Ted Nace

Last updated

Ted Nace
Born
California
CitizenshipAmerican
Education Phillips Academy
Alma mater Stanford University
OccupationEnvironmental activist
Publisher
Author
Years active20 years (activist)
10 years (publishing)
Notable work
Climate Hope (book)
Gangs of America

Ted Nace (born 1956) is an American writer, publisher, and environmentalist, known for his criticisms of corporate personhood and his support of a fossil fuel phase out. In 2009, he was described as "one of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement." [1]

Contents

He is the founder and Executive Director of Global Energy Monitor. [2]

Early life

Ted Nace was born in California and grew up in Dickinson, North Dakota. [3] In 1974, he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. [4] He received his B.A. from Stanford University, and attended graduate school at University of California Berkeley. [4]

Early career

In the 1970s, Nace worked for the Environmental Defense Fund and analyzed how to replace coal–fired power plants with alternative energy programs through computer simulations. [3] He spent several years working in North Dakota at the Dakota Resource Council, a citizens' group concerned about the impacts of energy development on agriculture and rural communities. [3]

Computer publishing

In the 1980s, Nace began working as an editor for the computer magazine PC World and as a columnist for Publish! and Computer Currents magazine. [4]

In 1985, he founded Peachpit Press with Michael Gardner, initially working out of his apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area. [4] He wrote numerous how–to books on computer–related subjects. [4] At the time, Elaine Weinmann, the computer writer, described his publishing approach as user-friendly and innovative. [5]

As the company grew in size and sales, it published books about Mac computers and became a leader in books about digital graphics, with a MacBible series, Real World series, and Visual QuickStart (VQS) series. [6] Peachpit published most of the popular manuals of style by writer Robin Williams, such as The Mac is Not a Typewriter and the Little Mac Book.

In 1994, Nace sold Peachpit to Pearson plc and he left the company in 1996. [4] [7]

Writing

In the 1980s, Nace began writing freelance essays, including regular contributions to Orion Magazine . [8] [6] [9]

Nace has criticized corporations such as General Motors for having too much political influence. GM headquarters in New York City. General Motors Building.JPG
Nace has criticized corporations such as General Motors for having too much political influence. GM headquarters in New York City.

After he left Peachpit, his work increasingly focused on the relation between corporations and democracy in America. He reflected on his own career as a business owner:

Something complex and even alive has come into existence, but it is no longer governed by intuitively familiar human motives and values. Instead, it is a sophisticated, complex, adaptive, continually evolving system––a sort of mindless yet intelligent being––governed by an array of internal and external programming. [10]

Gangs of America

His book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (2003) [4] argued that corporations have deleterious effects on society and the economy. According to Nace, the specious character of corporation's quasi-legal enablements undermine American democracy. He used about his own experiences watching a coal mine develop in North Dakota to explain his concerns with corporate power:

Business does tend to get its way, acting by means of a nebulous force known as "corporate power" that drives much of what happens in both the public and private spheres ... But, of course, the entity planning the mine wasn't a someone but a something––a corporation. Although people in the company may well have cared, the corporation itself didn't. ... Nothing you may feel or do really matters, because in the end there is no getting around the fact that you are not fighting a normal opponent––your opponent is simply nobody. [10]

Nace writes that as the corporate institution developed it got "too much power" in the United States. [10] [11] In an interview, he explained that the modern corporation was a structure that "gelled about a century ago", and that it is a "sort of life form" which has "persistence, metabolism, reproduction, adaptation". [12] He has claimed that the 1886 Supreme Court decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was an example of the "most well known" bad decisions that has granted corporations the same rights as people. [12]

He has criticized the role that business plays in shaping political policy in the last few decades. [11]

Castle Gate Power Plant in Utah. Grand Junction Trip 92007 098.JPG
Castle Gate Power Plant in Utah.

A New York Times critic found Nace's Gangs of America to be well-researched and made a compelling case that corporations have too much political power, but the reviewer faulted Nace for ignoring the benefit to American shareholders and for slighting "the contributions the corporate form has made to average Americans' prosperity." [11] Alan T. Saracevic, a reviewer at the San Francisco Chronicle , writes that Gangs of America makes a case that corporations have evolved to an "abusive state of being." [13]

Climate Hope

Nace's second book, Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Coal (2010) is a first-person chronicle of the anti–coal movement. Tina Gerhardt, the environmental journalist, lauded the book and described its climate agenda as "do-able". [14]

Environmental activism

In the mid 2000s, Nace turned his focus to anti-coal activism. He became active in efforts to block the development and use of coal power plants in the United States through sit–ins at coal mines and banks. [15] At the time, he argued that coal usage was creating a "clear planetary crisis" but that implementing a solution is being blocked by "well-financed lobbying and PR sponsored by the coal and utility companies." [12]

From a climate perspective, coal is far and away our worst problem because the remaining reserves are so much larger than those of other fossil sources like conventional oil and gas. NASA climate chief James Hansen says that phasing out coal emissions is "80% of the solution to the global warming crisis." In other words, phasing out coal is really the "silver bullet" for stopping global warming. – Ted Nace [12]

He was described in the Huffington Post as "one of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement." [1]

Global Energy Monitor

In 2007, Nace founded CoalSwarm, a website affiliated with Earth Island Institute, to share information similar to Wikipedia and Citizendium, but focused on coal. In 2009, Coalswarm started a tracker database of global coal-fired power stations that became "widely respected" by academic researchers, media outlets, and governments. [16] In 2018, Coalswarm changed its name to Global Energy Monitor and became an independent organization, expanding coverage to include natural gas pipelines, steel plants, coal mines, and other energy infrastructures. [17] [18]

Publications

Books

Computer publishing

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References

  1. 1 2 Jeff Biggers (November 28, 2009). "Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books For A Clean Energy Future". Huffington Post. Retrieved November 21, 2010. One of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement, CoalSwarm director Ted Nace has written a powerful chronicle of the grassroots movements to stop the construction of coal-fired plants, and halt mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia.
  2. ↑ "The Canary in the Coal Mine". USA Today. June 27, 2010. Retrieved November 19, 2010. Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Coal
  3. 1 2 3 Ted Nace (2010). "Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy" . Berrett-Koehler Publishers. ISBN   978-1576752609 . Retrieved November 19, 2010. While working for the U.S. Forest Service during high school, Ted Nace learned about the plans of several major corporations to develop coal strip mines and other energy projects near his hometown of Dickinson, North Dakota....
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Monadnock Summer (August 8, 2004). "Ted Nace: Confessions Of A Recovering Capitalist". New Hampshire Public Radio (nhpr). Retrieved November 19, 2010. ... he worked as an editor at PC World magazine and as a columnist for Publish! and Computer Currents magazines. Together with Michael Gardner, he founded the computer book publishing company Peachpit Press in 1985 and served as publisher until 1996, ... In 2008 he founded CoalSwarm, a collaborative information clearinghouse on U.S. and international coal mines, ... In addition to several computer how-to books, ...
  5. ↑ Elaine Weinmann, Peter Lourekas (2004). "Photoshop CS for Windows and Macintosh". Peachpit Press. ISBN   9780321213532 . Retrieved November 19, 2010. The Story behind the book ... Sometime in the mid-'80s, a smart guy in Berkeley, California, by the name of Ted Nace got a brainstorm. He decided to start up a computer book publishing company, which he called Peachpit Press. ... The books he published were innovative and user-friendly and offered a fresh approach to learning computer graphics. (page iii) (Ted let authors typeset and illustrate their own books – with Ted's feedback) ... in 1996, Ted handed the baton to successor Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel ...
  6. 1 2 "Ted Nace". Orion Magazine. November 19, 2010. Retrieved November 19, 2010. Ted Nace, founder of Peachpit Press, the world's leading publisher of books on digital graphics, is the author of Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy.
  7. 1 2 Alan T. Saracevic (reviewer) (May 30, 2004). "'Gangs of America' (book review) Insightful books put ubiquitous corporations under a microscope – Authors, film study powerful firms and how they got that way". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved December 4, 2010. ... Nace grew the company quickly. His lawyer suggested incorporating and he did. He even went on to sell the firm to a multinational company, Pearson Ltd., while remaining in charge of his imprint.
  8. ↑ Ted Nace (May 2006). "Breadbasket of Democracy". Orion Magazine. Retrieved November 19, 2010. IN THE NEW RED-BLUE LEXICON of American politics, the Red River Valley of North Dakota seems aptly named. This is football-on-Friday-night country, where Clear Channel Radio sets the tone, and patriotic themes blend smoothly with corporate ones.
  9. ↑ Ted Nace (January–February 2008). "Stopping Coal in Its Tracks: Loosely affiliated activists draw a hard line – and hold it". Orion Magazine. Retrieved November 21, 2010. ... LaPlaca returned home and read the latest messages posted on the No New Coal Plants e-mail list, an Internet watering hole initiated in April 2006 by Philadelphia organizer Mike Ewall.
  10. 1 2 3 Ted Nace (2003). "Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy". Berrett-Koehler Publishers. ISBN   9781576753194 . Retrieved November 19, 2010. "A surprising and welcome achievement...provocative and entertaining." (Ted Nace:) Business does tend to get its way, acting by means of a nebulous force known as "corporate power" that drives much of what happens in both the public and private spheres." page 2 ...
  11. 1 2 3 "Book Review: Gangs of America by Ted Nace". The New York Times Book Review. September 14, 2003. Retrieved November 19, 2010.
  12. 1 2 3 4 Christine Shearer and Ted Nace (November 21, 2010). "The Coal War: Interview with Climate Hope Author Ted Nace". Left Eye on Books. Retrieved November 21, 2010. From a climate perspective, coal is far and away ...
  13. ↑ Alan T. Saracevic (reviewer) (May 30, 2004). "Insightful books put ubiquitous corporations under a microscope – Authors, film study powerful firms and how they got that way". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved December 4, 2010. Nace, again, is an obvious lefty with a singular point of view: Corporations have evolved to an abusive state of being. He came to that conclusion in a legitimate way: He is the founder of a corporation.
  14. ↑ Gerhardt, Tina (June 27, 2010). "Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Coal". Huffington Post .
  15. ↑ Ted Nace (2003). "Climate Hope: On the Front Lines of the Fight Against Coal". Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Retrieved November 21, 2010. Author: Ted Nace is the founder of CoalSwarm (coalswarm.org) and the author of Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2003, 2005).
  16. ↑ "The race to build a better battery". RN. March 2, 2019.
  17. ↑ "About the CoalSwarm wiki". coalSwarm. 2008. Retrieved November 21, 2010. Begun in early 2008, the CoalSwarm wiki is a joint project between CoalSwarm and the Center for Media and Democracy, a Madison, Wisconsin-based media watchdog group. Consisting of over 4,000 articles, the CoalSwarm wiki is housed inside CMD's 70,000-entry SourceWatch wiki.
  18. ↑ "Advisors, Staff, and Wiki Reporter Network". CoalSwarm. 2010. Retrieved November 21, 2010. Ted Nace, director
  19. ↑ Gerhardt, Tina (June 27, 2010). "The Canary in the Coal Mine: Stopping Climate Change – Review of Ted Nace's Climate Hope". Huffington Post .
  20. ↑ United States Patent 5583978 (1996). "Apparatuses and methods for creating and using portable fonted texts with embedded automatically-created font descriptions". free patents online. Retrieved November 21, 2010. see references
  21. 1 2 3 "Books by Ted Nace". ACM Digital Library. November 21, 2010. Retrieved November 21, 2010.
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