Michael Shellenberger is Founder-President of Environmental Progress, a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, Dao Journalism Prize Winner, and C.B.R. Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.

Shellenberger is a leading investigative journalist who has broken major stories on crime and drug policy; homelessness; Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires. And he testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the Netherlands.

Michael has been called a “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.

Shellenberger has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road. In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspired Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocated harm reduction policies.

Michael offers testimony to Congress on a range of issues covering free speech, censorship, and the environment. He has testified on AI and censorship (September 2023); climate change and public health (April 2023); Big Tech censorship (March 2023); the Censorship Industrial Complex (March 2023); climate change and the global energy crisis (September 2022); Texas & California electrical grid failures (April 2021); climate change and agriculture (February 2021); climate change and health (August 2020); climate change and energy (July 2020); and nuclear energy (January 2020).