Ted Nordhaus (born 1965) is an American author and the director of research at The Breakthrough Institute. He has co-edited and written a number of books, including Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007) and An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) with collaborator Michael Shellenberger. [1] [2] [3]
The two were described by Slate as "ecomodernists," while the authors have described themselves as the "bad boys" of environmentalism. [4] [5] Like Shellenberger, Nordhaus generally advocates for increased use of natural resources through an embrace of modernization, technological development, and increasing U.S. economic growth, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. [6] [7] [8] [9] Many of Nordhaus' positions have been criticized by environmental scientists and academics, [4] [10] [11] [12] while reception from writers and journalists in the popular press have been mixed. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
Nordhaus is director of research at the Breakthrough Institute, which he co-founded with Michael Shellenberger in 2003. [1]
Nordhaus and Shellenberger have written a number of articles at Breakthrough, with subjects ranging from positive treatment of nuclear energy and shale gas [19] [20] [21] [22] to critiques of the planetary boundaries hypothesis. [23]
The Breakthrough Institute has argued that climate policy should be focused on higher levels of public funding on technology innovation to "make clean energy cheap", and has been critical of climate policies such as cap and trade and carbon pricing. [24] [25] [26] [27] The institute advocates higher levels of public spending on technology innovation, which they argue will lead to higher environmental quality, economic growth, and quality of life. [28] [29] [22]
In 2004 Nordhaus and Shellenberger co-authored "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World." The paper argued that environmentalism is incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born.
The paper was criticized by members of the mainstream environmental movement. [30] Former Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope called the essay "unclear, unfair and divisive." He said it contained multiple factual errors and misinterpretations. However, former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach praised the authors' arguments. [31] Former Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando said in 2005, referring to both Nordhaus and Shellenberger, "These guys laid out some fascinating data, but they put it in this over-the-top language and did it in this in-your-face way." [32] Michel Gelobter and other environmental experts and academics wrote The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century in response, criticizing "Death" for demanding increased technological innovation rather than addressing the systemic concerns of people of color. [10]
Matthew Yglesias of The New York Times said that "Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue, environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear.", adding that the paper "is more convincing in its case for a change in rhetoric." [13]
In 2007 Nordhaus and Shellenberger published Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility . The book is an argument for what its authors describe as a positive, "post-environmental" politics that abandons the environmentalist focus on nature protection for a new focus on technological innovation to create a new economy. They were named Time magazine Heroes of the Environment (2008) after writing the book.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that, "If heeded, Nordhaus and Shellenberger's call for an optimistic outlook -- embracing economic dynamism and creative potential -- will surely do more for the environment than any U.N. report or Nobel Prize." [14] NPR's science correspondent Richard Harris listed Break Through on his "recommended reading list" for climate change. [15]
However, academics Julie Sze and Michael Ziser argued that Break Through continued the trend Gelobter pointed out related the authors' commitment to technological innovation and capital accumulation instead of focusing on systemic inequalities that create environmental injustices. Specifically Sze and Ziser argue that Nordhaus and Shellenberger's "evident relish in their notoriety as the 'sexy' cosmopolitan 'bad boys' of environmentalism (their own words) introduces some doubt about their sincerity and reliability." The authors asserted that Break Through fails "to incorporate the aims of environmental justice while actively trading on suspect political tropes," such as blaming China and other Nations as large-scale polluters so that the United States may begin and continue Nationalistic technology-based research-and-development environmentalism, while continuing to emit more greenhouse gases than most other nations. In turn, Shellenberger and Nordhaus seek to move away from proven Environmental Justice tactics, "calling for a moratorium" on "community organizing." Such technology-based "approaches like those of Nordhaus and Shellenberger miss entirely" the "structural environmental injustice" that natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina make visible. Ultimately, the authors of Break Through believe "that community-based environmental justice poses a threat to the smooth operation of a highly capitalized, global-scale Environmentalism." [4]
Joseph Romm, a former US Department of Energy official now with the Center for American Progress, argued that "Pollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters -- reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and driving clean technologies into the marketplace." [33] (Romm also acknowledged that he had not read the book: "I won't waste time reading their new instant bestseller, unhelpfully titled Break Through, and you shouldn't either.") Reviewers for the San Francisco Chronicle, [34] the American Prospect, [35] and the Harvard Law Review [36] argued that a critical reevaluation of green politics was unwarranted because global warming had become a high-profile issue and the Democratic Congress was preparing to act.
In April 2015, Nordhaus joined with a group of scholars in issuing An Ecomodernist Manifesto . [37] [38] It proposed dropping the goal of “sustainable development” and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using natural resources more intensively through technological innovation. The authors argue that economic development is necessary to preserve the environment. [39] [40]
According to The New Yorker , "most of the criticism of [the Manifesto] was more about tone than content. The manifesto's basic arguments, after all, are hardly radical. To wit: technology, thoughtfully applied, can reduce the suffering, human and otherwise, caused by climate change; ideology, stubbornly upheld, can accomplish the opposite." [16] At The New York Times , Eduardo Porter wrote approvingly of ecomodernism's alternative approach to sustainable development. [17] In an article titled "Manifesto Calls for an End to 'People Are Bad' Environmentalism", Slate's Eric Holthaus wrote "It's inclusive, it's exciting, and it gives environmentalists something to fight for for a change." [18] The science journal Nature editorialized the manifesto. [41]
An Ecomodernist Manifesto was met with critiques similar to Gelobter's evaluation of "Death" and Sze and Ziser's analysis of Break Through. Environmental historian Jeremy Caradonna and environmental economist Richard B. Norgaard led a group of scholars in a review which argued that Ecomodernism "violates everything we know about ecosystems, energy, population, and natural resources," and "Far from being an ecological statement of principles, the Manifesto merely rehashes the naïve belief that technology will save us and that human ingenuity can never fail." Further, "The Manifesto suffers from factual errors and misleading statements." [12]
Environmental and Art historian T.J. Demos agreed with Caradonna, and wrote in 2017 that the Manifesto "is really nothing more than a bad utopian fantasy," that functions to support oil and gas industry and as "an apology for nuclear energy." Demos continued that "What is additionally striking about the Ecomodernist document, beyond its factual weaknesses and ecological falsehoods, is that there is no mention of social justice or democratic politics," and "no acknowledgement of the fact that big technologies like nuclear reinforce centralized power, the military-industrial complex, and the inequalities of corporate globalization." [11]
Nordhaus is the son of Robert Nordhaus, former General Counsel of the United States Department of Energy, nephew of economist William Nordhaus [42] and the brother of Hannah Nordhaus, environmental journalist and author of The Beekeeper's Lament. [43] [42]
Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is a non-profit libertarian think tank founded by the political writer Fred L. Smith Jr. on March 9, 1984, in Washington, D.C., to advance principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. CEI focuses on a number of regulatory policy issues, including business and finance, labor, technology and telecommunications, transportation, food and drug regulation, and energy and environment in which they have promoted climate change denial. Kent Lassman is the current President and CEO.
Roger A. Pielke Jr. is an American political scientist and professor, and was the director of the Sports Governance Center within the Department of Athletics at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Technogaianism is a bright green environmentalist stance of active support for the research, development and use of emerging and future technologies to help restore Earth's environment. Technogaianists argue that developing safe, clean, alternative technology should be an important goal of environmentalists.
Mark Lynas is a British author and journalist whose work is focused on environmentalism and climate change. He has written for the New Statesman, The Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post in the United States; he also worked on and appeared in the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011). Lynas is research and climate lead for the Alliance for Science and is co-founder of the pro-science environmental network RePlanet. Since 2009 he has been climate advisor to former president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed, and he currently works to assist Nasheed with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of the world's most climate-vulnerable 58 developing countries. He has co-authored a number of peer-reviewed scientific publications, including a 2021 paper which found that the consensus on anthropogenic climate change in the scholarly literature now exceeds 99%.
William Dawbney Nordhaus is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Nordhaus received the prize "for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis".
Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional who writes about politics, the environment, climate change and nuclear power, as well as how he believes progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness, and more recently the lab leak hypothesis and UFO claims. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. He is also the founder of Environmental Progress.
Ruth S. DeFries is an environmental geographer who specializes in the use of remote sensing to study Earth's habitability under the influence of human activities, such as deforestation, that influence regulating biophysical and biogeochemical processes. She was one of 24 recipients of the 2007 MacArthur Fellowship, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
Robert Stone is a British-American documentary filmmaker. His work has been screened at dozens of film festivals and televised around the world, notably seven of his films have appeared on PBS's American Experience series and four of his films have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is an Oscar nominee for Best Feature Documentary and a three-time Emmy nominee for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking.
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, first published in October 2007, is a book written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, both long-time environmental strategists. Break Through is an argument for a positive, "post-environmental" politics that abandons the traditional environmentalist focus on nature protection for a focus on creating a new sustainable economy.
Barry William Brook is an Australian scientist. He is an ARC Australian Laureate Professor and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Technology. He was formerly an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia, where he held the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change from 2007 to 2014. He was also Director of Climate Science at the Environment Institute.
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy. The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.
The Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, referred to as the DICE model or Dice model, is a neoclassical integrated assessment model developed by 2018 Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus that integrates in the neoclassical economics, carbon cycle, climate science, and estimated impacts allowing the weighing of subjectively guessed costs and subjectively guessed benefits of taking steps to slow climate change. Nordhaus also developed the RICE model, a variant of the DICE model that was updated and developed alongside the DICE model. Researchers who collaborated with Nordhaus to develop the model include David Popp, Zili Yang, and Joseph Boyer.
The green bubble is an economic theory that the world is facing an over-investment in renewable energy and that the current levels of debts in many clean technology companies are unsustainable. As the interest rate rises many clean technology projects will go bust, a major setback for the renewable energy industry.
Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing through eco-economic decoupling, i.e., by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.
Michel Gelobter is an American born social entrepreneur especially in the field of clean technology, who is also known for his research into and advocacy for environmental justice and social sector innovation.
Soft climate change denial is a state of mind acknowledging the existence of global warming in the abstract while remaining, to some extent, in partial psychological or intellectual denialism about its reality or impact. It is contrasted with conventional "hard" climate change denial, which refers to explicit disavowal of the consensus on global warming's existence, causes, or effects.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need is a 2021 book by Bill Gates. In it, Gates presents what he learned in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address global warming and recommends technological strategies to tackle it.
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All is a 2020 book by Michael Shellenberger.
A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the "Eco-modernist Manifesto."
A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the "Eco-modernist Manifesto."