Michael Shellenberger on Climate Change Alarmism

I mean, I worry about it. You kind of go, what happens when the progressives convince Facebook that San Francisco is dangerous? Yeah. And that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. This thing that you say about silencing you, that's not outside the realm of possibility. You know, I've seen it. I mean, we were talking about Barry Weiss earlier. She fucking basically pushed out in The New York Times because of this sort of ideology that's spreading rampant through journalism. And journalism has become slash activism. And then there's this idea that you have to do whatever you can and by any means necessary, push your agenda and silence the oppressors. You know, even if these oppressors are people like you that are just saying, listen, you've got to take a more radical approach to dealing with these ever growing problems. And one of the ways might be this carrot in the stick and this idea that you have to give people consequences for their actions and reward people for good actions. And we could possibly like build people back up, but we're going to have to do it in a way that it's going to make folks uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, it seems like two things are going on at once, right? There's definitely this top down effort at censorship and including the people like me. In fact, I was censored by Facebook. You were? I was. How so? When my last book came out, they censored True Facts. Which book is that? Apocalypse Never. Yep. Yeah, they censored. Why environmental alarmism hurts us all? Yeah, that came out in June of last year and I was censored in the article I wrote about it. And now other people that write about climate change are being censored. I will say though, you know, I mean. How so were you censored? Like what did you say that was? They put a warning label on the article that was being shared that was the initial article announcing the book saying this contains misleading and false information. It's not true. Didn't contain a single piece of false information. And misleading is a really subjective thing, right? What did you say that they objected to? So the main issues were, I pointed out that we're not in the midst of a mass extinction. A mass extinction is when over, when 75 or 90% of all species on earth are extinct or going extinct. In fact, only 6% of species are critically endangered and most of them should or will survive. The other one is I pointed out that natural disasters are not getting worse. Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% over the last hundred years. We're just much better at dealing with hurricanes and floods and, you know, non-climate related disasters like earthquakes as well. And so what they, they respond, you know, that on the disasters they point out that there's some evidence that hurricanes are becoming somewhat more intense, but then they leave out the fact that the best available science predicts that hurricanes will become 25% less frequent but 5% more intense, North Atlantic hurricanes. But even that doesn't matter because we're just so much better at preparing for hurricanes. So like vanishingly few people die. I think something like, in the most recent year, I think 2019 something like 400 Americans died of natural disasters, right? It's like 300, because I was like 300 times more people died of drug deaths in the United States than from natural disasters. I mean, this is how these two books work together, is me as someone that considers myself liberal or moderate. I used to be progressive. I don't use that label anymore. But my view is the drug crisis is objectively a much bigger threat to human life and to civilization than climate change. Like we're adapted really well to climate change. We should do something about it. It's real. There are risks associated with it, but like there's no scenario in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of climate change killing 93,000 Americans a year. In fact, there's no scenario of it killing, of it increasing deaths from natural disasters at all. Why is it more attractive? Why is that a more attractive talking point? Because this is one of the things that you keep hearing from, whether it's whistleblowers at news organizations where they're saying that climate change is the next thing. They're looking at it according to these people that are talking about it. They're looking at climate change as the next thing that's going to freak people out enough to guarantee ratings. Yeah. I mean, I look at the ... So both of these books are similar in the sense that I debunk popular myths, I explain what the solutions are, and then I also explore why it is that say the people that say they're the most concerned about climate change oppose the main solutions to reducing carbon emissions or adapting to climate change. Basically, the three things won't surprise you. There's financial interests. There's just sort of a broader will to power, both kind of status and politics and just kind of I'm going to jet around the world and tell people how to live their lives. Which is hilarious and often happens. Yes. And then the third is religion and that the death of God, what Nietzsche called the death of God, which is basically we just stop believing in traditional religions, whether it's Judaism or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism. As we stop believing in traditional religions, we still have a fear of death. We still have a need to believe in some higher power and so we make new religions. And the problem with the new religions, whether it's climate apocalypse or wokeism or victimology, the problem is that the people that are the adherents of those new religions don't think that they're promoting a new religion. They think that they're just being more compassionate or I'm just being more sensitive or whatever. So they're actually more dogmatic than the people in the traditional religions because you meet people that have even evangelical views, they'll always be like, well, I am an evangelical Christian. So they have some awareness of it. But folks that are, these people don't go, well, I am an apocalyptic environmentalist. What they say is they go, I'm more aware of the science or I just love nature and I just care about poor people more than you. It's always cast in some sort of highly charged moralizing framework, which is like this idea, it's like the main idea of the folks that have created the disaster in our cities is that they care more. That's the conceit. I just care more than you do. You're just insensitive, total bullshit, but that kind of appeal to emotion has a lot of power.