Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger
Era	21th-century political philosophy
Region	Politics
Main interests	political philosophy Environmentalism social psychology existentialism politics social values  ·
Notable ideas	Death of Environmentalism · Insecure affluence  · Pre-political institutions

Michael Shellenberger is an author and political strategist. He current serves as President of the The Breakthrough Institute, a think tank, and American Environics an opinion research firm specializing in social values research for progressive political and philanthropic causes.

"The Death of Environmentalism"

In October, 2004, Shellenberger and his colleague Ted Nordhaus, both long-time environmental strategists and consultants, authored a controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World." The essay argues that environmentalism is conceptually and institutionally incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born.

We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live...

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an “I have a nightmare” speech instead.

The two distributed the essay at the annual conference of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, held that year in Kauai, Hawaii. Following the November elections, the essay was widely discussed within environmental circles, first on Internet publications such as Salon.org and Grist.org, and eventually in the New York Times.

Praise and criticism came from all quarters. The prominent liberal blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the DailyKos.com, wrote "[The Death of Environmentalism was] perhaps the essay that has most influenced my thinking in the past couple of years." And the American Prospect's Mark Schmitt wrote, "Almost a year later, I am still periodically sent a copy, along with a breathless 'Have you read this?' note. Not only did I read it, I point out; I tried to call attention to it outside the environmental community back in March, predicting that 'it may be the most powerful and lasting of the very many 'What's wrong with the left?' documents of the George W. Bush era.'" From the right, the National Review wrote, "Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus . . . point to a reinvention of environmentalism which might garner the support of both Red and Blue America."

But many also attacked the essay and its authors. The Sierra Club's Executive Director Carl Pope called the essay "self-serving and damaging" and even "nihilistic." Grist blogger David Roberts criticized the author's year-later follow-up,"Death Warmed Over," writing, "While it, like the original, contains nuggets of insight, the bulk is taken up with strawman bashing, bad analogies, and an entirely unwarranted degree of smug self-satisfaction."

Break Through

Three years after the publication of "The Death of Environmentalism", Houghton Mifflin published Nordhaus and Shellenberger's book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility(Houghton Mifflin, 2007) to even greater controversy and debate. Break Through is an argument for a positive, "post-environmental" politics that abandons the environmentalist focus on nature protection for a new focus on creating a new economy. The authors largely agree with environmentalists that climate change is a dire "existential" threat comparable in seriousness to nuclear war. But they argue that a politics focused on doomsday provokes not a progressive political reaction for carbon regulation or clean energy but rather a dog-eat-dog mentality.

Part I of Break Through is a criticism of environmentalism's "politics of limits." The book begins with the birth of environmentalism. Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue that environmentalism in the U.S. emerged from post-war affluence, which they argue is a clue to understanding how ecological movements might emerge in places like China and India.

Progressive social reforms, from the Civil Rights Act to the Clean Water Act, tend to occur during times of prosperity and rising expectations—not immiseration and declining expectations. Both the environmental movement and the civil rights movement emerged as a consequence of rising prosperity. It was the middle-class, young, and educated black Americans who were on the forefront of the civil rights movement. Poor blacks were active, but the movement was overwhelmingly led by educated, middle-class intellectuals and community leaders (preachers prominent among them). This was also the case with the white supporters of the civil rights movement, who tended to be more highly educated and more affluent than the general American population. In short, the civil rights movement no more emerged because African Americans were suddenly denied their freedom than the environmental movement emerged because America suddenly started polluting.

Chapter two criticizes conservation efforts in Brazil, suggesting that nature protection cannot save the Amazon unless environmentalists provide an alternative way for Brazil to prosper. The authors criticize the environmental justice movement as focusing on low-priority pollution concerns in communities of color, narrowing the movement's focus instead of expanding it to include job creation and public health. And they fault climate activists for seeing climate change as a pollution problem like acid rain and the ozone hole instead of as an economic development and technological innovation challenge. The authors draw on science philosopher Thomas Kuhn to argue that environmentalists are stuck in a "pollution paradigm" when it comes to global warming.

One of Kuhn’s most famous examples was of the revolution led first by Copernicus and later by Galileo to overthrow the Earth-centered view of the solar system and replace it with our current sun-centered one. But in other instances, new paradigms leave part of the old paradigms intact, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, which left Newton’s theory of gravity on Earth intact even as it revolutionized our understanding of mass and energy in the rest of the universe.

Such may be the case with environmentalism. In many situations the pollution paradigm may still be a good way of understanding and dealing with air and water pollution. Our contention is not that the pollution paradigm is no longer useful for dealing with acid rain or rivers aflame but that it is profoundly inadequate for understanding and dealing with global warming and other ecological crises.

Part II of Break Through, "the politics of possiblity," is an argument for environmentalism to die and become reborn as a new progressive politics, one capable of winning a new social contract for Americans, so that they are financially secure enough to be able to care about ecological challenges, and a $500 billion public-private investment in clean energy. The last half of the book makes the case for a new social contract for the post-industrial age, one capable of helping Americans overcome "insecure affluence," whereby voters are both more materially wealthy but also more financially insecure than ever before. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say environmentalism should evolve from being a religion into being a church, and they see evangelical churches, with their capacity for providing belonging and fulfillment to their middle-class members, as models for a new "pre-political" institution for secular progressives. The authors argue for concrete policies, from "Global Warming Preparedness," and a global clean energy investment strategy modeled on the creation of the European Union after World War II.

In the final chapter of Break Through, "Greatness," argues that global warming will reshape national and international politics:

Climate change and the political response to it is already defining a new fault line in the culture. On one side of that line will be a global NIMBYism that sees the planet as too fragile to support the hopes and dreams of seven billion humans. It will seek to establish and enforce the equivalent of an international caste system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to energy poverty in perpetuity. This politics of limits will be anti-immigration, anti-globalization, and anti-growth. It will be zero-sum, fiscally conservative, and deficit-oriented. It will combine Malthusian environmentalism with Hobbesian conservatism.

On the other side will be those who believe that there is room enough for all of us to live secure and free lives. It will be pro-growth, progressive, and internationalist. It will drive global development by creating new markets. It will see in institutions like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund not a corporate conspiracy to keep people poor and destroy the environment, but an opportunity to drive a kind of development that is both sustainable and equitable. It will embrace technology without being technocratic. It will seek adaptation proactively, not fatalistically. It will establish social and economic security as preconditions for ecological action. It will be large and transformative, but not millenarian.

Critical Reception of Break Through

As with "The Death of Environmentalism," Break Through was simultaneously criticized and praised from both political left and right. Critics praised the book for challenging environmetnalist and liberal orthodoxies, such as the idea that economic growth and consumption are inherently destructive ecologically; that there are "limits" to growth; that humans are a violation of a separate "Nature"; that the truth of Nature can only be represented through Science; that Americans struggle more with poverty than with affluence; and that the government should not play a role in creating and shaping new markets (such as in clean energy).

Critics alternately faulted Break Through for constructing a "straw man" of environmentalists, arguing that few environmentalists oppose economic growth or technology; for embracing economic growth against ecological limits; for not recommending concrete policy proposals; for downplaying the importance of regulation to stimulating the transition to a clean energy economy; and for understating the persistence of poverty in the U.S.

Wired magazine profiled the authors in October 2007 and concluded, "Green groups may carp, but the truth is the book could turn out to be the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring." Plenty Magazine called Break Through "Elegant... Think Fast Food Nation meets The Audacity of Hope... Expect to underline a lot and then grab a friend or co-worker and say, "Listen to this!" Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat is On and Boiling Point, blurbed Break Through, saying "Break Through illuminates a new and empowering politics for America." Bill McKibben, author the End of Nature, faulted the authors for criticizing the failure of the Kyoto protocol, but added that the book is also "unremittingly interesting, sharp, and wide-ranging." The Nature Conservancy's Chief Scientist concluded, "Nordhaus and Shellenberger have thrown down the gauntlet. Only new thinking and perhaps even a wholesale paradigm shift in conservation can meet their challenge." And the Wall Street Journal wrote, "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."

Other reviewers were harshly critical. Joe Romm, a former Department of Energy Official now with the Center for American Progress, argued against Break Through's argument that public investment in clean energy technologies are more important than pollution regulation. "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." (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.") A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "the arguments of Nordhaus and Shellenberger attain an intellectual pretense that could almost pass for brilliant if their urgings weren't so patently empty." And the American Prospect argued the authors had created a straw man out of environmentalism and that most of Break Through "just rounds down to common-sense henpecking of those they purport to be aligned with, and a lot of wasted ink."

Breakthrough Institute

The Breakthrough Institute promotes itself as a "small think tank with big ideas." It promotes new thinking on health care, offering "Strategic Initiatives" such as a "New Apollo Project" to invest $500 billion in clean energy to "Healthy Generation" to a "Motherhood Tax Credit."

References

"The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World." essay
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility book web site
"Dead Movement Walking," Salon.org
Debate over Death of Environmentalism, Grist.org
"Pair Stir Debate Over Eco-Politics,New York Times
"We're All Environmentalists Now," American Prospect
"Two Heretics Anger Their Bretheran," Wired magazine
"Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming," New York Times
Review of Break Through in The Wall Street Journal