The Worst Possible Candidate for Governor

Source: The Worst Possible Candidate for Governor

Today a new episode of The Joe Rogan Experience drops featuring climate delay grifter extraordinaire Michael Shellenberger, who apparently is now running for governor. The phrase “high on his own supply” comes to mind.

At any rate, it reminded me of a piece I commissioned for Drilled over a year ago from investigative journalist Paul Thacker on Shellenberger and the Breakthrough Institute he co-founded, and why the media continuously gives both unearned credit. Niether Shellenberger nor his co-founder Ted Nordhaus would talk to Paul because he’d written pieces that were critical of them in the past, but I didn’t think we could ethically run the story without speaking to them both, so I did. Spent about two hours on each conversation and came away feeling like Shellenberger was unstable and Nordhaus was nowhere near as smart as he clearly thought he was. At the time, I opted not to run the piece. Neither Shellenberger nor BTI seemed that powerful, so it felt more like gossip than like information the public needed to hear.

The New Denial Is Delay

How an attempt to revolutionize the environmental movement became a push to delay action on climate change.

By Paul D. Thacker

In October 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the founders of a scrappy Bay Area think tank called The Breakthrough Institute, published “The Death of Environmentalism,” an essay that argued the environmental movement had failed. To knock back critics, the duo constantly underlined their environmental credentials and years of experience providing public relations advice to green groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

Seeking to define themselves as different from run-of-the-mill climate skeptics, Shellenberger told a reporter around that time, “We’re not like Bjorn Lomborg or whatever.” Lomborg, of course, is the Danish climate contrarian best known for the fact-challenged book Cool It and, more recently, False Alarm.

A few years after seeking to differentiate the Breakthrough Institute from Lomborg, Shellenberger joined the Danish writer on a panel at Brown University, where both urged more tempered rhetoric on climate change. As reported by the Brown Daily Herald, Shellenberger argued that climate change experts dismissed him and Lomborg because policy experts did not allow for their “alternative voices.”