Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Two Environmentalists Anger Their Brethren
For angry heretics on the run, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger sure know how to enjoy themselves. Sitting in a cozy Berkeley restaurant just a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, exchanging tasting notes on the vermentino (“cold white wine is so good with fatty, fried food,” Shellenberger says), they recount with perverse pleasure, in tones almost as dry as the wine, how they’ve been branded as infidels by fellow environmentalists. It started in 2004, when they published their first Tom Paine-style essay accusing the movement’s leaders of failing to deal effectively with the global warming crisis. “We thought that someone was going to take a swing at us,” Shellenberger says. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope published withering counterattacks, and the two men were dubbed “the bad boys of American environmentalism” by author Bill McKibben.
By its very nature, the environmental movement has always been antitechnology and antigrowth. Bikes are better than cars; open space is better than development; less is always more. As a result, its leaders have focused most of their antiglobal warming political energies on regulating carbon emissions and limiting domestic energy consumption. Noble aims, to be sure. There’s just one problem: In dealing with global warming, these strategies haven’t worked in the past and will not work any better in the future.
Consider the evidence: Since the Kyoto agreement, many of the 36 industrialized countries that committed to reducing emissions are not on track to meet even minimal goals — since 2000, their emissions have gone up, not down. And both China and India are building a slew of coal-burning plants as their economies explode. “If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050,” Shellenberger says, “we are super-deeply fucked.”
Read more at Wired.
