Michael Shellenberger
This content was last updated April 29, 2024, 2:12 p.m. UTC
Michael Shellenberger is an American nonfiction author and journalist, whose published work is mostly climate change denial. He is also the founder and president of climate denial organization Environmental Progress; cofounder of environmental research center The Breakthrough Institute, and cofounder of anti-drug, anti-homeless organization California Peace Coalition.
It's only a matter of time before the pseudoscience quackery known as "gender medicine" goes the way of blood-letting, leeches, and lobotomies. Future generations will look back on gender medicine with horror and try to understand how it happened.
-23 March, 2023, Shellenberger discussing gender-affirming care
Education and Work
Shellenberger attended Earlham College to study “Peace and Global Studies” and “Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution” between 1989 and 1993. He received his Master’s in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1996.
Between 1996 and 2003, Shellenberger started multiple public relations firms in San Francisco alongside author Ted Nordhaus. In 2003, he and Nordhaus co-founded The Breakthrough Institute, where Nordhaus took up the position of director of research while Shellenberger acted as executive director. After founding The Breakthrough Institute, Shellenberger started publishing articles about environmentalism, particularly positive pieces about nuclear energy. In 2016, he founded Environmental Progress.
Shellenberger has testified, at the request of conservative politicians, before the United States congress about his belief that humans cannot affect climate change. He has published multiple climate change denial books and long-form writing projects, including essay The Death of Environmentalism in 2004, Break Through in 2007, The Ecomodernist Manifesto in 2015, and Apocalypse Never in 2020. He also published San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, in which he blames the homelessness and drug crises on American liberals and leftists, in 2021.
Shellenberger believes the government is in possession of, and is concealing, alien spacecraft. He has also run for governor of California twice and lost both times.
Conflict with WPATH and anti-trans activism
Environmental Progress’s website has a page titled “Escape the Woke Matrix,” which contains supplemental information for a University of Austin speaking engagement given by Shellenberger. The webpage includes dozens of screenshots of news headlines about climate change, the Black Lives Matter movement, and violence against transgender people. They provide mostly skewed evidence, such as narrowed statistics about police violence against black Americans, or suggesting that it can’t be proven that violence against transgender Americans is a result of the fact that they are transgender.
On March 4th, 2024, Environmental Progress released “the WPATH files,” a collection of 140 pages of posts from the members-only forums of international transgender healthcare organization, World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The files also include an introduction by Shellenberger and an analysis of the files by the Environmental Progress employee who assembled them, Mia Hughes.
WPATH’s members-only forums can be accessed by anybody for $225, including non-healthcare professionals who just want to provide monetary support for the organization. The contents of “the WPATH files” are largely inconsequential forum posts from healthcare workers discussing their day-to-day work, and the majority of the posts have had usernames censored, making it impossible to verify who is posting and what credentials they may or may not have.
After “the WPATH files” were released, Shellenberger publicly described gender-affirming health care as “a pseudo-scientific cult,” and said that doctors were “performing witchcraft on children.”
On March 19th, during a brief outage of WPATH’s website due to a ransomware attack, Shellenberger spread misinformation on social media suggesting that the organization had abandoned its most recent Standards of Care document and removed its president, Marci Bowers. WPATH later issued a statement clarifying the cause of the outage and restored the website to its previous state.
Further resources:
Shellenberger's Twitter account