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At a time when our nation is becoming increasingly polarized, media often ignore viewpoints and stories that are worthy of attention. American Thought Leaders, hosted by The Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek and his reporting team, features in-depth discussions with important thought leaders on key issues facing America—and Canada, the world—today.

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One Key Fact About America’s Founding That Isn’t Taught Anymore | Eric Metaxas

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “It’s now been revealed that the Chinese—who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, both in the United States and Europe—have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches,” says Michael Shellenberger, an investigative journalist, author, founder of Public, and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.

Shellenberger is the author of the books “San Fransicko” and “Apocalypse Never.”

In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into key vulnerabilities in America’s energy grid, how Trump is transforming America’s energy future, the current status of the “censorship industrial complex,” as Shellenberger describes it, and his continued fight for government transparency, including around unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

Two years on from the publication of the Twitter Files—in which Shellenberger played a key role—where are things now?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Michael Shellenberger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Great to be with you.

I can’t help but notice that not a few days ago, as we’re filming right now on the 23rd of May, President Trump signed four executive orders related to nuclear energy. When we first met, I was interviewing you about your book, “Apocalypse Never.” So what’s your reaction to this?

I’m thrilled. I mean, it’s long overdue. I think he probably needs to go further and create a whole separate government agency, separate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has done a good job regulating a particular technology, which is the water-cooled reactors. But the technology is so complex, and the staff there and the regulations they have are so focused on this one technology. They’re probably, in my view, going to need a separate agency to really take nuclear power to the next level. But the big story, as you probably know, is that energy demand is growing very quickly and will increase even more due to AI.

I use AI every day. I rarely use Google search anymore. I believe the AI activity takes five to 10 times more energy than Google search. I’m already being limited by my subscriptions to AI by how much I can upload, for example. I’ve been uploading the recent RFK files and hit my capacity very quickly, and that’s an energy capacity.

I’m mostly very happy with where this administration has gone on energy. It has an energy abundance vision. They say energy dominance, but really what matters is just quantity. Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. A nation that is energy rich is a rich nation. There is no poor nation that’s energy rich, and there’s no energy rich nation that’s poor. So the commitment by this administration to expanding in particular natural gas and nuclear, which are the most important nuclear energies for the 21st century, I’m extremely thrilled with it.

I’m also happy to see the paring back of these big subsidies for renewables. I was particularly concerned about a large wind farm. They’ve been trying to build large wind projects off the East Coast, which we know have been hurting an endangered whale species that could go extinct if they continued, and Trump has paired that back. I think he could go a little bit further. He’s allowing at least one project to go forward. But this commitment to cheap and reliable energy might be the most important part of the Trump legacy.

I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite for creating new agencies at the moment.

Yes, fair enough.

But give me the entire case for that, because really we’re talking about the technology around nuclear has advanced quite a bit beyond the technology you were describing.

Yes, that’s right. Nuclear is our most complex technology. It obviously uses a tiny amount of fuel. There’s no combustion. You’re just splitting atoms and releasing all this heat. It’s still miraculous when you think about what nuclear power is.

I’m not suggesting any additional bureaucracy. I’m just suggesting what Lockheed Martin at one point called a Skunk Works project. That was the name of a sort of separate place in their area. I think it was in Southern California. They just had a separate building set up to develop new technologies that would be separate from the bureaucracy that could start fresh, with fresh leadership and a fresh set of rules.

So it would really be a Skunk Works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I don’t know if the administration is thinking about it in those terms. But I do think that if you want to make a stepwise change in the technology, we’re going to need a new regulatory commission than the one that we have.

What about these technologies like thorium reactors? That’s not necessarily a new technology, but it’s not a technology that we’re very familiar with.

There is a lot of skepticism around the new technologies, and there are reasons to be. There’s a long history of nuclear power. We could spend a lot of time discussing experiments by the Department of Energy in the 1950s, really going back to the 40s, of different ways to cool the uranium and also to slow the uranium fission process from occurring. There were particular chemical salts that could be mixed in with the uranium that are very promising, like fluoride or beryllium that could be mixed in with the fuel and sort of keep it cool so there would be no meltdown because the fuel itself would be melted. You can also use gas, helium gas or carbon dioxide gas, to keep it cool.

And then there’s water, and the water technology was developed to create submarines, and it’s perfect for submarines because they’re in water, and so there’s never going to be a chance of a meltdown, which is caused by the lack of water. Some people felt like that was an error in moving towards a water-cooled nuclear power system. I think they’re great. They’ve worked really well in the United States.

Contrary to the perceptions that people have had with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima, really only one of those accidents was extremely serious. With Fukushima, it was a huge overreaction. But water technology is the technology we know how to use. I compare the water-cooled nuclear to jet turbines, which we’ve had since the 1940s and 1950s. Our jets and air travel have become much safer, much better, and much more efficient over time, mostly due to what’s called human factors.

Nuclear, that’s still the main event. These new technologies do have promise, but there’s been so much hype around them, and not recently; there’s been hype around them really for decades, that I think that you just have to do both at the same time. We should continue to build the large water-cooled plants, and then we need to accelerate the demonstration and eventual commercialization of the more novel nuclear reactor designs.

There’s been so many things happening with the Trump administration, this record number of his executive orders. Trump declared a national energy emergency, which I frankly had forgotten that we were in that situation here. Of course, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement as expected, this National Energy Dominance Council, which you referred to, and then this executive order protecting American energy from state overreach. And there are others, but is there anything specifically that you’ve noticed, and obviously you follow this very closely, that you think is particularly important? And why an emergency?

The most important thing he did is he made his energy secretary, Chris Wright. Chris Wright is a real shining star from the world of oil and gas development. First of all, he’s very successful in commercial terms, successful in the oil and gas business. But more than that, he has a ton of heart. He’s somebody that has viewed lifting people out of poverty as his life’s mission.

We know that we still have a billion people in the world that are entirely dependent on wood, dung, and biomass for their primary energy source. Two billion people still rely on it for cooking and heating. That’s a brutal life. The kids have to go and gather wood from the forest. And of course, it’s also bad for those ecosystems. Just giving people access to propane fuel to burn for cooking saves time; it massively reduces the smoke in the village huts. He’s somebody that’s always been committed to that.

He’s been committed to bringing cheap, abundant energy to poor countries. He also understands that this is, again, the lifeblood—the power of the United States is in cheap energy—and he’s somebody that really knows the industry and has the confidence of the industry. So personnel policy and Chris Wright was a really intelligent choice by the president, the right choice by the president, who has made excellent choices for his cabinet members in general, I think. So that’s the most important thing.

The other thing to keep in mind is that energy is a national priority. We have 50 states. I’m a big believer in having governance be as local as possible because people know their communities best. But energy is a national priority. We are in a competition, a very serious competition with China, heavily around artificial intelligence, but not only about that. We need to be on equal footing and be very competitive with China and with Europe and other countries in terms of energy supply.

So those measures that you mentioned are Trump making efforts to establish that energy policy has to be a national priority. And these states that come in and are blocking very legitimate forms of oil and gas development, nuclear development, that needs to end. Hopefully, it’ll end at the state level, but the president’s measures will, I think, move things in the right direction.

One of these executive orders was strengthening the reliability and security of the United States electric grid. And this has become something that’s kind of been in the news a bit more in multiple ways. There have been these blackouts in Spain, presumably because of over-reliance on renewables. I’d like you to tell me about that a bit more. But also there are these kill switches in the Chinese inverters that talk about vulnerability, especially if you’re very reliant on the solar panels. So, unpack that for me, please.

The myth of solar is that there are no consequences. It’s good for the environment. There’s no downside to it. And solar is amazing. I mean, when you walk down here, you see little solar panels that we use outside. So, of course, it’s a wonderful, you know, niche technology. The problem with solar fundamentally gets to the physics of energy. All fuels and flows, in the case of sunlight and wind, their environmental impact is determined by the density of those fuels or flows.

So when you go from wood to coal, there’s twice as much energy density, which means a reduction of impact on the natural environment. Plus, you’re taking from underground rather than removing all your trees. You go from coal to oil and natural gas, another huge increase in power density. Then you go to nuclear, and you’re talking, you know, a million times more energy dense. And so when you go back to solar, you have to spread huge amounts of solar panels across landscapes.

Just go and Google search these pictures of it. Anybody that loves the natural environment sees in China they’re just coating entire mountain ranges with these solar panels, which just destroys all life underneath them. As an environmentalist, for me, as a true conservationist, I find that very disturbing because you don’t need to do that with nuclear and natural gas. You can significantly reduce your environmental impact.

The other thing is that we know that China is making its solar panels using effectively slave labor from Uyghurs who are being persecuted in China. And we know that they’re using a huge amount of coal. We know that the data that’s been used, the actual amount of energy that’s used to create solar, has been manipulated. They’ve used numbers from Europe rather than from China. So we know that solar is, in fact, not as environmentally friendly on the just straight pollution level as people have thought. All of that is before you get to the problems created for the electrical grid.

The thing that you have to understand about the electrical grid is that you have to very carefully match supply and demand at all moments. If you have too much energy, too much electricity on the grid, you can blow out transformers, and then that can lead to a whole set of other consequences. If there’s too little energy on the wires, then you get the depowering and the blackout, the entire collapse of the electrical grid, like we saw in Spain a few weeks ago. As soon as it occurred, it was obvious what had happened.

They were at this very high amount of solar on the system, and their electricity and energy fluxes on the grid. With a traditional power plant that’s creating steam or hot air to power turbines that spin, there’s a lot of built-in inertia in those machines so that you’re not going to get those huge fluctuations of electricity on the grid. So it was obvious to everybody that knows anything about electricity that the Spanish blackout was caused by a lack of inertia on the grid, which is a way of saying too much solar, since solar requires these inverters, which convert the electricity from direct current to alternating current, which is what travels across the electrical wires.

The Spanish government has been dishonest in ways that are almost humorous, pretending like they don’t know what caused it, whereas everybody really does know that it’s due to a lack of inertia on the system, which is a serious problem that is not going to be solved by more batteries or more solar. It’s something that you really require huge, heavy steel plants that are really the backbone, the foundation, not just of the fundamental problem in terms of the blackouts.

Now, in terms of this other issue, a completely separate issue, which is that it’s now been revealed that the Chinese who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, both in the United States and Europe, have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches. You might think that sounds like a conspiracy theory. It’s not a conspiracy theory.

There was actually a Chinese solar company that turned off the solar panels and sent up a little message to its users saying, “We’ve turned this off because these solar panels are only authorized to be used in certain countries. They can’t be used in Pakistan, the United States, and a few other countries.” It popped right up on the monitor. It was a huge discussion about it.

We know that the Chinese solar companies, all of which can essentially be used as arms of the Chinese military, there’s really no daylight between them. The Chinese government has made it clear that they can be viewed as extensions of the Chinese security state. They are able to switch off large amounts of solar. And if you are able to do that, then you are able to cause the depowering and thus the blackouts of the grid. How big of a problem is this? We don’t know.

We know that this capacity exists in the inverters. Obviously, the Chinese government wants to continue to be able to sell solar panels to us. I think most national security experts view this as something that the Chinese could do if there was, for example, an invasion of Taiwan and the United States decided to defend Taiwan. The Chinese could potentially trigger blackouts in the United States and Europe.

As crazy as that sounds, that is the reality. In fact, there’s not any debate about that. That’s where we’re at. The only question now is, how is the United States government responding to that? I haven’t yet gotten answers from the Department of Energy, but we’re hoping to get that within a few days, actually.

Give me a picture of how it is that China achieved total dominance in basically this technology, in manufacturing this technology? Because the United States was in a dream world.

We’re in dreamland. Obviously, they’re able to make solar panels cheaper than anywhere in the world, in large part due to the coerced labor from these Uyghur Muslims who are in these concentration camps. Again, not a conspiracy theory. This has been very well reported. That’s where the vast amount of solar cell manufacturing and panel manufacturing is occurring, in those areas.

We know the Chinese government has been massively subsidizing the investment in solar precisely so they can dump the solar panels in other countries to destroy other nations’ indigenous solar manufacturing. Look, we’ve been in a dream world. We’ve imagined that it’s okay to let the Chinese manufacture not just solar, but we’re talking drones, we’re talking critical military technology. Imagine the country that we’re most likely to go to war with or have some wars with, whether proxy wars or direct wars, is the country upon which we’re dependent for our military technologies.

The good news is I think there is a bipartisan agreement now in Washington that that’s a huge problem. The biggest, or maybe one of the biggest, of course, is the fact that most of our semiconductors, which also means our microchips, are being manufactured in Taiwan. So if China takes Taiwan, then we are in very serious trouble. There was a CHIPS Act passed under Biden. It did have bipartisan support. It’s a good thing to create incentives to return semiconductor and chip manufacturing to the United States, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to be self-sufficient.

I do think it’s a hypnotic globalization that we’ve been under. It’s a dream world where we just imagine that globalization is all good and obviously delivers a number of very positive benefits. So many of our products do come from low-cost China, but it just went too far. The pendulum swung way too far in one direction. We are now starting to see it hopefully swinging back in the other direction.

The CCP did this with a whole bunch of very critical industries, notably steel is one of them, right? But also telecom, like Huawei, you know, for national security reasons has been massively subsidized. And there are a whole bunch of countries, think of this, like 140 countries that rely on Huawei for their telecom.

It’s incredible. And of course, there was the, you know, Congress did act to then, you know, restrict U.S. reliance on Huawei. But then Huawei also made the solar inverters or made the inverters that are used in solar projects. So, and we just, the scandals kind of keep going on and on. It turned out that Huawei was the main partner with the government of California in an initiative basically to increase ties between California and China at a time when we were doing a big solar buildout. One of the places that is most vulnerable to a potential Chinese sabotage is California because of our high dependence on solar.

The other maybe unsaid, but should be said part of it is the Chinese have poured a huge amount of money into influencing American politics in terms of its propaganda campaigns, in terms of the spending by the Chinese government directly and indirectly on the American political system. So I think that we have been asleep at the wheel for really decades, arguably 30 years or longer. The fact that just the drones example, the microchips example, certainly the solar inverters example, ought to be a very harsh wake-up call and require some emergency action.

On another note, on the other side of it, these giant transformers that are, I think, manufactured only in China right now for the high voltage grids that, you know, basically to kind of keep the grid together. I’ve kind of understood that one of them was taken apart in some, maybe Los Alamos, I don’t know, somewhere. And some pretty things were found in there that shouldn’t be in there, let’s just say.

Absolutely. They justify the cellular radios in order to provide information in terms of how to manage grid electricity, and there may be some benefit to that, but there’s got to be a technical fix to this. It’s not clear what it will be because there are so many inverters. I think it’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inverters in the United States. So I’m not sure what the solution will be, whether it’s signal jamming or something else, but obviously that’s sort of heavy reliance.

The story from since the 1960s from anti-nuclear activists posing as environmentalists is that somehow, nuclear power, because it was just a few big plants, would make it more vulnerable. That turned out to be completely the opposite. Having these big plants really is a stabilizing factor in the grid. In military terms, they talk about a kind of surface attack area. The surface attack area for solar, because of the low power densities, because of the dilute nature of sunlight, is spread over much larger areas. You don’t have to reduce, I was mentioning before that perfect matching of supply and demand of electricity. You don’t have to reduce supply by very much to depower the electrical grid and send it into cascading failures and blackouts.

Just come to think of it, because this is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, have you tracked at all the CCP’s influence on American media, legacy media, and so forth?

I’m not an expert on it. I’ve only heard about it in part from The Epoch Times and from reading you guys. But certainly, it does seem like there’s a huge amount of it. Obviously, the big story has been TikTok and what it’s been doing. But no, I think it’s a serious concern. I mean, it’s an ongoing information operation. We now know that the Chinese intelligence community is by far the largest intelligence community in the world.

We know that there are a large number of Chinese spies in the United States working at all levels in our universities, in our government agencies. It’s a huge problem. We do want to remain an open society in the United States. That’s why it’s so special, but it is clearly something that we’ve also been asleep at the wheel on.

It’s very difficult because it’s like the things that make open societies, like you said, special is a good word, invaluable and something we want to believe in, right? And support. They can also be weaponized against us and our being to the nth degree.

That’s right, and it is so special. I’ve been going back and rereading my American history and just relearning how special this country was, and in particular the commitment to freedom of speech. But just this commitment to self-governance, it seems like something, and remember there was a whole story in the 1990s, and I bought into it, by the way, which was the whole end of history story that comes out in the late 80s after the fall of communism in the early 90s, the sense was that China and other countries would be moving towards democracy. That is not what occurred.

Democracy is not an emergent effect of prosperity like many people thought it was. It’s not something that emerges necessarily out of modernization. It can, but it really is a foundational value. It’s really got to be in the culture of the people who create that country and the people who come after. And we have to keep reminding each other why it is so special. It never occurred to me that we needed to, you know, continue to teach kids and to teach our kids and to remind each other about what freedom of speech is and why it’s so special and why we have to defend different points of view.

But we clearly do because I don’t think it’s intuitive. What’s intuitive is to make one other person shut up. And we see a lot of that. That’s the intuitive response. That’s the base response. That’s what we call fast thinking. Slow thinking, deliberative thinking is the thinking that protects freedom of speech. And obviously in a social media society, in a highly polarized society, in a highly ideological society, there’s a lot of fast thinking, not enough of that slow thinking that we need in order to defend our freedom of expression.

This is the perfect moment for me to mention this lecture that I watched of yours that you did about Rusty Reno’s 2019 book, “Return of the Strong Gods,” which I kind of had forgotten about. And I just, as I was preparing for this interview, I came across this interview. And by the way, congratulations on being the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. To add to your quite extensive acumen already, you’re now a professor.

It’s a real pleasure. My wife and I are building a home in Austin. We love Austin. It’s really culturally and politically aligned with our values. It’s a very libertarian culture. The parts of it that are liberal are the parts of it that are still liberal, and the parts of it that are more conservative are also the parts of me that are conservative. So it really represents, I think, a really special place. It’s obviously a tech center.

This is a really interesting university. It is so extremely hard to start a new university in the United States that nobody even thinks about doing it. This is a group of very big thought leaders; Bari Weiss from the Free Press, Joe Lonsdale, who’s one of our most successful venture capitalists behind Palantir and a number of other high-tech companies, and Niall Ferguson, who’s a truly great historian out of the Hoover Institute at Stanford.

They felt that we needed a new liberal arts university because of the totalitarianism that has overtaken so many other universities in the United States. So it’s a startup. I just taught my first quarter there from January through March of this year. And it was so special, Jan.

I tell you, you walk into the campus and some student is playing piano and there’s a big atrium and some of their kids are playing chess and they’re debating politics and the very high premium, not just on free speech, but the students themselves, high premium on making sure that people understand both sides of every argument. Like the students would be demanding that of me. Are we really hearing all sides of this? We don’t want to get a single perspective. So that core value has really taken hold in the university. So I’ve got really high hopes for it. The first year is only going to be coming to an end right about now.

I’ve had the opportunity to visit and interview a few key players. I loved everything I saw. Actually, watching this lecture, you said that you expect America to basically start depolarizing in the next 10 to 15 years. That’s fascinating. Before we go there, just tell me a little bit, give me a picture of what this book is about, and then I want to come into why you’re so bullish on depolarization.

With Rusty Reno, his author title is R.R. Reno, and the book is called “The Return of the Strong Gods.” As you mentioned, the book came out several years ago, maybe 2018 or 2019. He is an editor at First Things, which is a very fine journal that has a lot of religious writings, but also a journal of politics. It’s a small book. You can read it in one sitting, but it is maybe the book that best describes the current moment.

What he’s describing is, on the one hand, the rise of nationalism, return of nationalism, most dramatically in the form of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, also the rise of populists and nationalists in Europe. But I think he’s tapping into something deeper too. He basically describes the story where after World War II, the United States and Europe and global leaders quite understandably wanted to pursue a policy of sort of weakening national cultures, national traditions, which they had viewed as the cause of fascism and the driving force behind World War II. They wanted to weaken them and also open up countries and open them to globalization. And that made a lot of sense in 1946, 1947, when the post-war architecture was created, the Bretton Woods Agreements, the international institutions.

Over time, it just went too far. Then you get to the end of communism and after 1990, the bringing in of China into that system with this huge amount of confidence that China would behave like European nations had and moving more towards representative democracy, and things didn’t work out that way. And we saw that globalization both deindustrialized the United States. It also opened up our borders to a very rapid influx of immigration.

On the one hand, the United States is better positioned than any other country in the world to absorb and assimilate immigrants. Europe has had a much harder time doing that. But even here, it just obviously went too far. Donald Trump could not have been reelected a second time had the Biden administration not overreacted by opening up the borders in the ways that they did.

But the strong gods refer to the fact that there’s just something much deeper around national identity, around religious traditions, and around cultural traditions that had for a long time kind of been repressed or put down and have now emerged in ways that the ruling elites don’t even really understand. That’s why they don’t really understand the return of the strong gods.

They think that Trump has just tricked everybody or that the Americans somehow became fascists and all sorts of absurd things. And he’s pointing out that no, there is a true American tradition. There are things like the work ethic, there’s a laissez-faire, libertarian, egalitarianism in the sense of equal opportunity, not equality of outcome, and a strong sense of individualism that makes the United States distinctive as a nation.

Other countries have their own strong gods, but that’s what’s coming back at a time when globalization imagined that it was basically going to erase the differences between countries. Culture is real. The boundaries between cultures are obviously fuzzy, but culture is very real. Now there’s obviously, or not obviously, there can be a dark side to this. You certainly see things that the Trump administration has done that I don’t agree with, things around using what students have said as the basis of denying them a green card. That’s a case where the strong gods, so to speak, trump the liberal or individual enlightenment sort of rights, which are just weaker forces.

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