American Thought Leaders - The Myths We’re Told About Climate Change | Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: November 8, 2025

Recently, Bill Gates very publicly pivoted on climate change, rejecting “doomsday” predictions and calling for a more pragmatic, human-centered approach.Is that a sign that the era of climate alarmism is coming to a close?That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder of Public.news and the nonprofit Environmental Progress.From rising sea levels to surging forest fires to dying polar bears to disappearing coral reefs, much of what we’ve been told about climate change is not true, he says.The rising sea level narrative, for example, rests entirely on computer models that were manipulated to produce the desired outcome, Shellenberger says.“It’s clear that the activist scientists were manipulating models to show an acceleration in sea level rise when the only long-term, reliable source of data, which is called tide gauge data ... shows no acceleration from the 1850s on,” he says.How is data cherry-picked or skewed to create misleading narratives when it comes to climate change? What’s behind the sudden embrace of nuclear energy—after it had been demonized for decades? How might it be related to the global AI race?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

If you read the papers about the models, the modelers say, depending on the assumptions, we can show sea level deceleration or linearity or accelerations. From rising sea levels to surging forest fires, to dying polar bears, to disappearing coral reefs, much of what we've been told about climate change is just not true, says Michael Schellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, and founder of public.news. I think that those scientists that manipulate the data to show certain things, I think they really are apocalyptic. Like, they really think that the world is going to come to an end.

But then they look at their data and their data don't show that. So then they have to mess with it. At the same time, Bill Gates has recently come out to declare the, quote, doomsday view of climate change is wrong. Are we seeing a shift away from climate alarmism and the net zero agenda? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Michael Schellenberger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Young, great to be back with you.

So Michael, is the era of climate extremists destroying priceless works of art now over? That's a really interesting question. It feels like it's coming to an end. I mean, we still see, as you mentioned, you know, vandalism most recently against Stonehenge. In fact, those protesters got let off the hook by the... by the courts for what they did. I think in terms of legitimacy, yeah, I mean, climate extremism, I think, has lost a lot of legitimacy over the last five or six years. The most kind of obvious part of that is Bill Gates recently said that we really shouldn't look at climate separate from human welfare,

separate from human, like how we're doing, you know, at a human level. And on that, on those metrics, you know, we're doing well. I mean, we are more resilient to extreme weather events. The number of disasters has gone down because the number of deaths and the cost of disasters has gone down. So fewer people are dying from hurricanes and floods and all the other things that we're supposed to hurt us. And then I think most dramatically, I think in others finally understand that there was a manipulation going on on a lot of other data, you know, including your organization, which was censored by Facebook, for sharing accurate information about the fact that there's been no decline in sea ice in the Arctic for 20 years. And then we've also seen now,

it's clear that the activist, scientists were manipulating models to show an acceleration in sea level rise when the only long-term reliable source of data, which is called tide gauge data, just measuring the tides, shows no acceleration from the 18. 1950s on. And that doesn't mean that there's, that climate isn't changing. You know, I think the planet is changing. It doesn't mean that humans don't have an influence. I think we do have an influence. But this, the size of that influence, I think for me, it's even less than maybe I thought a few years ago. I was reporting even after I wrote Apocalypse Never, my book from 2020 on environmental alarmism. I was still saying, repeating the scientific.

ostensible scientific view that sea levels were, that the rise was accelerating. I don't think that's, I don't think I can say that anymore. It's part of the reason I wrote those recent pieces. But then when you just go through all the other metrics, yeah, I mean, there's just not really any case to be made. You know, I want to touch on one other thing. You know, I went to a round table of basically energy experts, real clear politics, organized it here in D.C. recently.

But as, as it went around, I thought to myself, wait, a second, all these people are talking about right now is how are we going to get enough energy into these AI data centers? It's an existential crisis. And I thought to myself, hmm, wait a second, is net zero dead? Is degrowth actually dead? And I asked that question and essentially what everybody would tell me is there's no more talk about net zero, you know? And so this information that you're bringing forth kind of fits with this rubric, but it also makes me wonder, If this isn't sort of a convenient revealing of information at an appropriate time, as everyone seems to be maddeningly, maddeningly gearing up to build as many data centers

and electricity production facilities as possible. Yeah, I mean, look, anytime you see such a big change in the discourse and the kind of conventional wisdom, as measured by Bill Gates, you know, I would say he kind of represents the left end of the conventional wisdom. And so his announcement is coming at a time, as you rightly point out, that the main focus of policymakers, and probably in both parties, certainly in the Republicans, but probably also in the Democrat Party, too, is just getting enough energy to power the data centers. And we see there's, we need more electricity. Electricity prices have been going up largely in response to

renewables and these renewables policies. But the there's also just rising demand. And I think that's just a huge factor that is changing the conversation. But it's a lot of things. I mean, there's a lot of people that for years have been pointing out that the data is just not there for an alarmist case. You know, and not only that, but actually the system, you know, the so-called energy system is doing a pretty good job on its own of decarbonizing. There's so much more abundant natural gas. Some of it not even being tapped. So I think in the United States, by the way, the conversation is completely changed. And now we're a pro-energy growth country. Europe, it hasn't. So the British are still

not tapping into their natural gas reserves that they have. They're still trying to do a lot of wind, which is making electricity expensive. Germany is in a state of degrowth and de-industrialization. And I think in some ways it's just, you know, committing suicide as a nation through its energy policies. But I think, yeah, I think that where things are headed, I think where the left is going to have to go, it's going to have to go towards more abundant energy production. And that's going to be from things like natural gas and nuclear that were, you know, verboten just a few years ago. Well, you know, this is another thing that I heard at that roundtable. It's clear that nuclear is going to be sort of full steam ahead, you know, quite literally, I suppose. But, you know,

you actually did your work in your book, Apocalypse, whenever this is actually how we actually met looking at all these questions, but it's very interesting that you were saying that your own research hadn't told you how far it had gone, how far this manipulation actually went. I find that quite astonishing. Yeah, I think on a couple of points, and I just published another interview with Judith Curry, who's a climate scientist, atmospheric scientist, Professor Emerita, Georgia Tech, kind of unquestionable credentials, you know, thinks humans are having an impact on the climate. I asked her, so what percentage did she think humans were responsible, that we were responsible with our both land use changes, which is also underestimated probably,

as well as our carbon emissions. And she said, you know, probably 50%. You know, the conventional wisdom is that humans are 100% responsible for all the warming. She said probably somewhere around 50%. The other thing that thought was interesting is that, you know, we were headed into, you know, she thinks that we would be headed into a cooling period if we were not contributing greenhouse gases to warming the planet. And then the third most kind of, you know, jarring part of this is that, you know, and it's not controversial at all, actually, is that warming is much better than cooling. And so, you know, just at a simple matter of deaths from cold, significantly outnumber

deaths from heat, those three things, maybe the, you know, that there's still a lot of natural variability in this complicated planet system that we have. We don't totally understand it. It's hard to measure it exactly. That, you know, that really we might be cooling now if it weren't for our interventions of our unintended effects of warming. And that warming can be good. And so if all else being equal, it's literally the opposite of pessimism. You'd kind of be on the side of like, wow, we kind of lucked out in a variety of ways. This is not reason for any apocalyptic thinking, and therefore all of the apocalyptic thinking is really motivated by other things, including based, you know,

I think the heart of it is a kind of Malthusian, anti-human, humans are bad, there are cancer on the earth, there's too many of them. Everybody knows that story because we're, you know, we teach it to our kids, and it's like a staple of Hollywood movies and television, but, you know, that's kind of what motivated a lot of it. And, you know, even the sea, you know, I look at the sea level scientists that I think were involved in mischief. There's certainly more truth and climate change than there is in, say, transgenderism, but they just exaggerated it to such an extent that it really became the opposite of what it is, which is something that, you know, that it's not the end of the world.

It's not entirely from humans, and it's certainly better, to the extent to which we're going to have some impact on the planet, it's certainly better to be in the direction of warming than cooling. You know, in your interview with Judith Curry, which I perused, that was kind of the most striking thing was just simply her assertion. The most important thing to know is that global warming isn't actually bad, isn't actually dangerous. And somehow, yet we have, as you point out, in your recent piece, there's all sorts of people that have driven, been driven to, you know, mental illness, to being extreme, as I mentioned at the beginning of destroying priceless, we're going to the great efforts to destroy priceless works of art, that are caught in this kind

of, you know, social contingence of climate alarmism, while in reality it's actually something that's at least neutral, if not positive. Yeah, and that means you have to look for different causes, you know, that certainly scientists who are motivated, misled people, but people were inclined to be catastrophic in ways that they weren't in the past. I mean, I always point out one of the other pieces of data, you know, because we had this big heat spell, we basically had higher, faster sea level rise from the 20s to the 50s than we did from the 50s to the 80s. And then we've had a faster rise since the 90s, but not significantly faster than that period from the 20s to the 50s.

That's also accompanied by a spike in heat waves in the 30s. Well, I went back and just for fun, I read all of the New York Times coverage of the heat waves in the 1930s. And Yan, what was so interesting about it is how relaxed they were. I mean, they had like, you know, hundreds of people were dying in heat waves, like in buildings. And the New York Times was, people were kind of down playing it. You know, I mean, you're in the midst of the Great Depression, right? You know, it's 1930s. It's, you know, there's, you know, it's also the Dust Bowl period, right? So you people, you know, it's bad times and they're kind of like, well, yeah, the heat waves, it's like the least of it. Whereas I think that it's really has to do with a lot of different things, obviously,

for it to be such a big phenomenon. I mean, part of it is, you know, just what I was saying about a kind of anti-human ideology. I think some of it is some class interests that are served by wanting to promote certain things like renewables or financializing carbon emissions through carbon markets, the United Nations. And there's the power trips, the attention for Greta Tonberg or the United Nations Secretary General or the president or, you know, former president or other politicians. They're sort of they get some narcissistic rewards. And then you can't help but notice that it's an apocalyptic discourse, which sociologists and historians have studied for hundreds of years, a millennarian end of the world. The world is nigh. We have a lot of psychological studies

of the kind of people attracted to those cults, you know, those apocalyptic cults. These are sort of lost souls, people that are really kind of a lot of failed artists. You know, I noticed that that's kind of a category of folks involved in those, you know, those vandalism protests. But, you know, people used to have a, you know, in the United States, mostly a Christian, you know, belief system. And it had a story about original sin and, you know, and then then the end of times, the revelations, well, when people stop believing in that, they don't really stop needing an, like a kind of cosmological explanation of things. It sort of emerges organically through the culture, I think, that sort of apocalyptic story. And I think, I think,

a sense of at a time when, you know, you also, it was a time of anxiety, you know, is the Cold War was over. We had a previously, we had a stand-in apocalyptic event in the form of the risk of nuclear war. When that goes away at the end of communism is when you, in the early 90s, that's when you see climate changing emerging as an apocalyptic story. So, you know, sum it all up, I would just say, I think the climate alarmism was a kind of, you know, a generalized anxiety disorder among, you know, college-educated elites who were trying to sort of virtue signal, feel good about themselves, give their lives' purpose and meaning. It's not to downplay the financial interests or the kind of the power tripping by various people,

but I think in some ways it's just a disordered, psychological, or spiritual response from people that, you know, have lost their faith. Yeah, and there's this other element of very, deliberate manipulation which is something that you highlight in this recent work that you've done and you alluded to it a little bit earlier when you were talking about you know that the trends change over time so if you pick a very specific time and you avoid mentioning the context of that you can make something look really dramatic and problematic that actually isn't but can you trace for me some of the major ways in which you know you can see this deliberate

manipulation actually happening yeah sure well that's such a that's a that's a it's fascinating even if you're not interested in climate change watching people that are very dogmatic about something people that are in their own dream world sort of manipulate things because I think that those scientists that manipulate the data or manipulate their studies to show certain things I think they really are apocalyptic like they really think that the world is going to come to an end But then they look at their data and their data don't show that. So then they have to mess with it. So in terms of the sea level rise, really you just have this one set of data from tide

gauges around the world. And when you just doesn't matter how you, you know, you've got to do some corrections and whatnot, but basically anybody that looks at that body of data says we can't see a long-term acceleration. You can pick periods of acceleration and deceleration, 1920 to 1950. 50, 1990 to today. But then when you just go and say, oh, then you didn't see that during these other decades, well, then it's not a long-term trend. And climate change is just, you know, long-term weather. You know, it's a, you know, it's just climate is this we call climate. It's a period of time.

You know, usually, you know, 30, 60, 120 years. And so if you're seeing natural variability over 30-year cycles, well, then you can't say that that's a trend of increased or of increased acceleration of sea level rise. You know, sea level has been rising since at least the 19th century. That was also when we started studying it. But then what they do is they say, okay, well, then we have to go find other measures. So they'll then use other measures. They love satellite data.

That requires a lot of assumptions. Then there's all these other indirect measures like salt marshes or coral. they're indirect, you have to ask yourself, why are you even using indirect measures if you have a direct measure in the form of tide gauge data? And the answer is because they can't show an acceleration otherwise. That's the real answer. I made public my email debate with the really the main guy. His name is Robert Kopp. He's at Rutgers University, very famous left wing university. And you know, you can see him when I sort of call him out on this, because, for example, they'll put it all in these models. And then they'll say, oh, the models, you know, they show

an acceleration. And you kind of go, well, but if you read the papers about the models, the modelers say, depending on the assumptions, we can show C-level deceleration or linearity or acceleration. So they're just different model outputs. And then they just, you know, there's so much going on in these studies. I mean, you're talking like hundreds or thousands of studies that then get boiled down into a single report for the UN IPCC that then get boiled down to a summary for policymakers, which then becomes press releases, which then becomes the statements by the scientists, all of which filter you up into a more apocalyptic or alarmist direction. But most people just miss the fact that, and they say irresponsibly, IPCC says, high confidence in acceleration.

Well, you can't have high confidence. You can't have any confidence in any direction. You can't have any confidence in any direction at all because you can show acceleration, deceleration, or linearity. So that's just one thing, yeah. That's just sea level rise. And by the way, that's the one that I'm somewhat proud of that investigation because that was one where like the headlines in the nowhere show the story I'm telling you. They still hasn't, you know, been picked up yet properly. I think it will be.

But whereas like on the Arctic sea ice, on the island Atolls that are the islands are supposed to be underwater. We have seen headlines that directly say scientific papers, headlines. Polar bears is another one. Like when I had checked for a podcast number six years ago, there was no way to show whether polar bear populations have increased or decreased. Now the main scientific group says they bury it, though, that there's been an increase. So some of it is cherry picking. It's kind of maybe the main thing, model manipulation, and then kind of burying it. Like they also, on heat waves, EPA, which, you know, should be fixing this under Trump, but the old EPA, they hide.

I say hide. I'm not making it. I don't know that they're deliberately. I can't prove they're deliberately hiding it. But if you just Google EPA and heat waves, you get the heat waves from 1960. You don't get this huge, the one from the whole 20th century, we get this huge spike in the 1930s. And so you're kind of like, why are you, well, we all know why they're doing that because they want to give the alarmist presentation. So they're sort of, yeah, it's really cherry-picking is probably the right single word to describe what they're doing,

but also some model manipulation and then just hiding a lot of these other findings so that you kind of, most people that don't want to spend a lot of time reading these documents, most of them end up never seeing. Michael, it just really reminds me of this whole approach of, you know, what they call activist journalism, where you have a kind of a predetermined vision of how, things are supposed to be the correct way, and then you kind of contort whatever things you find to fit that reality, which is kind of a, you know, the other word for that I use is propaganda and kind of truth independent, truth independent propaganda. This is what it reminds me of what you're describing. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, propaganda, traditionally,

when people do propaganda, like government officials, they're deliberately trying to do something. You know, they're trying to, they're kind of, they're conscious of it. I think in a lot of these cases, they're sort of barely conscious of it. You know, they have very elaborate justifications every time. Well, you know, the tide gauge data, we shouldn't just use tide gauge data. You know, there has to be other data. And everybody kind of nods along and there's no like, you know, they never are quite consciously saying we have to do this. But there's some, clearly, they're dealing with this problem of the data not showing what they want it to say, or the polar bear data or the heat wave data, they just kind of, well, they make

up some word salad about why they're justified in burying it or hiding it or whatever. They always have some reason. They only are, they're always basing what they're saying based on the activist journalists, you know, and the activist journalists are based on what they're saying on the activist scientists. They're the kind of two groups that really work together to do it. But yeah, I mean, the spirit of actually debunking things was sort of demonized by journalists who call it climate denialism or climate skepticism. Anybody who did climate denialism is like Holocaust denial. That's what the phrase is supposed to remind people of. Skepticism, I mean, skepticism should have entirely positive connotations because skepticism is what science is. And so they just

use these kind of bullying tactics. And it's like the way that all this stuff, cancel culture, censorship. They're always sort of, they're getting really into the weeds where people stop paying attention. That's where a lot of the mischief occurs. I think there's a lot of intimidation of the technical and scientific side of these things, but you don't actually have to know a lot of other details about what they're doing to just know that if you just get to the core empirical data, then there's really no basis for them introducing, you know, this other indirect forms of data, short-term data, or this elaborate modeling exercises. So is this the same thing that happened when it comes to catastrophic weather or hurricanes and damage? I mean, on the one hand,

there just isn't an increase in these factors that I'm aware of. On the other hand, the reporting tells you there's this dramatic increase in that that's evidence of this, you know, the apocalyptic vision or the evidence that it's an existential issue and so forth. Or was this just simply misrepresenting reality. Which is it? Yeah, it's very similar. I think the extreme weather has a lot of similarities to the sea level rise manipulations. Let's take kind of the biggest one by far as hurricanes. If you properly measure hurricanes over 100, 150 years, there's been no increase in land falling hurricanes during that time, like full stop. There's just no trend. I think I've seen some people actually produce a slightly declining trend, but basically

no trend in landfalling hurricanes. Now, we do have new ways to measure hurricanes, which is with satellite data. So if you don't adjust the data to account for better detection of hurricanes and you don't do landfalling hurricanes, for example, If you do all hurricanes, because of course, then you can show an increase because the satellites are better at detecting hurricanes offshore now, you know, obviously, then just, you know, like there are a hurricane out there. So one of the, there's actually two graphs I point out, one by Financial Times, one by the New York Times that do two different manipulations. The Financial Times doesn't correct for the change of technology to measure hurricanes. So they just, they, it's completely irresponsible. I mean, I don't know how else to say.

It's misinformation. I mean, or disinformation, depending on what they understood. The New York Times then does the time series trick. So you don't have a long enough period of time to show a trend. In other cases, it's sort of somewhat different. On the fires, it's multiple things because there's sort of the total amount of land that's on fire has declined. So, so you can't say that climate change has caused. an increase in the amount of land on fire.

But even on that, it's also, even that's almost a misleading piece of data because fire is not necessarily bad. A lot of our forests need fire. Fire clears out the underbrush. It often allows the seeds to be able to germinate. And so it's not like even fires are bad.

It might be that we should have more fires, right? In some places, it depends. But then the other one is the high intensity fires. And this is the craziest one. And I was absolutely like pilloried for saying this at the time. And now I'm, now I look back and think I didn't say it even strongest, strong enough. All of the increase of high intensity fires, all of it can be explained by poor forest management. You just allow woody debris to accumulate and you're going to get these big bonfires

in the forest that are bad in the sense that they burn the crowns of the trees and destroy the whole tree as opposed to these low level, less hot fires that you, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's natural and good and positive in terms of burning out that undergrowth. So all of it is about forest management. And then they would, so they would say, well, you can't say that there's not some role of climate change. And I guess what I would say is, yeah, slightly warmer weather, you could say, made the, added some kind of unmeasurable additional heat, but it's so small and irrelevant compared to the accumulation of wood fuel, that adding it as a cause, and it's all through modeling is the other

thing, they can't show it. That's your first sign that there's some mischief that they're doing because you have to ask, well, why are we modeling it at all if we have real world data? And then there's this other piece. I just, I noticed you mentioned it in your piece, which is coral declines, right? And you mentioned that the Great Barrier Reef is, you know, sort of blooming like never before or at least in recent history. How does coral fit into this? Another big one, right?

I mean, anybody that was, you know, old enough to remember of all the things we were worried about, you know, worried about a big coral die-off on the Great Barrier Reef. And every year there were new headlines about the corals just getting, it's just getting worse and worse. There was just one headline. And then in 2022, they said it's record coral. And I think 2020, and by the way, Facebook banned that story, that accurate story in 2020. They banned one of the most respected Australian researchers of Coral Peter Ridd in 2022.

2023, they, Facebook relented because they had two years of data showing record. But, Jan, it's not even that it was just, there's a 35-year record. That's how long they've been studying it because there's so many of these. I mean, I think I counted like seven climate impacts where they had completely misrepresented them. But the other one, I don't even know if it was in that one, was just the greening of the earth. You know, there's more CO2. So it's being, there's more CO2 that's being absorbed, more plant life, more tree life. Mostly we like that because we like green.

And green is good for all sorts of reasons, local air pollution, sinusoid climate change. But that's this thing that every, there's not like anybody's like, there's nobody like, there's nobody like arguing against that that's just everybody knows that's happening but they find these ways carbon brief is the really bad actor on this they find these ways to sort of sort of say that it's sort of not happening or that it's being simplified like you know because judy curry was part of his Department of Energy review of the climate science that they put out in the spring and carbon brief does this response and i was reading and i couldn't even barely understand what they were saying It was such a word salad, you know, it was such like, like you were, so I finally asked, you know, I was like, read it to Judy Curry.

Basically, they were saying, oh, but it's not just the carbon dioxide. It's also, it's also greater warming, right? And it's like, well, okay, so then, but you're saying the greater warming is all from more carbon dioxide anyway, but so great, it's more warming and more CO2. Like, that doesn't mean that it's not the CO2 as well. And I just was like, why are they doing that, you know, to Judy? And she's like, because they can't, they don't want to. admit that there could be something good about global warming. They don't want to admit that there might be something good about CO2. So you're not really talking about global warming. You were talking about your particular version of theological evil. So, you know, one issue that you've been working on for a very long time is promoting nuclear power as a solution, as an energy solution. And, you know, I guess, you know, you're seeing suddenly the beginnings of the

the realization of your quest here. How does that feel? It feels great, Jan. Thank you for asking. It was a lot of grief trying to say, as an environmentalist and Gen Xer raised on fear of nuclear power, I took a lot of grief over speaking out for nuclear, pointing out just how superior it is to renewables. I mean, orders of magnitude better. So it's been enormously satisfying, particularly the change in public opinion. I mean, it's 70, no, sorry, it's 61% public approval in the United States of nuclear power. Renewables, I believe, are at 52%. When I first started making the case for nuclear back around 2016, those numbers were reversed. I mean, renewables actually, I think, were in the 70s in terms of

public approval. Nuclear, I believe, was in the 40% area. So it's been a huge change, and I think it's inspiring in that way. You know, there's, you know, the bad news is that all the stuff I was worrying about, you know, that nuclear plants are being shut down. We did lose a fair number of them. Saved a bunch of them. Saved the nuclear plant in California. Saved a couple of plants in Illinois and New York, South Korea, made the case in Europe. But there's still shut up. shutting down nuclear plants in Germany, lost a couple in the United States. You know, it's a mixed thing. I mean, you know, Facebook, you know, meta needs so much power for their server farms that

they bought all the power from Three Mile Island. That's the one reactor that has been operating since 1979. The reactor right next to it melted in 1979. And people thought that was some apocalyptic event actually proved the overall safety of the worst form of accident of a nuclear plant had melted. and the radiation was contained in the containment dome, just like it had been designed to do. And now everybody wants that power,

desperate for that cheap nuclear power in a plant that's already built. So now the question is, what do we do to build new nuclear plants? And on this, you know, I'm excited to see there's been talk about, you know, just continuing to build. Once you build a standard water-cooled nuclear plant, a big one like we have in the United States, it's guaranteed to pay for itself. It's just guaranteed.

And the reason is that they can run for 92% of the year or so, which is a huge amount of time. They can basically always be on. You can rely on them for your server farms. You have to refute the time where you can't, that 8% of the year you refuel them or you do a little bit of maintenance, but they're guaranteed to make money.

Even if they go way over budget, they're still going to make money, you know, depending on financing and the price of electricity. the, you know, in the 20th year or the 25th year. And, you know, they can run forever. I mean, you might have to swap out parts, but you're talking about plants that are going to be licensed to run for, they are licensed for 80 years or more now. So it's a long-term investment. There's a lot of, you know, hope for a whole different kind of nuclear, but I just think my view is you kind of continue to iterate on the kind of nuclear. We know how to build and

have proven to build. Do some experiment. But, yeah, I mean, I just think you see Silicon Valley, the Trump administration, a fair number of Democrats, including, you know, Governor of California, have all recognized that nuclear is really amazing. It's really quite a, it's the best form of electricity. It's got all these advantages, and we just should be building a lot more of it. We should have been building a lot more of it 20, 30 years ago, but, but if we couldn't do that, we should at least do so now. Well, so one of the things I heard, you know, as we were, again, discussing at this roundtable, RCP roundtable that I was at, well, there were a couple of things. One is that the big challenges, one are financing, which you pointed out, because these are big,

you know, basically, even the small reactors are big, big projects with, you know, it takes quite a number of years to kind of get back at your kind of initial capital back. That's one side of it. The second part is the over-regulation. And so I just noticed someone on X, and I can't remember for the life of me who it was, just commenting, you know, we do actually have quite a bit of experience doing nuclear. Look at the U.S. military. Look at how many active, long-term nuclear reactors with zero problems have been running,

you know, across the U.S. and the military. Yeah. And, I mean, even the regulation, I think, has overstated. So for the, you know, we just built, I think we need, at least we should, start building at least two more of the same reactors that we just got done building in Georgia. They're called the AP 1000. And our regulator, which is the best in the world, the nuclear regulatory commission, they were there the whole time. I mean, they're standing around, you know, at the construction site and they're making sure everything is done by the book

and at the highest standard. There's been some folks that have tried to make an enemy out of the nuclear regulatory commission. I don't think that's accurate. or fair. I think that they're, they've been under a lot of pressure, you know, from anti-nuclear people to just become crazy zealots like they are. And they haven't done that, you know, in 50 years. And, you know, I think there should be, everyone should try to go as fast as possible, but no faster. You know, let's just start building. We know how to do it. We have the blueprints, you know, and I think the money is there. I mean, in other words, if you're an investor, the only way that you won't make your money back is if they don't build the plant.

And so, like, that's kind of the main thing is you just have to get yourself so that they, you know, don't stop building it, just build it. But you'll make more or less money betting on how quickly you get it done. But we know how to do it and you're guaranteed to make your money back as long as you, you know, don't succumb to, you know, pressure from crazy people and stop building it. well and there's probably a number of plants even though this is expensive and laborious that you can recommission still yeah um that's a huge boy you know that's i mean you look at place like germany i ask my friends you know i'm like boy have they started taking or indian point in new york is another one where you're like have they how far have they you know because you're like can you just mothball it you know till everybody gets a little bit calmer you know because

yeah if you mothball it you know you could between potentially bring it back. You know, I mean, really, I mean, you can, it's like, it's just a big, you know, it's a big power plant. So, I mean, you can take parts out and decommission it, but you could still rebuild it. I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, that's why I think a lot of us, we just look at it and it's like vandalism. You know, it's like here you've got this magical machine that produces just huge quantities of electricity produces essentially no air or water pollution. The water that comes out is clean, you know, a little warmer than normal, but not, you know, nothing wrong with it.

You know, the air, there's no smoke coming out of the plants, you know, I mean, they're incredible to just take them apart and decommission them when they could run for decades longer. It's just like they're just such magnificent pieces of technology. And to see people taking them down, it's like, you know, it's so irrational and superstitious. It's like they're, it's like witch burning or something to, to be dismantling a nuclear plant. As we finish up, Michael, it's something just struck me, you know. We seem to be challenging as a society, a whole suite of shibbolets here. And maybe, and this seems like the next one, although I'm kind of wondering about this one because, because there's, you know, kind of a sea change in opinion when it comes to the value and need of

energy. So I'm wondering if that isn't driving some of some of some of that shift in thinking. But again, that's again, not necessarily a huge problem either. What do you make of this sort of shift and are you seeing the same thing I'm seeing? No, I mean, I think look, we're at an accelerated period in history. I tell my students and my children pay attention because this is a very exciting and many ways dangerous moment. We're in between two epochs, I would say, two periods. I'm really a big, I'm now really interested in these big cycles, you know, Declaration of Independence, 1776 to the Civil War, 1865, 1865 to 1945 as a second kind of American Republic, you know, post-Civil War. And then the post-World War II era until now,

also an 80-year period, you know, 75 to 80 years in that range. And I think it signals now we're moving out of the globalist Pax Americana era into a more nationalist era. I think the United States is still the leader of the Western world, but it's obviously a multipolar world. It's a world with a very, very big and powerful China, you know, less big, less powerful Russia, but nonetheless, a Russia that is asserting control over its you know, the part of the earth that it really feels, you know, that it has sway over and we're starting to see the United States focus a little bit more on Latin America. So I think that there's a return towards nationalism, you know, I think a return towards other values, you know, that are emerging. I mean, I think a big surge of interest in faith after the assassination

of Charlie Kirk is very interesting. I think a renewed appreciation. of masculinity after young men have been told that their their masculinity and their sexuality are dangerous and and toxic, but also a re-appreciation of things like discipline and hard work and the necessity for some of these, you know, these older, you know, traditional values. I don't think that's just something that is viewed as entirely conservative anymore or I think the country's becoming a bit more conservative in recognizing that. You need police officers, you need firefighters, that's more important than, you know, racial sensitivity trainings, you know, that there's just, I think, a return with basics. You know, even on schools, we see Mississippi starts teaching its kids just basic reading that they weren't doing in places like California and that progressives. So I think we're at the beginning of a really different era and that, yeah, it makes sense that we'd come back to nuclear in this, this imperial.

like this, that we'd move away from globalist issues like climate change. I think the whole LGBT issue is falling apart with the backlash against men and women's sports and the medical mistreatment that we've seen with trans medicine, you know, on a whole, obviously migration and a backlash against this mass migration agenda. So it's a, you know, I think that, yeah, I think to your point, what's the changes that we've seen in the conversation around energy, the conversation around climate change are all happening at a time when I think we're moving into a really different era of consciousness to use a fancy word, a period where people are just thinking differently about themselves, about the countries that we live in, and about the future.

That's, I think, a very different picture than they've had for the last really at least 80 years, if not longer. Well, and the trend that I'm seeing, and I hope this is right, because I'm also seeing some other trends, but in line with what you're saying, is just a trend in more interest in truth and just reality in itself as opposed to a kind of utopianism. Would you agree? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think we're in back to reality. And people were really in a trance on a lot of these issues. trance around renewables, a trance around trans, a trance around asylum and migration, you know, a trance around defunding the police and we don't need law and order and we just got to be more compassionate and then we'll solve all of our problems. You know, a trance around teaching kids to read and do math, oh, we don't have to make them memorize things. They don't have to memorize

syllables. They can just learn from context. Yeah, it's progressive utopianism. I mean, it's kind of an old story. It's a very, you know, a fantasy that in some ways is a reaction against some of the realities of life, you know, this, and we're very comfortable. So it's easy to get pulled into those dream worlds because we can, you know, a lot of us can escape them. But particularly the managerial class of professionals, which is the 30, 35 percent of the country that's college educated, that really has governed the culture, that runs the media, universities, professional associations. They've really had, they've really let their, you know, dogmas and dream worlds take hold over a large part of the population. Left is in trouble, you know, because of that.

The Democrats are in trouble. I mean, even when Trump lost some, you know, public support after the Epstein files, the Democrats' approval ratings did not go up. That's very rare. It's very unusual. Usually, you know, politicians, their approval ratings go up and down together, and the Democrats are really discredited. And you see even when they try to reform, like when Gavin Newsom tries to pivot a little bit, he gets in trouble with his base because the base of the Democrat Party is so radicalized. 55% of people that identify is on the left say that the murder of Donald Trump might be justified. the share of college students who say that violence might be necessary against a campus speaker rose from under 20% in 2020 to 34% today. It means a third of all college students think that it might be okay to use violence to stop somebody from speaking. These are coddled children.

I mean, really, you know, it's curdled the coddling of these kids. It's gotten so bad. The reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, I mean, it's just you kind of, you hear about it. then you go look at it. It's shocking. So you've, I think that that's just a, there's still a lot. I mean, it's taken a huge blow in terms of credibility and legitimacy, you know, all of these things that you would see that was sort of the ways in which the radical left became the mainstream left, the way the radical left kind of took over the Democratic Party on everything on climate and trans and migration and race and DEI and, you know, all this stuff. I think that's now just taking a huge beating in that the, you know, we need a, I mean, there's always going to be a left and our right

in politics. So you, that, the problem, I mean, some ways, it's like we don't have, we always have is, that's why you see so many arguments within the right, I think, right now. I see so many different factions of people on the right arguing about various manner of things, because there's no left that has any credibility to argue with, because their entire agenda has been discredited with somewhere on the order of 55 to 65 or 75 or 7. or 80% of the public. You know, that's how bad it is. So I think that future Democrats, I mean, they're probably going to have to lose a few

election cycles, but future Democrats are just not going to look like what Democrats have looked like for the last, you know, decade or more. Michael, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final thought? Just, you know, these are exciting, dangerous times. People should remain aware and vigilant of your surroundings at all moments. I think we do see threats to free speech continuing around the world. That's where my alarm has been the greatest in the recent weeks and months.

President Trump defunded a lot of the bad censorship stuff in the United States, particularly at National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security. But we just reported on an international gathering at Stanford last, or I should say in September, of censorship officials from the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia. and Brazil, which are all the worst actors in the West right now, and they are just desperate, and the French president just gave a speech last week, they're just all desperate to censor social media. I think that they're in a much weaker place than they were a year ago, but they won't let it go.

And I hope it's the demand for censorship that we're seeing out of those places is a kind of final death throes of this pretty discredited set of ideologies. But definitely something worth keeping our eyes on because I think at moments of transition, like the one that we're in, where we're sort of in between periods, in between a kind of globalist era and I think a new nationalist era, I think that's when a lot of dangerous things can happen. So people should definitely be aware that there are continuing threats to our freedom, including the threat of a digital ID, but certainly of censorship. And we need to keep, we need to maintain that vigilance and maintain our demand for free speech. Well, Michael Schellenberger, it's such a pleasure to. have had you on again. It's great to be with you, Jan.

Thank you all for joining Michael Schellenberger and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Yanya Kelek.