Michael Shellenberger

Climate change has completely overshadowed the conservation concerns that used to be so important to the Democratic Party.

All renewables thus require a material throughput - from mining to processing to installing to disposing of the materials later as waste - that is orders of magnitude larger than for non-renewable energy sources.

Renewables require the use of vastly more land, longer and less-utilized transmission lines, and large amounts of storage whether from lithium batteries, new dams, compressed air caverns.

Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don't need it, and not enough when they do.

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.

Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.

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.

Allowing for suburbanization of California's ranches and farmlands would still allow for strong protections of California's truly natural areas like Yosemite, the redwoods, and oak woodlands and green spaces near cities.

Voters must feel that that the burden of new housing is being shared equally and not falling disproportionately on any one group.

The renewable industry claims technical innovations will improve solar and wind - but in reality nothing can change the lower power density of sunlight and wind.

The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.

The value of solar and wind decline in economic value as they become larger shares of the electricity grid for physical reasons. They produce too much energy when societies don't need it and not enough energy when they do.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them.

Climate change is happening. It's just not the end of the world. It's not even our most serious environmental problem.

I believe Forbes is an important outlet for broadening environmental journalism beyond the overwhelmingly alarmist approach taken by most reporters, and look forward to contributing heterodoxical pieces on energy and the environment in the future.

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.

What we need to talk about is what we want America to look like: what a sustainable, economically prosperous America looks like in the 21st century, and what we need to do to get there.

Neither solar nor wind are actually substitutes for coal or natural gas or oil.

If you care about the environment, you want food and energy production to become more efficient and centralized. You want to put less inputs in and get more outputs out and get less waste.

If you look at all the energy that is used by an iPhone, not just to make it and to power it, but also to power all the servers, all of the stuff that you don't see that the iPhone is connected to, it uses as much energy as a refrigerator.

You cannot power the world on wind and solar.

Nuclear is just a huge part of moving towards a cleaner electrical system.

Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.

In reality, Chernobyl proves why nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. In the worst nuclear power accidents, relatively small amounts of particulate matter escape, harming only a handful of people.

Chernobyl' is supposedly about the lies, arrogance, and suppression of criticism under Communism, but the mini-series portrays life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as inaccurately, and melodramatically, as it portrays the effects of radiation.

Some amount of fear of nuclear weapons is necessary for nuclear deterrence to work.

Hawks and doves have long found common ground opposing the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states.

The nature of nuclear weapons makes it impossible to either ban the bomb or wipe out an enemy's arsenal. Nuclear deterrence was unavoidable.

While some wars are planned, others result from each side retaliating in ways it views as proportionate but viewed by the other side as disproportionate.

In many countries, wind turbines pose the single greatest threat to bats after habitat loss and white-nose syndrome.

Celebrities, whether from the world of entertainment or politics, moralize about the need to change individual consumption when they should be moralizing about the need to change collective energy production.

It was only with the rise of capitalism and the need for workers to be freer, more mobile, and prosperous, that societies were able to undermine pagan morality and the ancient institution of slavery.

The reason renewables can't power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.

If you think modernity is mostly to blame for pollution, visit Africa where people still burn wood and dung as an energy source.

Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have - whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need - into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.

If solar and wind farms are needed to protect the natural environment, why do they so often destroy it?

Humankind has never transitioned to energy sources that are more costly, less reliable, and have a larger environmental footprint than the incumbent - and yet that's precisely what adding large amounts of solar and wind to the grid requires.

Privately, many climate and energy experts admit that the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to decarbonize energy supplies is with nuclear power.

The burden of higher cost electricity and benefits of renewable energy subsidies fall unevenly on Californians.

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.

Hydroelectric dams remain the way many poor countries gain access to reliable electricity, and both solar and wind might be worthwhile in some circumstances. But there is nothing in either their history or their physical attributes that suggests solar and wind in particular could or should be the centerpiece of efforts to deal with climate change.

Sunlight and wind are inherently unreliable and energy-dilute. As such, adding solar panels and wind turbines to the grid in large quantities increases the cost of generating electricity, locks in fossil fuels, and increases the environmental footprint of energy production.

The producers of 'Chernobyl' should tell the truth: the accident demonstrates the relative safety, not danger, of nuclear power.

I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing.

Homelessness has become a human rights crisis.

Now that Europe has developed through deforestation and fossil fuel use it is telling Brazil not to develop through deforestation and fossil fuel use. Bolsonaro is the backlash against such hypocrisy.

The Amazon uses as much oxygen as it produces.

Less land is being converted into agriculture globally in part because farmers are growing more food on less land.

Nuclear is the largest source of clean, carbon-free power in rich nations, and the science shows it is the safest way to make reliable electricity.