This is Part 1 of a three-part series titled: “Michael Barnard: Exposing Anti-Hydrogen Media Bias – Part 1 of 3 – Barnard’s CV & Journalistic Style” In this section, the topic and thesis statement for the series are introduced, along with Barnard’s curriculum vitae and journalistic modus operandi. We also explore how Barnard fits into the genesis of the anti-hydrogen media narratives that began a media blitz in October 2013. In “Part 2 of 3 – Heavy Ground Transportation: Rail, Bus, and Truck” we examine how Barnard misleads readers into viewing batteries and hydrogen as competing technologies rather than complementary ones. In “Part 3 of 3 – Critical Minerals, China’s Coal Economy, and Fair Trade” we explore the foundation of the global clean energy economy and China’s near-total monopoly on raw mineral production and metal refining that underpins the battery, magnet, solar PV, silicon microchip, and electric motor industries. Each part stands alone, but the report was originally written as one long report and later divided into three parts to better fit your reading budget:  Part 1 is ~7,500 words & takes about 30 to 35 minutes to read, Part 2 is ~8,500 words & takes about 35 to 40 minutes to read, and Part3 is ~8,750 words and takes about 45 minutes to read.

Topic

Michael Barnard’s constant attacks on hydrogen for over 11 and half years at Cleantechnica lack objectivity and journalistic integrity.  The best way I can think of to explain the topic of this series about Michael Barnard’s journalism is with an analogy to a classic line in Shakespeare’s famous play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.  A guard named Marcellus famously says in Act 1, Scene 4: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”.  The line conveys a sense that corruption or moral decay is festering beneath the surface of a seemingly orderly society.  Marcellus’ role as a guard is a small one in the story, but Shakespeare often gave key lines to small or obscure characters in his famous plays.  RMP is a small non-profit dedicated to protecting freshwater resources, and like Marcellus, we play a small but important role in energy journalism.  RMP helps the sustainable energy transition by exposing bad energy information published by people like Michael Barnard, Cleantechnica, and his gang of actors pictured in the featured image.  Exposing bad actors in sustainable energy journalism, like Michael Barnard, is part of RMP’s overall objective of protecting fresh water resources in Michigan and around the world.

RMP got our start in energy research by learning about how oil & gas drilling works.  We learned by communicating directly with petroleum geologists at Michigan’s MDEQ (now called the EGLE).  Two other volunteers and I started reading literally hundreds of Michigan driller’s logs, well summaries, and well completion records.  We began as a small group of three concerned citizens in 2008 when High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (HVHF) came to Michigan.  We wanted to understand if Michigan’s fresh water was being protected & used wisely for Michigan’s economic future.  The oil industry was propagating information about HVHF being ‘no big deal’ and no different than conventional fracking into Michigan’s Antrim shale that has been going on over 50 years.  The oil industry created a marketing arm for fracking called Energy In Depth that launched a year later in 2009 and still publishes today.

The information we were researching about HVHF activity in Michigan and across the USA was not matching the information being broadcast by EID and we were learning through our extensive research that HVHF was very different than conventional fracking.  While much of the information EID was publishing was supported by indisputable facts, things were being omitted that were misleading without context.  For example, an average Antrim Shale frack well uses about 50,000 gallons of Michigan freshwater in a 1,500 foot deep well while an HVHF frack well into Michigan’s Collingwood Shale used on average over 10,000,000 gallons of water into a well bore over two miles long.  That’s like someone saying a whale and a mouse are the same thing because they’re both mammals but leaving out key context about size.  Something was rotten about EID’s reporting.

RMP has been researching and writing about energy ever since 2009 with a keen eye for disambiguating good information from misleading information.  EID’s agenda is clear but at least they are who they say they are: they are America’s oil & gas industry.  Barnard operates like EID in many respects but promotes electrifying everything, which is the opposite narrative pushed by the oil industry.  While EID operates as a mouthpiece for the American Petroleum Institute—with identifiable affiliations, organizational constraints, and a clear industry agenda, Barnard operates somewhat independently.  Barnard is untethered to any institution, which affords him more freedom but also results in a lack of objectivity, accountability, and journalistic integrity.  Barnard publishes valid information in many respects, but he also uses misleading tactics: omitting key context, subtlety peppering in false statements, making illogical leaps to extreme future energy scenarios, and attacking or smearing anyone whose work does not support the very specific narrative he promotes.  Something is rotten in the state of Cleantechnica.  And if Cleantechnica were akin to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Michael Barnard is playing the role of King Claudius.

Introduction

Michael Barnard is a prolific publisher of anti-hydrogen articles for Cleantechnica.com.  He has published over 1,140 articles and counting for CT with the very first in February of 2014.  He has already published over 100 articles since I began my research into his history for this post in June 2025.  Over 200 of Michael’s articles (~20%) have the keyword hydrogen in the title making it the #1 keyword in his titled works behind #2 keyword Tesla, and #3 keyword China. It’s not ironic or surprising that my research into Michael Barnard led me to realize he and Michael Liebreich work together as colleagues in preaching their anti-hydrogen gospel.  This exercise of diving into Barnard’s work, as opposed to putting him on mute for so long, has been therapeutic in a way as it has helped me to see so clearly Barnard’s modus operandi and understand how “anti-hydrogen” voices like Michael Barnard, Michael Liebreich, and many others form an affiliation of support that attempts to add credibility to their anti-hydrogen narrative.

Zachary Shahan, the chief editor at Cleantechnica, edits Michael Barnard’s articles before publication and is a key linchpin in that he brings folks like Michael Barnard and Michael Liebreich into the Cleantechnica hydrogen smear machine style of bad journalism. Shahan’s Cleantechnica amplifies voices like Barnard’s and Liebreich’s as well as the voices of their cohorts.  This cabal of credentialed academics, engineers, journalists, and authors (see featured image) aims to lend credibility and objectivity to a shared narrative, but it’s contrived and unconvincing.  Something is rotten beneath the surface.

As a long-time hydrogen advocate, I have been taking information into account like that published by Barnard, Liebreich, Shahan, et al and distilling it for over 11 and a half years.  It’s time to demonstrate how Barnard connects to this “hydrogen smear machine” and take on this exercise of organizing examples of the key tenets of Barnard’s anti-hydrogen narrative. I will illustrate the key role Barnard plays in downplaying how hydrogen fits into energy conversations that influence policy makers in Western countries like mine (USA) and his (Canada).  I will use detailed footnoting of the reams of information Barnard has published as a necessary step to demonstrate these examples are in Barnard’s own words and actions. I will show that even though he publishes thousands of words each week, everything he writes can be boiled down to a simple and repeating pattern.  You don’t need to read all the references and footnotes unless you want to dig in deep, but they are there to add substance to this post by using Michael Barnard’s own words to demonstrate my thesis.

If you are a hydrogen ‘anti’ like Barnard and you’re reading this post to satiate your incredulity for hydrogen advocacy, welcome.  I don’t expect I will change many people’s opinions, but maybe I can get just one of you to stop for just a minute or two and think, it’s the only thing I ask of you.  I will propose to you what I think are some objective observations & fair questions to ask and encourage you to answer them for yourself honestly.  I ask that you think about how complex and enormous the energy & industrial chemical industries are on a global scale.  RMP submits there is no one technology that solves our sustainable energy challenges and there are multiple solutions that will work alongside one another together.

Thesis Statement

RMP will demonstrate Michael Barnard follows an anti-hydrogen narrative that became popularized in late 2013 by Elon Musk.  This post will look at four basic tenets thematic throughout Michael Barnard’s published history at Cleantechnica and on his podcast Redefining Energy:

1. Always support Tesla & spin or discredit any negative news about Tesla
2. Always attack hydrogen and argue that it can never and will never be used in transportation
3. Never say anything bad about China & downplay China’s global dominance in every single hydrogen and “new energy” market segment.
4. Wind, solar, and batteries will solve all the world’s energy issues now, and we need to act fast to electrify everything and buy these products that have supply chains utterly dominated by China.

RMP will show how if any person or organization says anything that goes against the four tenets above, Michael Barnard will attack those authors or representative organizations shamelessly and relentlessly.   I will demonstrate with multiple examples how Barnard always stays within this narrative and has no qualms about libeling respected research institutions if their publications are not within the parameters of his basic narrative tenets.  I will also demonstrate how Michael Barnard’s predictions do not make logical sense and why they differ so much from the well over 60 countries, including all G8 members, that have national hydrogen strategies in place as can be confirmed from multiple authoritative sources .^{[1] [2]}

History of Michael Barnard for Context:

Résumé & Pre-hydrogen Personal Blog

While Michael Liebreich talked so much about his personal life I had to leave information on the cutting room floor, Michael Barnard is the opposite.  Barnard doesn’t share much about his personal life on the internet, but rather shares a curated image of the professional journalist & consultant he wants to be viewed as.  I could only glean little bits about Barnard’s background here and there from spending time listening to his podcasts and other podcasters that have interviewed him.  Michael is from North Bay, Ontario^[3-1] which is about 200 miles north of Toronto with a population of about 50,000.  North Bay is surrounded by forests & lakes and ~75% of the people speak English only and ~25% are bilingual French & English speaking.

Michael Barnard loves to gamble and Texas Hold’Em is his game.  He claims to have played 1,000’s of hours of Hold’Em at casinos in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.  He credits the game with improving his negotiation skills to score himself a larger salary.  In March of 2001, Michael was on a business trip in LA working on a project with KNX technology.  He rented a red Mitsubishi Spyder convertible during the trip and played some Hold’Em at the Parkwest Bicycle Casino.  On that same trip, he bought a plane ticket for his girlfriend Carolyn to fly down to meet him, but her flight was to Las Vegas.  He drove the Spyder top-down at 160km/hour across the desert from LA to Las Vegas to meet her and made her his second wife on April Fool’s day 2001.  He & Carolyn got hitched at a drive-thru wedding chapel on the Las Vegas strip.  He bought the wedding with witness package and paid an extra $10 for a polaroid wedding photo.  He keeps the single wedding polaroid in a full-size wedding album on his coffee table for humor.^[4]

Looking at Barnard’s Linkedin employment history is confusing compared to most corporate types like me or most professionals in general.  Michael lists himself as a student at the Unversity of Toronto from 1988 to 1995.  He lists his first job at CIBC from 1989 to 1999 with overlap to his time at University of Toronto.  In 1999, he moved to Vancouver to be self-employed for almost 4 years until landing his second “regular” paycheck to paycheck professional job at IBM in 2002.  He sticks with IBM in Vancouver for 8 years before making the move back to Toronto from 2010 to 2012.  This is when Michael starts to live abroad.

In 2012, Michael says that he works in São Paulo, Brasil.  Interestingly (to me anyway) he doesn’t really mention Brasil in any of his podcasts aside from a brief passing reference.  As we get to end of 2012 on Michael’s LinkedIn career chronology, work history becomes more difficult to follow.  He lists himself working at IBM still, but now in late 2012, he resides in Singapore. While I don’t recall him mentioning his time in Brasil much at all, he speaks about Singapore frequently and fondly on his podcasts.  Michael writes about Singapore for the first time when he starts blogging profusely in early 2013 at his new blog site called Barnard On Wind [which is now 404].  I submit this is when Michael found his calling and what he truly loves to do:  write about energy topics in a guerilla style of debate.

Michael says of his time in Singapore “I studied Mandarin while living in Singapore for two years, and worked closely with Chinese nationals both in Singapore and in China.” ^[5]  From this point on in Michael’s Linkedin timeline, there are no more typical paycheck to paycheck jobs.  Michael starts his pro-wind blog from Singapore in February of 2013 and posts an article just about every day.  If you look through the archived posts, you see it’s where he first developed the guerilla style of writing that he still uses today.  Everything on his wind blog sings the praises of wind energy for Ontario; where wind mills are now everywhere in 2025.  If you were speaking up about health concerns related to wind mills back in 2013, Michael would go on the attack to discredit you and always influence further investments in windmills.  His tactics were very harsh and Michael made many enemies.  There are still posts living on the internet long after Michael’s blog has been archived which talk about Michael’s shady character and meanness in mocking people who could no longer live in their homes because of windmill related noise problems.

In 2013, when Michael said he started meeting and working with Chinese nationals in Singapore, he also started to heavily promote windmill technology completed dominated by a Chinese vertical supply chain.  In 2013, four of the world’s top ten turbine manufacturers—Sinovel, Goldwind, United Power, and Mingyang—were based in China.^[6]  In fact, eight of the world’s top fifteen wind turbine producers in 2013 were Chinese companies.^[7]  By 2013, China’s push to export windmill technology abroad was already underway, driven in part by market involution, the cycle of escalating domestic competition that compels firms to seek external markets once growth opportunities slow domestically. Over the past twelve years, this same pattern has come to define other areas of renewable energy for Chinese producers, from battery electric vehicles to solar panels, and in 2025 involution remains a central challenge as saturation of domestic demand heightens the pressure for China to expand markets like solar and batteries overseas.^[8] The windmill technology Barnard was pushing in Ontario, Canada in 2013 was being manufactured and exported by Chinese companies who were experiencing market involution.

Michael mocked people like Dr. Nina Pierpoint and Ms. Sarah Laurie aggressively and ruthlessly when they voiced concerns about windmill setbacks from people’s homes.  Mary Kay Barton penned a piece in September 12, 2013 for MasterResource taking on Michael and calling him out as a shill for the windmill industry.  Mary Kay led with the heading “Pro-Wind Media Controlling the Message” before proceeding to write about Barnard’s unethical moderation of comments on his personal blog.  She explains Barnard’s style of comment moderation as what I consider standard protocol for someone who can be considered unfair & unethical.

Mary Kay learns that by trying to post comments on Michael’s blog, she has ended up in Michael’s funhouse that operates like M.C. Escher’s house of staircases.  She laments having commented on Barnard’s blog, only to be forced to jump through a series of hoops of Michael’s own design just to see her comment appear.  After all that struggle to get her comment approved [by Michael], Mary Kay Barton writes “However, he refused to post the facts contained within my follow-up comment and question, claiming they were not ‘relevant’ to the discussion about property values”.  My research at RMP into Barnard for this post gave example after example, like Mary Kay Barton’s example, of how I am not the first person to spot Barnard’s unethical journalistic behavior.

Michael had seemingly found his passion in writing about energy topics and engaging in online debate.  He was posting almost every day with indications he must have spent hours preparing substantiation for his arguments.  Barnard was good at getting people worked up and he liked it.  Read this excerpt from Mary Kay’s article pointing out that Michael Barnard emailed Dr. Nina Pierpoint and Dr. Calvin Martin to mock them for trying to hold him to account.  If MasterRersource had gone 404, which is common for long running websites, I would have never have found this 12-year-old piece penned by Barton.  Mary writes:

It was 2013 and Michael was developing a style of riling people up with no qualms about playing by his own rules of bare-fist journalism.  He had found his calling.  You can almost picture him smile and crack his knuckles over his keyboard as he gears up to humiliate his next victim.  Not much has changed since 2013 in terms of Michael’s writing style on his wind blog.  It should be noted; Michael Barnard had not once blogged about hydrogen in the entire history of his ‘Barnard on Wind’ blog according to the archive in the wayback machine with over 50 posts.  Michael was shilling for wind in early 2013 and never mentions hydrogen in any of his posts.  Michael hadn’t mentioned hydrogen once because he hadn’t been recruited into the anti-hydrogen media sphere yet.  In fact, the anti-hydrogen media bubble didn’t exist yet because the “anti-hydrogen” narrative didn’t get backing until later in 2013.

It is now September of 2013 on our story’s timeline, and Toyota had just announced a series production hydrogen fuel cell car coming soon and Hyundai was already building the hydrogen ix35 Tuscon.  If you work in the auto industry your whole career like me, you know it is a big deal to launch the first series production hydrogen FCEV from the ground up.  Making a dedicated platform for a low volume hydrogen car is more involved than putting a fuel cell system in a Hyundai Tuscon or a Chevy Equinox.  This would be the very first car purpose built from the ground up with production tooling for a hydrogen refueling infrastructure that didn’t exist yet.  Automotive tooling is very expensive and must be amortized over long term business horizons of high volume runs to achieve a positive return on investment.  Knowing your financial business case will have lower volume sales means you know the costs of production tooling & fixtures will be amortized over a much smaller run.  Toyota’s gambit to introduce hydrogen to the world was expensive and was meant to put environmental goodwill over initial profits.

Toyota, who had introduced the world to the battery powertrain in the name of environmental stewardship twenty years earlier, wanted to introduce the world to true sustainability with a symbol they named the Mirai, which in Japanese means ‘future’.  Who could have predicted at the time such a bold and expensive venture to help move the world toward sustainability would soon have thousands of people shouting it down with pitchforks and torches like Barnard and his followers?  BEV supporters were about to be influenced to think that hydrogen is bad and only batteries are good.  A marketing campaign to trash hydrogen & praise a “BEV only” mindset was being developed from the moment Toyota announced the Mirai. The folks displayed in this post’s featured image have played key parts in undermining support for hydrogen since October 2013; they are all key influencers of Barnard’s same narrative.

Late 2013 is a key time for the anti-hydrogen narrative and the media sites that would soon get the memo to promote it.  Elon Musk needed to influence the narrative around green vehicle technology away from any limelight shining toward Toyota’s Mirai about to be introduced in Tokyo.  It was now October 22^nd, 2013, just about one month after Toyota’s announcement of the Mirai.  Elon Musk was visiting a Tesla service center in Germany when he took his very first public swing at hydrogen with this comment: “Oh god, a fuel cell is so bullshit. Hydrogen is suitable for the upper stage of rockets, but not for cars.” ^[10]  This was the very first public shot from Musk to his millions of followers & retail investors disparaging hydrogen technology literally one month after Toyota’s announcement.

I had been working at a company that manufactured and integrated the Tesla Model S automated robotic tooling in Novi Michigan since 2010 at this point in 2013.  The company I worked for was currently working on the Model X tooling when Musk made this first anti-hydrogen comment.  The company I worked for would win the Tesla Model 3 business a couple years later as well.  This was the first moment I looked at Elon Musk’s Tesla, who’s company was giving us $100’s of millions of dollars’ worth of government subsidized business in Detroit, and thought what was that about?  Who is this guy?  I had barely taken much notice of Musk up to this point and had never heard of Michael Barnard.  RMP had been following clean energy blogs and publications from every corner of the internet for several years since 2008, and to the best of our knowledge, we had not come across any meaningful anti-hydrogen coverage before October 2013. RMP had been tracking oil companies across Michigan for five years already at that point and actively advocating for hydrogen; if there had been any significant anti-hydrogen narratives circulating online, we likely would have encountered them. There was practically no anti-hydrogen news on the internet at this point up through September 2013 when Toyota introduced the Mirai.  Elon’s public disparagement video in October 2013 effectively marked the kickoff of mainstream anti-hydrogen narratives.

While the “anti-hydrogen” narrative was not the primary objective of Musk cross promoting brand new media sites like Electrek, Teslarati, Cleantechnica, and InsideEvs in 2013, it was certainly a significant part of the messaging at these newly created Tesla-centric media sites. Elon’s goal was to sell battery electric cars and the age of the BEV influencer was born through his anointments.  These new media sites, social media influencers, and YouTubers collectively posted thousands of articles promoting Tesla & broadcasting the message that buying a Tesla was helping to fix climate change – a powerful marketing message leveraging people’s nature to want to do good.  It would become clearer over the next decade that Elon Musk’s priorities did not primarily align with philanthropy.  While some of us learned early, most of the world would learn 10 years later Musk’s true motivations were more about money & power, not sustainability.

Tesla had just begun mass production of the Model S in June of 2012.  These pro-Tesla promotional media sites came on the scene to usher in the electric car era and Tesla was on the rise.  Pro-Tesla faux news sites, like Cleantechnica, adopted anti-hydrogen messaging as one part of the pro-Tesla influencer narrative like all the rest.  The raison d’être of all these sites was to promote the rise of the BEV and Tesla.  Hydrogen was being cast as a villain and distraction to sustainability efforts.  Many BEV fanatics still today think promoting sustainable hydrogen is a ‘big oil’ conspiracy because of Musk’s powerful influence.

Michael Barnard’s fortune would change in late 2013 when Musk lent his weight to amplifying a new age of BEV transportation and supporting these new media sites like Electrek, Cleantechnica, Teslarati, InsideEVs, and Green Car Reports.  Michael was drafted into Cleantechnica in early 2014 along with many others writing for or running pro-Tesla media sites.  These sites declared their support for Tesla and $TSLA shareholders in support of “the mission” to accelerate the adoption of BEVs.  Early investors in $TSLA like Zachary Shahan, Fred Lambert, and Michael Barnard, profited handsomely as Tesla’s share price took off like a SpaceX rocket over the next 10 years.  Michael Barnard’s Linked in page would never list a corpo-style job again.  Michael would henceforth assign himself lofty titles like independent journalist, consultant, fellow, honorary board member and more from 2014 forward.  His current LinkedIn tagline for himself is “Climate futurist, board advisor & director, author”.   He had found his proverbial cottage industry in February of 2014.

China Moves Into Michael’s Heart

Michael’s time in Singapore has had a profound impact on his career & life.  From the >1,140 articles Michael has posted at Cleantechnica, the keyword ‘China’ appears in the title 52 times as of June when I began researching this article.  Only first place keyword ‘hydrogen’ and second place keyword ‘Tesla’ appear in Michael’s post titles more than third place keyword ‘China’.  After Michael mentioned studying Mandarin for two years in Singapore and bragged about working with Chinese nationals while there, he goes on to boast about his other Chinese ‘bona fides’ as he calls them.  In his Barnard’s own words:

Throughout this post, I will illustrate [per the narrative] that Michael never disparages China, always praises China, and always downplays China’s dominance in both critical new energy minerals as well as hydrogen investments.  I will demonstrate how Barnard’s deep knowledge of China’s energy policy does not reconcile with his lack of reporting on the economic and national security risks faced by the USA, Canada, and other Western countries.  Michael’s blind spot for glaring red flags in Sino-U.S. and Sino-Canadian economic relations is alarming & disturbing.  Barnard obviously understands well the renewable energy monopoly China leverages and weaponizes over the West yet he ignores it, attacks people who point it out as an issue, and worse: promotes it.  Commensurate with the theme of this post, something is rotten in Michael’s reporting.

The way Barnard ignores or downplays issues that do not fit ‘the narrative’ is very similar to when I wrote about Michael Liebreich during his conversation with Chargepoint’s CEO Pasquale Ramano.  Ramano was pointing out fundamental economic issues that made it impossible to scale Class 8 truck charging to rural areas in the U.S. even though you could see high voltage powerlines running parallel to almost every mile of interstate freeway in America.  Ramano explained how you would have to build a multi-million-dollar substation everywhere you wanted to add a truck charger in order to step the voltage down for charging.  Leibreich’s semi-inebriated response was to ignore this glaring show-stopper issue and move on to the next topic.  Leibreich asked zero questions and offered no reflection on the enormity of this problem.  Why?  Because Leibreich’s reporting is just like Barnard’s: if it doesn’t fit the narrative, it doesn’t get talked about or is attacked.  In fact, when we get to the ‘trucks’ section of this report, I will point out where Barnard calls this exact same issue of truck charging ‘trivial’ several times; it is a remarkable example of Barnard’s energy ignorance despite his bravado as an expert.

Michael Barnard’s Fascination with Science Fiction and Pseudoscience

Barnard frequently refers to himself as a nerd across his podcasts and Quora history, and often discusses his love of science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler, C. J. Cherryh, Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Iain M. Banks, and Dan Simmons. His fondness for Atwood illustrates how personal relationships can influence the way he treats complex climate and technology topics, in contrast to his generally harsh coverage of similar subjects. For instance, on a Tom Raftery podcast, Barnard recounts meeting Atwood for lunch, during which he was introduced to Graciela Chichilnisky, the architect of the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon market and a co-founder of Global Thermostat. He describes Chichilnisky’s work on Direct Air Carbon Capture as “one of the very, very few [solutions] that makes any sense” Taken on its own, this might sound like a small concession, but when contrasted with his long history of ridiculing all other forms of carbon capture, it stands out. The favorable framing seems less about the technology itself and more about the fact that it came from someone close to Margaret Atwood, who’s association he valued and he didn’t want to ruffle feathers.^[11-1]

This anecdote highlights Barnard’s selective lens: while he grants Chichilnisky a “pass” due to her connection with Atwood, his broader publication history demonstrates an aggressive dismissal of all forms of carbon capture technologies. Since 2014, Barnard has authored at least 22 articles explicitly criticizing carbon capture, in addition to referencing it critically in dozens of other posts and podcasts. The contrast between his praise for Chichilnisky and his generalized attacks on the same technology elsewhere exemplifies what can be described as his pattern of ‘selective amnesia’—allowing personal relationships to override consistent analytical rigor.

When it comes to Barnard’s true pseudo-science philosophy, however, we must talk about Michael’s admiration for the French philosopher Bruno Latour.  Barnard references Latour in several podcasts and blog posts.  Latour is most famous for developing Actor Network Theory, a framework that examines how scientific and technological facts emerge from the intertwined actions of people, institutions, and material objects. Latour’s work sought to show that facts are both real and constructed, grounded in empirical reality but stabilized through social and technical networks, with the goal of making science more transparent, accountable, and resilient.

Latour’s Actor Network Theory was developed as a nuanced way to trace how scientific and technological facts emerge through the interplay of empirical evidence, social actors, and material systems, a method meant to enrich our understanding of how knowledge is built. Barnard, like many others, distorts Latour’s framework, starting not with an open mapping of possibilities but with a prewritten script declaring certain technologies as “settled” and the energy transition being a closed case right now. Instead of allowing innovations to compete and evolve within the network, he treats his preferred options as inevitabilities, framing dissent as obstruction. For Barnard, the task is merely to rally enough influential actors to his narrative, as if consensus could replace empirical scrutiny.  Barnard forms a posture that strips away the honest rigor Latour sought to preserve.  Barnard turns network building into a tool for suppressing alternatives rather than exploring them which [I think] would have Latour turning over in his grave. 

Although Barnard references Latour frequently, episode “51. The Hydrogen Titanic” of his podcast Redefining Energy, featuring actor/guest Dr. Joe Romm, best illustrates how Barnard interprets Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. As Barnard explains to his buddy Joe Romm at the 14:56 mark:

In my opinion, Michael demonstrates his modus operandi here as well as his view on how to abuse Latour’s A.N.T. theory unethically.  Michael laments a minute earlier in the same podcast that people have abused Latour’s work to act as climate deniers. The irony is that Barnard, who loudly criticizes climate deniers for twisting Latour’s ideas into tools for undermining scientific consensus, is himself doing the same thing but toward his own ends; it’s a classic ‘it takes one to know one’ situation. Barnard uses a distorted version of Actor Network Theory to declare certain energy technologies beyond dispute and marginalizes competing innovations with unfair scrutiny, out of context comparisons, and ignores key issues. Latour would likely lament such abuses from either side of the spectrum, as his aim was never to arm partisans with rhetorical tricks for shutting down debate, nor to see his work reduced to a modern shorthand for misinformation.  Many critics feared, during Latour’s era, that misusing his work could one day contribute to the creation of “misleading facts.” and “fake news”^[13]

Let’s look now at examples of how hydrogen bias is reported at large and how Michael’s views align with anti-hydrogen bias.  In the next section headings, we will examine examples of what Michael promotes & objects against as well as how Michael fits into the larger anti-hydrogen narrative.  We will also look at some of “the actors” in Barnard’s implementation of Latour’s Actor Network Theory.  Hint: Barnard’s actor friends are the floating faces in this post’s featured cover image. 

The Anti-Hydrogen Media Sphere

RMP’s objective has long been to advocate for hydrogen research, hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen storage to work alongside other renewable technologies for a sustainable energy future. Michael Barnard’s objective in his broadcast narrative is to influence the public and decision makers that hydrogen has no place in energy now or in the future. Michael works with his friends or “actors,” per Latour’s Actor Network Theory, to give clout to his theories about how energy works.

The Wider Anti-Hydrogen ‘Network’ & The Technoking of Tesla

I have seen the same “actors” in Michael’s corner of the anti-hydrogen media sphere surface repeatedly on social media for over 11 and half years. Names like Hoekstra, Flis, Liebreich, Jacobson, Dr. Joe Romm, and more are frequently cited in outlets like Electrek, Cleantechnica, Teslarati, InsideEVs, and Hydrogen Insight to disparage hydrogen vehicle technology. From there, second tier publications such as Jalopnik, Arstechnica, Wired, The Verge, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Engadget pick up the talking points, repackage them, and broadcast them to an even wider audience.

An example you can relate to are tweets from Elon Musk.  One tweet from Musk can spawn dozens of stories in publications you read every day. In June 2020, Musk mocked hydrogen fuel cells by tweeting “Fuel cells = fool sells” and calling them “staggeringly dumb” due to their inefficiency compared to battery electric vehicles.  These tweets [from the top] trickle to media outlets and become full-length articles based on 280 characters or less. (Observer, Popular Mechanics).  Wired ran a story titled “Elon Musk Calls Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars ‘Bullsh*t’” covering his comments in detail and repeating his claim that the technology is more marketing gimmick than practical solution.  Electrek published a piece, “Toyota admits ‘Elon Musk is right’ about fuel cell, but moves forward with hydrogen anyway,” summarizing his dismissal of hydrogen as “incredibly dumb” and adding context about Toyota’s ongoing efforts.  InsideEVs worked Musk’s criticism into a story about Jim Glickenhaus challenging him to prove fuel cells are “stupid” by racing an FCEV in the Baja 1000.  This has gone on regularly for over 11 and half years since that first public hydrogen disparagement in October 2013; one month after Toyota announced the upcoming debut of their hydrogen vehicle.  The anti-hydrogen message gets unleashed repeatedly whenever any Western company touts an upcoming hydrogen bus, truck, or production project.

Broader tech outlets like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Engadget have also periodically referenced Musk’s skepticism toward hydrogen when covering BEV versus FCEV debates, extending his talking points to audiences beyond the BEV enthusiast community.  With constant bombardment of anti-hydrogen articles stemming from a single tweet, we see dozens of publications rebroadcast the same message which amplifies it.  A lone Musk tweet acts like a cancer cell undergoing rapid mitosis, proliferating unchecked until it forms a dense tumor of identical narrative.  Thousands of people share the articles from the tweets to their followers and Latour’s A.N.T. is validated; even if it is being abused.

This has gone on for so many years now that most anti-hydrogen voices naturally frame energy narratives as batteries -vs- hydrogen as mutually exclusive and we must choose only batteries.  RMP submits this is “either/or” concept of only choosing one technology is what’s ‘staggeringly dumb’.  We have these two great complimentary technologies, the battery cell and the fuel cell, that are in essence very similar:  an anode and a cathode separated by an electrolyte with no moving parts.  Yet somehow instead of embracing both the battery cell and fuel cell as very similar wonder twins with incredible synergies, we have villainized one technology and put a halo on the other.  Batteries and fuel cells are very similar ‘cousins’ with the fundamental difference being one stores energy internally and one uses fuel stored externally.  Both battery cells and fuel cells have strengths and weaknesses like every other technology.  Neither technology deserves a halo and neither technology deserves unfair abuse.  Something is rotten in that close minded framing.

Michael Barnard’s Subset Group of Actors

Michael Barnard has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the broader anti-hydrogen movement. If Musk sits at the top of the pyramid, Barnard operates just below as a tier-one amplifier, far above the typical anti-hydrogen social media personality. His role today mirrors the one he played over a decade ago on his pro-wind blog, where he devoted himself to mocking and discrediting people harmed by poorly planned wind projects. The target has simply shifted: now it is anyone or any institution that supports hydrogen in any form. His narrative has traction, drawing thousands of supporters, even as it undercuts U.S. job creation and national energy security. Energy podcasts run by rooftop solar owners and BEV enthusiasts have sprung up to reinforce the same narrow anti-hydrogen worldview, fueling a cottage industry detached from global energy realities. Cleantechnica provides the platform, the fanbase supplies the loyalty, and Barnard now makes his living from the echo chamber he helped construct. What’s interesting to note about Michael’s professional assault on any person or organization that talks positively about hydrogen prospects, is he never directs his blather at China who leads in every single segment of the hydrogen economic sector. Michael’s guns only aim west.

The military analogy of Musk being an influencer general and someone like Barnard being a lieutenant influencer is apt. Lieutenants often lead smaller groups like a platoon or a company and are more directly involved in tactical on the ground leadership. Of course, Barnard does not actually command a platoon, but the lieutenant comparison captures the way he operates within the larger anti-hydrogen network. The faces of the men floating around Michael’s face in this post’s featured image are some of the actors in Barnard’s A.N.T. platoon. Some are longtime friends going back to his Ontario days like Paul Martin. Others are ‘citation bros’ like Jesse Jenkins, Mark Jacobson, and Auke Hoekstra who aim to add academic credibility. Some are like minded anti-hydrogen evangelists such as Dr. Joe Romm and Michael Liebreich. These characters make up the orbit of Barnard’s ecosystem of anti-hydrogen articles, published podcasts, and guest appearances. Some podcast guests are travel companions on his sponsored cleantech junkets where he relaxes his interview style but keeps his tongue sharp. Other podcast guests are unsuspecting ‘normies’ who do not realize they have walked into a biased and unobjective platform. For them, Michael puts on the kid gloves and hides his bare-knuckle approach.

With the foundation of Barnard’s CV and journalistic style established here in Part 1, let’s look at specific energy viewpoints from Michael’s published works as they relate to his “batteries for everything” and “hydrogen for nothing” narrative in Part 2 of this series.  In Part 2 we will see how the characters (or actors) listed so far in Michael’s A.N.T. platoon are all weaved into the four tenets of the narrative throughout Barnard’s published work.  Again, just like we looked at with Liebreich, we will seize on Barnard’s silence on areas where he could be objective but displays a double standard.  We will look at examples of inconsistencies in how Michael reports harshly about hydrogen activity in Western countries while he minimizes and demurs about hydrogen activity in the world’s hydrogen leader by an order of magnitude: China.  Thanks for reading Part 1.  Part 2 will drop next Sunday and Part 3 will drop the Sunday after that.

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Footnotes:

Footnote [1] – International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). “Green hydrogen strategy: A guide to design” IRENA, 30 July 2024, https://www.irena.org/Publications/2024/Jul/Green-hydrogen-strategy-A-guide-to-design. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [2] – Anne-Sophie Corbeau & Rio Pramudita Kaswiyanto. “What Do National Hydrogen Strategies Tell Us About Potential Future Trade” Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, 2 May 2024, https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/what-do-national-hydrogen-strategies-tell-us-about-potential-future-trade/. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [3] – Michael Barnard (w/ guest Michael Raynor). “40: Buses – Hydrogen vs Batteries (2/2)” Redefining Energy, no. 40, 20 November 2024, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/40-buses-hydrogen-vs-batteries-2-2/id1675126007?i=1000677634349. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [3-1] – 12:02 – Michael Barnard says “I’m from North Bay and Missanabie”

Footnote [4] – Bailey Damiani. “Podcast 077: Michael Barnard: Nuclear, solar, wind, hydrogen, batteries? This expert predicts the winners and the losers” Freeing Energy Podcast, no. 77, 1 February 2022, https://www.freeingenergy.com/michael-barnard-podcast-nuclear-solar-wind-hydrogen/. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [5] – Michael Barnard. “Do the Chinese believe that their race should lead the world?” Quora, 1 September 2022, https://www.quora.com/Do-the-Chinese-believe-that-their-race-should-lead-the-world. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [6] – Long Lam; Lee Branstetter; Inês L. Azevedo. “The Unsustainable Rise of the Chinese Wind Turbine Manufacturing Industry” NBER Working Paper – EPCs14, 28 January 2014, https://conference.nber.org/confer/2014/EPCs14/NBER_Conference_Azevedo_Branstetter_Lam.pdf. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [7] – Iacob Koch-Weser and Ethan Meick. “China’s Wind and Solar Sectors: Trends in Deployment, Manufacturing, and Energy Policy” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission Staff Report, 9 March 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Staff%20Report_China%27s%20Wind%20and%20Solar%20Sectors.pdf. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [8] – P. Ru. “The transition of innovation modes in China’s wind turbine manufacturing industry: A case study of Goldwind” Energy Policy, 4 July 1905, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421511010305. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [9] – Mary Kay Barton. “New York Wind Wars: Hiding the Facts” Master Resource, 12 September 2013, https://www.masterresource.org/grassroots-opposition/new-york-wind-wars/. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [10] – Damon Lavrinc. “Elon Musk Calls Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars ‘Bullsh*t’” Wired, 22 October 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/10/elon-musk-hydrogen/. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [11] – Tom Raftery. “The Truth About CCUS: Michael Barnard Discusses Real Paths to Emission Reduction” Tom Raftery: Climate Confident, 25 September 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_D0DudIAis. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [11-1] – 05:29 – Michael Barnard explains that Margaret Atwood is a birder and has a place on Point Peely in Ontario on the Great Lakes directly in the path of migratory birds. She had concerns about birds migrating while offshore wind was going up. Barnard starts commenting on Atwood’s blog to go after “the idiots” as he calls them but doesn’t realize it’s her blog. Barnard later realizes is Margaret Atwood’s blog and puts the attack dogs away quickly and now his tone changes and he manages to befriend Atwood and become her “green tech consultant” for a few years. Then he meets her, she invited him to lunch a couple times. She introduces him to Graciela Chichilnisky who is the architect of the Kyoto Protocol’s Carbon Market. She also assisted China with their carbon market. Also one of the founders of Global Thermostat which is a direct air capture solution which is one of the very very few that make sense. This highlights his picking & choosing based on political, financial, or social favor.

Footnote [12] – Michael Barnard (Host), Dr. Joseph Romm (Guest). “51. The Hydrogen Titanic (1/2)” Redefining Energy – TECH, no. 51, 14 May 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/51-the-hydrogen-titanic-1-2/id1675126007?i=1000708454010. Accessed 27 September 2025.

Footnote [12-1] – 14:56 – Michael Barnard says “Latour said, technology doesn’t win in the marketplace because it’s better.  It wins because we tell ourselves – so there’s a whole bunch of people who get together… What he talks about – is you have a bunch of actors, human and non-human, and you have a narrative and then a whole bunch of actors enroll in the narrative.  Once they’ve enrolled, the central part of the narrative becomes a black box.  And nobody opens the black box to look inside and to make sure that anything in the black box makes any sense.  And then it becomes this self-healing bubble moving through time.”

Footnote [13] – Charles Lawson. “Has Latour Real-ly Unravelled the Real: The Journey from Laboratory Life to Down to Earth?” Law, Technology and Humans, 21 November 2020, https://doi.org/10.5204/lthj.1551. Accessed 27 September 2025.