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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Sep 7, 2022 • 30 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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Many think we will subsidize our way to renewables, but we won't, for inherently physical reasons. Sunlight & wind are too energy-dilute. Solar/wind projects need ~300x more land, 300% more copper, and 700% more rare earths than fossil fuels, making them prohibitively expensive.
Wind/solar/batteries require: 1,000% more steel, concrete and glass; 300% more copper; and 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900%, and 700% more lithium, graphite, nickel, and rare earths, respectively, than fossil fuels, to produce the same amount of energy, according to IEA and others. Image
The capital costs of solar, wind, and batteries have been rising since 2017 and, given the energy crisis, are about to skyrocket, and stay high for a decade. Energy today only uses 10%–20% of total global minerals. There's no way its share will rise to 50-70%, as IEA envisions. Image
Today, 40 CEOs of European metal companies warned of the “existential threat” to the industry due to energy shortages and the "extra raw materials needed to shift away from fossil fuels...50% of the EU’s aluminium & zinc capacity has already been forced offline due to the crisis” ImageImage
Policymakers insist that taxpayers will subsidize the transition to renewables, but renewables make electricity more expensive everywhere they are deployed at scale, and higher energy costs will make them prohibitively expensive.

The proximate cause of the global energy crisis is Europe's over-dependence on Russian fuels, and yet Western elites are on the verge of repeating that mistake by becoming dependent on China for the extraction and processing of the minerals needed to make solar, wind, & batteries Image
China’s market share of renewables/EV minerals is 2x OPEC’s share of oil. The U.S. is dependent on imports for 100% of 17 renewables/EV-critical minerals; for 28 others, imports account for >50% of domestic demand. Image
China dominates solar and battery production. Minerals = 60%–70% of the cost to produce solar panels & lithium batteries. And China's solar panel labor costs have been very low to free, considering that they have been covered as part of its genocide.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/ban-chinese-…
There is no tech fix. The underlying problem is physical: the energy-dilute nature of sunlight & wind & their low power densities. There is simply no way that energy's share of minerals consumption will rise from 10%–20% to 50-70%, with or without today's energy shortages. Image
We've known for 200 years that the industrial revolution was made possible first by coal and then by oil and gas. It simply wasn't possible with wood, water wheels, and wind mills. Scholars have now shown, using physical measures, why this was the case.

amazon.com/Energy-English…
"The availability of free energy... explains why the industrial revolution started in Britain, where coal was readily available & firewood already depleted, or difficult to transport, whereas Germany, with its huge forests next to rivers, was much later."

amazon.com/Subterranean-F…
For a much more exciting, humanistic, and contemporary account of energy transitions, check out this 2020 best-seller 😉

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…
If renewables are doomed for basic physical reasons, why do so many educated people believe we will transition to them?

Most politicians are just ignorant. They have been surrounded by professional ideologues who have deceived them for decades. To wit:

But many others are nihilists who have turned nature into a god and have convinced themselves that civilization is destroying it. They are in the grip of a pathological dogma no different from the dogma that grips cult members. They dream of apocalypse.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/anti-energy-…
In Europe, politicians are either delusional or nihilistic. The delusional ones think they can cap the price of energy, but that will just shift the costs from ratepayers to taxpayers. The nihilistic ones, like the Greens, seek de-industrialization.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
We are headed for recession and Europe may be headed for depression. Western civilization will be rocked to its very core. Most of the politicians in power today won't be in power three years from now. People will learn the physics of energy the hard way.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/biden-and-tr…
Energy is the biggest story the world. Most of what you read about it in the mainstream news media is misinformation. I am traveling the world to get to the bottom of the crisis. Please consider subscribing to my Substack to stay informed.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/anti-energy-…
"Amazon experienced “critical fire” in at least 6 of its 47 sites with solar... By June last year, all of Amazon’s U.S. operations with solar had to be taken offline.... Those details didn’t show up in Amazon’s 100-page sustainability report"

cnbc.com/2022/09/01/ama…
Change is coming

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/end-of-renew…
“Many solar panels are already winding up in landfills, where in some cases, they could contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium…. it costs roughly $20 to $30 to recycle a panel versus $1 to $2 to send it to a landfill.” ImageImage
People say innovation will save renewables, but their underlying problem is physical. The dilute nature of sunlight and wind means they will always require 300x more land, 300% more copper, 700% more rare earths than nuclear or natural gas.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/end-of-renew…
Places with a lot of renewables are reaching their limits. The amount of zero-carbon electricity California generated *declined* 10% over the last decade. In Germany, the total amount of electricity from renewables *declined* in 2021, even as overall electricity consumption rose. Image
China’s global market share of renewables and EV minerals is 2x OPEC’s share of oil. China already dominates solar and battery production. Minerals are 60%–70% of the cost to produce solar panels and lithium batteries. We can't shift those industries to the US & keep costs low. Image
Energy today only uses 10%–20% of total global minerals but the International Energy Agency says its share must rise to 50-70% for the world to transition to renewables. That's simply not going to happen. It would make energy and everything else prohibitively expensive. Image
People say I don't talk about solutions enough, but I do, in nearly every single article, and usually for one-third of the space.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/end-of-renew… Image
michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/anti-energy-… Image
michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/biden-and-tr… Image
Not to the mention the real world successes we keep racking up

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/how-we-saved…
LFG!

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-elitis… Image
Solar costs soaring ImageImage

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 23, 2025
So “60 Minutes” straight up lied. Plus, they could have gone to a White House press briefing or asked Trump after a cabinet meeting or on Air Force One. They chose not to. Totally unethical & irresponsible behavior. @bariweiss was right to hold the piece.
Image
Almost like there’s a pattern here
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 22, 2025
It was "corporate censorship" for CBS @bariweiss to delay her story, says "60 Minutes" reporter Sharyn Alfonsi. But Alfonsi presented no evidence to support her allegation. And Alfonsi has a history of biased reporting that even liberal "fact-checkers" denounced as inaccurate. Image
In April of 2021, CBS’s “60 Minutes” falsely claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis exclusively chose Publix, a major Florida supermarket chain, to distribute Covid vaccines because it had donated to his political campaign.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who helped oversee the state’s vaccine distribution at the time, repeatedly debunked the accusation. He did so first in response to a March 2, 2021, Miami Herald piece.

“This idea why @Publix was picked has been utter nonsense,” Moskowitz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission.”

On April 4, the day the “60 Minutes” segment aired, Moskowitz tweeted, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by @FLSERT and @HealthyFla as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”

Now, the same reporter who did the flawed DeSantis piece, Sharyn Alfonsi, has accused her employer of censoring her story about deportees El Salvador’s prison. “The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship,” Alfonsi wrote in an email to her colleagues that has been viewed four million times on X.

However, Alfonsi offered no evidence to support her allegation of “corporate censorship,” implying that people to whom Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss reports caused her to delay the piece.

Neither Weiss nor Alfonsi responded to a request for comment. If either does, we will update this story immediately. Moreover, we will report any evidence that we or others find that shows that corporate executives above Weiss directed her to kill the story. So far, there is none.

And an editorial decision is not the same as censorship, particularly since Weiss said she is delaying, not killing, the segment.

Alfonsi, in her leaked email, said she tried to get a response from the Trump administration but couldn’t, which was one of the reasons Weiss cited in her email to CBS staff for holding back the piece.

An experienced television news journalist, who has been in the business for three decades, said CBS could have done what it has often done in the past, which is to ask a Trump official at one of the many press availabilities.

“They could have sent a CBS reporter to the White House press briefing,” the person said, or had a reporter ask President Trump directly during one of his frequent press conferences at the White House and on Air Force One. The CBS website shows that it has at least six full-time reporters at the White House.

“The episode shows Sharyn’s poor investigative skills,” the person added. “She should have doorstepped the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security or sent someone to the White House.”

To “doorstop” a person is when a journalist confronts someone, such as a senior government official, often when they are coming or going into their workplace.

“Sharyn could have gone to the briefing herself, or CBS could have gone in and said ‘CBS has finished an investigation. Here are the allegations. How do you respond?’”

Alfonsi falsely claimed in her segment that DeSantis gave an “exclusive” to Publix. Floridians could get the Covid vaccine from many different sources, including county health departments, other major pharmacy chains including CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, and mass vaccination drive-thru sites with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Three major liberal or left-wing fact-checking organizations and the liberal Boston public TV station WGBH all criticized the piece. “60 Minutes’ misses the mark in its story about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and COVID-19 vaccines,” wrote Poynter. “A sloppy moment on Sunday’s show is raising serious concerns.”

Wrote Politifact, “While “60 Minutes” focused on his emphatic denial, it left out the background that he offered about how the state had been working with other retail pharmacies to distribute coronavirus vaccines at long-term care facilities in December and his own interactions with Publix customers.”

Said the progressive Media Nation, “It’s a rare day when we encounter as blatant an example of liberal media bias as in the “60 Minutes” report last Sunday on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis…Unfortunately, the botched story on DeSantis, a Republican, will be cited by conservatives for a long time as evidence that you just can’t trust the media.”

And a Boston CBS News reporter said, “If you’re going to smear someone by guilt-by-association, or pay-to-play, which is about the most serious offense a public official can engage in, you better have the facts in a row. If you don’t, you’d best leave it out.”

There are other signs of “60 Minutes” bias....

x.com/shellenberger/…

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!

x.com/shellenberger/…
Here is the liberal Boston PBS member station segment on Sharyn Alfonsi's biased and inaccurate story. Every single person in it criticizes Alfonsi's piece about Ron DeSantis' vaccine roll-out.

Nobody who looks at this walks away thinking that Alfonsi did anything other than an irresponsible hit piece.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 10, 2025
Days before last year’s election, the media claimed Trump wanted to kill Liz Cheney, which we debunked at the time. @BBC has now admitted it was a lie. @CNN should do the same. Notably, BBC & CNN have, for years, promoted censorship of their competitors for “misinformation.” Image
The media around the world demand government censorship on the basis of the disinformation it produces on Trump, covid, climate, gender, Ukraine, etc. The EU is currently paying European media to act as “trusted flaggers” — censors — of social media.
It’s digital totalitarianism.
A Norwegian newspaper spread misinformation about the demolition of the Nord Stream pipeline and Facebook censored on the basis of that censorship

x.com/shellenberger/… x.com/shellenberger/…
Read 6 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 2, 2025
Marco Rubio is the most powerful Secretary of State since Kissinger. As such, it is significant that he believes the US has recovered alien tech and given it to private military contractors. A senior Rubio advisor says, “We’re headed toward massive disclosure.” Image
Since May of this year, Marco Rubio has served in a dual role as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. The National Security Advisor is the President’s principal in-house advisor on all national security matters, chairs the National Security Council, coordinates the interagency process across the government, and briefs the President daily.

As Secretary of State, Rubio negotiates treaties, appoints and directs ambassadors, controls the $84 billion State Department and USAID budget, oversees 80,000 employees at more than 270 diplomatic posts worldwide, and has direct authority over diplomatic security, intelligence sharing, sanctions enforcement, and emergency evacuations of U.S. citizens abroad.

The last official to hold both such positions was Henry Kissinger from 1973 to 1975. For Rubio, who was also the former ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to play both roles reflects President Trump’s high confidence in him.

As such, it is significant that Rubio believes that elements within the US government have recovered technology from a nonhuman intelligence, reverse-engineered it, and let private military contractors take control of it in ways that could be undermining national security and result in a Pearl Harbor-like event.

“The real risk in transferring technology that is not useful to us today to a corporate entity over decades,” says Rubio, “is that the corporate entity comes to basically possess and control access to it for their own purposes, not for the purposes of national security.”

Nick Pope, who investigated Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) for the UK Ministry of Defence, said, “It’s hard to overstate the significance of [Rubio’s] statement. Rubio’s remarks are so forthright that one could speculate they’re officially-authorized prelude to Disclosure, to test the waters ahead of an official, Presidential announcement.”

The State Department declined to provide an on-the-record comment to Public for this story. A spokesperson for the Department of War said it had no “verifiable information to substantiate claims that any U.S. government or private company programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials and technology have existed in the past or exist currently...."

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the full article!

x.com/shellenberger/…
Any true skeptic of this issue should want significantly more government transparency and disclosure on UAP. Anyone arguing against greater transparency and disclosure is telling you that they want to continue the cover-up.

If you belive that this is all a dangerous delusion and social contagion resulting from years of government disinfo to cover up secret weapons programs, which has now infected the highest levels of government, then you should be the loudest advocate for UAP transparency and disclosure in the world.

The secrecy has gone on for too long. It is destablizing for our highest security, defense, and intelligence officials say one thing to journalists and filmmakers and for the DOD to say something completely different. The State Department, CIA, ODNI, and White House all declined to comment publicly for my piece. We need our government officials to be honest about what is going on.

There is no security justification for this level of secrecy. We are free people governed by a constitution that protects us against unaccountable government actors. We must fight to maintain that status.Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 18, 2025
We can trust Oracle to centralize our data in a single place to create digital IDs, says Larry Ellison. We can't. Thanks to a "previously unknown & widespread vulnerability" in Oracle's "E-Business Suite software" thousands of us recently had our personal data stolen. Image
"The Washington Post... didn’t explain why it took almost a month to determine the amount of data stolen and has not responded to multiple requests for comment." @JeffBezos @CyberScoopNews Image
@JeffBezos @CyberScoopNews "Oracle quietly admits data breach, days after lawsuit accused it of cover-up" Image
Read 10 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 15, 2025
New Epstein files show Rep. @StaceyPlaskett got real-time help via text messages from Jeffrey Epstein on how to hurt Trump during 2019 congressional hearing with former Trump attorney. Plaskett is the person who smeared us during Twitter Files hearing & falsely accused @mtaibbi
From WaPo:

"At 10:02 a.m., Epstein texted Plaskett: 'Great outfit'
'You look great,' he added at 10:22 a.m. 'Thanks!' she replied shortly afterward.

"'Cohen brought up RONA - keeper of the secrets,' Epstein texted, misspelling Graff’s first name."

“'RONA??'” Plaskett responded. “'Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,' she added, suggesting she would question Cohen soon."Image
Documents here

journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/docum…Image
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Read 5 tweets

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