California-based energy expert Michael Shellenberger has argued that the lack of media reporting on the healthy state of the planet and a decline in natural disasters and deaths was “one of the worst cases of climate misinformation and disinformation.”
Mr. Shellenberger, co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition, disputed the mainstream narrative about climate change, asserting that “high energy” societies were the best way to resolve environmental issues, in a speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Conference in London on Oct. 31.
The environmentalist noted that contrary to media coverage of the climate “apocalypse,” carbon emissions had declined 22 percent between 2005 and 2020 in the United States due to the transition from coal to natural gas, and had, in fact, peaked over 50 years ago in the United Kingdom.
Mr. Shellenberger added that the total amount of land swept by bushfires declined 35 percent, while the size of areas impacted by flooding around the world has also dropped, including in China and Pakistan.
He also said that many once-endangered species had now recovered, including the Hawksbill Sea Turtle, accusing climate change activists of discrediting the work of conservationists.
“We’ve lost less than 1 percent of species on Earth since 1500,” he said.
Overall, deaths from natural disasters declined by over 90 percent while the cost of disasters globally has reduced over the last 30 years, he noted, adding that about 300-500 people a year die from disasters in the United States, compared to about 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2022.
“When you add up these two things, declining costs, declining deaths, you end up with declining overall weather and climate disasters,” he told the conference.
High Energy Societies the Way Forward
The energy expert also argued that using more energy, not less, was the solution to protecting the environment.Mr. Shellenberger advocated for a “pro-human vision” in dealing with energy issues, explaining that it consisted of “energy abundance, unlocking prosperity, and environmental progress.”
“If you want to save nature, you need to not use it or use less of it. If you’re going to do that you need to have substitutes, and you need to intensify your energy consumption,” he said.
“We save nature by using more energy so that we can produce more food on less land and return our farmed areas to grasses and forests.”
Energy, he said, had lifted many people out of poverty. It has also reduced the amount of land used to produce the same amount of food by over 60 percent since 1960, which leaves more room for endangered species.
“There is no rich low-energy country just as there is no poor high-energy one,” Mr. Shellenberger said.
Mr. Shellenberger said nuclear was the “safest, cleanest” source of energy, which could help reduce material throughput and take 300 to 400 times less land to produce compared to solar and wind energy.
“What we’ve seen is that we are potentially going to see more coal burned this year. The reason for it is that we have had incredible opposition to more oil and gas production,” he said.
“If you want to reduce your coal consumption, increase your gas consumption. It’s that simple. If you want to increase your carbon emissions, shut down your nuclear plants and follow the example of Germany.”
He argued that while Germany aimed to reduce their per capita energy consumption a little bit over time, the country would not drop itself to “Vietnamese, Indonesian, or Indian levels” of energy consumption per person.
Renewable Energy Costs Do Not Stack Up
Mr. Shellenberger also said renewable energy sources actually cost more as they scale up.For example, in his research, the value of wind energy dropped 40 percent when it comprised 30 percent of an electricity grid, while solar’s value declined 50 percent when it reached 15 percent of a grid.
While renewable advocates touted their lower costs, they did not count the cost of transmission lines, storage, and the cost of re-engineering gas plants.
“The more renewable you have, the higher the cost of your electricity,” he said.
Mr. Shellenberger added that solar panels were only cheap because “they were made by people living in concentration camps.”
Climate Change Filling Our Spiritual Needs: Shellenberger
One of the reasons behind vigour of the climate change movement was the move toward atheism and increasing secularisation.Mr. Shellenberger said there were parallels between the climate change narrative and religious ideas.
“Men cannot endure his own littleness unless you can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. If we don’t have a God to believe, and if we don’t have a religion, we will create one, consciously or unconsciously, and that’s what’s occurred.”
He said this process comprised two steps. The first was nihilism, the belief that there is no truth or meaning in the world, which was followed by “the creation of new secular religion.”
“As [GK] Chesterton said, ‘The problem of disbelieving in God is not that man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it’s much worse than that. He ends up believing anything.’”
