Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger (born 1971) is an American author, environmental policy writer, cofounder of Breakthrough Institute and founder of Environmental Progress. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment (2008), winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, co-editor of Love Your Monsters (2011) and co-author of Break Through (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and The Death of Environmentalism (2004). He and his co-author Ted Nordhaus have been described as "ecological modernists" and "eco-pragmatists." In 2015, Shellenberger joined with 18 other self-described ecomodernists to coauthor An Ecomodernist Manifesto. On November 30, 2017, he announced during a New York Times conference that he would run for Governor of California in 2018.

In July 2017, Shellenberger, with colleagues and associates of Environmental Progress sent an open letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in urging him to reconsider his nuclear phase-out proposal, given the importance of South Korea's nuclear program to protecting the climate. In August 2017 a comprehensive report, "The High Cost of Fear" was published, outlining the likely impacts on South Korea of that proposal. In October 2017, a South Korean citizen's jury voted to restart the construction of two halted nuclear reactors.

In 2017, Shellenberger told The Australian: "Like most people, I started out pretty anti-nuclear. I changed my mind as I realised you can't power a modern economy on solar and wind... All they do is make the electricity system chaotic and provide greenwash for fossil fuels."

In February 2016 it was revealed that Shellenberger had relinquished his position as president of the Breakthrough Institute, to run a new organisation, Environmental Progress, which is behind several public campaigns:

In January 2016, alongside several other authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto—including Robert Stone, David Keith, Stewart Brand and Mark Lynas—as well as Kerry Emanuel, James Hansen, Steven Pinker, Stephen Tindale and Burton Richter; Shellenberger signed an open letter urging officials not to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. It was addressed to California Governor Jerry Brown, the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric and California state officials.

In April 2016, Shellenberger, alongside other conservationists and scientists—including James Hansen, Stewart Brand, Nobel Laureate Burton Richter, Kerry Emanuel and Mark Lynas—signed an open letter urging against the closure of the six operating nuclear power plants in Illinois: Braidwood; Byron; Clinton; Dresden; LaSalle; and Quad Cities. Together, they account for Illinois ranking first in the United States in 2010 in both nuclear capacity and nuclear generation, and generation from its nuclear power plants accounted for 12 percent of the United States total. In 2007, 48% of Illinois's electricity was generated using nuclear power.

In July 2016, an open letter signed by climate scientists, scholars, environmentalists and concerned citizens was sent to Governor Andrew Cuomo and leaders within New York's Public Service Commission, urging them to support legislation that would protect New York's nuclear plants from closure, including the Indian Point nuclear power plant. In August, Cuomo announced that the PSC had formally approved a Clean Energy Standard (CES) that explicitly recognises the zero-carbon contribution of nuclear power plants.

In April 2015, Shellenberger joined with a group of scholars in issuing An Ecomodernist Manifesto. This proposes dropping the goal of “sustainable development” and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity’s footprint by using nature more intensively. The authors argue that economic development is, in fact, an indispensable precondition to preserving the environment.

In 2011, Nordhaus and Shellenberger started The Breakthrough Journal, which The New Republic called "among the most complete efforts to provide a fresh answer" to the question of how to modernize liberal thought, and The National Review called "...the most promising effort at self-criticism by our liberal cousins in a long time."

In, 2007, Houghton Mifflin published Nordhaus and Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Wired Magazine called Break Through "the most important thing to happen to environmentalism since Silent Spring." 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. Time Magazine named Nordhaus and Shellenberger two of its 32 Heroes of the Environment (2008) calling Break Through "prescient" for its prediction that climate policy should focus not on making fossil fuels expensive through regulation but rather on making clean energy cheap. Break Through was awarded the Green Book Award, 2009, whose other recipients include E.O. Wilson and James Hansen.

In 2004, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, both long-time strategists for environmental groups, co-authored a controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World." The paper argues that environmentalism is conceptually and institutionally incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born. The essay was debated, and continues to be widely discussed and taught.

Shellenberger was president and a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, which he co-founded with Ted Nordhaus in 2003. Today, Breakthrough Institute consists of a policy staff, an annual conference, a policy journal, and a network of affiliated fellows. Breakthrough Institute's analyses of energy, climate and innovation policy have been cited by National Public Radio the Wall Street Journal and C-SPAN.

Shellenberger graduated from the Peace and Global Studies (PAGS) program at Earlham College in 1993.

In 1993 he moved to the San Francisco to work with progressive organization, Global Exchange, authoring articles on Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, Gulf War syndrome, and affirmative action. At UC Santa Cruz he helped organize a graduate students union and defend affirmative action. Later he co-founded Communication Works, an allied progressive public relations organization. which worked on a wide range of campaigns, from challenging Nike over its labor practices in Asia, to saving the Headwaters Redwood forest. In 2002 Shellenberger co-founded the consulting firm Lumina Strategies. Its clients included Global Exchange, Americans United for Affirmative Action, the Ford Foundation, the Sierra Club, and the Venezuelan Information Center. In 2005 Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus co-founded American Environics, whose clients include AARP, Earthjustice, the Ford Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Shellenberger's early writing and activism focused on Latin America and he was introduced to activism and political direct action due to being raised a Mennonite. That work included the founding of an Amnesty International chapter in high school in Greeley, Colorado, and debating Latin American policy, for which he attended the National Forensic League Championships. He traveled and worked in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s.

Former Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando said, referring to both Shellenberger and his coauthor Ted Nordhaus, "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." Michel Gelobter and others with an environmental justice perspective criticized Death for not addressing the concerns of poor people who were not white, and wrote The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century in response.