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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Sep 11, 2020 • 24 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
Stop politicizing a tragedy

California's top *forest* scientists say main causes of fires are

- 5x more wood fuel in forests due to 100+ years of fire suppression

- Drought (2012-16) that would have occurred w/o climate change
“Climate dries the [wood] fuels out & extends the fire season BUT IT'S NOT THE CAUSE OF THE INTENSITY of the fires. The cause of that is fire suppression and the existing debt of wood fuel.”

— Malcolm North, US Forest Service

forbes.com/sites/michaels…
The 2013-2014 Rim fire, which burned 250,000 acres, exposed FIVE TIMES MORE PEOPLE to unhealthy air conditions from smoke than it would have if the same area had been burned regularly with smaller “prescribed” fires.
You @GavinNewsom were Lt. Gov from 2011-19 during which time you:

- did nothing to improve forest management

- helped raise Calif. electric prices 6x more than rest of U.S.

- fought to replace our last nuclear plant with fossil fuels

- ran for governor
@GavinNewsom Now, you are:

- shamelessly politicizing a tragedy

- pretending to care about climate change while shutting down our last nuclear plant

- pretending to care about forests you neglected for the last decade

- running for president
Now you & @JerryBrownGov are scrambling to deflect attention from your catastrophic, decades-long failure to manage our forests

And you & Jerry are hustling to deflect attention from your efforts to kill off our largest source of zero-carbon energy, nuclear power
Is climate change "playing a role"?Sure. Scientists estimate that climate change made the 2012 - 16 drought *15-20%* worse & extended the fire season

BUT CLIMATE CHANGE DID NOT CREATE THE DROUGHT NOR RESULT IN 5X MORE WOOD FUEL IN OUR FORESTS!
Should we address climate change? Yes! And most of the US is doing just that by:

- switching from coal to natural gas

- keeping their nuclear plants operating

You @GavinNewsom & @JerryBrownGov talk non-stop about climate change AS P.R. COVER FOR KILLING OFF NUCLEAR POWER
@GavinNewsom @JerryBrownGov Climate change or no climate change, scientists say somewhere between 500,000 and 4M acres of forest land need to burn *annually* in California.

Doing that requires moving beyond the pyrophobia, alarmism, and politicization that got us into this mess in the first place.
@GavinNewsom @JerryBrownGov Even left-wing magazines in California were starting to cover forest fires in a sane and scientific way until @GavinNewsom @KamalaHarris started politicizing them
This is a terrific article by @SavorTooth from @MotherJones a left-wing magazine in SF from just last year:

"Drought, disease, and insects have left 100 million dead trees browning across California, and in some places, 90 percent of the trees have died"

motherjones.com/environment/20…
Good @ShogrenE @MotherJones in 2017 “We have 100 years of fire suppression that led to huge accumulation of fuel loads... As a result, our forests and woodlands are not healthy, and we’re getting more catastrophic fire behavior than we would otherwise.”

motherjones.com/environment/20…
"Between 4.4M & 12M acres burned each year in prehistoric California but btwn 1982-1998 managers burned, on average, 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres."

motherjones.com/environment/20…
Even @nytimes did a pretty good job here:

"With rare exceptions [prescribed burning] remains infrequent in the West. Calif intentionally burned just 50,000 acres in 2017... One study found that the state would need to burn or treat 20M acres

nytimes.com/2020/09/10/cli…
But all of that nuance went out the window this morning with this irresponsibly alarmist, one-sided & misleading travesty that @nytimes put on the front page

nytimes.com/2020/09/10/us/…
And then there's this nonsense propagated by a scientist & journalist who know better

The amount of carbon emitted and absorbed by forests goes up and down depending on how bad the fires were that year.

@Weather_West & @dwallacewells are trying to be clever in noting that the carbon emitted in a big fire year is larger than the emissions from energy production...
... but it doesn’t actually show anything important to either climate change or conservation since the carbon will be reabsorbed by the forest in the form of new vegetative growth in future years of less burning, when the forest is growing back.
If there is net emissions over a long period of time then what’s happening is deforestation, and if that’s our concern, and I think it is a bigger and more important one than climate change, then we measure that directly in terms of changes to land in California.
Again, climate change is real and we should address it.

But the over-the-top alarmism we are witnessing is polarizing, destructive, and anathema to both adaptation (e.g. forest management) and decarbonization.

/FIN
NEW:

- A large, well-managed California forest has survived the high-intensity Creek Fire raging around it

- Other forests, including in Yosemite, survived 2013, 2014, & 2018 megafires

- Cases prove that good forest management trumps climate change

forbes.com/sites/michaels…
People are missing what's important about fires & climate change so I made this short vid

- Well-managed forests surviving despite cl. ch.

- 5x more wood fuel in forests means mega-fires were likely w/o cc

We are not doomed to, nor need accept, megafires & mega-smoke!
"We live in one of the most fire-prone landscapes on Earth… Experts have been saying we need to restore fire at landscape scales for 30 years and we’re seeing the results of not taking that seriously"

"Land use drove Calif. fires more than warming — experts"

h/t @BjornLomborg

"Climate change played a minor role in the wildfires that devastated California in the past three years, a panel of experts said yesterday, blaming most of the damage on land management and development" Image
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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 28
In 2022, Obama gave a speech at Stanford Cyber Policy Center advocating sweeping censorship of the Internet. Now, Public has discovered the same Center last month hosted a secret meeting with EU, UK, Brazil, & Australia officials to plot global censorship — including of the US. Image
In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy addressat Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

The 2024 election of President Donald Trump significantly reduced the threat of Obama, DHS, and NSF censoring the American people. Trump defunded much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Platform Accountability Act is going nowhere in Congress. Elon Musk fired most of the censorship staff at Twitter and has allowed a significantly wider range of speech on the platform. And even before Trump’s election, Stanford donor Frank McCourt stopped funding the Stanford Internet Observatory after Public, Racket News, and House Weaponization Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan exposed its central role in the DHS censorship-by-proxy scheme.

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

Public emailed all 21 participants and organizers and only heard from four, PLI, the Australian government, the UK government, and the European Union, which declined to comment because, even though Public gave it over 24 hours, a spokesperson said, “We would need several days.”

The UK government said, “The legal framework gives Ofcom power to enforce the duties in the Act which are related to securing protections for people in the UK; it does not give Ofcom powers to enforce under any other legal regimes…. Ofcom has always engaged with various international forums and networks across all of the sectors we regulate, including online safety, spectrum, telecommunications, post, and broadcast and media. Regulators around the world regularly exchange insights, experience, and best practice.”

A spokesperson for PLI said it “has made unrestricted gifts to several academic research programs, including Stanford University” and that “PLI does not receive funding from governments, intergovernmental organizations, or large technology companies.”

But PLI’s own policy “blueprint” reveals that it is demanding a single total global censorship regime and intends to use the EU’s market power, known as the “Brussels effect,” to force big tech companies to comply. The blueprint calls for governments to “Recommit to a Single, Global Internet,” with “regulatory interoperability and oversight, to achieve a single unified market” and use the large size of the EU market to “drive bilateral and multilateral agendas to formally enshrine reciprocal guarantees.”

A spokesperson for the Australian government said, “Whilst in attendance at Stanford for the 2-day conference, some attendees, including trust and safety researchers, industry, civil society, and government representatives, were also invited to attend an informal evening roundtable event organised by Stanford University entitled, ‘Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.’ This roundtable did not involve any discussion of compliance coordination or regulatory information sharing.”

The Australian spokesperson claimed that “eSafety has no role in regulating hate speech or disinformation. eSafety has no remit or interest in regulating the affairs of other nations, nor does it have any role in diplomatic, trade or other government-to-government relations.”

But it also said, “As the internet is global and functions irrespective of national borders, by necessity eSafety collaborates with law enforcement, other government agencies, and non-government partners around the world, including in the United States.”

The leaked agenda’s stated purpose was to “discuss the state of compliance and enforcement” in order to “identify where data, research, and expertise can enable more effective compliance with and enforcement of existing policy.”

Much of the following two days of the public conference were focused on coordinating government censorship (“regulation”) of social media platforms, and the other nations that attended the meeting are all intensively involved in censoring their citizens and US tech companies.

And, the head of Australia’s eSafety, Julie Inman-Grant, who was a keynote speaker at Stanford’s foreign censorship meeting, is also the head of a global government censorship network that serves as forum, she told the World Economic Forum, “to help us coordinate, build capacity and do just that…. We use the tools that we have, and can be effective, but we know we’re going to be, go, much further, when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe.”

As such, the people who are demanding censorship are once again spreading disinformation about what they are doing.

All of this is happening in a context of global censorship intensifying. The UK government arrests 30 people per day for “offensive” social media posts, is attempting to censor 4Chan, which has no servers in the UK, and will mandate digital IDs for employment, which may give unprecedented control to politicians and bureaucrats to censor. The Brazilian government has, for year,s been censoring journalists and policymakers, incarcerating people for legal social media content, and threatening prosecution of journalists, including this author. And several European nations are censoring and arresting their citizens, preventing opposition political candidates from running for office, and preparing to implement digital IDs.

Why did Stanford Cyber Policy Center hold this meeting, what is its strategy for global censorship? Who leaked the agenda to Public and why? And what can be done to stop Stanford, Brazil, Australia, the EU and others from realizing their totalitarian censorial vision?

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigatie journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!
Here is the leaked agenda from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's secret foreign censorship meeting on September 24, 2025:Image
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Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 8
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer. Image
Receipts:

networkcontagion.us/wp-content/upl…

today.yougov.com/politics/artic…

x.com/shellenberger/…
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.Image
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 8
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳 Image
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.Image
Read 9 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 28
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations. Image
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.

Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.

Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.

x.com/shellenberger/…
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.Image
Read 10 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 27
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
This article in the left-wing UK magazine @NewStatesman details how Ellison bankrolled Starmer's Digital ID push.

This is not a partisan issue. Freedom lovers on the Left and Right should both aggressivley oppose digital totalitarianism.

Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.

Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.

Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 27
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
Stop your creepy totalitarianism @sundarpichai @Google Image
@sundarpichai @Google UK opposition vs support of digital IDs is 45 to 42.

Opponents should be able to drive that opposition number up significantly.

It is absolutely essential that the UK kill two-tier @Keir_Starmer plan for digital IDs before they metastasize across the West. Image
Read 18 tweets

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