# Michael Shellenberger **Michael Shellenberger** (born 1971) is an American author and activist who started on the environmental left and now publishes the [[Substack]] newsletter *Public*, holds a chair in "politics, censorship and free speech" at the [[University of Austin]], and runs a nonprofit called Civilization Works. He is best known for two books, *Apocalypse Never* (2020) and *San Fransicko* (2021), and for his part in the [[Twitter Files]]. He is on the map because he keeps making one move, and it keeps getting picked up. Three times he has written as a former insider that a liberal cause had gone wrong: environmentalism, then homelessness policy, then efforts to curb online misinformation. Each time conservative media, Republican committee chairs and the tech right adopted the argument. His phrase "censorship industrial complex" (see [[Censorship Industrial Complex]]) became the title of a House Judiciary Committee hearing. ## From environmentalist to critic of environmentalism Shellenberger moved to San Francisco in 1993 to work on progressive causes and spent the next decade in advocacy and public relations. In 2003 he and Ted Nordhaus founded the Breakthrough Institute, a California think tank. Their 2004 essay "The Death of Environmentalism" argued that the environmental movement as it existed could not solve global warming. Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment" in 2008. He left Breakthrough and in 2016 started Environmental Progress, which campaigned to keep nuclear power plants open. His 2020 book *Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All* ([[HarperCollins]]) accepted that [[Climate Change]] is real but argued it is not the existential threat activists describe. The book was praised on the right and criticized by scientists. Six researchers convened by the fact-checking group Climate Feedback found that his essay promoting it mixed accurate, misleading and false statements. Environmental scientist Peter Gleick, reviewing it for Yale Climate Connections, wrote that "bad science and bad arguments abound." MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, who sat on Environmental Progress's own board, said he was concerned about its imprecisions. Nordhaus later wrote that Environmental Progress had served mainly as a vehicle for Shellenberger's ambitions. ## San Fransicko and two runs for governor *San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities* (HarperCollins, 2021) made the same kind of argument about cities. Shellenberger wrote that homelessness in San Francisco and other West Coast cities is driven mostly by addiction and untreated mental illness, and that progressive tolerance of street camping and drug use made it worse. Researchers who study homelessness disputed that. A writer for [[The Atlantic]] reported that homelessness experts almost uniformly reject his account, and the University of California San Francisco's homelessness research center published a rebuttal of his claims about housing costs. The book arrived in October 2021, while the campaign to recall three San Francisco school board members and the [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] campaign were both under way. It gave the recall-era case against the city's government a national audience. The San Francisco Examiner reported that it featured [[Michelle Tandler]], the best-known of the city's "anti-San Francisco" posters, and she urged her followers to read it. Shellenberger ran for governor of California twice. In 2018 he ran as a Democrat and finished ninth in the primary with 0.5 percent. In 2022 he ran without a party and finished third with 4.1 percent, about 290,000 votes, behind [[Gavin Newsom]] and Republican Brian Dahle. ## The Twitter Files and the "censorship industrial complex" In December 2022 Shellenberger was one of the writers, along with [[Matt Taibbi]] and [[Bari Weiss]], whom [[Elon Musk]] gave access to internal Twitter documents. He wrote two installments of the [[Twitter Files (2022-2023)]]: Part 4, on the company's deliberations the day after the [[January 6 Capitol Attack]] before it banned [[Donald Trump]], and Part 7, on the [[FBI]]'s contacts with Twitter around the [[Hunter Biden Laptop]] story. On March 9, 2023, he and Taibbi testified before the [[House Judiciary Committee]]'s subcommittee on the "weaponization" of the federal government, chaired by [[Jim Jordan]]. Shellenberger told the panel that taxpayers were unknowingly funding a "censorship industrial complex" that endangered free speech. The phrase stuck. Taibbi credited it to him, the two were called back later in 2023, and on February 12, 2025, the full committee held a hearing titled "The Censorship-Industrial Complex" with both as witnesses. In November 2023 Shellenberger, Taibbi and Weiss shared the first Dao Prize, a $100,000 investigative journalism award from the National Journalism Center, a project of the conservative Young America's Foundation. The theory has had more success in Congress than in court. In [[Murthy v. Missouri]] (2024) the Supreme Court threw out the leading lawsuit built on it, ruling that the plaintiffs could not show government pressure had caused their posts to be moderated. For one of the research groups the theory was aimed at, see [[Stanford Internet Observatory]]. For an earlier source of the theory, see [[Mike Benz]]. ## After Twitter: gender medicine, Brazil and UFOs Since 2023 Shellenberger has applied the leaked-files format to new subjects. - **The "WPATH Files" (March 2024).** Environmental Progress published leaked messages from an internal forum of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, with a report by Mia Hughes arguing that the group's standards for gender medicine were unscientific. Shellenberger said the source came to him because of the Twitter Files. - **"Twitter Files – Brazil" (April 2024).** He published internal Twitter emails that he said showed Brazilian Supreme Court Justice [[Alexandre de Moraes]] pressing the company to censor supporters of [[Jair Bolsonaro]]. Musk began attacking de Moraes days later, and House Judiciary Republicans issued a report on Brazil that month. Within days Shellenberger retracted one claim, that de Moraes had threatened to prosecute Twitter's lawyer in Brazil, saying he had no proof. He testified about Brazil to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on May 7, 2024. - **UFOs (November 2024).** He testified at a House Oversight hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena. See [[UAP and the Science-Conspiracy Boundary]]. In 2024 Environmental Progress gave way to Civilization Works. An April 2026 speaking engagement billed his topic as which conspiracy theories are real, listing censorship, Covid origins, Russiagate, Epstein and UFOs. ## Why it matters **The convert's authority.** Shellenberger's standing with conservative audiences rests on where he came from. A lifelong Republican saying environmentalists exaggerate, or that San Francisco is too soft on drug use, is unremarkable. A former green activist and Bay Area progressive saying it is a story. Michelle Tandler's posts worked the same way at street level. **A supply line into Congress.** His reporting does not stay on Substack. A phrase from his 2023 testimony named a 2025 hearing, and the Brazil files were followed within two weeks by a House committee report. The route runs from Musk's document releases through a handful of independent writers to Jim Jordan's committee. **The same criticism each time.** Climate scientists said *Apocalypse Never* picked its evidence selectively. Homelessness researchers said the same of *San Fransicko*. Brazilian journalists said it of the Brazil files, and he withdrew a claim. The subjects change and the complaint about method stays the same. ## See Also - [[Twitter Files (2022-2023)]] · [[Twitter Files]] — the releases and what they did and didn't show - [[Matt Taibbi]] · [[Bari Weiss]] — the other two lead writers - [[Jim Jordan]] · [[House Judiciary Committee]] — where the "censorship industrial complex" became hearings - [[Murthy v. Missouri]] · [[Stanford Internet Observatory]] · [[Mike Benz]] — the theory in court, one of its targets and an earlier source - [[Alexandre de Moraes]] — the Brazilian justice at the center of the 2024 files - [[University of Austin]] — where he holds a chair - [[Michelle Tandler]] · [[Chesa Boudin Recall]] — the San Francisco story *San Fransicko* fed