Shellenberger, Wielcki, Pielke - Three Illustrations Of What Happens To Climate Liars Over Time
Links (many) at original.
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Michael Shellenberger basically admitted it last year, becoming the template for a dis(info-)influencer. For years after it was relevant, Shellenberger touted his TIME: Hero of the Environment award from 2006 to show that his criticisms of environmentalists were supposedly in good faith. But that schtick only lasted so long (about a decade) before he was removed from the group he co-founded, and had to create another: Environmental Progress. But that, too, was unsuccessful in maintaining funding, leading him to run for Governor of California under a 'fund the police to be crueler to addicts' platform seeking to unite both conservatives in the state and liberals nostalgic for the War on Drugs.
He's now barrelling forward with a chaotic mix of covid, climate, and censorship conspiracies that are popular on Twitter (especially in its Musk era) and selling subscriptions to the Substack with UFO "whistleblowers" straight out of Ancient Aliens. He went from 'I'm just like you, I care about the environment, and I'm just a very sensible, serious person so I think environmentalists are always wrong about everything,' to 'The government is hiding UFOs from you.' Quite the career arc! The same fate perhaps awaits former University of Alabama climate scientist Matthew Weilcki, who's left academia and moved to Colorado to, apparently, do Substack "science" and fall for obvious parodies, while posting things like "Fossil fuels are directly responsible for ending slavery" on Twitter. We'll see, as he chases subscription sign-ups, how quickly and how far he strays from the anodyne science-y explainers denying climate science connections to things like heatwaves, and chases the clicks further into UFO territory.
Because he wouldn't be the first. According to a note in his Substack, CU-Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. has been not just relegated to a tiny office (which he considers "unusable" because it's filled with boxes of his past failures) but has also now, per a July 2023 update on "Conflicts of Interest", says he has been removed from his department and has "no research funding other than support via Substack." While still tenured there, he apparently only receives nine months of salary, so he's hoping to use Substack to fill the gap and per his pinned tweet, has made blogging his "profession, not just [his] passion". Apparently that means a lot of friendly conversations with climate deniers and Covid conspiracy theories, while also criticizing climate activists and journalists for good measure.
And like Shellenberger's UFO whistleblower (to abuse the term) Pielke too has found a whistleblower, supposedly, though this one is complaining about a shadowy conspiracy shutting down a thoroughly-criticized climate paper, so Pielke's not yet venturing to the Shellenbergian territory of shadowy conspiracy hiding evidence of UFOs or China's supposed shadowy conspiracy to develop Covid as a bioweapon targeting white people and sparing Chinese and Jewish people.
EDIT
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/20/2182376/-Shellenberger-Pielke-Wielicki-Using-Substack-To-Support-Themselves-After-Failing-Out-Of-Real-Life#view-story
