News Corp’s favourite ‘energy expert’ is back, this time with a sketchy Pelosi story

In his pinned tweet, Michael Shellenberger grandly proclaims that he’s the “first reporter” to get to the bottom of the attack on senior Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul by David DePape, concluding that, actually, DePape was motivated more by drugs and homelessness than right-wing animus.

If anything, Shellenberger found, DePape was more reliably left-wing in his views. But while the claim has had a lot of take-up in conservative media, it doesn’t really hold up. Via The LA Times:

Ben Shapiro, on his popular conservative podcast, also read an excerpt from the Substack blog of writer Michael Shellenberger, which has widely circulated online. The writer describes a Berkeley house displaying left-wing flags and signs as the home of Oxane Taub and DePape’s former home.

DePape, however, does not reside there. The criminal complaint states that DePape lived in a garage in the backyard of a home in Richmond.

And of course, DePape’s online history is replete with conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism and election denial.

We note this only because the name Shellenberger rang a bell. Turns out he was rather feted in News Corp’s Australian publications back in 2020 — but not as a reporter. Back then he was, apparently, an environmentalist. And a very sorry one at that.

“On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years,” he wrote in The Australian in July 2020. Positioning himself as a leftist apostate fighting unhelpful hysteria and spruiking nuclear power over renewables, and careful to describe himself as an “energy expert” and not a scientist (because he’s not), he was published in the Oz, put on Sky News with Chris Kenny, and earned the praise of Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt for his trouble.

He was back in Australia last month for CPAC Sydney, arguing renewables are causing energy price rises (although between the booing of mainstream Liberal figures and Teena McQueen saying the Liberal Party’s shellacking at the federal election was good because it got rid of all the “lefties” in the party, he didn’t get quite so much attention).

We look forward to the same level of endorsement from News Corp now that he’s ditched one baseless theory and replaced it with another.