Michael Shellenberger

The Hormuz crisis is the precipitating factor in the current energy crisis, but the underlying cause is too little oil and gas production outside the Persian Gulf. Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession. North America — The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. — The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year. — The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. — In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions. — In January 2024, the Biden administration paused all pending approvals for LNG export terminals shipping to non-free-trade-agreement countries, freezing projects representing tens of billions of cubic feet per day of potential capacity. — Venture Global’s CP2 terminal in Louisiana, designed for 20 million tonnes per annum, sat in regulatory limbo for over a year. — NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG in Texas, with 48 MTPA of planned capacity, stalled alongside it. — PTT Global Chemical’s proposed $10 billion ethane cracker in Belmont County, Ohio, first announced in 2015, remains on indefinite hold after failing to attract financing partners amid climate-driven investor sentiment. — Across the US Gulf Coast, nearly 60% of planned plastic and petrochemical production projects sit on hold. — LNG Canada, the Shell-led terminal at Kitimat, British Columbia, took over six years from construction start to first cargo, with its pipeline running 263% over budget. Environmental review, Indigenous disputes, and contractor cost escalation all contributed. — Pieridae Energy’s Goldboro LNG project in Nova Scotia, a 10 MTPA facility first proposed in 2012, was abandoned in November 2023 after more than a decade of permitting and financing obstacles. Australia — Australia’s Santos’s Barossa gas project was halted midway through construction after a Federal Court ruling overturned its environmental approval. — Woodside’s Scarborough project faces ongoing litigation from the Australian Conservation Foundation seeking to block it on climate grounds. Africa — Perhaps nowhere has the damage been more consequential than in Africa. At COP26 in 2021, wealthy nations pledged to halt overseas development finance for gas projects, a commitment that fell hardest on the continent least responsible for climate change and most in need of energy infrastructure. — The World Bank stopped financing oil and gas extraction in 2019 and imposed restrictive conditions on downstream gas projects. — The European Investment Bank announced a complete ban on unabated fossil fuel financing by the end of 2021, with its president declaring that “gas is over.” — At least 21 other development finance institutions followed suit. As a result: — TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project sat under force majeure for four and a half years after the UK Export Credit Agency and other backers withdrew climate-motivated financing. — The East African Crude Oil Pipeline lost financing commitments from more than 30 major international banks under pressure from climatists. Europe — France prevented the completion of a third gas interconnector with Spain, citing climate neutrality goals. — The United Kingdom imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019 despite sitting atop one of Europe’s most promising shale gas formations. — Germany, which shuttered its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, compounded its gas dependency by refusing to develop domestic shale resources. — CF Industries permanently shut the UK’s largest ammonia plant at Billingham, a facility that also produced 60% of Britain’s food-grade CO2. — Yara International curtailed output across plants in France, Italy, and Belgium before permanently closing its 400,000 tonne per year ammonia facility at Tertre, Belgium, in October 2024. These closures occurred because European climate policy made gas too expensive for the domestic industry to survive.

🎯 x.com/MDC12345678/st…

The Hormuz crisis is the precipitating factor in the current energy crisis, but the underlying cause is too little oil and gas production outside the Persian Gulf. Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession. North America — The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. — The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year. — The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. — In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions. — In January 2024, the Biden administration paused all pending approvals for LNG export terminals shipping to non-free-trade-agreement countries, freezing projects representing tens of billions of cubic feet per day of potential capacity. — Venture Global’s CP2 terminal in Louisiana, designed for 20 million tonnes per annum, sat in regulatory limbo for over a year. — NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG in Texas, with 48 MTPA of planned capacity, stalled alongside it. — PTT Global Chemical’s proposed $10 billion ethane cracker in Belmont County, Ohio, first announced in 2015, remains on indefinite hold after failing to attract financing partners amid climate-driven investor sentiment. — Across the US Gulf Coast, nearly 60% of planned plastic and petrochemical production projects sit on hold. — LNG Canada, the Shell-led terminal at Kitimat, British Columbia, took over six years from construction start to first cargo, with its pipeline running 263% over budget. Environmental review, Indigenous disputes, and contractor cost escalation all contributed. — Pieridae Energy’s Goldboro LNG project in Nova Scotia, a 10 MTPA facility first proposed in 2012, was abandoned in November 2023 after more than a decade of permitting and financing obstacles. Australia — Australia’s Santos’s Barossa gas project was halted midway through construction after a Federal Court ruling overturned its environmental approval. — Woodside’s Scarborough project faces ongoing litigation from the Australian Conservation Foundation seeking to block it on climate grounds. Africa — Perhaps nowhere has the damage been more consequential than in Africa. At COP26 in 2021, wealthy nations pledged to halt overseas development finance for gas projects, a commitment that fell hardest on the continent least responsible for climate change and most in need of energy infrastructure. — The World Bank stopped financing oil and gas extraction in 2019 and imposed restrictive conditions on downstream gas projects. — The European Investment Bank announced a complete ban on unabated fossil fuel financing by the end of 2021, with its president declaring that “gas is over.” — At least 21 other development finance institutions followed suit. As a result: — TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project sat under force majeure for four and a half years after the UK Export Credit Agency and other backers withdrew climate-motivated financing. — The East African Crude Oil Pipeline lost financing commitments from more than 30 major international banks under pressure from climatists. Europe — France prevented the completion of a third gas interconnector with Spain, citing climate neutrality goals. — The United Kingdom imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019 despite sitting atop one of Europe’s most promising shale gas formations. — Germany, which shuttered its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, compounded its gas dependency by refusing to develop domestic shale resources. — CF Industries permanently shut the UK’s largest ammonia plant at Billingham, a facility that also produced 60% of Britain’s food-grade CO2. — Yara International curtailed output across plants in France, Italy, and Belgium before permanently closing its 400,000 tonne per year ammonia facility at Tertre, Belgium, in October 2024. These closures occurred because European climate policy made gas too expensive for the domestic industry to survive.

@MDC12345678 🎯

To be absolutely clear, the looming fertiliser and food price crisis has not happened to us. We have done this to ourselves. In 2014, I worked with the UK’s shale gas sector and the fertiliser industry. Our warning was very simple: without domestic gas, you lose ammonia; lose ammonia, you lose fertiliser; lose fertiliser, you hit food supply. Ammonia is also needed to make... explosives - which are quite handy when you need to re-arm. Westminster, green campaigners and national media journalists scoffed. It was dismissed by anti-fracking campaigners as “scraping the barrel”. Then reality intervened in 2021–22 with the war in Ukraine. In June 2022, fertiliser producers went into administration because they could not secure feedstocks at viable prices. By 2023, CF Fertilisers (which acquired Grow How) announced the permanent closure of its UK operations. And now, in 2026, we are told the problem is Donald Trump and disruption to the Strait of Hormuz. This is classic obscurantism. Shift the focus to the trigger. Avoid the structural cause: domestic energy policy, climate policy (Net Zero) and deindustrialisation. And continue to deny the potential of shale and the North Sea. Our media and political elites do this because confronting the actual cause is too uncomfortable. Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all chose, over time, to make this country more dependent. Not always explicitly, not always deliberately, but consistently. Sabotage fracking. Ban it in 2019. Vandalise the North Sea with the EPL. Allow energy-intensive industry, including fertiliser, to be offshored. Accept higher costs and greater reliance on imports as the price of policy. And if you are Ed Davey, boast to journalists that you are “proud” to have played your part in sabotaging the sector as Energy Secretary. SW1 can dress it up however they like. They can continue to point to geopolitics, wars, foreign leaders. But the chain was known in the 2010s. The risks were flagged. The capacity was allowed to wither anyway. Now the whole country will pay for it. See the @NWTaskforce briefing note from 2014 here: d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/nwenergy/pages…

@GavinNewsom Gasoline in California is nearly $2/gallon more expensive than the national average, thanks to your policies. Receipts here: x.com/shellenberger/…

This aged well!

Receipts: x.com/shellenberger/…

Gasoline in California is nearly $2 more per gallon than the national average.

The Iran conflict is a reminder that we must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, say many in the media. Iran’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz means the world is now losing 13 million barrels per day of oil and refined products, which is over 10% of global consumption. After QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG exporter, declared force majeure on all exports after Iranian drone strikes, Asian buyers scrambled to redirect orders to Australia. But then, last week, a cyclone slammed into Australia’s LNG corridor, forcing shutdowns at three of the country’s largest facilities. David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times noted, “No one has ever started a war over solar panels.” But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations, not superiority. Many respond by claiming that fossil fuels persist because of government subsidies and political favoritism. The IMF says global fossil fuel subsidies total $7 trillion. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited that number when he called for eliminating “fossil fuel subsidies that distort markets and lock us into the past.” But the $7 trillion figure is almost entirely fictional. The IMF’s own data show that only 18% of its subsidy estimate reflects actual government spending or undercharging for supply costs. The remaining 82% consists of what the IMF calls “implicit subsidies,” a theoretical construct that assigns a dollar value to the environmental and social costs of burning fossil fuels and then treats the failure to tax those costs as a subsidy. By that logic, any product whose price does not reflect the full externalized cost of its production is “subsidized.” The real problem is that the world overinvested in green energy and underinvested in oil and gas. Globally, the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025 report documented that $2.2 trillion flowed to clean energy in 2025, exactly double the $1.1 trillion invested in oil, natural gas, and coal combined. In the U.S., federal tax expenditures for green energy end users in fiscal year 2025 alone totaled $57.9 billion. That figure exceeds the aggregate of all federal fossil fuel tax expenditures over the 31-year period from 1994 to 2025, totaling $50.8 billion. The oil and gas extraction sector generated $1.8 trillion in total U.S. revenues in 2024, meaning that the $3 billion in actual government support represents 0.17% of industry revenue, an economic rounding error. Renewable energy hardware is overwhelmingly manufactured in China, creating a supply chain dependency that is more precarious than the oil dependency it purports to replace. China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot, and wafer production has reached approximately 95%. China controls 91% of rare earth processing and 94% of the permanent magnet production essential for wind turbines. China dominates more than 75% of global solar cell and module manufacturing and is projected to control nearly 60% of all critical mineral refining by 2030. In 2025, Beijing weaponized this dominance, and bismuth prices surgednearly 500% overnight. Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year. The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article! x.com/shellenberger/…

We should have spent more on green energy, say the media. No, we shouldn't have. The $2 trillion we spent did nothing to prevent the energy crisis and may even have caused it.

This thread draws heavily from @shellenberger 's explosive Substack below: public.news/p/compromised-…

The response to the 2022 energy crisis should have been to expand oil & gas production. Instead, @GavinNewsom tried to shut down the state's refineries, resulting in gasoline ~$2/gallon more expensive than the national average. Catastrophically irresponsible.

President Donald Trump is responsible for California’s high gasoline prices, says Governor Gavin Newsom. “Americans will pay $1.5 BILLION MORE at the gas pump just this week because of Donald Trump’s war with Iran,” he wrote. When the Trump administration invoked the Defense Production Act to restart the Sable Offshore pipeline near Santa Barbara, Newsom condemned the move as a cynical attempt to exploit a crisis of the president’s own making. “Donald Trump started a war, admitted it would spike gas prices nationwide, and told Americans it was a small price to pay,” Newsom said. “Now he’s using this crisis of his own making to attempt what he’s wanted to do for years: open California’s coast for his oil industry friends so they can poison our beaches.” But California’s $5.86-per-gallon gasoline price exceeds the national average of $3.95 by nearly two dollars because Newsom has systematically dismantled the state’s energy supply infrastructure. Washington and Hawaii, the next most expensive, trail California by more than a dollar. Texas drivers pay $2.70. while leaving demand largely intact. California imports roughly 63% of its crude oil from foreign countries, despite having at least 1.7 billion barrels of proven reserves. Its oil production fell by more than 75%, from over 1 million barrels per day in the 1980s to 246,000 barrels per day at the end of 2025. California made itself into an energy island, isolated from the continent’s abundant oil and natural gas resources by regulatory choice rather than geographic necessity. Where California used to be one of America’s largest oil producers, most of the state’s crude now arrives by sea. “Because Gulf Coast refiners can access domestic crude through pipelines,” notes Robert Rapier, “Persian Gulf barrels are not evenly spread across the country. A disproportionate share of those Saudi and Iraqi imports ends up in PADD 5, the West Coast refining district, precisely because California lacks pipeline access to Permian supply.” And California’s refineries aren’t set up to refine domestic crude but rather foreign imports. California thus resembles Asian nations that lack domestic hydrocarbons and depend on seaborne imports through chokepoints, except that California sits atop a continent with the world’s largest combined oil and natural gas production. It has no major refined product pipeline connecting it to Texas or Louisiana. And it has been routing imported gasoline through the Bahamas to avoid the Jones Act’s requirement that goods shipped between U.S. ports travel on expensive American-flagged vessels... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, read the full article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

Gavin Newsom says Trump is to blame for California’s $5.86/gallon gasoline, but that’s nearly $2 higher than the national average. And it was mostly Newsom’s destruction of the state’s oil production and refining capacity that explains the difference.

The companies building the world’s leading artificial intelligence systems say that their products are politically neutral. Google states that its AI will “seek to avoid unjust impacts on people, particularly those related to sensitive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, income, sexual orientation, ability, and political or religious belief.” Anthropic, the maker of Claude, claims a 94% “even-handedness” rating for its latest model and says Claude’s goal is to “treat opposing political viewpoints equally.” And OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, declared that “ChatGPT shouldn’t have political bias in any direction,” and says its newest models have reduced political bias by 30%. But their track record tells a different story. In February 2024, Google’s Gemini AI generated images of America’s Founding Fathers as black men and women, depicted racially diverse Nazi soldiers, and created images of a female Pope and Asian Vikings. When users asked Gemini to create images of white people, it refused. The system had been programmed to inject diversity language into prompts, so that a request for a picture of a German soldier in 1943 would produce, as NPR reported, images of nonwhite people in Nazi uniforms. In response to the controversy, AI leaders took action. Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the results “completely unacceptable” and told employees that the company “got it wrong.” Google paused Gemini’s image generation, pledged structural changes, and promised to relaunch with better guardrails. AI leaders across the industry reasserted their commitment to neutrality. OpenAI published a new framework for evaluating political bias. Anthropic released its own even-handedness metrics. But they did not correct the bias. Wynton Hall, a senior fellow at the Governmental Accountability Institute and author of the new bestselling book Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, recently conducted a study using Google Gemini’s most advanced reasoning model, Deep Research. He asked it to evaluate all 100 sitting U.S. senators against Google’s own hate speech policies. The result: seven Republican senators were flagged as violators. Zero Democrats. The AI also hallucinated that Marco Rubio and JD Vance were still senators rather than the Secretary of State and Vice President. The specific “hate speech” violations involved statements about immigration and transgender issues. Senators Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, and Rick Scott all responded publicly. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have confirmed that most large language models exhibit measurable left-leaning bias, and even liberal users say AI has a liberal bias. While this may seem obvious to many, it is puzzling in that the AI companies have shown themselves to be so sensitive to not being perceived as biased, as the 2024 Google Gemini controversy showed. Last year, Meta’s AI chatbot falsely implicated conservative activist Robby Starbuck in the January 6 Capitol attack and labeled him a white nationalist, a Holocaust denier, and antisemitic. Starbuck said that Google’s Bard and Gemini chatbots generated at least 22 false statements about him, including fabricated accusations of sexual assault, rape, and a shooting, and even invented fake news articles attributed to real journalists to support the claims. The implications are significant. AI systems already shape what billions of people see in search results, social media feeds, and news recommendations. As Hall documents, AI is being deployed in government procurement, defense, and education. If these systems treat conservative, libertarian, and traditionally religious viewpoints as forms of “hate speech,” the result will be a powerful and pervasive censorship apparatus, or worse. AI-generated reputation scoring will feed into insurance decisions, mortgage approvals, and even custody determinations. For example, Starbuck said he received death threats, his children were doxxed, and he could no longer attend public events without security. Multiple insurance companies denied him homeowners, car, and other insurance, telling him only that they considered him a risk. Police arrested a man in Oregon who wanted to kill Starbuck. Asked to comment on the current situation, Starbuck told Public, “People need to imagine how dangerous this is when AI chatbots are deployed to swing an election, changing the way a few percent of the population vote by convincing them that one candidate is a criminal. Our next president could effectively be decided by biased AI. This is one of the most critical issues of our generation.” Why is AI still so biased toward the left and against the right?... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, read the rest of the article, and watch the full interview! x.com/shellenberger/…

Big Tech's AI keeps getting caught delivering false, ideological, and defamatory information, notes @wynton_hall in his bestselling new book, Code Red. The reason is pervasive partisan bias and "Effective Altruism" dogma, which is detached from the West's moral foundations.