In 2004, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus published The Death of Environmentalism, which featured the infamous Chinese ideogram for crisis on its cover — danger plus opportunity.
In it, they argued that the great successes of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s had laid the seeds of the movement’s failure in the early years of the 21st century.
In Break Through, they continue their argument for a new environmental movement that isn’t just another special interest group.
In, The Lowdown on Doomsday, Jonathan Adler looks at their book and why the public shrugs at global warming:
The authors contend that the environmental movement must throw out its “unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts, and exhausted strategies” in favor of something “imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented.”
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But no one, they contend, is going to demand draconian emission limits–the kind that would actually slow the warming trend — if they bring down the standard of living and interrupt the progress of the economy.A progressive approach, the authors say, would acknowledge that economic growth and prosperity do not, in themselves, pose an environmental threat. To the contrary, they inspire ecological concern; the environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a “post-material” need that people demand only after their material needs are met. To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that “constrain human ambition, aspiration and power” instead of finding ways to “unleash and direct them.”
Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger want “an explicitly pro-growth agenda,” on the theory that investment, innovation and imagination may ultimately do more to improve the environment than punitive regulation and finger-wagging rhetoric. To stabilize atmospheric carbon levels will take more — much more — than regulation; it will require “unleashing human power, creating a new economy.”