The religion of climate change

This blogpost comes from an interview of Michael Shellenberger, who is an environmentalist, commentator, author and an advocate for pragmatic solutions to climate change.

Summary

I accept the core science of climate change, but not the alarmism because climate change is gradual and manageable, and not catastrophic. There is no climate crisis or climate emergency. That’s a corruption of the science. For example, sensational scenarios are fraudulent and scare tactics.

Climatic alarmism is a pessimistic and depressive religion. It hates humanity. It’s like a religious cult whose predictions cause anxiety in children.

The best source of energy to replace baseload coal power stations is nuclear power. This is reliable, whereas renewables like solar and wind are unreliable, expensive, and require gas-powered backup. Renewable energy is awful for the environment because it uses so much land.

Climate policies that promote renewables (like in California) have led to blackouts and higher electricity prices.

Interview

Are you a climate change denier?

It depends on what you mean by “denier”. I definitely deny that climate change represents a significant catastrophic risk. I don’t believe that anywhere in the mainstream science is any scenario for existential risk. Not in Working Group 1 of the IPCC is there anything mentioning an apocalyptic scenario. And in fact all the trends are going in the right direction. But when it comes to climate science I agree with the IPCC’s basic view of the core science. Where I part company is with the policy prescriptions. But I do believe that the earth is getting warmer and that greenhouse gases in general and carbon dioxide in particular are what’s driving that warming.

What do you make of this phrase “climate change denier”? Where does it come from and what’s been the impact of that phrase?

The phrase comes from climate activists wanting to frame their opponents as holocaust deniers and so they choose that word deliberately in order to shut down debate. It’s a sort of debate ending tactic aimed at gaining power over the entire discourse which has been incredibly successful. It’s why when people think of climate change they think of the end of the world rather than thinking of it as a manageable risk. Or one that we are doing a very good job of mitigating already because carbon emissions have been going down in Britain, the United States, most of Europe, and in most of the world for the last 30-50years. In the US carbon emissions declined 22% between 2005 and 2020. 61% of that reduction was simply switching from coal to gas. Climate activists are against the two main fuels that are going to reduce carbon emissions and that are reducing carbon emissions – natural gas and uranium. Which raises the question – is their concern really climate change or are they after something else?

Do you feel that they are trying to censor you with this label?

That’s right, “climate denier” is a label that’s used – It was the original cancel culture before we even had the term “cancel culture”. It was aimed at shutting down conversation and scapegoating a set of people who were asking some hard questions. There’s certainly some people with fringe views that I don’t share around the causes of climate change. But they use the term to sweep in people that accept the basic science of climate change but reject the proposed solutions.

Why do you describe climatism as if it were a religion?

The structure of the story that climate activists tell is identical to the Judeo-Christian tradition. So there as an idea that before the use of fossil fuels, or if you want to go back further before the dawn of modern agriculture, that humans were living in harmony with the environment. That we ate from the fruit of the knowledge of farming or fossil fuels (depending on where you want to locate the fall) and then fell from the state of nature and are now living in a fallen world. The difference is that traditional religions including Judeo-Christian religions offer some sense of gratitude for what we’ve been given. A sense of redemption and also the concept of forgiveness. And all three of those are missing from the climate change religion.

What do you think are the values of this religion?

The core values are hatred of humanity. I think that’s at the bottom. But if you look at the structure of the climatism story it’s basically the story of a depressed person. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most effective treatment for dealing with depression, said that depressed people have three basic story lines. These are that I’m a terrible person, the world is a terrible place and the future is bleak. And those are the exact three structures in the climate change story. We are sinning against nature. We’re destroying the planet. We’re terrible. The future is dark and the world has fallen. It’s a terrible place.

The reality of course is totally different from this. We’ve made huge amounts of environmental progress. Almost all of us have been out of poverty, but we’ve still got around 1 billion people living in extreme poverty. But the story of human success is incredible and with that success has come a reduction of our impact on natural environments. So we see grasslands and forests coming back in Europe and the US. As countries get richer we can produce more food on less land that leaves more room for habitats for endangered species. And we’ve been reducing carbon emissions and protecting ourselves and our communities from extreme weather events. So really it’s a story of environmental progress, particularly over the last 50 years. And I think that reality only intensifies the desire and the exaggerations by climate activists.

To what extent do you see this religion as being a left-right political phenomenon? Because if it’s anti-industrialization then there’s kind of philosophies on both the left and the right that could be linked to that. JRR Tolkien was against industrialization in some ways. If you go back to the French Revolution, those philosophers looked at the state of nature and the idea of perfect harmony in nature. And that was very much an anti western philosophy as well. But then most climate activists are on the left. So how do you see the political divides in the religion?

Well that’s right, it’s paradoxical and somewhat confusing because climatism is illiberal and in some ways it is conservative. But it’s absolutely located on the political left all around the world (not just on western nations). I think it’s important to go back to the period before World War 2 where the left was associated with building large hydroelectric dams, with modern agriculture, with industrialization, urbanization, and forward progress. The reversal of the left’s position on economic development occurred after World War 2 when we saw the rise of neo-Malthusianism. It’s really the same as the ideas of Thomas Malthus who said that the more people there are the more starvation there would be. He was dead wrong – the opposite occurred. As we got wealthier, people chose to have fewer children. So the reversal is quite extraordinary. So you have the new left in western societies who start to embrace a kind of primitivism or a conservativism of wanting to go back to some earlier period. And then there is illiberalism – the labelling of any political disagreement as tantamount to holocaust denial. And other tactics that we now associate with cancel culture (censorship), woke culture, a kind of totalitarianism, trying to control every aspect of our lives in the name of basically what is an apocalyptic religion.

Where does Greta Thunberg sit within this religion?

Well, she’s a late stage entrant and a sort of Joan of Arc. She sees herself as speaking on something that nobody cares about. She’s actually a product of the dominant secular religion climatism, which is the dominant religion of western elites right now. It’s everything we’ve been talking about. Those are the views of the European Union, of the Democratic party of the US, of every left and center-left party in the world. So she comes out basically just telling elites what they’ve been already been saying but accusing them of not being radical enough. You may recall during her signature moment at the United Nations when she said “How dare you”, she wasn’t addressing climate deniers, she was addressing people who claim to be concerned about climate change. So in Greta Tunberg you see a sort of infantile extremism that sought to intensify demands for these extreme measures.

I think Greta Thunberg is an end stage product of the climate religion. As renewables come into crisis everywhere in the world because of local community opposition to the land use impacts, as well as the high associated costs of transmission lines and backup storage, and those things are taking the bloom off the rose for climate activists. We now see that renewables are actually awful for the environment. It takes 3-600 times more land to produce the same amount of electricity from renewables (solar and wind) as it does from a natural gas or nuclear plant. And so you are seeing a real world environmental impact of renewables that then undermines – it’s a contradiction within the climatists discourse and you start to see an undermining of that political movement.

The thing that I don’t understand about Greta is why did so many world leaders listen to someone who is so young, almost a child?

Well, we’ve seen it’s a form of narcissism. Psychologists have documented an increase of narcissism in the west over the last 50 years. It was intensified by social media. So Greta Tunberg was a way for elites to feel good about themselves. She was a sort of mirror that elites held up to be told that their own extremist views were reflected back at them and that they were right. To seek reinforcement of their existing views. This is true of both the left and the right. And so with Greta Thunberg they got that reinforcement, plus they were able to wield her as a weapon against their opponents. It was a powerful weapon because people are reluctant to criticize a child and so you were able to have all the venom that’s inherent to the climate discourse inside of a child. Then anybody that attempted to respond was accused of being mean to a child. And indeed that’s what occurred.

You describe this as a religion, but the irony is that they talk about science and rationalism. And how 97% of scientists agree with us and therefore you must comply. How do you reconcile those two things?

Well the use of climate science by climatist activists, the apocalyptic activists, is a kind of disinformation campaign. They are spreading disinformation that climate change is an apocalyptic threat rather than a gradual incremental impact that we need to mitigate and adapt to. So the science is being corrupted all the time. It mainly occurs in the summary for policy makers and in the press releases and then in the statements made about the press releases and then by the time it makes it into media culture it’s just turned into something absolutely bonkers. Really the opposite of what the data show. So in some sense it’s just a very clever disinformation campaign by apocalyptic activists, who if it weren’t climate change they would protest about something else, like overpopulation.

That word disinformation is quite a strong word because it implies their intention is to purposely mislead people or disinform them. Do you say that that’s their intention?

I do. I’ll give you a recent example. The IPCC have multiple scenarios for the future. The most apocalyptic scientists who have a significant amount of control and influence with the IPCC continue to demand to use a scenario known as RCP8.5 even though everybody knows perfectly well that there’s no possibility of RCP8.5 happening. I testified in front of the US Senate on this issue. It is a high emissions scenario – a coal-based world. But we’ve been transitioning away from coal to abundant natural gas for decades in Europe and the US. They continue to use that scenario and then they combine it with other scenarios that suggest that it will be a low economic growth future. Well the two things can’t occur simultaneously. You can’t have a high emission scenario and a low economic growth scenario at the same time. In my Senate testimony I criticized one of the economists who is combining this high emissions – low economic growth scenario and they know exactly what they’re doing.

But what is their motivation behind that?

It’s the usual human motivations. It’s desire for attention or what psychologists call narcissistic supply. They know perfectly well that if they describe the most likely scenarios which is a moderate growth future along with a higher natural gas rather than coal future that they can’t then tell the most extreme stories. There’s not really an apocalyptic story even under RCP8.5 scenarios because humans are so good at adapting to climate change. We have reduced our deaths from natural disasters by over 90% even as the population quadrupled over the last century. They know that if they move away from these really extreme impossible scenarios to the more moderate scenarios, then they can’t point to many significant environmental impacts at all. So it’s sensationalism. They are driven by the money that goes into the scientific enterprise and into the renewables industry. And I think that there’s a broader sense of political power and societal power. Whoever describes the risk is in the position of being able to demand the solutions to it and that’s what we’ve seen on climate.

But if this is a religion then one would expect all the incentives to say that you must produce research that is more apocalyptic in its predictions and disincentives to the opposite, so you are becoming a heretic if you say actually it isn’t quite as bad as we thought it was.

That’s right. In my book “Apocalypse never”, I describe how important it was for climate extremists to demonize people like Roger Pielke Jnr. at the University of Colorado. Somebody who had done pioneering work showing that the cause of natural disasters, once you accounted for more wealth and harms way, had not increased. And there was no climate signal in those natural disasters. In fact, we now see over the last 30 years that the cost of weather and climate related disasters has been declining because our infrastructure is so robust that any relatively modest increase in extreme weather events is offset by better infrastructure. They absolutely had to demonize him and they went to great lengths – we documented how the White House itself participated under Barak Obama in demonizing Roger Pielke as a climate denier. And alleging that he was funded by fossil fuel interests which was untrue. So there is a sort of ritualized scapegoating that one can understand in a sort of anthropological way. But he also posed a direct threat to some very powerful financial interests.

When you are trying to persuade people who have an opposite opinion to you on these issues and you view it in terms of a religion, how do you try to persuade people from believing this religion?

It’s important to point out that certainly when you present these facts to people who believe something very different their first reaction is to reject the facts. But that’s just in the immediate term. I think over time it does help people to point out the ways in which they’ve been trapped in a kind of cult-like belief system. And so I’ve been pointing this out since at least 2020 and we’ve already seen a lot of people start to temper their discourse. In the last three years there’s been a trend of many climate scientists themselves wanting to emphasize that climate change is not the end of the world. They always emphasize that really it’s not the end of the world if we do the things I want to do, but nonetheless I think there has been some recognition that they’ve lost credibility with the public by continuing to cry wolf about extreme weather events and about climate change. We’re in the hurricane season right now in the US and we haven’t seen much happen. They predicted that climate change was killing the Great Barrier Reef’s corals in Australia. We know that over 2021-22 there’s been record number of corals. So I think the problem for the climate activists is that the public can see that the reality is not reflective of the predictions that they made.

Because we’ve been fed these predictions for many decades that the world is essentially doomed and there is going to be this apocalypse. At one point they said it was 12 years away if we don’t do anything. What do you think the impact of these doomeresque predictions has been on the general population and particularly on young people?

It’s been catastrophic. I’m working on an essay titled, “Why progressives affirm psychiatric disorders”. We’ve seen on race, climate and transexual issues progressives affirming creating and increasing diagnosable psychiatric disorders like gender dysphoria and climate anxiety. Social media has also contributed significantly to anxiety amongst children, as has the decline of physical exercise, and the decline of physical education programs in schools. We all need to exercise much more than we actually do every day. We spend too much time on our phones. A lot of status anxiety is driven by social media. We feel like we are in a fish bowl. We feel like when we’re being criticized or ignored that we’re nor getting those dopamine internal rewards that people want. But I think the climate change discourse has been absolutely toxic. People are told that they have no future. That’s there’s no point in having children. The exact same thing happened in the 1960s with the population scare. And we are now concerned about not having enough population in western countries! We’re worried about population decline in places like Japan, Korea and western Europe and the US. We’re making some of it up with immigration. Nonetheless I think the anxiety that we’ve been telling children that their futures are ruined is absolutely horrendous. It’s irresponsible. We need to tell kids the opposite. There is every reason to think that their future will be better than the present. I’m always struck by how good we are at saving endangered species. As long as we’re reducing our footprint when it comes to agriculture and energy that’s what will happen. If we expand our footprint with renewables then we are going to have a much more devasting impact on natural environments. But there is every reason to believe that the future will be better than the past and we should be telling children that.

It’s a very anti-human ideology because you are saying if you have children they will be carbon emitters and cause terrible problems for the world. And the world that they will be born into will also be a disaster. Has this anti-human ideology led to anxiety and some extremism among groups like Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace and other radical climate groups?

Absolutely true. And it comes from a bad place, a depressed person’s view of the world who seeks to feel slightly better about themselves by being the center of attention by offering these doomsday stories. It’s also a kind of narcissism because you are looking for people to applaud when you make these outrageous claims. We saw this in the 1960s with the population scare. We also saw it with the nuclear scare in the 1970s. Then we see it in the climate change scare. So it’s a really selfish discourse. It’s a way of people trying to get societal power for themselves by frightening other people including children. In some ways it’s the worst of the problems because most developing countries if they’re capable of getting the energy they need they will. But the younger people are much more vulnerable to these discourse and we start to see rising levels of anxiety and depression particularly among more liberal children who are more likely to believe at face values these apocalyptic claims.

And there’s also this odd dynamic which one could even point to being a Marxist dynamic where parents are now beholden to their children and you’ve got Greta Thunberg telling world leaders what to do about very big and important decisions in their economies. There’s an atmosphere where children today feel that they have right to tell their parents that they are ignorant and to blame their parents and their grandparents for emitting carbon and for destroying their future. Do you think that is also a dynamic particularly in the US and western countries?

Yes, absolutely it has. And it’s an anti-civilization discourse as well. We have to remember that all of this prosperity came from us telling stories about our future that were positive while expressing gratitude towards our ancestors. This is true in the western world and its also true in Asia where you see sort of ancestor worship which is a way of expressing gratitude for everything that’s come before us and also extending that responsibility into the future with our children. But I was very struck when we saw the protest by Just Stop Oil which was the evolution of Extinction Rebellion last year. And they were doing a set of things I found very interesting. They were throwing soup onto paintings including the famous van Gogh “Sunflowers’. They poured milk onto the floors at a grocery store. And they glued their hands to a floor at an automobile display. I thought this is incredible because these are the behaviors of toddlers throwing temper tantrums. So it’s really the infantilism of an apocalyptic worldview that is cojoined with Great Thunberg being the leading climate change advocate. So the process of infantilization goes back many decades along with rising secularism and rising narcissism. With rising infantilism people take longer to become adults in societies as a result of prosperity so the children don’t need to help their parents on the farms anymore. We’ve seen the decline of chores. The decline of free play. These factors are viewed by psychologists as the drivers of the rising anxiety and narcissism in young people. So they’re really getting it from all directions. So you can see people trying to get particular psychological needs met in adulthood through climate advocacy.

Do you worry about eco terrorism?

There have been some episodes of violence by environmentalists. I don’t think it’s the main event. I worry much more about the ways in which these things undermine civilization. Undermining cheap energy. Civilization is not super complicated. You need three basic things, cheap energy, law and order and meritocracy [a society governed by people selected according to merit]. If you’d like to have a liberal democracy than you would also have equal justice under the law and free speech and free markets. We see all six of those foundations of liberal democracy in western civilization under attack by the radical or woke left with a view of replacing all those things with some different moral order. One based on a racial hierarchy, on an idea that one’s sex is determined by the individual, and also based on this idea that the world is coming to an end from climate change and that we need to radically reduce our energy and food consumption and supposedly harmonize with the natural environment even though that involves expanding our environmental footprint. So I do worry more about the anti-civilization impacts than I do about the tactical behaviors. Though certainly we saw in Britain with the Just Stop Oil last year at least one motorist killed as part of those Just Stop Oil protests.

The reason I ask is because if you do have people who genuinely believe the world is doomed and everyone on planet earth could die or at least there could be a significant population wipeout and you want to stop that from happening then anything is justified. Isn’t it? This has happened particularly in Britain where we’ve see Just Stop Oil and other protest groups becoming more radical in their actions. Do you think that there is a particular British phenomenon in this? Why hasn’t it happened in America for example?

It is interesting to see how extreme the British activists have become. We certainly have our share of them in the US, but it is diluted across a bigger country. Things are so concentrated in Europe, it’s such a smaller area. Things are so concentrated in Britain in particular. And Britain is very secular now, but it was very religious and in my kinder moments I’ll see the climate activists as real spiritual seekers. The final chapter in my book “Apocalypse never” is called “False gods for lost souls” and I think that these are lost souls who need some sort of purpose and in failing to find that purpose through conventional means, namely work and love and some sort of more benign spiritual practice, we see them engaging in political extremism. So I do think there is reason to worry about the radicalization. I also think that sometimes these movements can die out as the media discourse shifts. Because in many ways these are just creations of the media that have used this issue to create alarmism and to generate fear because fear sells newspapers. And so I think the extent to which the news media start to move on to other issues like the crises in the middle east, or economic problems, and as the renewables agenda comes into crisis and the climate science comes back much less apocalyptic every year, I do hope that we will see climatism if not come to an end then at least a diminish in its societal power.

Do you have any advice to parents who are concerned about their children’s radicalism in this area or even just their children’s beliefs in this sort of doomeresque climate agenda? What would you say to parents to deprogram their children because they might be surrounded by all sorts of Tik Tok videos and their friends and teachers telling them things? As a parent you’ve got a bit of power over your child but it’s quite difficult to control all of those other things that might be influencing their ideas on this.

I think that young people, particularly adolescents are much more influenced by their peers than they are by their parents. But I think that children do take what their parents tell them very seriously even if they pretend that they’re not doing that. And I think asking questions is often a good way to go and also even asking your children for some evidence to back up of the claims that they’re making. I think rather than getting into a heated argument or a debate about it asking their children for references if they’re saying things like climate change is ending the world. It’s, where did you get that from? Can you show me the scientific papers? Is that in an IPCC report? I wrote “Apocalypse never” in part because I wanted it to be for friends and family of people that had embraced this climate fanaticism. It summarises all the evidence. I point to specific peer-reviewed scientific papers and parts of the IPCC report and include data on hurricanes, and fires. None of these data support any of the extreme statements that people make.

Let’s talk about the real world impact of some of the policies that politicians have tried to put in place to tackle climate change and decarbonization. In the UK they are obsessed with the phrase “Net Zero” with a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. In California there are some extreme policies. Can you discuss what’s happened in California and maybe that acts as a warning to other places around the world.

In California we’ve seen rolling blackouts almost every year over the last six years. This is coming at a time when you’re having demands for more electric cars which would require a much larger number of power plants than we have. We’ve seen our electricity prices rise seven times more than they did in the rest of the country over the last decade because of these mandates for renewables, solar in particular. One interesting statistic is that in 2021 we received less electricity from zero carbon sources than we did in 2011 despite having had a huge built out of solar and the reason is that we were in a drought year and so we had less water for hydroelectric dams and we had shut down a nuclear power plant. So it shows the limits of renewables. Of the last three years Germany has flatlined in terms of its renewable energies, even though they have been installing more wind and solar projects and the reason is because it wasn’t very windy and it wasn’t very sunny. And so the vagaries of weather show you just how unreliable renewables are. Not just day to day, but also year to year. And the incredible cost that they impose on society. That’s why you start to see politicians like the Prime Minister of Britain and the Governor of California and heads of state around the world starting to pull back from those extreme commitments. The wind industry is now demanding a bailout in the US because the prices are such that those projects no longer make any sense. I think you’re going to see very significant opposition from Republicans and the Congress to more money for the wind industry whose projects has been subsidized by at least 33% for about 30 years now. I think at a certain point you have to say this technology can’t stand on its own and we need to phase out its funding.

You talk about the demand for electricity from electric cars. This must be a significant concern for policy makers because there isn’t the capacity and there isn’t enough energy to supply if we all convert to electric cars because they’re trying to ban petrol cars in the UK and the EU by 2035 I think. What’s going to happen when they ban petrol cars and we all have to shift to electric cars? Do you see a crisis that’s coming?

Well, we’re in it right now. There’s a glut of electric vehicles because they’re not able to sell them because of the higher costs and because of the anxiety that consumers feel about needing to recharge and having to spend a lot of time recharging at a time when you just need to stay on the road. So I do think that that’s starting to happen now. The amount of critical minerals that are required to create electric cars is huge and so you’ve got these awful supply chains going back to central Africa. We’ve seen some of the horror stories around the mining of various minerals for electric cars. They are mostly processed in China. It’s hard for me to believe that the US and Europe are going to want to shift their energy dependence from themselves or the North Sea to China, particularly given the chaos and the global situation. We have seen petroleum consumption rise after the COVID period. And I don’t see that peaking anytime soon and certainly not because of electric cars. And there’s some power density problems as well when you move from the smaller passenger vehicles into the trucks. So that crisis has already begun.

Have there been some developed countries who have handled these climate policies better than others? Are there some examples where we can look to for some hope for the future of where countries are adapting to climate change but they’re not taking these kind of radical climate policies to completely destroy for example their nuclear power stations?

The places we would normally look to were France and Sweden because they had such a big nuclear buildout. France had been ambivalent about nuclear by reducing it from about 80% to about 70% of its generation. It didn’t properly maintain its plants and so it had to take multiple reactors offline over the last 18 months in order to make those repairs. That should have been avoidable. Similarly Sweden has gone back and forth on this issue because anti-nuclearism is so strong. But we are starting to see a return to nuclear around the world. It’s been 10 years since the Fukushima accident in Japan. The Japanese government has returned to nuclear. Korea voted out anti-nuclear party and voted in a pro-nuclear party. There is stronger support for nuclear power in Canada. Even on the center left we’re seeing a return to nuclear because it’s so important for climate change. And so that was one of the core contradictions of the climate discourse – climate change is an urgent threat but we couldn’t possibly use nuclear power! That’s starting to change. We’ve seen it among Democrats in the US where a minority of Democrats supported nuclear about 10 years ago and today a majority support it.

You talk about public attitudes towards climate policies. In the UK if you look at opinion polls most people support net zero. Do you think that those attitudes will shift as these policies come into place and suddenly things are becoming much more expensive and it will impact people’s lives? Or do you think that those opinion polls will maintain their level of popularity?

They have shifted already otherwise the Prime Minister of Britain wouldn’t have scaled back the net zero commitments. I also think that people support things in the abstract. They support ambitious goals in the abstract and that’s understandable. But they’re not totally sure what it means. Net zero is a branding exercise, it’s not a specific policy agenda. I might be in favor of net zero if it were focused on nuclear power. Although even there you’re always going to have some emissions and so it is a rather extremist position and the earth does absorb 45% of all carbon emissions that we emit. So it’s not like you need to reduce all emission to zero even from an ecological perspective, you can produce some amount of carbon dioxide. So I think it is running into crisis. And when people get asked that question, they’re simply being asked whether they care about climate change and they are saying yes. I don’t think they are necessarily signing up for the destruction of the energy economy and western civilization.

You mentioned that Rishi Sunak the British Prime Minister reversed on some of the net zero policies and that there are some center left politicians who are doing the same thing. Have you seen a shift in views on energy and climate within the Democratic party?

Well, we just gave a huge amount of money (around $400 billion, but it’s probably going to be more like a trillion dollars) to various green energy technologies. It was so much as to alarm the EU around these heavy subsidies for green energy. But they’ve reduced the requirement that electric cars be produced in the US. That will also probably happen with solar panels as well. If you were to try to produce solar panels and electric cars in the US the prices would increase significantly as opposed to making them in China. So I do think we’ve seen some of that occur but we haven’t been pinched in the same ways as in Britain and Europe because we have so much abundant oil and natural gas. We had very expensive oil prices in 2022 and we’re just so rich in oil and gas in the US that we were able to increase production and bring those prices down rather quickly.

But that was through Joe Biden reducing the reserve of oil in the US.

That’s true, but there has been as increase of oil and gas production too.

Acknowledgements

This blogpost comes from an interview of Michael Shellenberger in November 2023. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California.

Posted, April 2024