But Jan, it’s not even that it was just a 35-year record. That’s how long they’ve been studying it because there’s so many of these. I counted like seven climate impacts where they had completely misrepresented them.
But the other one, I don’t even know if it was in that one, was just the greening of the earth. There’s more CO2, so it’s been more CO2 that’s been absorbed, more plant life, more tree life. Mostly we like that because we like green and green is good for all sorts of reasons. Local air pollution, sinusitis, climate change. But there’s nobody like arguing against that.
Everybody knows that’s happening. But they find these ways. The Carbon Brief news site is the really bad actor on this. They find these ways to say that it’s not happening, or that that’s being simplified.Judy Curry was part of this Department of Energy review of climate science that they put out in the spring. Carbon Brief does this response, and I could barely understand what they were saying. It was such a word salad.
So I finally said, read it to Judy Curry. Basically, they were saying, oh, but it’s not just the carbon dioxide. It’s also causing greater warming. But you’re saying the greater warming is all from more carbon dioxide anyway. But so great is more warming and more CO2. Like that doesn’t mean that it’s not the CO2 as well. And I just was like, why are they doing that, you know, to Judy?
And she’s like, because they can’t, they don’t want to admit that there could be something good about global warming. They don’t want to admit that there might be something good about CO2. So you’re not really taught, we’re not really talking about global warming, are we? You were talking about your particular version of theological evil.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, you know, one issue that you’ve been working on for a very long time is promoting nuclear power as a solution, as an energy solution. And I guess you’re suddenly seeing the beginnings of the realization of your quest here. How does that feel?
Mr. Shellenberger:
It feels great, Jan. Thank you for asking. It was a lot of grief trying to say, as an environmentalist and Gen Xer raised in fear of nuclear power, I took a lot of grief over speaking out for nuclear power, pointing out just how superior it is to renewables. I mean, orders of magnitude better. So it’s been enormously satisfying, particularly the change in public opinion. It’s 61 percent public approval in the United States of nuclear power. Renewables, I believe, are at 52 percent.
When I first started making the case for nuclear back around 2016, those numbers were reversed. I mean, renewables actually, I think, were in the 70s in terms of public approval. Nuclear, I believe, was in the 40 percent area. So it’s been a huge change. And I think it’s inspiring in that way.
The bad news is that all the stuff I was worrying about, you know, that nuclear plants are being shut down. We did lose a fair number of them, saved a bunch of them, saved the nuclear plant in California, saved a couple of plants in Illinois and New York, South Korea, made the case in Europe, but they’re still shutting down nuclear plants in Germany, and lost a couple in the United States. You know, it’s a mixed thing.
Facebook Meta needs so much power for their server farms that they bought all the power from Three Mile Island. That’s the one reactor that has been operating since 1979. The reactor right next to it melted in 1979. And people thought that was some apocalyptic event, which actually proved the overall safety of the worst form of accident of a nuclear plant that had melted. And the radiation was contained in the containment dome, just like it had been designed to do. And now everybody wants that power, desperate for that cheap nuclear power in a plant that’s already built.
So now the question is, what do we do to build new nuclear plants? And on this, I’m excited to see there’s been talk about just continuing to build. Once you build a standard water-cooled nuclear plant, a big one like we have in the United States, it’s guaranteed to pay for itself. It’s just guaranteed. And the reason is that they can run for 92 percent of the year or so, which is a huge amount of time. They can basically always be on.
You can rely on them for your server farms. You have to refuel during the time when you can’t—the 8 percent of the year you refuel them or you do a little bit of maintenance—but they’re guaranteed to make money. Even if they go way over budget, they’re still going to make money, depending on financing and the price of electricity in the 20th year or the 25th year. And they can run forever. I mean, you might have to swap out parts, but you’re talking about plants that are going to be licensed to run for—they are licensed for 80 years or more now. So it’s a long-term investment.
There’s a lot of hope for a whole different kind of nuclear power, but I just think my view is you kind of continue to iterate on the kind of nuclear we know how to build and have proven to build, do some experiments. But yes, I just think you see Silicon Valley, the Trump administration, a fair number of Democrats, including the Governor of California, have all recognized that nuclear power is really amazing. It’s really quite the best form of electricity. It’s got all these, and we just should be building a lot more of it. We should have been building a lot more of it 20, 30 years ago, but if we couldn’t do that, we should at least do so now.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, so one of the things I heard, you know, as we were, again, discussing at this roundtable, RCP roundtable that I was at, well, there were a couple of things. One is that the big challenges—one is financing, which you pointed out, because these are big, you know, basically even the small reactors are big projects with, you know, it takes quite a number of years to kind of get back your initial capital. That’s one side of it.
The second part is the over-regulation. And so I just noticed someone on X, and I can’t remember for the life of me who it was, just commenting, you know, we do actually have quite a bit of experience doing nuclear. Look at the U.S. military. Look at how many active long-term nuclear reactors with zero problems have been running across the U.S. and the military.
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes, and even the regulation is overstated. So for the, you know, we just built, I think we need at least—we should start building at least two more of the same reactors that we just got done building in Georgia. They’re called AP1000. Our regulator, which is the best in the world, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they were there the whole time. They’re standing around at the construction site and they’re making sure everything is done by the book and at the highest standard. There’s been some folks that have tried to make an enemy out of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
I don’t think that’s true; they’ve been under a lot of pressure, you know, from anti-nuclear people to just become crazy zealots like they are. And they haven’t done that, you know, in 50 years. And, you know, I think there should be—everyone should try to go as fast as possible, but no faster. You know, let’s just start building. We know how to do it.
We have the blueprints, you know, and I think the money is there. If you’re an investor, the only way that you won’t make your money back is if they don’t build the plant. And so that’s kind of the main thing is you just have to get yourself so that they don’t stop building it, just build it. But you'll make more or less money depending on how quickly you get it done.
Mr. Jekielek:
But we know how to do it and you’re guaranteed to make your money back as long as you don’t succumb to pressure from crazy people and stop building it.
Mr. Shellenberger:
Well, there’s probably a number of plants, even though this is expensive and laborious, that you can recommission still, yes. That’s a huge—boy, you know, that’s—I mean, you look at a place like Germany. I asked my friends, you know, I’m like, boy, have they started taking—or Indian Point in New York is another where you’re like, have they—how far have they—you know, because you’re like, can you just mothball it, you know, until everybody gets a little bit calmer?
Because yes, if you mothball it, you know, till everybody gets a little bit calmer, you know, because yeah, if you mothball it, you know, you could potentially bring it back. You know, I mean, really, I mean, you can—it’s like, it’s just a big, you know, it’s a big power plant. So I mean, you can take parts out and decommission it, but you could still rebuild it. I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, that’s why I think a lot of us, we just look at it and it’s like vandalism. You know, it’s like you’ve got this magical machine that produces just huge quantities of electricity, producing essentially no air or water pollution. The water that comes out is clean, a little warmer than normal, but nothing wrong with it. The air—there’s no smoke coming out of the plants. They’re incredible.
To just take them apart and decommission them when they could run for decades longer, it’s just like they’re just such magnificent pieces of technology. And to see people taking them down, it’s like, you know, it’s so irrational and superstitious. It’s like they’re—it’s like witch burning or something to be dismantling a nuclear plant.
Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, Michael, something just struck me. You know, we seem to be challenging as a society a whole suite of shibboleths here. And maybe—and this seems like the next one, although I’m kind of wondering about this one because there’s kind of a sea change in opinion when it comes to the value and need of energy. So I’m wondering if that isn’t driving some of that shift in thinking. But again, that’s not necessarily a huge problem either. What do you make of this sort of shift? And are you seeing the same thing I’m seeing?
Mr. Shellenberger:
No, I mean, I think, look, we’re at an accelerated period in history. I tell my students and my children, pay attention, because this is a very exciting and, in many ways, dangerous moment. We’re in between two epochs, I would say, two periods, the Declaration of Independence, 1776, to the Civil War, 1865; 1865 to 1945 as a second kind of American Republic, you know, post-Civil War, and then the post-World War II era until now, also an 80-year period, you know, 75 to 80 years in that range.
And I think it signals now we’re moving out of the globalist Pax Americana era into a more nationalist era. I think the United States is still the leader of the Western world, but it’s obviously a multipolar world. It’s a world with a very, very big and powerful China, you know, a less big, less powerful Russia, but nonetheless, a Russia that is asserting control over its, you know, the part of the earth that it really feels, you know, that it has sway over. And we’re starting to see the United States focus a little bit more on Latin America.
So I think that there’s a return towards nationalism and a return towards other values that are emerging. The big surge of interest in faith after the assassination of Charlie Kirk is very interesting. I think a renewed appreciation of masculinity after young men have been told that their masculinity and their sexuality are dangerous and toxic, but also a re-appreciation of things like discipline and hard work and the necessity for some of these older traditional values.
I don’t think that’s just something that is viewed as entirely conservative anymore, or I think the country is becoming a bit more conservative in recognizing that. You need police officers, you need firefighters. That’s more important than, you know, racial sensitivity training; you know, there’s just, I think, a return to basics.
Even in schools, we see Mississippi starting to teach its kids just basic reading that they weren’t doing in a period like this, that we’ve moved away from globalist issues like climate change. I think the whole LGBT issue is falling apart with the backlash against men and women’s sports and the medical mistreatment that we’ve seen with trans medicine, you know, as a whole. You know, obviously migration and a backlash against this mass migration agenda.
To your point, what’s the changes that we’ve seen in the conversation around energy, the conversations around climate change are all happening at a time when I think we’re moving into a really different era of consciousness, to use a fancy word, a period where people are just thinking differently about themselves, about the countries that we live in, and about the future. That’s a very different picture than they’ve had for the last 80 years, if not longer.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, and the trend that I’m seeing, and I hope this is right, because I’m also seeing some other trends, but in line with what you’re saying, is just a trend in more interest in truth and just reality in itself, as opposed to a kind of utopianism. Would you agree?
Mr. Shellenberger:
Yes, 100 percent. Yes, I’m back to reality. And, you know, people were really in a trance on a lot of these issues, a trance around renewables, a trance around trans, a trance around asylum and migration, you know, a trance around defunding the police. And we don’t need law and order. And we just got to be more compassionate. And then we will solve all of our problems.
There is a trance around teaching kids to read and do math. Oh, we don’t have to make them memorize things. They don’t have to memorize syllables. They can just learn from context. Yeah, it’s progressive utopianism. I mean, it’s kind of an old story. It’s a very, you know, a fantasy that in some ways is a reaction against some of the realities of life, you know, this, and we’re very comfortable.
So it’s easy to get pulled into those dream worlds because we can, you know, a lot of us can escape them, but particularly the managerial class of professionals, which is the 30 to 35 percent of the country that’s college educated, that really has governed the culture, that runs the media, universities, and professional associations. They’ve really had, they’ve really let their, you know, dogmas and dream worlds take hold over a large part of the population.
The Left is in trouble, you know, because of that, the Democrats are in trouble. I mean, even when his base, because the base of the Democratic Party is so radicalized. 55 percent of people that identify as on the Left say that the murder of Donald Trump might be justified.
The share of college students who say that violence might be necessary against a campus speaker rose from under 20 percent in 2020 to 34 percent today. It means a third of all college students think that it might be okay to use violence to stop somebody from speaking. These are coddled children. I mean, really, you know, it’s curdled, the coddling of these kids. It’s gotten so bad.
With the reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, you hear about it and you would see that was the way in which the radical Left became the mainstream Left, the way the radical Left kind of took over the Democratic Party on everything on climate and trans and migration and race and DEI. That’s now just taking a huge beating.
There’s always going to be a Left and a Right in politics. That’s why you see so many arguments within the Right. Now, I see so many different factions of people on the Right arguing about various matters of things because there’s no Left that has any credibility to argue with, because their entire agenda has been discredited with somewhere on the order of 55 to 65 or 75 or 80 percent of the public. You know, that’s how bad it is. So I think that future Democrats, I mean, they’re probably gonna have to lose a few election cycles, but future Democrats are just not going to look like what Democrats have looked like for the last decade or more.
Mr. Jekielek:
Michael, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final thought?
Mr. Shellenberger:
Just, you know, these are exciting, dangerous times. People should remain aware and vigilant of their surroundings at all moments. I think we do see threats to free speech continuing around the world. That’s where my alarm has been the greatest in the recent weeks and months. President Trump defunded a lot of the bad censorship stuff in the United States, particularly at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.
But we just reported on an international gathering at Stanford last, or I should say in September, of censorship officials from the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil, which are all the worst actors in the West right now. And they are just desperate.
And the French president just gave a speech last week. They’re just all desperate to censor social media. I think that they’re in a much weaker place than they were a year ago, but they won’t let it go. And I hope it’s the demand for censorship that we’re seeing out of those places is a kind of final death throes of this pretty discredited set of ideologies, but definitely something worth keeping our eyes on because I think at moments of transition, like the one that we’re in, where we’re sort of in between periods, in between a kind of globalist era and I think a new nationalist era, I think that’s when a lot of dangerous things can happen.
So people should definitely be aware that there are continuing threats to our freedom, including the threat of a digital ID, but certainly of censorship. And we need to maintain that vigilance and maintain our demand for free speech.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Michael Shellenberger, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. |
