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Speaker 1: From the Opinion Pages of The Wall Street Journal. This is Free Expression with Gerry Baker.

Gerard Baker: Hello, and welcome to Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Thanks very much for joining us. If you're not already, please be sure to subscribe at Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And do kindly leave us a nice review. Free expression is essential to a healthy democracy and each week on this podcast, we aim to contribute by having a wide-ranging and candid conversation with leading practitioners and commentators in the world of politics, business, technology, the arts, and culture, exploring in depth the themes, people, and topics that are shaping our world. This week with Democrats in Congress looking to secure a victory for their plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars promoting green energy. We're going to talk about the grip that the so-called climate crisis seems to have on our modern media, the Democratic Party, our cultural elites, and even now much of the corporate world.My guest is Michael Shellenberger. Michael is a fierce critic of green extremism as we could call it, but he's no right-wing curmudgeon like me. He's a former Democratic candidate for Office in California. He's written extensively on climate change, energy, and politics. In his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, he rejects the idea that the changing climate can only be saved by a massive restructuring of the economy. He argues instead that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological innovation. But his critique of modern progressivism doesn't stop with climate. He's also written extensively on the state of American cities and how left-wing policies and leaders are basically destroying them. Last year, he published San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which looks at how so many of the big cities in America are characterized by violent crime, homelessness, and general disorder. And of course, this all despite progressive's claims that their policies and higher taxes are creating a future that we can all live in.Let me start, if I may. We do seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of what could we call climate catastrophism. Every single time now there's a major weather event, whether it's extremely hot, or it's extremely cold, or we have hurricanes, or rain, or wildfires, it's all attributed to manmade climate change. It's all very apocalyptic and telling us that unless we radically completely transform our economy, eliminating carbon, we're all going to die, essentially in a human-created hell. But let me ask you first, you've written a lot about this, and how did we get here, and why do you think we are so much now in the grip of this kind of extremist language?

Michael Shellenberger: Sure. And thanks for having me, it's great to be with you. I think that you have to go back to the end of the Cold War. So around the late eighties, early 1990s is when climate change emerges as a topic of high concern among political elites, among mostly left and center elites, but even some right-of-center folks were concerned, Margaret Thatcher being one of the most high profile. I think you have to understand that really ever since World War II and arguably before that, a certain sector in society has wanted to view certain things as an apocalyptic threat.We had a really good candidate from 1945 until the end of the Cold War and nuclear war, that was the object of concern for people was the idea that there might be a nuclear exchange in the United States and Soviet Union that could literally end life on the planet. And whether or not you think those apocalyptic fears were overblown or not, after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war went down significantly, everybody agrees on that. And it was in that vacuum into which climate change, which is something that had been discussed and observed and studied for a very long time before the late eighties and early 1990s became the apocalypse du Jour.

Gerard Baker: You're absolutely right. They have prominent conservative politicians and thinkers have argued strongly for measures to mitigate climate change too, Margaret Thatcher was one of them. If you look at the arguments, you look at the debate and you look particularly what especially the climate extremists as I would call them say, it's really all about massive expansion of regulation, massive expansion of the role of the state. The classic authoritarian progressivism, if you like, which tells people how they should be living their lives. So it does seem to me that it's kind of and of course, we can all acknowledge that the climate is changing. We know that, but it does seem to be a really handy tool for those who favor a particularly assertive role for the state and authority, it's larger than anything they've ever been able to get their hands on before in a way, isn't it?

Michael Shellenberger: Absolutely. I mean, I think what's notable is that it didn't have to be that way in the sense that if you look between 2005 and 2020, the United States reduced its carbon emissions, 22%. 61% of that decline was due to the transition from coal to natural gas. There was some government R&D involved, but mostly we replaced coal with natural gas in the United States because gas became cheaper, thanks to hydraulic fracturing, fracking, and a whole set of other expansions of the oil and gas industry that allowed it to occur. And yet the people who say they care the most about climate change and say that's an apocalyptic threat are adamantly opposed to natural gas, have blocked fracking operations. Same story for nuclear power, your nuclear generates effectively zero carbon emissions and yet it's hotly opposed by Greta Thunberg and other people who say that climate change is the end of the world. So it's hard not to conclude that what they're really after is something quite different than carbon emissions because if they wanted carbon emissions, their whole strategy would focus on expanding natural gas and nuclear.

Gerard Baker: Michael, you do agree, and in your writing, you do agree that there's a challenge and the world needs to transition away from some of the more harmful energy that we produce. But exactly as you point out, as you've just said there, we are doing, right? Okay, there have been various agreements, we know Paris and Kyoto and all of these things, but without major interventions by government or international organizations. We've made considerable progress already, haven't we?

Michael Shellenberger: Very significant progress. In fact, most of the trends are going in the right direction. Most people don't realize that carbon emissions globally were flat over the last decade. That only became clear in the middle part of last year when satellite data became available, that showed that there had been less land use change, and therefore less carbon emissions due to land use change. Usually, we're talking about the conversion of forest and grasslands into farms and then the burning that goes along with that. But also because of the emissions reductions from moving from coal to natural gas, and then to a prior extent, this transition from coal to nuclear.So yeah, I mean, the fact is we've been doing a really good job in part because more efficient forms of energy burn cleaner. And we've always wanted to move towards nuclear, for example, the big build-out of nuclear in the West was mostly just to create greater energy security. Those are a more acute problem in Europe, in the United States, we wanted to sort of redeem ourselves for having created such a terrible weapon. But yeah, I mean, you've seen really significant progress, much more reason for optimism than for pessimism.

Gerard Baker: Do you think part of the climate change industry that we see in the extremism is because of a capture of academic, but also nonacademic institutions? It's where the money is, right? If you're a climate scientist and you want a job, and you want to do research, and you want funding for that research, that's where government money in particular and international organizations' money is coming from, isn't it? So it's a self-perpetuating process. It's very, very hard, I think, to be a skeptic about some of this because you just don't get the institutional or financial support that those who favor more aggressive action seem to get.

Michael Shellenberger: Well, that's right. In fact, in Apocalypse Never, I talk about how the National Academy of Science and Engineering in the United States in 1983 came out with a major study on climate change. And it concluded that it was mostly a manageable problem and that if the United States continued to expand natural gas production and nuclear there was really quite low reason to worry. Well, that's not a very good job creator if you've already basically mapped out a way to solve the problem, which is by expanding two very new promising sources of energy, natural gas and nuclear against 1983. That's not very satisfying, both for the people that are in a spiritual quest for apocalypse nor for people that stand to make a lot of money selling solar panels, home weatherization, energy efficiency programs. People selling wind turbines, people like you mentioned in the scientific community, technical community who stood to gain a lot. I mean, you've seen a huge number of institutions, whole think tanks, university, academic research institutes form to deal with the so-called climate crisis. So you've seen a marriage of a kind of political-ideological and financial interests.

Gerard Baker: I want you to talk through some of these specific techno you've talked a little bit about it already with going from cold to natural gas, but some of the sort of scientific-technological innovation that we're seeing. But just one other sort of general thoughts on where we stand here now, which is this question of ESG. ESG again, this is, as I said, in my opening, the perhaps one of the most striking changes in the last 10 or 15 years or so has been the extent to which this climate extremism has captured the corporate world and the financial world. And to a very large extent with this and particularly through things like this phenomenal ESG, environmental, social, governmental, prioritizing investing. You've written about this. It just seem to me that some of that is changing now a little bit that the pressure that some of these huge investment companies were putting on all companies to decarbonize and to really to make that part of an investing strategy. Am I right in thinking that may be starting to recede a little bit?

Michael Shellenberger: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you saw BlackRock being one of the biggest to come out and pretty dramatically change its investment profile as soon as we started headed into a recession. But I think you've seen it collapses from within as well when people start to point out, why do some of ESG funds include oil and gas companies? Why do some exclude Tesla? There's it appears there's no rhyme and reason. I think that ESG reflects the confusion of the conventional wisdom around energy and environment more broadly. So you saw most ESG funds excluded nuclear energy, even though it is the largest source of zero-emissions electricity.When they would ask ESG fund managers, why they excluded nuclear, they would say things like, "Well, because it's somehow tied in nuclear weapons." Well, first of all, it's not clear which of the ESG criteria of any nuclear weapons would even violate. But more to the point civilian nuclear energy has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. They're not used to make the plutonium or enriched uranium and nuclear weapons, the nuclear plants. They share the same name and there's the same basic physical process of splitting atoms. But other than that nuclear power is now widely recognized as a core solution. My view may be the core solution to dealing with the replacement of fossil fuels in order to deal with climate change. So ESG never made any sense and at the end of the day just looked like a way for some fund managers to overcharge their portfolio participants.

Gerard Baker: Michael, give us an overall sense of where the planet is. We know from the official side, from the United Nations, the IPCC, from most governments in the West, most European governments and of course, the Biden Administration and Democrats here really play up the climate crisis, the extreme scenarios, and are aiming for this net zero target. Net zero carbon emissions, as they say, absolutely essential to prevent the world from warming, climate's going to warm significantly. But they say, if we get to net zero by 2050, actually that we need to do that in order to save the planet. What's your sense of actually how significant the threat is, further warming, and what actually can be achieved without such extreme measures?

Michael Shellenberger: Well, I mean, I think climate change is real, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think most metrics have been going in the right direction, become much more resilient to natural disasters over time. I mean, deaths from natural disasters in the United States is usually a few hundred people, nothing close to deaths from many other accidents, car accidents, drug overdoses. And that's going to be the case around the world, especially as countries develop. All else being equal, we wouldn't want to change the temperature by very much in either direction because we do have our civilization, our farming, our nature reserves all built around this particular temperature band. That being said, it'd be better to get a little warmer than a little cooler. Nonetheless, it's good to keep that temperature increase from being too high.I mean, I think we're in a really interesting moment here. I mean, the Democrats basically got everything they wanted. I mean, they're going to complain about not getting some more money for transmission lines and the ability to control state electrical grids. But I think the real issue is what is the future of American energy policy? And in the Cold War period, the post-Cold War period, the last 30 years, the view of Republicans was basically all of the above, for Democrats it's been renewables. We're in the worst energy crisis in 50 years. The United States is in a unique position to be able to provide oil and gas, export oil and gas to our Asian and European allies. We should be doing a lot more of that. If we do it right and we take a page from what Putin did, you'd expand nuclear power in the United States, you would use a lot of that nuclear power to replace the gas that we're using for electricity.You would export a bunch of the gas to Asia and Europe so they can survive. Putin's stranglehold over energy, which really extends to oil and gas and not just to Europe, but really the whole global market now. We've just seen Putin now starting to manipulate some of the OPEC members in Saudi Arabia. So I think a vision of energy abundance is the right direction. And that means a much bigger role for nuclear and natural gas. I think in that vision, you can see a solution to reducing carbon emissions as well. But I do think that climate change needs to be put in its place within a larger energy abundance agenda

Gerard Baker: In practical terms, again, if you listen to the people who dominate the debate right now, we shouldn't be flying in aircraft. We should all be in electric vehicles, if indeed we are in any vehicles at all, we should all stop eating meat. In practical terms, so tell us actually if we follow the kind of policies that you recommend, how radical a change will it really be for us? I mean, do we really don't have to wear the hair shirt here and transform our lives in the way that the extremists seem to want us to do it.

Michael Shellenberger: Well, quite the contrary, it's actually this contrast I'm wanting to paint is that we need an energy abundance vision and strategy, not an energy scarcity strategy. We've had energy scarcity for the last year, year and a half. That's been in the agendas to get more energy scarcity. And the situations of energy scarcity, we actually revert back to burning more coal. In a situation of great energy abundance, which is the situation the United States had been in really over the last 12 years, thanks to the fracking revolution, energy prices came down because natural gas was so abundant and carbon emissions came down.And in fact, this is not a surprising pattern at all. It's a transition from wood to coal by making coal more abundant and plentiful and cheaper that we were able to reduce the indoor air smoke from burning wood and dung, and that same pattern around the world. So I think it's quite the opposite. That's why I say the people who are out there screaming end of the world from climate change, they're really prosecuting a religious agenda, which has to do with historical guilt, fear of the apocalypse. Like you said, wanting to wear a hair shirt, engage in a kind of aestheticism, self-flagellation. They're after something very different from what actually is required to reduce carbon emissions and provide abundant energy that's required for economic growth and prosperity worldwide.

Gerard Baker: What role do you see for renewables? There's been much debate obviously about, you've talked a lot about nuclear power and natural gas, but renewables as a proportion of our total energy supply has been rising. I mean, we know that we're familiar with the problems though there, that vast amount of land needed for things like wind farms and solar farms, the unreliability, the intermittent nature of some of that. But I mean, is it realistic to think that we could push up the proportion of our energy supply from renewables significantly?

Michael Shellenberger: We could push it up a bit more, but I mean, you have to look at what's going on around the world is that we're in a crisis of too much renewables. Germany had too much renewables, its electricity is now the most expensive in Europe, and it became dependent on Russia for reliable fuels, mostly natural gas because it depended so much on these weather-dependent renewables. In the Western parts of the United States first, but now increasingly in the Midwest of the United States, we're running into potential electricity shortages. That's been a consequence of becoming overly reliant on weather-dependent renewables, namely solar panels and wind turbines. The response in some situations has been positive, or at least from my point of view, the Governor of California has effectively decided to keep our last nuclear plant operating, not incidentally out of climate change concerns, so he may say that's part of it, but really it's because we were facing blackouts due to over-reliance on renewables and over-reliance on natural gas, which we didn't have enough of either.So particularly at a period where I think you're going to see elevated natural gas prices for the foreseeable future, particularly if the United States does what it should, which is to aid Europe in Asia, by exporting more of our gas, we're going to have more expensive gas. That's going to be good for nuclear in the short to medium term, but I think longer term, it raises real questions about what kind of an electric grid are we trying to create with all this unreliable weather-dependent energy. You always have to have backup sources of power, it's really one-to-one in terms of your solar and wind. So you end up creating basically a layer of renewables on top of a reliable power grid. It just makes energy much more expensive and difficult to manage.

Gerard Baker: Finally, on this energy question, we've seen this year, the unraveling of so much of the kind of basis on which energy policy in Europe and some extent America has been driven for the last 20 years with the crisis over the War in Ukraine and the sharp spike in both natural gas and oil prices as a result. Do you think at a political level, we might be changing and coming around more to your view, actually the disaster that we've really seen this year and the extent to which our policies have been revealed to be utterly kind of ruining us. Do you think that's changing the debate?

Michael Shellenberger: Oh, it definitely is. I mean, you see it most dramatically in Germany right now where a large majority of Germans are now in support of nuclear power, once again. This was a country that my pro-nuclear allies had tried to persuade me to give up on just a few years ago because Germans were so dogmatically opposed to nuclear power. So the energy crisis has really woken up the Germans. It's happened like I mentioned in California, my home state where the anti-nuclear movement really begins in the 1960s and seventies, those attitudes have changed to become more pro-nuclear. I think we're seeing many people wake up to the limitations of solar and wind and their weather-dependent nature.So, I think we're at a high point of the renewables' mania and some much greater appreciation of natural gas, much greater appreciation of nuclear. I think the ball is in the court of Republicans and to some extent moderate Democrats who have had some concerns in the past. But I think at a kind of all of the above free market view, I think as the world reverts back to nationalism and we see China and Russia growing closer as Russia sends more of its fuel towards China, rather than towards Europe, as Asia and Europe look increasingly to the United States as a supplier, less resort for its natural gas and oil. I think we're going to see a kind of repolarization along ideological lines between the West and the East. And I think that is going to mean that we're going to need to double down on nuclear and natural gas, if only to be competitive globally with Russia and China.

Gerard Baker: We must take a short break there, but when we come back, we'll have more with Michael Shellenberger. Particular, we'll be talking about how progressives are ruining American cities.Welcome back. I'm talking with Michael Shellenberger. Let's move on because this topic you've written particularly extensively on recently is the state of American cities and particularly the role that progressive policies have played in the ruination of so many of these cities. Obviously, the last two years have been traumatic times for many American cities. We've seen the lockdowns from COVID, COVID itself obviously, we've seen the protests and the wake of George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter. We've seen this surge in crime in many, many years. It's almost as though we're kind of tied as receded years and years of strong growth and years and years of prosperity and actually declining crime rates, all that sort of receded.And we're now kind of left with this detritus that we're seeing as a result of these policies in so many cities. One response you get from the press, by the way, it's always not as bad as all that actually things are fine, but the title of your book, San Fransicko, I think absolutely perfectly captures the state of that particular city, but also some American cities. So what particularly are these policies that are leading to this damage and how bad is the problem of urban America?

Michael Shellenberger: It's worse than people think. I mean, I work on two issues really, energy and the environment on the one hand, crime versus homelessness on the other. And on the first things are going much better than people realize. The trends are much more going in the right direction in terms of energy and the environment than people realize. Drugs, crime, and homelessness is much, much worse than people realize. It's going to be very difficult to bring down crime, deal with the drug epidemic, and deal with the homelessness crisis. In fact, it's actually just spread and got worse in going into other cities. What happened during the pandemic was like so many other trends, an acceleration and intensification of preexisting trends.Those trends included de-policing certain areas, certain crimes, reducing consequences for illegal and inappropriate behaviors. By which I mean, some of the kind of we call them quality of life behaviors, but things like public defecation, urination, petty theft. Those aren't crimes that grab headlines, but they erode the fabric of a city and also deprive mentally ill people and drug addicts the interventions that they had previously received to get into treatment, to get the help they needed.I think the other thing that was going on is really starting with the Black Lives Matter protest. In 2015, we saw a demoralization of the police and a pullback. They called it the Ferguson effect after the protest in Ferguson Missouri, where the police would pull back from ordinary policing, including the investigation and just the deterrence of homicides. And then the result was an embodiment of the criminal element. And I think what is interesting because George Soros, the billionaire financier who had financed a lot of the efforts to de-police certain crimes, he wrote a defensive op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, he said he did acknowledge the withdrawal of police from policing as one of the factors behind higher crime. And I thought that was very interesting that he was willing to acknowledge that, but he didn't acknowledge that part of it, which is of course that the withdrawal of police is what emboldens criminal behavior.So you've seen really just a breakdown of social order in a number of cities. Obviously, San Francisco, Los Angeles are the worst, but you've seen it in New York as well, a significant increase in people being pushed onto the subway tracks, a significant increase of behavioral disorders as they get called by people with addiction, and mental illness. And all of that on top of the fact that we never really had a proper psychiatric care system, we had psychiatric hospitals that we really shut down between the fifties and 1980s. So it's a crisis point, drug overdose deaths rose from 17,000 in the year 2000 to 107,000 this year. So we're in a psychiatric crisis in my view, and we haven't really even come to grips to what's going on.

Gerard Baker: We've been very familiar with a lot of the opioid-related death. And a lot of that is not actually, perhaps not even so much big American cities, we associate that perhaps more with sort of smaller cities across the country. I mean, that seems to be the result of a number of factors, but in what sense is it a result of progressive policies? How is that fueling that crisis?

Michael Shellenberger: The underlying cause is a loosening of strictness around law enforcement, but also around social values. I see it as sort of a single phenomenon. So you saw the overprescription of opioids, pharmaceutical companies certainly deserve a lot of blame for that, so do medical doctors. But the ethos was that we were being too tough on people and that we were under treating pain. To some extent, I think that's true. I think there's another part of it though, that we were not properly treating in psychiatric problems, mental illness. And to some another extent, I think we were justifying people becoming drug addicts out of the typical reasons people do, alienation social isolation, loneliness, but also just because people wanted to have a good time. Well then they switched to heroin and they switched to fentanyl. So by 2017, you had 70,000 people dying from drug overdoses, so it was already up from the 17,000 in the year 2000.But then you had this acceleration of fentanyl. I will say there's another drug that has been absolutely devastating that we don't talk about enough probably and that's methamphetamine. That had been increasing at a pretty incremental basis, really from the 1950s when it was being used as a street and including as a prescription drug. But methamphetamine is contributing significantly to the behavioral disorders that we're seeing in the cities. So you see people in psychotic states, screaming at invisible enemies, engaging in physical attacks and harassment. When people are psychotic, we don't know if it's due to schizophrenia or from methamphetamine. But the increased amount of it has to be driven to a large extent by methamphetamine abuse, because schizophrenia we know is almost certainly a genetic triggered by environmental factors. Whereas methamphetamine has become much more widespread and its use and it disorders associated with it.

Gerard Baker: What is it that's driving this epidemic, all these things you talk about, this epidemic of mental health as you see it, now what's behind it? I must say you paint a very, very vivid and rather bleak picture, what's driving it and what can be done to reverse it?

Michael Shellenberger: I mean, a big part of it is just going too soft on addiction and on homelessness. And I don't say that to mean most addicts don't need to go to prison for example, but there need to be consequences for their behaviors. Certainly we should not be giving them money and normalizing the use of these really intoxicating and dangerous drugs. But we do know that you have to have consequences for behaviors, otherwise you'll get more of those behaviors. It's now become very mainstream, is this idea of harm reduction, which carries the idea that nothing should be done to dissuade people from addiction or from the use of these really dangerous drugs. Now, it's true that many people, arguably most people can experiment with all kinds of drugs and not form addictions, but a large percentage of people that do use opioids or methamphetamine end up forming some sort of substance use disorder.As we call it, end up becoming addicts, stop working, lie, steal and cheat from family and friends, eventually get kicked out of their friends and family's homes. That's the basic pattern of how people end up in tents in the street, feeding their addiction, begging for money, or stealing what they call boosting women turn to sex work. It's just a breakdown of civilization at a fundamental level that we're not enforcing consequences to those behaviors. And instead, the tendency has been to view the people that are suffering from addiction as victims, and to be sure many of them are victims and many of them become victims because of their addiction. But that's not a reason not to have consequences for illegal or inappropriate public behaviors, including public campaign, including public defecation. Yeah, it's just this sort of relaxation of social norms and laws.I trace it all the way back to the fifties in my research, we were just much stricter about these things in the past. And you find conservative cities are much more strict than liberal cities. Doesn't have to be that way. I mean, if you go to Amsterdam or Lisbon, most countries in Europe just don't allow this kind of widespread homelessness among drug-addicted or mentally ill people that we allow. So there's also a kind of libertarianism too. If I had to kind of give it a single title, I guess I would call it left-libertarianism, you might call it a kind of anarchism. That's really justified as a kind of victim ideology, but also by people that really just think civilization that are against Western civilization that really think that our system of liberal democratic capitalism is wrong. And I think they have been quite willing to put on display and allow these kinds of inappropriate and quite ill behaviors in public because they see them as manifesting the overall inherent evil of our civilization.

Gerard Baker: Where do we start? I mean, where do we at least start to turn back this tide? Is it simply as you imply that about reasserting the kind of policies and values and practices that actually we used to have when we didn't have these problems? Whether it's better law enforcement, whether it's better prosecution instead of some of this sort of crazy George Soros-funded prosecutors who don't seem to want to prosecute crime, whether it is enforcement on issues like homelessness and drug abuse. I hate to say, but is it kind of that simple, is that the direction we need to go?

Michael Shellenberger: Yeah, I think it does start there. I mean, I think there's big opportunities for new political actors, frankly in either party or a new party to seize on. It starts with an affirmation of what we call civilization. And civilization is based on institutions and those include cities and cities require policing. And I think there's something here that speaks to the fact that all neighborhoods have a right to public safety and public cleanliness, including poor and working class neighborhoods. So for Republicans that are ambitious to win over more poor working class and minority neighborhoods, it's a great issue for them. I also think that it requires an affirmation of the nation and in part, because the contrast between the United States and the alternatives, really the contrast between the West and the alternatives has not been more dramatic for at least 30 years, maybe longer Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, China's mistreatment of the weaker Muslims.I think it's more evident now to Americans, what makes Western civilization special than it had been for many decades, the idea that we were all going to kind of unite in a single world, in a single system, that's pretty much gone now. So that even progressives, Democrats are seeking ways to isolate Russia, we saw Nancy Pelosi fly to Taiwan. And I think there's a sense in which America is special. It is sort of the anchor, it's the heavyweight among the Western nations. So I think reaffirming the value of civilization, reaffirming the specialness of the United States as the protector of civilization of what we call liberal democratic Western civilization is important.And that civilization requires rules, it requires law and order, it requires institutions. I think if the Republicans need to move in a particular direction, I think it would be away from, I think, a kind of knee-jerk affirmation of free markets above everything else. I think the nation has to come first and that's going to require some sort of system of psychiatric and addiction care that we just have never really put in place in the United States. Most of Europe put it in place after World War II, we never did. So I think there's room here for new political actors, whether they're Democrats or Republicans to affirm a pro-civilization, pro-American agenda that has some affirmation as well of some universal institutions and systems, including psychiatric care, but also things like policing and the value of cities.

Gerard Baker: Michael Shellenberger, thank you very much indeed for joining us on Free Expression.

Michael Shellenberger: Thanks so much for having me.

Gerard Baker: That's it for this week's episode of Free Expression with me Gerry Baker from The Wall Street Journal opinion pages. Thanks for listening. Please do join us again next week for another exploration of the issues driving our world. Thanks and goodbye.

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How Progressives Caused a Climate Panic and Ruined Cities - Opinion: Free Expression - WSJ Podcasts - The Wall Street Journal