Quotes from Michael Shellenberger

the spike in environmental alarmism comes at a time when anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising within the general population, especially among adolescents, in both the United States and Europe.67 Seventy percent of American teenagers call anxiety and depression a major problem.68

the first dead body I had ever seen

Psychiatrists have long warned against giving money to the mentally ill homeless addicted to drugs, and yet that is what San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other progressive cities do. "It is not only clinically incorrect," said the director of psychiatric services at San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, "but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.

Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too.

It's not that nuclear energy never kills. It's that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear's known total death toll is just over

But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.8

Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.

I believe safety is the first thing you need to guarantee as mayor," she said.47

The American people are capable of distinguishing between stigmatizing fentanyl use without stigmatizing the sick person who is using fentanyl. The person requires our compassion, but the behavior requires our condemnation.

Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.

Complaints about human waste on San Francisco's sidewalks and streets were rising. Calls about human feces increased from 10,692 to 20,933 between 2014 and 2018.7 In 2019, the city spent nearly $100 million on street cleaning—four times more than Chicago, which has 3.5 times as many people and an area that is 4.5 times larger. Between 2015 and 2018, San Francisco replaced more than three hundred lampposts corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.

unless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.

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.

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.

At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women's cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

When climate goes away as an apocalyptic concern, something else will emerge. No doubt about it.

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.

Hypocrisy demonstrates how unaccountable one is to conventional morality.

The main problem with biofuels - the land required - stems from their low power density.

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.

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.

YIMBYs should embrace a housing reform agenda broader than increasing urban density. This should start with ending tax shelters in the form of land conservation easements to cattle ranches and farms that abut suburbs. This would create an incentive for landowners convert them either to new housing subdivisions or to genuinely new natural areas.

It's when the conservationists became environmentalists that everything went bad. It stopped being about the environment. It became about controlling society.

If you want to save the natural environment, you just use nuclear. You grow more food on less land, and people live in cities. It's not rocket science.