Michael Shellenberger is a journalist and the author of such books as Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (2020) and San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (2021). He is also a professor at the newly founded University of Austin, a staunch advocate of free speech, and a famous sceptic of the modern environmentalist movement. He was kind enough to sit down with Hungarian Conservative for an exclusive interview after his lecture at MCC Feszt 2025.
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You are known for your scepticism about climate activism and environmentalism. One of my favourite stories about this—I don’t know if you have heard this one—is from this March, when there was a climate summit called the COP30 in Belém, Brazil. The government actually cleared out tens of thousands of acres of rainforest to make way for a highway for the climate summit. Have you heard of this story?
Yes.
Is this hypocrisy something that’s more of a theme than an isolated incident?
I think the hypocrisy is very interesting. I mean, there’s a lot of private jet use by climate advocates, celebrities, and billionaires who demand restrictions on travel, restrictions that they often take their private jets to fly to conference meetings to talk about. So one interpretation of that is that people are unaware of their own hypocrisy. I think it’s something else. I believe being hypocritical in that way is a way of flaunting your wealth and your virtue. It’s a way of saying that a different set of rules should apply to me than they should apply to you. It’s a sense of entitlement, which is one of the chief characteristics of narcissism. We see a lot of narcissism in the climate change movement by a lot of different people. The sort of black and white thinking is very characteristic of narcissism, as well as an exaggerated, deep desire for constant attention. So I see it as a function of a sort of elite narcissism and entitlement.
I listened to your panel and the lecture you gave at MCC Feszt. The primary thesis of your lecture, if I understand correctly, is that there are a number of metrics that are actually pointing to the right or a promising direction in climate change. These data points are not suppressed, but they do not fit the narrative, so the media is not pushing them. Did I get your main point correctly?
Yeah, most environmental trends are going in the right direction, including carbon emissions. Also, food production and endangered species. I don’t think climate change is the most important environmental problem. I think the most important environmental problem continues to be rainforest destruction, both by human impacts and natural impacts. And that is the one thing where, on the one hand, things have been getting better, but we still have a lot of frontier agriculture that is a huge threat to some particular species that we should be addressing. Climate change has just become such a religious cult that it’s crowded out those other concerns.
Your other main area of expertise and area of advocacy is free speech. We are here in Hungary. In the Western media, they often describe the Orbán administration as an authoritarian or oppressive regime. But a point I often make about this, if you think back to a couple of years ago, even in the United States, if you posted something on social media that was against liberal mainstream, there was a good chance that if it got enough traction that you would get your account terminated. Even the President of the United States got his social media accounts banned. Here in Hungary, that’s never happened. Is there any other reasonable way of looking at it than, okay, there have been more serious free speech issues in the West? Not just in the United States, but for example, in the UK, where they are arresting people for social media posts.
I mean, the censorship industrial complex has been up and running for about ten years, or at least ten years now. And it’s the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security that were involved in it. We saw people being censored for simply repeating what Pfizer had said in its own press release about COVID vaccines, and we saw people being censored for saying that children should not be vaccinated. We saw a woman being censored for saying that a man can’t become a woman. That’s now something we’ve seen in Brazil and Mexico, a desire to censor people who insist that biological sex is real. And now, the British are arresting 30 people a day for social media offences. They’ve got a special police force that’s involved in actively censoring and demanding censorship from social media platforms. Brazil has mass censorship; they’re censoring their political enemies. And in the European Union, they have something called the Digital Services Act, the basic idea of which is to create committees of experts to decide what the truth is and to censor social media platforms on the basis of that.
And right now in the United Kingdom, they have just rolled out the enforcement of this new Online Safety Act, which has faced a huge backlash online. You need to submit your ID or a face scan to access basic social media websites. Is there any pushback from the regular mainstream human rights watch groups?
No, they’re advocates of censorship. Really, there was a takeover by the Soros Foundation of much of civil society to make them more censorial. We also know that the Soros institutions work directly with the intelligence and security agencies. So it’s a really corrupt process.
‘Climate change has just become such a religious cult that it’s crowded out those other concerns’
I think it’s important to keep in mind that there is an end goal that most Western governments, as well as the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, all have, which is that everybody will have a digital ID. It will be tied to your bank account, to your vaccine record, and to your social media. And then the idea would be that if you say things on social media that the government doesn’t like, they’re going to find a way to punish you, including financially. So I think that where they definitely want to go is something called a social credit system, like they have in China, where they’re actually actively punishing people for thinking or saying the wrong things.
On a more recent issue, I’ve looked through your X posts. You have talked about this new scandal where the Obama administration ordered a new intelligence report in 2016 after it initially found that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that the Putin government did not prefer Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in office. What is your take on the issue? What’s the big picture here?
I mean, the picture that we now have is that Hillary Clinton was very nervous about being criticized for her ties to Russia. The biggest scandal here is that her husband accepted half a million dollars to give a speech in Moscow by somebody who was tied to a uranium consortium. And then she approved uranium from Russia as Secretary of State. So she was very vulnerable to the perception that she had been bought off and sacrificed national security for money. Therefore, they had a plan developed—and this is in the new files—by somebody who was very close to the CIA, who worked at a CIA intermediary organization called the Center for New American Security—if you go there, they have CIA people listed on the website. I mean, it’s not even a secret. She’s also part of something called WestExec, which is also a place for many CIA people. This CIA-linked individual named Julian Smith proposed a strategy to smear Trump as someone controlled by Putin. And it was explicitly to distract attention from the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email servers. That’s all now come out.
We also know that the vast majority of good intelligence said that the Russians actually favoured Hillary Clinton because they viewed her as manageable, and they viewed Trump as erratic. Well, I don’t think that should surprise anybody. You look at Trump’s behaviour, it’s really quite unpredictable, particularly compared to Hillary’s behaviour. So there was manipulation. The other thing we know is that the President of the United States and the CIA director were all aware of Hillary Clinton’s desire to paint Trump as a puppet of Putin. They then made a set of decisions and did a set of things, including leaking to the news media in December 2016 that there was supposedly intelligence linking Trump to Russia. This is all disinformation. Usually, disinformation is based on a kernel of truth. They didn’t even have a kernel of truth here. They just had complete assertions. I mean, they just invented many things. At one point, they invented the idea that there was a relationship between Trump and a particular bank in Russia called Alfa-Bank. They said there was communication between the servers. But servers are always communicating, so there was no tie there. Later, The New York Times did not one but two separate stories suggesting that Trump was controlled by the Russians because he banked at Deutsche Bank. And guess what? Russians also bank at Deutsche Bank. That was the entire basis of it, and it was like two major stories. So this is really a scandal; it’s a stain on the news media in the United States.
The news media in the United States are not what they claim to be. They’re not objective, and they are not objectively describing reality. They’re doing propaganda work for Democrats, the deep state, and the intelligence agencies. You know, we have a history in the United States of the CIA having journalists on its payroll. So this is a pretty serious thing to have the intelligence community orchestrating this disinformation campaign. It’s a massive abuse of power, and we’re still, only now, ten years later, starting to figure it out.
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