Q&A: Golden dreams, dire warnings

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine.

Author, journalist, gubernatorial candidate, and California resident Michael Shellenberger has been a fearless voice exposing the policy mistakes made in the Golden State regarding crime, homelessness, environmental alarmism, and leadership. He talks to American Experiment’s John Hinderaker about the evolution of environmentalism, the damage to California by the political left, free speech, and how to be an optimist in a blue state.

Michael Shellenberger is the founder of Public, the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin, and the best-selling author of “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” and “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.” Shellenberger also offers testimony as a journalist and policy expert to the U.S. Congress on a range of issues covering free speech, censorship, and the environment, and has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Prize for journalism.

John Hinderaker: Michael Shellenberger, you first became widely known as an environmentalist, and you wrote a book in 2020 called “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.”

Michael Shellenberger: I’ve been an environmentalist my whole life ever since I was a teenager concerned about nature conservation, but like many people on the left, and I was very radical left, I became attracted to climate change and had a really apocalyptic view of it for many years. And then I started to do more research on it and started to become friends with people like Roger Pielke, Jr., who explained to me that we couldn’t see any evidence of climate change making extreme weather events worse or making natural disasters worse.

I came to see nuclear power — after doing a lot of research — as an absolutely essential technology that had been misunderstood. I spent from 2013 to around 2020 working to save nuclear power plants and change attitudes about nuclear. When Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion really burst into consciousness and said incredibly extreme and exaggerated things, I became very concerned with the impact that all of this alarmism was having on kids in particular — also as a father of an adolescent girl at the time — [with] huge numbers of kids reporting nightmares and anxiety. So I had about 20 or 25 years of experience by the time I sat down to write “Apocalypse Never.”

But some supporters were no longer deciding to support me because they didn’t like what I was saying about climate change or about nuclear power. I realized that I would have to make my living as a journalist. I still have my nonprofit, it’s now called Civilization Works. And then in 2021 I did a book called “San Fransicko” about homelessness, and then I did the Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in 2022. And then I’ve been working on censorship and free speech issues ever since, but I’ve never stopped working on the environment.

Your second book is “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” Why do progressives ruin cities?

I’ve changed my view a little bit since the book came out in 2021. The short answer is victimhood ideology — meaning this idea that current society is basically just wrong and that all of the inequalities that we see, whether it’s economic or racial or otherwise, are all a result of some system, whether it’s capitalism or modern life. And then that system creates winners and losers, and the losers in that system are victims of the winners. This is the dominant view in San Francisco, particularly among the radical left, who have rebranded themselves as progressives and have been in power, but also held by many liberal people.

The idea is that anybody who is on the streets — homeless, addicted, mentally ill — is a victim, and to victims, everything should be given and nothing required. Well, when it comes to mental illness and addiction, which is the main driver of homelessness, that’s often a death sentence, particularly in the age of fentanyl. You’re essentially enabling addiction. You’re incentivizing addiction: free housing, cash, welfare, and often even giving out the supplies to use drugs. All of these things are defended by progressives in a very mechanistic way, because by suffering and living on the street, that means, by definition, you’re a victim. And by definition, you should only be enabled in your addiction. Nothing should be done to mandate that you get rehab or even that you follow basic laws.

You’re allowing so-called victims to break laws, including against public camping, public drug use, and public drug dealing. It’s so absurd. We’re essentially killing mentally ill people and drug addicts with fentanyl all in the name of taking care of them.

We’ve known that you often have to impose an intervention on family and friends and loved ones when their addiction takes over their brains. But that is now verboten in places like San Francisco, which is why we end up enabling so much death and destruction.

My view is that you can’t solve this problem locally. People are too transient, and you need a statewide psychiatric and addiction care system like they have in other states, like we used to have. And that leadership has to happen at the gubernatorial level.

You mention the need for statewide solutions, and I assume that’s why you’ve run for governor of California twice now, in 2018 and 2022.

It was really fun. We had a good showing. We raised a little bit of money and came in third, narrowly missing the runoff. It’s a big, expensive state. It’s hard for somebody who’s not a billionaire, or who grew up with billionaires, in the case of Gavin Newsom, to win here. But I think that the success that we did have was a testament to the problem being so bad. Homelessness was always sort of an issue that people would complain about, but it was never a top-three issue for voters. And in California, it became number one.

There’s a big faction among our political leadership that is the DFL Party that wants to emulate California. There have been several instances where the only real rationale for some policy that’s being pushed by liberals in Minnesota is, well, that’s how they do it in California. It seems like a very poor idea to copy your public policies from California.

I’m shocked that they’re actually explicit that they want to copy California. It seems like California has gotten enough negative publicity. We have some of the most expensive electricity in the country. We used to have much cheaper electricity simply because we use about half the electricity as the national average. We probably use even less than half of what folks in Minnesota or in the Great Lakes region do, which get very cold in the winter. The climate is so temperate, that’s why people want to be in California; we don’t really use much heating or air conditioning, and so we have very low power costs.

Now we spend more on power than the national average. I think it’s 20 percent — but a huge increase because of this heavy reliance on solar. So, the thing to remember about electricity and the laws of thermodynamics is that energy is never created or destroyed. It’s only converted. And so what you want from electricity is a real tight matching of demand and supply, and that’s why power plants like nuclear, but also reliable coal and gas, produce such cheap electricity. There can be a little variation, but very little. That’s why you have grid managers trying to manage that. When you introduce these sources of energy like wind and solar, with wind being the worst, where it has huge fluctuations, it just takes a lot more.

You’re kind of a Renaissance man in terms of interests. One of the things you’ve been writing about lately is free speech issues, particularly in Europe, the UK, Germany, and other places.

Free speech is not something I ever thought much about. But, after Elon Musk buys Twitter, he opens up all the files and Matt Taibbi gets in there, and then Bari Weiss — she gets in and says to me, “Can you cross the bay to San Francisco and get into Twitter?” I was like, heck yeah. We first discovered a typical kind of woke left censorship. For example, my friend Meghan Murphy was censored and de-platformed for replying to the CEO of Twitter at one point around the trans issue, saying, “But men aren’t women.” And she was de-platformed for that.

That’s how crazy it got. It’s part of the reason Elon wanted to buy it. But then Matt and I, as we spent more time in there, we started discovering more and more communications from the FBI, from the Department of Homeland Security, and also from other government agencies. We started discovering essentially a very elaborate effort to use intelligence community intermediaries, usually NGOs, to act and behave like activists in demanding greater censorship.

It’s clearly a strategy to impose censorship on the social media platforms through a combination of pressure and also trying to get them to rely on these highly ideological and partisan NGOs, many of whom have people that work for them, that used to work for the intelligence community. So it was terrifying. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things. I didn’t have any conversion experience on free speech. I was always for free speech. I never thought you’d have to worry about it. In the United States, we have the First Amendment, we have a Supreme Court that’s been very strong in defending free speech, but this effort was clearly designed to get around the First Amendment.

But the upshot of it is that Trump’s election really undermined the censorship industrial complex as we’ve described it. Unfortunately, it’s actually gotten more aggressive in Europe and also in Brazil. If you don’t have free speech, you really don’t have a democracy.

You have a new book coming out in February called “Pathocracy.” What’s that about?

The book originally was about why institutions that are supposed to be involved in helping and healing people have been involved in hurting and harming them. And we were looking at addiction, but also the trans medical scandal, physician-assisted suicide, and COVID. And then we realized, well, we’re really doing a survey of the left. If you look at those issues, it’s not like they’re all independent. In each case, this thing we broadly define as the left, meaning everybody from centrist Democrats to the radical left, most of the mainstream news media, almost all universities, even most K-12, and most NGOs that the left has been involved in, are doing things that in some cases are actually the reverse of their earlier positions, but in many situations have been quite destructive and really an assault on reality.

It’s a book consisting of 10 really detailed case studies of big progressive issues, everything you would imagine, including climate change and schools, universities, censorship, and COVID, and about the left’s denial of reality and the ways in which it undermined what we call the foundations or the fences of civilization.

Among the many things that you’ve been doing, you’ve also been involved with the University of Austin.

This is a really neat experiment at the University of Austin. It’s Bari Weiss who runs The Free Press, a very important independent publication, Joe Lonsdale, who’s one of the main founders of Palantir Technologies, and Niall Ferguson, who’s a well-known historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. They really started this new university, and it was committed to free speech. They invited me to give a speech, and on the basis of that speech, they offered me a job. I’m now the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech. I taught my first quarter of students from January through March of this year and just had an absolute blast.

It’s an absolutely wonderful place. It’s a heterodox university. There’s a real commitment to getting a critical perspective, being able to understand what your opponents are saying or people who you disagree with are saying. So it’s been an incredibly fun experience to be a part of. I’ll be there every winter quarter now, January through March of every year.

One of the things I deal with all the time in Minnesota is pessimism. I talk to people who say, “Hey, your organization is great. You do terrific work. But man, I’m giving up on Minnesota.” I find myself in the position often of making the case for optimism and reasons to believe that yes, we’re currently not on a good path. Our government has been pursuing some poor public policies. As a result, we’ve been losing population to other states. What do you see as the future for a state like California or perhaps a state like Minnesota?

Well, I share your view. First of all, I think optimism of the spirit is very important because we know persistence in any endeavor is absolutely essential. How many stories do you hear of people who have had success only after persisting on something for such a long period of time? That was the case for me. The environment was a very frustrating issue, driven by dogma for a long time. It’s now just cracking wide open. I mean, we’ve seen just on the climate issue, the islands that were supposed to be underwater, 85 percent of them have not shrunk, and some have grown. Sea level rise is not accelerating.

Remember when Trump announced that he was running for president again? He was just ridiculed. It was conceptually impossible. He obviously persisted and was elected, and it has had a dramatic impact.

Politics is chaotic. That can go both ways, but I don’t think it’s warranted to be pessimistic. And then the reason to favor optimism is that it’s actually what keeps you going. It’s what keeps you persistent. And we know the importance of persistence. I would say that it’s hubristic to be overly negative or to write off the United States.

For example, on the crime issue, the media and the left have been telling people there’s no problem with crime. The public doesn’t believe it. Even if you were to say, “Oh, it was all higher in the ’90s.” Well, who cares? There’s too much crime. People don’t want crime. So, one thing for people trying to make change is to look for those opportunities. When you have majorities that want to see those changes, the fact of the matter is the left is completely hypocritical on issues around crime, on energy, and all of these issues. It seems like a whole bunch of wedge issues have opened up for people that are more heterodox or that are more conservative to use against the left, the radical left, the Democrats, that weren’t so visible even just five or 10 years ago.