The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming in a Post-Environmental World In 2004, Nordhaus and Shellenberger co-authored "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World." The paper argued that environmentalism is incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born. The paper was criticized by members of the mainstream environmental movement.
Carl Pope, the former executive director of the
Sierra Club, called the essay "unclear, unfair and divisive", stating it contained multiple factual errors and misinterpretations.
Adam Werbach, another former Sierra Club president, praised the paper's arguments. John Passacantando, the former
Greenpeace executive director, said in 2005 that Shellenberger and Nordhaus "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, as well as other environmental experts and academics, wrote
The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century as a response that criticized "Death" for demanding increased technological innovation instead of addressing the systemic concerns of people of color.
Matthew Yglesias of
The New York Times said that "Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue...environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear." Yglesias added that the "Death" paper "is more convincing in its case for a change in rhetoric."
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility In 2007, Shellenberger and Nordhaus published
Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. 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. They were among 32 of
Time magazine's
Heroes of the Environment (2008) after writing the book, and received the 2008 Green Book Award from science journalist
John Horgan.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that "(i)f 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." Environmental scholars
Julie Sze and Michael Ziser questioned Shellenberger and Nordhaus's goals in publishing
Break Through, arguing the "evident relish in their notoriety as the 'sexy'(,) cosmopolitan 'bad boys' of environmentalism (their own words) introduces some doubt about their sincerity and reliability." Sze and Ziser asserted that
Break Through failed "to incorporate the aims of
environmental justice while actively trading on suspect political tropes", such as blaming China and other nations as large-scale polluters. Furthermore, Sze and Ziser claim that Shellenberger and Nordhaus advocate technology-based approaches that miss entirely the "structural environmental injustice" that natural disasters like
Hurricane Katrina make visible. Ultimately, "Shellenberger believes that community-based environmental justice poses a threat to the smooth operation of a highly capitalized, global-scale Environmentalism."
Joseph Romm, a former
US Department of Energy official now with the liberal think tank
Center for American Progress, argued that "(p)ollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really mattersreducing greenhouse-gas emissions and driving clean technologies into the marketplace." Environmental journalist David Roberts, writing in
Grist, argued that while the BTI and its founders garner much attention, their policy is lacking, and ultimately they "receive a degree of press coverage that wildly exceeds their intellectual contributions." Reviewers for the
San Francisco Chronicle, the
American Prospect and the
Harvard Law Review argued that a critical reevaluation of green politics was unwarranted because global warming had become a high-profile issue and the Democratic Congress was preparing to act.
An Ecomodernist Manifesto In April 2015, Shellenberger joined a group of scholars and
Whole Earth Catalog founder, author
Stewart Brand, in issuing
An Ecomodernist Manifesto. It proposed dropping the goal of "sustainable development" and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity's footprint by using natural resources more intensively through technological innovation. The authors argue that economic development is necessary to preserve the environment. According to
The New Yorker, "most of the criticism of [the
Manifesto] was more about tone than content. The manifesto's basic arguments, after all, are hardly radical. To wit: technology, thoughtfully applied, can reduce the suffering, human and otherwise, caused by climate change; ideology, stubbornly upheld, can accomplish the opposite." At
The New York Times, Eduardo Porter wrote approvingly of ecomodernism's alternative approach to sustainable development. In an article titled "Manifesto Calls for an End to 'People Are Bad' Environmentalism",
Slate's
Eric Holthaus wrote "It's inclusive, it's exciting, and it gives environmentalists something to fight for for a change."
An Ecomodernist Manifesto was met with critiques similar to Gelobter's evaluation of "Death" and Sze and Ziser's analysis of
Break Through. Environmental historian Jeremy Caradonna and environmental economist
Richard B. Norgaard led a group of environmental scholars in a critique, arguing that Ecomodernism "violates everything we know about ecosystems, energy, population, and natural resources," and "Far from being an ecological statement of principles, the
Manifesto merely rehashes the naïve belief that technology will save us and that human ingenuity can never fail." Further, "The
Manifesto suffers from factual errors and misleading statements." In his book, Shellenberger argues that people shouldn't need to be worried about climate change causing crop failure, famine and consequent mass deaths because he believes that when it comes to food production, humans will be able to produce more food despite the effects of climate change. Shellenberger cites an editorial that is published by a group led by
Eric Holt-Giménez to support his statement, however Holt-Giménez later told
Snopes that Shellenberger "has either misunderstood our editorial, or is purposefully mischaracterizing our points." Instead Holt-Giménez criticized the
industrial farming that Shellenberger advocates, and says that such practices are using a model of overproduction that generates poverty. He explained that people typically don't become hungry because there is not enough food, but that instead they become hungry when they are too poor to afford to buy the food that is produced. Before publication, the book received favorable reviews from climate scientists
Tom Wigley and
Kerry Emanuel, and from environmentalists such as
Steve McCormick, but reviews after publication were mixed. The book has received positive reviews and coverage from
conservative and
libertarian news outlets and organizations, including
Fox News, the
Heartland Institute, the
Daily Mail,
Reason,
The Wall Street Journal,
National Review, and "climate 'truther' websites". In
National Review, Alex Trembath generally praised the book, writing that "despite the flaws", "Shellenberger ... do[es] a service in calling out the environmental alarmism and hysteria that obscure environmental debates rather than illuminate them. And they stand as outliers in those debates for precisely the reason that they claim: Abjuring environmentalist orthodoxy carries heavy social and professional penalties, so few are willing to do so." However, Trembath criticized some of the book as "nuclear fetishism". In the
Financial Times, Jonathan Ford wrote that the book "provide[s] a corrective to many of the green assumptions that dominate the media. And if they make the world a little more questioning of the next polar bear story, that is no bad thing." In the
Scientific American,
John Horgan said that "
Apocalypse Never will make some green progressives mad. But I see it as a useful and even necessary counterpoint to the alarmism being peddled by some activists and journalists, including me", but Horgan criticized the book for arguing too "aggressively for nuclear power" and added that "my main gripe with Shellenberger isn't that he's too optimistic; it's that he's not optimistic enough." In contrast, in reviewing
Apocalypse Never for Yale Climate Connections, environmental scientist
Peter Gleick argued that "bad science and bad arguments abound" in the book, writing that "what is new in here isn't right, and what is right isn't new." A 2020 Forbes article by Shellenberger, in which he promoted
Apocalypse Never, was analyzed by seven academic reviewers and one editor from the
Climate Feedback fact-checking project. The reviewers conclude that Shellenberger "mixes accurate and inaccurate claims in support of a misleading and overly simplistic argumentation about climate change." Benjamin Schneider, writing in the
San Francisco Examiner, described the book's thesis as "[P]rogressives have embraced 'victimology,' a belief system wherein society's downtrodden are subject to no rules or consequences for their actions. This ideology, cultivated in cities like San Francisco for decades and widely adopted over the past two years, is the key to understanding, and thus solving, our crises of homelessness, drug overdoses and crime."
Wes Enzinna, writing in
The New York Times, charged that Shellenberger "does exactly what he accuses his left-wing enemies of doing: ignoring facts, best practices and complicated and heterodox approaches in favor of dogma." Olga Khazan, writing in
The Atlantic, said that "The problem — or opportunity — for Shellenberger is that virtually every homelessness expert disagrees with him. ('Like an internet troll that's written a book' is how Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness, described him to me.)." Khazan also noted that "some experts agree with some of Shellenberger's critiques of Housing First. Though they stop short of endorsing Shellenberger or his views."
Tim Stanley, writing in
The Daily Telegraph, described it as a "revelatory, must-read book", but added "There is much in the argument for liberal readers to contest."
Claims regarding UAP reports During the November, 2024 U.S. House of Representative Oversight Committee hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). He said that there are hundreds or even thousands of undisclosed images and videos. Shellenberger had previously published a story that alleged the U.S. Government was operating a secret UFO program called
Immaculate Constellation. “The intelligence community is treating us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.” == Politics ==