#michael shellenberger

Allison Fisher at MMFA:

In early October, Paramount Skydance bought the The Free Press and hired its founder, Bari Weiss, as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, a newly created position which will shape how the newsroom covers major stories which could include the climate crisis.  Notably, among the national broadcast networks, CBS has led coverage of climate change for at least the past four years, airing the most coverage, the most climate scientist guest appearances, and the most segments that discussed climate solutions as compared to ABC and NBC. But its role as network leader is already under threat. Reported by HEATED, as part of a series of layoffs at the network, the “majority of the five person team supporting CBS News’s climate coverage” were fired. In the memo announcing the layoffs, the new chief executive David Ellison said “he was ‘phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.’”

And there are other changes that could compound this threat: On October 24, it was reported that Weiss was interested in poaching Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who has a troubling record on climate reporting to “potentially helm the CBS Evening News.” Additional reporting suggests that she may also be interested in bringing on board another conservative voice, CNN contributor Scott Jennings. And on October 27, CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson announced he was leaving the network at the end of the year. Though Weiss infrequently focused her contrarian opinions on climate-related issues in her pieces for The New York Times and on her podcast, under her leadership as founder and editor-in-chief, The Free Press has published a number of articles undermining climate science and promoting contrarian views that mirror commentary from right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

The Free Press has undermined climate science

On August 19, The Free Press reported on a widely criticized climate study from the Department of Energy through an interview with one of its authors, Steven Koonin, a climate contrarian who has appeared on several right-wing media programs including several appearances on Fox. The interview included questions such as “what about climate change is real?” and provided a platform for Koonin to misrepresent a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that  affirmed the link between climate change and extreme weather events. 

Koonin has made the same false claims on Fox, including on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, where he downplayed the findings of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin dismissed the connection between extreme weather and climate change, a key finding of the report, claiming that natural disasters are “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.” In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Canada into triple digits just six weeks before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming. 

In January of this year, The Free Press interviewed Koonin to downplay the role of climate change in intensifying the LA wildfires. Similar to right-wing media outlets like Fox, The Free Press misleadingly suggested that then-President Joe Biden and many climate scientists claimed climate change was the cause of the fires rather than a contributing factor to the intensity of the blazes.  

In 2023, The Free Press published one of its signature contrarian pieces – titled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” by Patrick T Brown. In the piece, the author, who works for Breakthrough Institute, which was founded by anti-renewable advocate Michael Shellenberger, claims to have purposely limited his research paper showing warming temperatures increased the likelihood of wildfire growth in California in order to prove that articles in scientific journals were “distorting the scientific process by focusing too narrowly on climate change.” As reported by The Washington Post, “The opinion piece quickly provoked backlash from scientists and the editor of Nature herself.”

[...]

Conservative journalists like Bret Baier could undermine CBS’ leadership in climate coverage

For at least the last four years, CBS has led its broadcast counterparts in volume of climate coverage. In 2024, the network accounted for 50% of total broadcast TV news climate reporting – 381 minutes of 771 minutes across all three national broadcast networks. The network also led in the number of climate scientist guest appearances it aired and the number of segments it ran that discussed climate solutions.  Meanwhile, the climate denial that has for decades been a staple of Fox News opinion shows has also appeared on the so-called straight news program anchored by Bret Baier. Fox’s flagship Special Report has repeatedly softened or distorted the stakes of global warming and climate action. From 2009 through May 2021, more than 87% of its climate segments contained misinformation or misleading narratives.

More recently, Baier conducted a nearly 10-minute interview with Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in which Baier promised a “fair” and “balanced” conversation. Instead, he  helped the administration justify repealing the endangerment finding — potentially the most consequential climate rollback in modern history.  While Americans may be changing how they consume the news, legacy media and broadcast journalism at networks like CBS still matter, as the entire media landscape still relies on traditional journalism as part of the beginning of the information food chain. This includes how anchors report on extreme weather events, climate action, and scientific reports and findings.

By: Gerald Posner

Published: Mar 4, 2024

Newly leaked files from the world’s leading transgender health-care organization reveal it is pushing hormonal and surgical transitions for minors, including stomach-wrenching experimental procedures designed to create sexless bodies that resemble department-store mannequins.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health documents demonstrate it’s controlled by gender ideologues who push aside concerns about whether children and adolescents can consent to medical treatments that WPATH members privately acknowledge often have devastating and permanent side effects.

Yet the US government, American doctors and prominent organizations nonetheless rely on WPATH guidelines for advice on treating our youth.

The files — jaw-dropping conversations from a WPATH internal messaging board and a video of an Identity Evolution Workshop panel — were provided to journalist Michael Shellenberger, who shared the documents with me.

Shellenberger’s nonprofit Environmental Progress will release a scathing summary report, comparing the WPATH promotion of “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy genitals in vulnerable people” to the mid-20th-century use of lobotomies, “the pseudoscientific surgical destruction of healthy brains.”

‘Arbitrary’ age limits

The comparison to one of history’s greatest medical scandals is not hyperbole.

It is particularly true, as the files show repeatedly, when it involves WPATH’s radical approach to minors.

When the organization adopted in 2022 its current Standards of Care — relied on by the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization and every major American medical and psychiatric association — it scrapped a draft chapter about ethics and removed minimum-age requirements for children starting puberty blockers or undergoing sexual-modification surgeries.

It had previously recommended 16 to start hormones and 17 for surgery.

Not surprisingly, age comes up frequently in the WPATH files, from concerns about whether a developmentally delayed 13-year-old can start on puberty blockers to whether the growth of a 10-year-old girl will be stunted by hormones.

During one conversation, a member asked for advice about a 14-year-old patient, a boy who identified as a girl and had begun transitioning at 4.

The child insisted on a vaginoplasty, a surgery that removes the penis, testicles and scrotum and repositions tissue to create a nonfunctioning pseudo-vagina. It requires a lifetime of dilation. Was he too young at 14?

Marci Bowers, WPATH’s president and a California-based pelvic and gynecologic surgeon who is herself transgender, said she considered any age limit “arbitrary.”

But she would not do it. Why?

“The tissue is too immature, dilation routine too critical.”

In lay terms, that means boys who are too young do not have enough penal tissue for the surgery and the surgeon must harvest intestinal lining to build the faux vagina. Even Bowers admits that can lead to “problematic surgical outcomes.”

She would know since she has performed more than 2,000 vaginoplasties. Her highest-profile patient is 17-year-old Jazz Jennings, the transgender star of reality TV show “I Am Jazz.”

Three corrective surgeries were required to fix problems from the original vaginoplasty.

“She had a very difficult surgical course,” Bowers admitted in a 2022 appearance on the show. “We knew it would be tough — it turned out tougher than any of us imagined.”

Still, Bowers told her colleagues in the internal discussion forum of the best age for an adolescent to undergo surgery: “sometime before the end of high school does make some sense in that they are under the watch of parents in the home they grew up in.”

Christine McGinn, a Pennsylvania plastic surgeon and herself transgender, agreed. McGinn has performed “about 20 vaginoplasties in patients under 18” and thinks the “ideal time in the U.S. is surgery the summer before the last year of high school. I have heard many other surgeons echo this.”

Waiting until teens are older than 18 and in college is problematic, she said: “there are too many stressors in college that limit patients’ ability to dilate.”

Dangers downplayed

WPATH assures patients that surgical and hormonal interventions are tested and safe. It is a different matter in private.

President Bowers, for instance, said publicly in 2022 that puberty blockers are “completely reversible,” although in the internal forum she conceded it is “in its infancy.”

What about children who are infertile for life since they started hormone blockers before they reached puberty?

Bowers told her colleagues the “fertility question has no research.”

At other stages, members talk frankly about the complications for the transition surgery for girls, a phalloplasty in which a nonfunctioning pseudo-penis is fashioned from either forearm or thigh tissue.

It requires a full hysterectomy and surgical removal of the vagina. They also discuss other serious consequences, including pelvic inflammatory disease, vaginal atrophy, abnormal pap tests and incontinence.

A 16-year-old girl who had been on puberty blockers for several years before she was put on testosterone for a year had developed two liver tumors that an oncologist concluded the hormones had caused. Another member described “a young patient on testosterone for 3 years” who had developed “vaginal/pelvic pain/spotting . . . [and] atrophy with the persistent yellow discharge.”

Several colleagues described patients with similar conditions, some with debilitating bowel problems or bleeding and excruciating pain during sex (“feeling like broken glass”).

Vaginal estrogen creams and moisturizers as well as hyaluronic acid suppositories “can be helpful.”

One WPATH member seemed surprised: “The transgender people under my surveillance do not complain about this matter. However, I confess that I have never asked them about it.”

Rise of ‘de-gender’ surgery

The litany of transition surgery’s side effects did not stop WPATH from endorsing far more radical “nullification” surgeries for patients who do not feel either male or female and identify only as nonbinary.

Several dozen so-called “de-gendering” surgeries are designed to create a sexless, smooth cosmetic appearance that is unknown in nature. There is even an experimental “bi-genital” surgery that attempts to construct a second set of genitals.

In 2017, when tabloids reported a 22-year-old man had spent $50,000 to surgically remove his sex organs so he could “transform into a genderless extra-terrestrial,” it seemed a one-off oddity.

But WPATH has enshrined that concept in its Standard of Care — the same document in which the group endorsed for the time first time chemical or surgical castration for patients who identify as eunuchs. (WPATH even linked to the Eunuch Archives, where men anonymously share castration fetishes.)

These science-fiction-like surgeries are not only reserved for adults.

“How do we come up with appropriate standards for non-binary patients?” asked Thomas Satterwhite, a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon who has operated on dozens of patients younger than 18 since 2014. “I’ve found more and more patients recently requesting ‘non-standard’ procedures.”

What are nonstandard procedures? They include “non-binary top surgery,” a mastectomy without nipples. There are brutal procedures for girls that eliminate all or part of the vagina and for boys that amputate the penis, scrotum and testicles.

The goal, as one San Francisco surgical clinic proclaims on its website, “is a smooth, neutral body that is cosmetically free of sexual identification.” On TikTok the trend is called a “flat front.”

‘Too young to understand‘

A particularly intense subject of discussion was whether minors could understand the lifelong consequences of their gender treatments. Minors are presumed by law to be incapable of making an informed decision about having a vasectomy or tubal ligation.

Gender surgeries are an exception, however.

WPATH’s Standard of Care allows all procedures so long as the minor “demonstrates the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”

In a May 2022 internal workshop, “Identity Evolution,” WPATH members conceded that was all but impossible.

Daniel Metzger, the British Columbia endocrinologist who cowrote the Canadian Pediatric Society’s position paper on health care for trans minors, said, “I think the thing you have to remember about kids is that we’re often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven’t even had biology in high school yet.”

Metzger noted adolescents are incapable of appreciating the lifelong consequence of infertility. “It’s always a good theory that you talk about fertility preservation with a 14-year-old,” he said, “but I know I’m talking to a blank wall. They’d be like, ‘ew, kids, babies, gross.’ Or, the usual answer is, ‘I’m just going to adopt.’ And then you ask them, ‘Well, what does that involve? Like, how much does it cost?’ ‘Oh, I thought you just like went to the orphanage, and they gave you a baby.’ . . . I think now that I follow a lot of kids into their mid-twenties, I’m always like, ‘Oh, the dog isn’t doing it for you, right?’”

There is extensive research showing adolescent brains are wired to have little control over rash behavior and are not capable of grasping the magnitude of decisions with lifelong consequences. It is why society doesn’t allow teens to get tattoos or buy guns. Car-rental agencies set 25 as the minimum age for renting a car, and Sweden sets the same limit for deciding on sterilization.

Detransitioners ignored, shunned

Although many WPATH members privately doubt that adolescents can give truly informed consent to life-altering procedures, they must affirm whatever children say about their gender.

Unless, the WPATH files disclose, the patient wants to reverse course and become a so-called detransitioner.

WPATH members mostly dismiss those cases as insignificant or overblown by the media and question whether minors who want to revert to their birth sex really understand what they are doing.

It’s a question that would never be asked for minors who declared themselves to be gender dysphoric.

One case involved a 17-year-old boy, just graduated from high school, who had been on testosterone for two years. He was reported to be “very distraught and angry. He reports he feels he was brainwashed and is upset by the permanent changes to his body.”

A self-described “queer therapist” did not believe any young person could be brainwashed. “In my experience, those stories come from people who have an active agenda against the rights of trans people.”

WPATH President Bowers said that “I do see talk of the phenomenon [detransitioners] as distracting from the many challenges we face.”

‘Frankenstein files’

The leaked files put a spotlight on the danger of mixing ideological activism with medicine and science. They should serve as an urgent wakeup call for the medical associations and government agencies that rely on WPATH guidance for transgender health.

The files might even prompt investigations into how those with distorted personal agendas seized control of the organization at the expense of science and patients.

Investigating what has gone wrong at WPATH might prove uncomfortable for some gender progressives in the Biden administration, none more so than Adm. Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health. Levine, the first transgender four-star military officer, is a WPATH member and has lavished praise on the organization.

She says it “assesses the full state of the science and provides substantive, rigorously analyzed, peer-reviewed recommendations to the medical community on how best to care for patients who are transgender or gender non-binary. It is free of any agenda other than to ensure that medical decisions are informed by science.”

Either Levine is unaware of the hormonal and surgical experimentation the group promotes or refuses to acknowledge it.

“The Frankenstein files.”

That is how a pediatrician described the leaked documents after I shared them with her.

Unfortunately, this is no horror novel.

The incuriosity and fuzziness with which people look at the west coast homelessness crisis drives me fucking batty.

Now look, I admit up front that I am also both incurious and wool-headed about this issue, but I work in a fucking restaurant for minimum wage. If you write a book about the fucking homeless crisis or run the city government I expect you to think a little bit harder than the average schmoe on the street, and I think that's reasonable.

One thing that pisses me off about the way people talk about homelessness is that they don't seem to know why it's bad, or what it would look like to solve it. Which I know sounds crazy but hear me out.

Scott Alexander helpfully reviews San Fransicko for me so I don't have to punch any holes in my drywall, but I want... Well, actually I was composing this as I finish Alexander's review, and I got to his utilitarian discussion at the end that cuts to the heart of the matter:

Along with all the problems and preaching, San Fransicko offers solutions. These won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read this far: they’re basically the Amsterdam plan presented earlier. Break up open-air drug markets. Force addicts into rehab by threatening prison sentences for noncompliance. Ban camping on streets and force the homeless into shelters. Offer permanent housing when appropriate, but make it contingent on good behavior. Have a strong psychiatric system with ability to commit people who need it, and enforced outpatient treatment when appropriate.

Would these work?

I’m pretty sure they would work well for housed people and the city as a whole. Homeless people would no longer block the streets and assault passers-by; they would be safely out of sight in shelters or in mental institutions. A new generation of tough DAs would crack down on crime. Stores could reopen, and citizens could walk the streets without fear. It’s hard for me to imagine this not working.

...

I have to admit - I talk a good utilitarian talk on this, but I don’t know if I live up to my ideals. An addictionologist interviewed in San Fransicko heaps contempt on well-off liberals who get the benefits of virtue-signaling while externalizing the costs onto poor people in bad areas:

[You] sit in the suburbs and feel smug about the fact that you oppose the war on drugs and have a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard. But you don’t have homeless people taking a crap on your front stoop every day or [have] all your packages stolen every single day

So I imagine - what if I lived in the worst parts of SF, had people crap on my front steps every day, had all my packages stolen, and (by the bounds of this hypothetical) wasn’t allowed to move to the suburbs, ever? I think I would last two weeks before I sacrificed all of my principles on the altar of “less human feces, please”.

Maybe, as a lefty, I'm supposed to read that and gasp and say, "How can you be so heartless?" or maybe I'm supposed to say, "Gosh, when you get right down to it, doesn't the poor guy have a point?"

But instead I'm going to ask:

Do you have any studies showing how effective those policies are at getting rid of human feces?

I'm not being a smart-ass, I'm genuinely wondering how Alexander didn't notice that so much of the criticism he himself quotes in Shellenberger's book has nothing to do with any of that stuff.

This is the particular quote from Shellenberger that caught me up short:

"An experiment with 249 homeless people in San Francisco between 1999 and 2002 found those enrolled in the city’s Housing First program, Direct Access to Housing, used medical services at the same rate as those who were not given housing through the program, suggesting that the Housing First program likely had minimal impact on the participants’ health."

Did it have an impact on how often they took a shit on a public sidewalk? Did it have an impact on the amount of litter they dumped on streets? Did it have an impact on time spent chasing people around and screaming obscenities? Did it have an impact on how often they injected heroine in the subway? Did it have an impact on how many sidewalks they blocked with tents?

All that fucking soul-searching, all that "Gosh, perhaps to solve the problem we simply must be cruel" and this reluctant commitment to reducing the effect of homelessness on tourists and housed locals, and realizing that, gosh, we might have to sacrifice the well-being of homeless people if that's what it takes, an utter commitment to ignoring anything but the reduction of social harm from mass camping...

And the criticism of DAH is that it doesn't improve the health outcomes of the people enrolled in it?!

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

This kind of goalpost shifting is RIFE within the discussion of west coast homelessness, where opponents of current policies or even speculative ones waffle back and forth about whether or not they give a shit about the health of the homeless or not.

Before all that soul-searching I quoted this is Scott's assessment of Housing First policy:

Conclusion: Housing First seems to work in getting people housing. It probably also helps people use fewer medical services, and it might or might not save money compared to not doing it (probably more likely when treating very severe cases, less likely in areas with high housing costs). It probably doesn’t affect people’s overall health or drug use status very much.

So... Housing first policies probably actually do a pretty damn good job at making the Homeless less obnoxious to tourists and housed people in a number of concrete ways related to litter, camping, public defecation, etc.?

There's good reason to think, pending further research, that they might actually do a pretty good job at reducing some of the problems that, after all that soul-searching, we decided were the only priorities we have?

I'm furious and unhappy at the way Portland is being covered by tent cities, mounds of trash, and grafitti. But I have this utterly baffling conversation with people where they go,

"This camping is shameful, the city should crack down on it!"

"So, get people into stable housing"

"Well, if you get people into stable housing it only puts a band-aid on the problem, they still can have health and behavioral problems that are really important."

And I always go, "Right, but I thought we were trying to reduce camping."

There's this kind of baffling goal-post moving. Alexander has a lot of paragraphs of hand-wringing over whether or not we should accept that sometimes we have to be TOUGH and HARD to really solve these problems, and accept that we may just have to care less about what Homeless people do or want, but he somehow hasn't noticed that he actually has very little data on whether or not Shellenberger's preferred policies work better than what he calls "Housing First" in terms of these metrics.

This is a wild guess and armchair psychologizing, but what seems to be happening is that in cities like San Francisco or Portland, as the problem gets worse, you, as a relatively better-off housed person, start thinking of Homelessness less and less in purely charitable terms with worries about how it effects the homeless, and more and more things like, "I don't like crossing the street because the sidewalk I was going to use is blocked by tents and piles of garbage" and "I don't like how often people chase after me screaming obscenities" and that feels somehow hard and uncompassionate, so you sort of start to assume that the only way to solve these problems is through policies that also feel hard and uncompassionate.

Michael Shellenberger è un ambientalista e attivista del clima, fondatore e presidente di Environmental Progress, organizzazione di ricerca e politiche che combatte per l’energia pulita e la giustizia energetica. Nel 2008, è stato anche nominato “Eroe dell’Ambiente” dalla rivista Time. Shellenberger ha voluto scusarsi, a nome di tutti gli ambientalisti, per l’allarmismo climatico creato negli ultimi 30 anni e lo ha fatto con un lungo articolo pubblicato su Environmental Progress.

“I cambiamenti climatici stanno avvenendo. Non è la fine del mondo. Non è neanche il nostro problema ambientale più grave”, scrive Shellenberger. “Sono un attivista del clima da 20 anni e un ambientalista da 30, ma come esperto di energia a cui è stato chiesto dal Congresso di fornire una testimonianza esperta obiettiva e invitato dall’Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) per fare da esperto revisore del suo prossimo rapporto di valutazione, sento l’obbligo di scusarmi per come noi ambientalisti abbiamo fuorviato il pubblico”, continua Shellenberger, che elenca “alcuni fatti che pochi sanno”:

“L’uomo non sta causando una sesta estinzione di massa

L’Amazzonia non è il polmone del mondo

I cambiamenti climatici non stanno rendendo i disastri naturali peggiori

Gli incendi si sono ridotti del 25% nel mondo dal 2003

La quantità di terra che usiamo per la carne, il più grande uso di terra dell’umanità, si è ridotta di un’area grande quasi quanto l’Alaska

L’accumulo di combustibili legnosi e più case vicino alle foreste, non i cambiamenti climatici, spiegano perché ci sono incendi sempre più pericolosi in Australia e California

Le emissioni di anidride carbonica sono in calo nella maggior parte delle nazioni ricche e sono diminuite in Regno Unito, Germania e Francia da metà degli anni ‘70

I Paesi Bassi sono diventati ricchi, non poveri, adattandosi alla vita al di sotto del livello del mare

Produciamo il 25% di cibo in più di quello di cui abbiamo bisogno e le eccedenze alimentari continueranno ad aumentare mentre il mondo si riscalda

La perdita di habitat e la diretta uccisione di animali selvaggi sono minacce alle specie più grandi dei cambiamenti climatici

I combustibili legnosi sono ben peggiori per le persone e gli animali rispetto ai combustibili fossili

Prevenire le future pandemie richiede più agricoltura industriale, non meno”.

“So che questi fatti suonano come “negazionismo climatico” per molti, ma mostrano solo il potere dell’allarmismo sul clima. In realtà, questi fatti provengono dai migliori studi scientifici disponibili, inclusi quelli condotti o accettati da IPCC, FAO, IUCN e altri principali organismi scientifici”, afferma Shellenberger.

“Fino allo scorso anno, ho principalmente evitato di parlare contro l’allarmismo climatico. In parte perché ero imbarazzato. Dopo tutto, sono colpevole di allarmismo come qualsiasi altro ambientalista. Per anni, mi sono riferito ai cambiamenti climatici come ad una minaccia “esistenziale” per la civiltà umana e l’ho definita “crisi”. Ma soprattutto avevo paura. Sono rimasto in silenzio sulla campagna di disinformazione sul clima perché avevo paura di perdere amici e finanziamenti. Le poche volte che ho trovato il coraggio di difendere la climatologia da coloro che la distorcono, ho subito dure conseguenze. Quindi ho aspettato e non ho fatto quasi nulla mentre i colleghi ambientalisti terrorizzavano il pubblico”, scrive l’ambientalista.

“Lo scorso anno, le cose sono andate fuori controllo. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ha dichiarato che “il mondo finirà in 12 anni se non affrontiamo i cambiamenti climatici. Il gruppo ambientalista di più alto profilo in Gran Bretagna ha sostenuto che “i cambiamenti climatici uccidono i bambini”. Bill McKibben, il giornalista ecologista più influente del mondo, ha definito i cambiamenti climatici come “la più grande sfida che l’uomo abbia mai affrontato” e ha detto che “distruggeranno le civiltà”. I giornalisti delle principali testate hanno riportato ripetutamente che l’Amazzonia è “il polmone del mondo” e che la deforestazione è come una bomba nucleare pronta ad esplodere. Di conseguenza, metà delle persone intervistate nel mondo lo scorso anno ha detto che i cambiamenti climatici faranno estinguere l’umanità. E a gennaio, un bambino britannico su 5 ha detto agli intervistatori di avere incubi sui cambiamenti climatici”, denuncia Shellenberger, che ha scritto un libro, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Mai l’Apocalisse: perché l’allarmismo ambientale fa male a tutti) in cui presenta le sue scuse formali per l’allarmismo climatico.

Tra i punti salienti del libro, basato su 20 anni di ricerca e 30 anni di attivismo ambientale, ci sono:

“Le industrie e l’agricoltura moderna sono le chiavi per la liberazione umana e il progresso ambientale

La cosa più importante per salvare l’ambiente è produrre più cibo, soprattutto carne, su meno terra

La cosa più importante per ridurre l’inquinamento dell’aria e le emissioni di carbonio è passare dal legno al carbone al gas naturale all’uranio

Il 100% delle energie rinnovabili richiederebbe l’aumento della terra utilizzata per l’energia dall’odierno 0,5% al 50%

Dovremmo volere che città, allevamenti e centrali elettriche abbiano maggiori densità di potenza, non minori

Il vegetarianismo riduce le emissioni di una persona di meno del 4%

La carne bovina ruspante richiederebbe 20 volte più terra e produrrebbe il 300% di emissioni in più

Il dogmatismo di Greenpeace ha peggiorato la frammentazione delle foreste dell’Amazzonia

L’approccio colonialista alla conservazione dei gorilla nel Congo ha prodotto un contraccolpo che potrebbe aver determinato l’uccisione di 250 elefanti”.

In my research, I have come to see the entertainment industry as a major factor behind popular fears of nuclear.

Movies like “China Syndrome” (US - 1979), “Die Wolke” (Germany - 2006) and “Pandora” (South Korea - 2016) all contributed to the halting of nuclear plant construction, and the burning of fossil fuels instead.

…

Mazin insisted that his mini-series would stick to the facts. "I defer to the less dramatic version of things,” Mazin said, adding, “you don’t want to cross a line into the sensational."

And so, by the time I sat down to watch HBO’s “Chernobyl,” my dread had given way to hopeful anticipation. Could it be that Hollywood was finally going to represent the worst nuclear accident fairly and accurately?

…

In the first episode of “Chernobyl” the nuclear reactor explodes, blows the top off the building, and catches on fire. The plant workers vomit, their faces turn red, and several appear to die.

We  see a plant worker in his twenties hold open a door to the reactor hall and various parts of his body start to bleed. He rescues a comrade with a red, blistered, and bloody face, and appears to leave him for dead in a hall. Later we see the man slumped over and smoking what appears to be his last cigarette.

Later, the plant manager who was in denial about the accident becomes violently ill after he learns the true scale of the disaster. As he leaves for the hospital, we see a fireman who is carrying a body on a stretcher collapse and drop the body.

I was left thinking that dozens of workers and firefighters were immediately killed, but according to the official United Nations report (p. 66) on the accident, just two workers, not dozens, or hundreds, were killed within a few hours of the explosion.

Neither of the workers died from radiation. One was killed by the rubble from the explosion and the other by thermal burns from the fire.

…

Two-thirds of the Chernobyl first responders who died had thermal (fire) burns in addition to having been exposed to extremely high levels of radiation.

“In five cases, skin injuries [from thermal burns] were the sole cause of death,” concludes the UN report (p. 624). By contrast, “six patients who did not suffer fatal skin burns” survived.

…

I don’t know if Mazin and HBO meant for viewers to assume that all of the symptoms that viewers witnessed were from radiation, instead of from fire, or that many more workers and firefighters died right away than actually did, but that was the impression I was left with.

…

Chernobyl’s total death toll is small compared to other famous disasters. According to the United Nations, 28 first responders died a few weeks after the accident, and since then 19 died for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”

Accidental deaths are always tragic, but it’s worth putting them in perspective. The worst energy disaster, the collapse of a hydroelectric dam in China, killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people. The Bhopal chemical disaster killed 15,000.

…

In earlier studies, the UN estimated there could be up to 16,000 cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation.

Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160, with the vast majority of them occurring in the elderly.

That’s it. There is no reliable evidence that radiation from Chernobyl caused an increase in any other disease or malady including birth defects.

…

Research showing increases in birth defects “lacked data about confounding risk factors such as maternal alcohol intake and diet,” note the Oxford researchers.

Even the lead author of a paper showing higher birth defects from Chernobyl radiation later admitted, “We did not prove with this study that radiation causes birth defects.”

The radiation from Chernobyl may have caused more harm than was measured but, if it did, it didn’t cause enough to be detected against all of the other things that cause harm.

…

Mazin says he took seriously his responsibility to stick to the facts, but as the episode progressed, my fears grew.

The wife of one of the main characters, a firefighter, is pregnant, as are other women. We see several ominous scenes of parents pushing their newborn babies in strollers.

It’s hard to believe HBO would put all of those pregnant women and babies in Act I if it weren't going to show widespread birth defects, and suggest a causal connection, in Act III.

…

If its death toll is so low, why does Chernobyl continue to arouse our fascination and fears, and garner tens of millions of dollars in HBO funding?

Part of the answer, I believe, is because nuclear accidents remind us of nuclear bombs and our vulnerability to them.  Early in “Chernobyl,” one plant worker asks another, “Is it war? Are they bombing?” The conversation is repeated later by other workers. The plant manager and Communist Party bureaucrats meet in a special room designed "to withstand a nuclear attack by the Americans."

…

Jacob Bacharach at TNR:

A few weeks into 2025, Ross Douthat, The New York Times’ idiosyncratically conservative columnist, interviewed Marc Andreessen: Netscape co-founder, venture capitalist, general Silicon Valley gadabout, and, lately, fixture in Trump-adjacent Washington, where he has reportedly been interviewing candidates for top agency positions and promoting rollbacks of Biden-era cryptocurrency guardrails. O tempora, o mores. In the course of the interview (the audio of which is available in full as an episode of the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast), Andreessen laments the pressures of a socially conscious press, college students, social media activists, and activist shareholders. He evokes a genuinely paranoid fantasy that tech workers were once on the verge of a violent labor uprising: Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your keyboards! He appears to claim that, at some point in the years 2016 to 2020, “the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary.” It’s unclear what he was referring to. The Times, in any case, removed the offending quote in its print edition. Andreessen is far from alone in his embattled posture. A set of increasingly vocal, increasingly right-wing tech billionaires has come to share with some segments of the left (or, as we shall see, the former left) an almost obsessive concern with the hypocrisies and shortcomings of modern liberalism. Some of these figures, like PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, have long been associated with the political right, and Thiel’s 1998 attack on “multiculturalism” in elite universities, The Diversity Myth (co-written with current Trump “crypto czar” David O. Sacks), presaged today’s great national DEI freak-out. Others were more ambiguous, political agnostics in the vast, squishy center of American politics who have only more recently drifted into the embrace of a newly dynamic right unbound by its stodgy past.

Andreessen himself long supported Democrats, but he grew incensed by the Biden administration’s mild skepticism toward and willingness to regulate cryptocurrency, eventually embracing a belief that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the deep state were engaged in a deliberate program to “debank” conservatives and cryptocurrency investors. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously cultivated a studiously apolitical public image, killed all DEI initiatives at Meta (blaming them on his departed female COO, Sheryl Sandberg) and went on the Joe Rogan show to propose a need to bring “masculine energy” back to the workplace. Elon Musk was once a darling of liberals and environmentalists, but his various musings on “free speech”; his chummy social media interactions with online Nazis, “race realists,” and other such strange creatures; and, of course, his spectacular embrace of Donald Trump have disabused the center and the left of any notion that he might be on their side.

This rightward turn has drawn noisy criticism. Yet the tech barons, platform operators, and publishers had already found a new set of friendly voices in the media. As it turned out, there was a pool of ready-made scribes, who, like them, had soured on the Democratic Party, on speech codes they perceived as a regime of censorship, and on the perceived excesses of DEI, and who were eager to take advantage of the new, growing platforms that billionaires like Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen acquired or funded.

Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders. His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make appearances, most notably Free Press founder and former Times columnist Bari Weiss, who, while lacking Greenwald’s or Taibbi’s superstar-journalist quality, comes across as a much cannier operator with a longer and more strategic view of her project.

Greenwald and Taibbi arrived at their journalistic celebrity through different paths. Greenwald, a civil libertarian and (usually) strident critic of U.S. military and intelligence policy, cut his teeth as a blogger and Guardian columnist before rocketing to international fame by acquiring and publishing the Edward Snowden National Security Agency leaks and founding The Intercept with backing from billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Taibbi started as a kind of new gonzo journalist—will no one free young men from the curse of Hunter S. Thompson?—but became famous and respectable through excellent and trenchant reporting for Rolling Stone, particularly on the 2008 financial crisis. Neither writer was ever a doctrinaire leftist, but it is fair to say that, even when criticizing Democrats and liberals (for example, for continuing the war on terrorism and the use of drones, or for favoring banks over homeowners during the Obama years), their critiques appeared to emerge from positions further left. But over the course of the first Trump term and subsequent Biden presidency, they gradually, then swiftly, drifted into the inchoate, mercurial world of “heterodox” thinking and writing—a sprawling and capacious complex of pontificators, with tendencies that range from fairly standard Silicon Valley sci-fi libertarianism to fantasy-genre monarchism to hard-right ethnonationalist neofascism.

Both of these main characters became uncomfortable in the liberal media around the time of “Russiagate,” a sprawling, incomprehensible liberal conspiracy theory that blamed Trump’s 2016 victory on Russian state malefactors. Both were deeply skeptical of the theory, while major left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, where Greenwald had once been a greenroom fixture, went particularly big on it. Ironically, however, both Greenwald and Taibbi took an almost conspiratorial view of the media’s commitment to Russiagate, treating the dissemination of the theory as a media conspiracy in and of itself, with Taibbi going so far as to compare it (with caveats, to be fair) in scale to the “WMD affair heading into the Iraq war” rather than as desperate wish-casting by liberals for some explanation, any explanation, for the election of Trump. Both men found friendlier audiences at Fox, where Greenwald became a regular guest of Tucker Carlson, and eventually as far abroad as the hair-sprayed Technicolor studios of Newsmax.

In the years that followed, both men took positions of reflexive hostility to mainstream media and contemporary liberal values. During the pandemic, for example, Taibbi criticized the legacy press for its “censorship of ivermectin news.” In the Biden years, he grew increasingly critical of any attempts to prosecute Trump for various crimes, arguing, as many conservatives did, that such attempts were inherently politically motivated and would set up cycles of revenge prosecution. Both men evinced growing concern with “cancel culture”: Taibbi created a regular feature on his website called Meet the Censored, in which he interviewed supposedly canceled writers and public figures, and Greenwald lamented that one of his own passion projects, a documentary about the tennis player Martina Navratilova, had been derailed at least in part by the unreasonable objections of trans activists.

These positions brought both men into alignment with a tech elite who increasingly saw value in an unfettered, (mostly) uncensored, alternative online media. Both publish primarily on Substack (Taibbi has over 500,000 subscribers, and Greenwald over 300,000), the newsletter platform that received substantial funding from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz. Greenwald has also built an impressive audience for his System Update news show on the Thiel-funded, right-wing YouTube alternative, Rumble—a friendly arena for figures with contrarian viewpoints, a maximalist view of free speech, and a reflexive anti-liberalism. Taibbi, along with Bari Weiss and the reporters Lee Fang and Michael Shellenberger, among others, benefited from a more direct relationship with the tech oligarchy.

When did Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who both have had lefty credentials at one point, become de facto right-wingers? Sometime in the late 2010s-early 2020s.