People think nothing could have been done to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, but that's absurd: if Putin thought the costs of invasion outweighed the benefits, he wouldn't have done it. He's a rational actor not a madman. And today it's clear Putin calculated correctly.
After Russia invaded, a few people demanded that Europe stop buying its natural gas, but European utilities snatched up long-term Russian contracts, and the White House said, "Our sanctions are not designed to cause any disruption to the flow of energy from Russia to the world."
People who believe that nothing could have been done to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine thus imply that Russia's chokehold over European energy supplies was inevitable, but it wasn't. Europe could have easily increased, rather than closed, nuclear plants and natural gas
Britain could have increased fracking for nat gas but didn't. Why? Because Russia pumped $95M into anti-fracking advocacy. Noted the head of NATO, Russia “engaged actively with environmental organisations... to maintain Europe’s dependence on Russian gas”

thecritic.co.uk/issues/decembe…
Europe could have kept operating and expanded its nuclear power plants but instead, under pressure from climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, shut them down

Climate activists even forced nuclear-heavy France to throttle its nuclear plants so order to use more industrial wind energy. The result was significant outages over the last few weeks at a time when French nuclear plants were needed most.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-gretas-c…
Efforts to make Europe less energy independent, and thus more dependent on Russian gas imports, were led by powerful banking interests in coordination with climate activists and center-Left parties around the world.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-thr…
Not satisfied with their successful efforts to make Europe dependent on Russia, global elites have sought to deny poor African nations abundant energy

All of this happened in plain sight at Davos, the European Commission, and U.N. conferences

The ideological justification for energy scarcity long predates climate change. In the 1960s, radical Left activists abusing their authority as scientists claimed that the world was running out of energy, despite the fact that nuclear proved that energy supplies are infinite.
The reason pro-scarcity "greens" attacked nuclear was because it debunked the idea that we faced resource scarcity and environmental degradation from overpopulation.

Infinite nuclear energy meant infinite fertilizer, freshwater, and food

forbes.com/sites/michaels…
Pro-energy scarcity greens hid their motivations. When asked if he had been worried about nuclear accidents, a Sierra Club anti-nuclear activist said, “No, I really didn’t care because there are too many people anyway … I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine”
Bankers & renewables companies promote energy scarcity. Three of the largest donors to climate causes are billionaire financial titans Michael Bloomberg, George Soros & Tom Steyer, all of whom have big investments in renewables and fossil fuels.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-real-thr…
Shadow bank BlackRock has long promoted renewables. Its senior climate official @BrianDeeseNEC heads the White House National Economic Council

Biden’s “Build Back Better” talking points echoed BlackRock's pitch for “climate resilient” infrastructure

forbes.com/sites/michaels…
Biden and Democrats would like to see the whole of the US follow the California model

California saw electricity prices rise 7x more than the rest of the US over the last decade, is experiencing blackouts, and intends to shut down its last nuclear plant

The goal of Western elites is energy scarcity

The cost of that scarcity is to empower tyrants like Putin who can invade nations like Ukraine with little cost

Western elites are thus Putin's useful idiots

They are the ones now saying nothing could have prevented invasion
What the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and other Western allies must do is obvious and urgent: we must massively expand nuclear energy and oil and gas production. This will lower energy prices and reduce exposure to Russian use of energy as a weapon of war.
The public needs to understand that Russia could not have taken Ukraine had the West expanded energy production rather than throttled it by closing nuclear plants and reducing oil and gas production.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/how-climate-…
We need @JoeBiden @SpeakerPelosi @GOPLeader @SenSchumer @LeaderMcConnell take immediate bipartisan action to keep nuclear plants operating and expand oil & gas production for domestic use and export to our allies in Europe & Asia.

German fragility

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More from @ShellenbergerMD

Feb 24
Russia has leveraged an economy half the size of Germany's to end the post-Cold War era and defeat NATO

It did so with aggression, natural gas, & nuclear

America must produce massively more nuclear, natural gas, and oil, or liberal democratic Western civilization is dead
Imagine thinking that the US, Europe, and liberal Western democracies can stand up to China and Russia by becoming wholly dependent on solar panels made by the former and natural gas produced by the latter

It's civilizational suicide

Everyone's been asleep. Time to wake up.
The writing was on the wall years ago

The basic physics of renewables is why they can't work

Imagine making our high-energy capitalist civilization work on energy sources THAT LITERALLY KEPT HUMANS TRAPPED IN POVERTY FOR CENTURIES

Renewables is the energy of serfs and slaves.
Read 11 tweets
Feb 23
Advocates of government-run drug use sites say they will reduce surrounding drug use, dealing, and violence, but San Francisco's experiment shows the opposite, with a homicide, OD death of 16 year-old girl, and the shooting of neighborhood ambassador occurring since its opening
Defenders of @LondonBreed say we just need to give the supervised drug use site time to work, but the open air drug dealing and drug use around the UN Plaza, where the fentanyl & meth smoking lounge is located, has only gotten worse.

San Francisco Mayor @LondonBreed said

"When someone is openly using drugs on the street we're going to give them the option of... treatment... But if they refuse, we're not going to allow them to continue using on the street."

Read 14 tweets
Feb 22
San Francisco’s District Attorney @chesaboudin claims “Most of the residents that I speak with aren't particularly upset that there are drug sales happening” in their neighborhood.

This a gross & gigantic lie — even for a guy who lied his way into office

washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02…
Boudin says, “The drug sales themselves are in many ways a symptom of a larger problem”

YES.

The larger problem is that Boudin is using a sanctuary law, designed to protect refugees, to protect the Mexican drug cartels making billions from killing 100,000 Americans a year.
“But he said he prosecutes about 85 percent of the felony drug cases the police bring to his office, a rate that has risen steadily over the past two years”

Grossly misleading. Boudin plea bargains them away. Dealers fake rehab before returning to the streets & killing more kids
Read 9 tweets
Feb 22
People think California’s water scarcity is natural but it’s actually the result of opposition by Malthusian “environmentalists” ⁦@SierraClub⁩ ⁦@NRDC⁩ et al. who have blocked water recycling, storage, & desalination projects for decades calmatters.org/commentary/202…
Reactors could be added to our Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to desalinate gigantic quantities of water. Indeed, that was the original plan.

Instead, Gov. @GavinNewsom intends to close the plant 40 years prematurely, in 2024-25. At a time of blackouts.

energy.stanford.edu/publications/a…
My colleagues & I unearthed the blueprints showing that there were supposed to be 6 reactors at Diablo

Thanks to @JerryBrownGov & the Getty oil-backed dad of @GavinNewsom there’s just 2

We should build the 4 new reactors to create electricity, hydrogen, and fresh water
Read 7 tweets
Feb 21
It's hard to find a city whose residents say they care about black lives more than San Francisco.

But it's also hard to find a city that does a worse job taking care of them.

Why is that?

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-progress…
It is hard to find a city in America whose residents say they care about black lives more than San Francisco. Two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors affirmed in a resolution that “Black Lives Matter.”
In response to a police officer killing George Floyd in 2020, more than 1,000 San Franciscans marched under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” And, later that same year, San Francisco Mayor London Breed promised to defund the police and spend the money saved on black lives.
Read 52 tweets
Feb 17
People last week accused me of violating the privacy of a homeless addict named Korey, who I interviewed as he smoked fentanyl & meth

But thanks to that video, an outreach worker tracked down his sister, Keneda. She hadn't seen him for two years

I brought her to him yesterday
People rightly worry about the privacy and dignity of homeless drug addicts, but many tell me they feel invisible and *want* to share their stories. They often express gratitude afterwards.

Here's the first video with Korey that upset so many people

My critics are struggling with how to attack me. At first they said I never actually interview any homeless people, and just don't want to look at them. Then, after I shared video interviews, my critics said I was exploiting the homeless, and violating their privacy. Which is it?
Read 11 tweets

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