These gatherings challenged conventional green thinking in ways that I found stimulating and healthy.
Later I attended conferences organized by their think tank, the Breakthrough Institute (see my reports here and here). I chatted with Shellenberger on in 2008 and interviewed him and Nordhaus here at Scientific American in 2011. (I also gave the award to biologist Edward Wilson, oceanographer Sylvia Earle and climatologist James Hansen before my funding ran out.) So, in 2008 I invited Shellenberger and Nordhaus to speak at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, and I gave them a $5,000 prize that I created, the Green Book Award. The book annoyed some greens, but I liked its can-do spirit, and I thought my students would too. Shellenberger and Nordhaus also faulted the environmental movement for being reluctant to acknowledge its successes, as if doing so will foster complacency. People are unlikely to care about polar bears, they pointed out, when they’re worried about feeding their children. We need economic and technological development to overcome climate change and other environmental threats, Shellenberger and Nordhaus insisted. His influential 2007 book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, co-written with his fellow activist Ted Nordhaus, accused environmentalists of being hostile to science, technology and economic progress. For years, he has urged his fellow greens to adopt a more optimistic outlook, which he insists is more conducive to activism than fear. Last spring I was feeling pretty glum about, well, everything when iconoclastic environmental activist Michael Shellenberger sent me a prepublication copy of his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.īefore I weigh in on the book, some background.
Depending on what I’m reading, and perhaps shifts in my neural weather, I ricochet between optimism and dread. My views on climate change-and, more generally, on humanity’s future-have never been stable.
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