Quotes from Michael Shellenberger

Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments

Every time I hear somebody say, 'Well, I just want to help people,' I want to punch them in the face," said Vicki Westbrook. "Those are the people that are usually harming the people the most.

The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.

Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions.

environmental apocalypse?

Scientists find that plants grow faster as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations.

Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today's high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal.

When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, "Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.

Book of Isaiah, "He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

environmental scientists, journalists, and activists have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.

The cost of buying and installing the latest Tesla Powerwall is more than $10,000. The cost of installing solar panels on top of that ranges from $10,000 to $30,000.4 Helen and I pay about $100 per month for electricity. It would thus take at least 200 months, or more than seventeen years, for us to recoup our investment.

When a television reporter asked Bay Area mayors why there was so much homelessness in Bay Area cities but not in affluent communities east of the Bay Area, the Berkeley mayor answered, "I assume [it's] the fact that our cities have such robust social services and shelter, as well as just the environment, the climate, a city that is inviting and welcoming to people.

While some homeless are attracted to San Francisco for housing and services, many of San Francisco's most visible homeless people don't use them. When I visited the Tenderloin with Tom Wolf, he pointed to the doorway to a building. "I slept here," he said, "because I was such an addict that I didn't want to walk the five blocks to the shelter. I wanted to be right near the dealers.

Even people who would prefer to live in sober environments say they do not want to quit their addictions. "When we surveyed people in supportive housing in New York," said University of Pennsylvania homelessness researcher Dennis Culhane, "almost everybody wanted their neighbors to be clean and sober but they didn't want rules for themselves about being clean.

What ends up happening with a lot of progressive liberals in San Francisco," said Tom, "is they get to go home to their nice house in Noe Valley and six-figure job and kids in private school. They can afford to vote progressively for social justice because they don't have to walk their kids through the Tenderloin and play hopscotch over the feces and needles.

Homelessness advocates often level serious charges at people who disagree with their view of the problem and the solution. In the early 1990s, a Harvard sociologist who wrote a book on homelessness noted, "those who see the homeless as passive victims of circumstances beyond their control often react to [the evidence of service refusal] with a mixture of fury and disbelief.

I have to say there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian," writes University of California journalism professor Michael Pollan, in a passage from his 2007 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris."70 The trouble with dogmatic vegetarianism

Greta Thunberg, in 2019. "I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic."20

fear-mongering "seems like patronizing neo-colonialism to people elsewhere."92

Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables

the trouble with renewables isn't fundamentally technical—it's natural.

an important, paradoxical truth: it is only by embracing the artificial that we can save what's natural.