Michael Shellenberger

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Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

(Guy Corbishley/Alamy Live News) Caleb with Daniel at the Virunga dam, which was built to support economic development and reduce the threat to mountain gorillas from wood-fuel use. (Michael Shellenberger) In 2014, White House science advisor John Holdren claimed Roger Pielke, Jr., had misled Congress. One year later, Representative Raúl Grijalva from Arizona announced an investigation of Pielke. (Holdren: NASA Image Collection/Alamy Stock Photo: Pielke: CSPAN) Helen with the gorillas. People protect endangered species like mountain gorillas not because human civilization depends on them but rather because of their spiritual and aesthetic value. (Michael Shellenberger) About the Author MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”; the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings; and an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Animals in England, writes a historian, “had been divided into the wild, to be tamed or eliminated, the domestic, to be exploited for useful purposes, and the pet, to be cherished for emotional satisfaction.” 48. Michael Shellenberger, “An Interview with Founder of Earth Innovation, Dan Nepstad,” Environmental Progress, August 25, 2019, http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2019/8/29/an-interview-with-founder-of-earth-innovation-dan-nepstad. 49. “Brazil and the Amazon Forest,” Greenpeace, accessed January 20, 2020, https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/issues/brazil-and-the-amazon-forest. Michael Shellenberger, “An Interview with Founder of Earth Innovation, Dan Nepstad,” Environmental Progress, August 25, 2019, http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2019/8/29/an-interview-with-founder-of-earth-innovation-dan-nepstad. 50.

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Rhett Butler, “Greenpeace Accuses McDonald’s of Destroying the Amazon,” Mongabay, April 7, 2006, https://news.mongabay.com. 56. Michael Shellenberger, “An Interview with Founder of Earth Innovation, Dan Nepstad.” 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. David P. Edwards et al., “Wildlife-Friendly Oil Palm Plantations Fail to Protect Biodiversity Effectively,” Conservation Letters 3 (2010): 236–42, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2010.00107.x. 63. Michael Shellenberger, “An Interview with Founder of Earth Innovation, Dan Nepstad.” 64. Dave Keating, “Macron’s Mercosur Veto—Are Amazon Fires Being Used as a Smokescreen for Protectionism?

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

“Tokyo,” Atlas of Urban Expansion, accessed April 3, 2021, www.atlasofurbanexpansion.org, cited in Michael Shellenberger, “Dear Fellow YIMBYs: Yes, Urban Density Is Wonderful. But We Also Need More Suburbs,” Forbes, April 13, 2018, www.forbes.com. 9. Shellenberger, “Dear Fellow YIMBYs.” 10. “Conservation Easement,” California Council of Land Trusts, accessed April 3, 2021, www.calandtrusts.org; “Conservation Easements,” Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, accessed April 3, 2021, www.cmap.illinois.gov; Michael Shellenberger, “California in Danger: Why the Dream Is Dying and How We Can Save It,” Environmental Progress, February 14, 2018, www.environmentalprogress.org. 11.

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He has written on energy and the environment for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Nature Energy, and other publications for two decades. He is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent, nonpartisan research organization based in Berkeley, California. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Michael Shellenberger Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All Copyright san fransicko. Copyright © 2021 by Michael Shellenberger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

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Dedication For Helen Epigraph Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.1 —instruction to Saint Francis Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Introduction 1: “I Just Want to Clean Up the Mess” 2: Pleasure Island 3: The Experiment Was a Success but the Patients Died 4: The War on the War on Drugs 5: “We Can’t End Overdoses Until We End Poverty and Racism” 6: Let’s Go Dutch 7: The Crisis of Untreated Mental Illness 8: Madness for Decivilization 9: Medication First 10: Not Everyone’s a Victim 11: The Heroism of Recovery 12: Homicide and Legitimacy 13: When the Law’s Against the Laws 14: “Legalize Crime” 15: It’s Not About the Money 16: Love Bombing 17: “It’s a Leadership Problem” 18: Responsibility First 19: Civilization’s End Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Also by Michael Shellenberger Copyright About the Publisher Introduction When I first heard last June that a group of people had taken over a neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ostensibly in response to the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by a police officer in Minneapolis, I couldn’t understand what had happened.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

As prosperity faltered, we now found ourselves in a paradoxical position. Most Americans were still much wealthier than their grandparents had been. But our ascent had stopped: we could no longer count on advancing economically as rapidly as those earlier generations had. Many of us had entered what Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have called a state of “insecure affluence,” where our material needs were still largely met, but our desires for better status, or more self-esteem, or other postmaterial aspirations, were being thwarted, which left us angry, anxious, and ready to blame someone. And yet, while such anger and anxiety, twenty years earlier, might have motivated us to take political action, the current culture pushed us in another direction.

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New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Morozov, Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: Public Affairs, 2013. Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Pocket Books, 1958. ———. The Waste Makers. New York: Pocket Books, 1964. Pelfrey, William. Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of Two Unique Men, a Legendary Company, and a Remarkable Time in American History.

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“S&P 500: Total and Inflation-Adjusted Historical Returns,” Simple Stock Investing, http://www.simplestockinvesting.com/SP500-historical-real-total-returns.htm. 7. William Lazonick and Mary O’Sullivan, “Maximizing Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance,” Economy and Society 29, no. 1 (Feb. 2000): 19. 8. Ibid. 9. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, p. 156. 10. “Work Stoppages Falling,” graph, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/images/201302/20130212work_stoppage600.png. 11. Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, “Declining Labor Shares and the Global Rise of Corporate Savings,” research paper, October 2012, http://econ.sciences-po.fr/sites/default/files/file/cbenard/brent_neiman_LabShare.pdf. 12.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

By the time Vladimir Putin ratified the protocol, in 2004, Russia was already certain to meet its goal for 2012. The countries with the best emissions-reduction records—Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic—were all parts of the Soviet empire and therefore look good for the same reason. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in their 2007 book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, write, “Germany and Britain have reduced their emissions, but most of those reductions were due to the collapse of the British coal-mining industry in the 1980s and the collapse of East German heavy industry and power generation after the reunification of Germany.

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From the macaroni box: “As the stewards of our fragile planet, we humans need to unite and speak out on behalf of all of Earth’s inhabitants—from plankton to polar bears to whales to redwoods. We are all interconnected. We all share the same home. Displaying a BE GREEN sticker gives you this voice.” 48 Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 113-14. 49 Doug Struck, “Canada Alters Course on Kyoto,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2006. 2. Liquid Civilization 1 Neela Banerjee, “Many Feeling Pinch After Newest Surge in U.S.

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Scientific American , February 5, 2008. A brief version of this article appeared in the April 2008 issue of the magazine; a longer version appears online at: www.sciam.com. 19 François Leydet, The Last Redwoods and the Parkland of Redwood Creek (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1963), p. 132, quoted in Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 26. 20 Statistics from the National Park Service, quoted in “Environmental Awareness,” The Economist, February 8, 2007. “No park, it seems, is immune to the decline: even in Yosemite, one of the system’s oldest parks and probably its best known, the number of visitors dropped 17% over the ten-year period.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

.: Gateway Editions, 1949), 336. 40 ‘something uncanny’: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 554. 40 ‘menace and uncertainty’: George Marshall, Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 95. 41 processes of thought: Cf. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 43 relationship with the non-human: Cf. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, ‘The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World’ (Oakland, CA: Breakthrough Institute, 2007): ‘The concepts of “nature” and “environment” have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large’ (12). 44 ‘post-natural world’: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 49. 51 tides and the seasons: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha make this point at some length in their excellent book, SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2009). 51 and on Salsette: I am grateful to Rahul Srivastava, the urban theorist and cofounder of URBZ (http://urbz.net/about/people/), for this insight. 51 a chest of tea: Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K.

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See chap. 8 of Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006). 183 in the United States: Anthony Giddens notes, ‘In no other country is opinion about climate change so acutely divided as in the US today.’ See Giddens’s The Politics of Climate Change, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 89. 183 politics of self-definition: See Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, ‘The Death of Environmentalism’: ‘Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not’ (10). Similarly Andrew J. Hoffman, notes, ‘The debate over climate change in the United States (and elsewhere) is not about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas models; it is about opposing cultural values and worldviews through which that science is seen’ (How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015], Kindle edition, loc. 139). 183 ‘means to be American’: Raymond S.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). See also Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Post-Industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971): 991-1017. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger elaborate on Inglehart’s concept in their book Break Through to suggest that we now live in a condition of “insecure affluence.” See, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 2. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976). 3.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

Radiation poisoning is a terrifying prospect, and the accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan seem to provide all the evidence one could need that nuclear power plants can’t be operated safely. As the environmental policy analyst and self-described “ecomodernist” Michael Shellenberger highlights, however, the evidence is strong that nuclear is actually the safest source of reliable energy. A study published in the Lancet in 2007 found that over the previous fifteen years death rates from pollution were generally hundreds of times lower for nuclear power than for coal, gas, or oil, and that accident rates were also comparatively low for nuclear.II As Shellenberger points out, “Nobody died from radiation at Three Mile Island or Fukushima,III and fewer than fifty died from Chernobyl in the thirty years since the accident.”IV Nuclear power doesn’t deserve its bad reputation.

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solid majorities of citizens in twenty-four countries: Damian Carrington, “Citizens across World Oppose Nuclear Power, Poll Finds,” Guardian, June 23, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/jun/23/nuclearpower-nuclear-waste. A study published in the Lancet in 2007: Anil Markandya and Paul Wilkinson, “Electricity Generation and Health,” Lancet 370, no. 9591 (September 15–21, 2007): 979–90. “Nobody died from radiation at Three Mile Island or Fukushima”: Michael Shellenberger, “If Nuclear Power Is So Safe, Why Are We So Afraid of It?,” Forbes, June 11, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/11/if-nuclear-power-is-so-safe-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-it/#cc9469863859. The Japanese government attributed his death to the accident: Motoko Rich, “In a First, Japan Says Fukushima Radiation Caused Worker’s Cancer Death,” New York Times, September 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/asia/japan-fukushima-radiation-cancer-death.html.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

84 And after all of this, when it comes to energy, the public will suffer. America’s largest state, California, has been an incubator for far-left environmental experiments. During the summer of 2020, California’s climate policies resulted in a widespread blackout. Millions of its citizens had their electrical power cut off in the midst of a heat wave. Michael Shellenberger at Forbes explains: “[T]he underlying reasons that California… experience[ed] rolling black-outs for the second time in less than a year stem[s] from the state’s climate policies….”… “California saw its electricity prices rise six times more than the rest of the United States from 2011 to 2019, due to its huge expansion of renewables….”85 “Even though the cost of solar panels declined dramatically from 2011 and 2019,” writes Shellenberger, “their unreliable and weather-dependent nature meant that they imposed large new costs in the form of storage and transmissions to keep electricity reliable.

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.____, MUR21083, https://www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/(2.8.2021)%20THRIVE.pdf (April 10, 2021). 84 Collin Anderson, “Progressives Push Biden to Include $10 Trillion Climate Plan in Infrastructure Package,” Washington Free Beacon, March 31, 2021, https://freebeacon.com/policy/progressives-push-biden-to-include-10-trillion-climate-plan-in-infrastructure-package/ (April 10, 2021). 85 Michael Shellenberger, “Why California’s Climate Policies Are Causing Electricity Blackouts,” Forbes, August 15, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/08/15/why-californias-climate-policies-are-causing-electricity-black-outs/?sh=43991d831591 (April 10, 2021). 86 Ibid. 87 “Understanding the Texas Energy Predicament,” Institute for Energy Research, February 18, 2021, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/understanding-the-texas-energy-predicament/ (April 10, 2021). 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Benji Jones, “The Biden administration has a game-changing approach to nature conservation,” Vox, May 7, 2021, https://www.vox.com/2021/5/7/22423139/biden-30-by-30-conservation-initiative-historic. 91 Mark R.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Contents * * * Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication From the Nightmare to the Dream The Politics of Limits The Birth of Environmentalism The Forest for the Trees Interests Within Interests The Prejudice of Place The Pollution Paradigm The Death of Environmentalism The Politics of Possibility Status and Security Belonging and Fulfillment Pragmatism Greatness In Gratitude Notes Bibliography Index Connect with HMH Copyright © 2007 by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. hmhco.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Nordhaus, Ted. Break through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility / Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

He also claimed that while he supports wind power, “some places should be off limits to any sort of industrial development” and that “our most important wildernesses are 228 GUSHER OF LIES those that are closest to our densest population centers, like Nantucket Sound.”19 Kennedy’s many critics contended that his opposition was just another example of the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) syndrome. Two environmental activists, Ted Norhaus and Michael Shellenberger, quickly penned a response to Kennedy in the San Francisco Chronicle, calling his opposition to the wind farm an example of “a worldview born among the privileged patricians of a generation for whom building mansions by the sea was indistinguishable from advocating for the preservation of national parks.”20 In early 2007, the owners of the fabled King Ranch, one of the largest working ranches in the world, led a push in the Texas legislature to pass a law that would regulate the installation of wind turbines.

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Capewind.org. Available: http://www.capewind.org/article24.htm. 19. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “An Ill Wind off Cape Cod,” New York Times, December 16, 2005. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/opinion/ 16kennedy.html?ex=1292389200&en=58e5dd67e381fd58&ei=5090&partner =rssuserland&emc=rss. 20. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus, “Arctic Battle Should Move to Hyannis Port,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 21, 2005. Available: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/21/EDGU6 GALTN1.DTL. 21. Robert Elder, “King Ranch Leads Backlash against Wind Farms,” Austin American-Statesman, March 28, 2007. 22.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

It will also help you appreciate how complementary the solar technologies are in supplying our electricity. We will also need some physics in Part II to counter the arguments of those who oppose the solar revolution. Many people find the debate about energy options extremely confusing. Here is a typical argument from two commentators, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in The Wall Street Journal on 22 May 2013. They are clearly sceptical about renewable energy and critical of two solar supporters, Robert F. Kennedy Jr of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Bill McKibben, who had been writing in The Daily Beast. You can find the reference to this, and other quotations, in the Bibliography.

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Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Doubleday (2003). 4. Jeremy Leggett, Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis, Portobello Books (2005). 5. Jeremy Leggett, The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance, Routledge (2014). 6. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, ‘Going Green? Then Go Nuclear’, Wall Street Journal, 22 May 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014241278873237163045784826634914263 12, accessed 10 December 2013. 7. K.W.J. Barnham, D. Hart, J. Nelson and R.A. Stevens, ‘Production and destination of British civil plutonium’, Nature, 317, 213 (1985). 8.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Staffell, “The Future Cost of Electrical Energy Storage Based on Experience Rates,” Nature Energy 2 (2017), doi: 10.1038/nenergy.2017.110. 33.  Arnulf Grubler, “The Costs of the French Nuclear Scale-Up: A Case of Negative Learning by Doing,” Energy Policy 38, no. 9 (2010): 5174–5188, doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2010.05.003. 34.  Ted Nordhaus, Jessica Lovering, and Michael Shellenberger, “How To Make Nuclear Cheap,” The Breakthrough Institute, June 2014, https://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Breakthrough_Institute_How_to_Make_Nuclear_Cheap.pdf 35.  Brad Plumer, “How Carbon Capture Could Become a Rare Bright Spot on Climate Policy in the Trump Era,” Vox, April 12, 2017, http://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/12/15269628/carbon-capture-trump. 36.  

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No. 115-JCX-3–17, Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures for Fiscal Years 2016–2020, (2017), https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4971. 33.  David G. Victor and Kassia Yanosek, “The Crisis in Clean Energy Stark Realities of the Renewables Craze,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2011): 112–120, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2011-06-16/crisis-clean-energy. 34.  Alex Trembath, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Jesse Jenkins, “Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence,” The Breakthrough, April 17, 2012, http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/beyond_boom_and_bust_report_ov. 35.  Nichola Groom, “Prospect of Trump Tariff Casts Pall over U.S. Solar Industry,” Reuters, July 25, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-solar-insight-idUSKBN1AA0BI. 36.  

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

., “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change,” Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 89, 2011, pp. 15-16, available at http://culturalcognition.net; Umair Irfan, “Report Finds ‘Motivated Avoidance’ Plays a Role in Climate Change Politics,” ClimateWire, December 19, 2011; Irina Feygina, John T. Jost, and Rachel E. Goldsmith, “System Justification, the Denial of Global Warming, and the Possibility of ‘System-Sanctioned Change,’ ” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, (2010): 336. 62. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “The Long Death of Environmentalism,” Breakthrough Institute, February 25, 2011; Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “Evolve,” Orion, September/October 2011. 63. Scott Condon, “Expert: Win Climate Change Debate by Easing off Science,” Glenwood Springs Post Independent, July 29, 2010. 64. For an example of how psychologists interested in generational differences have analyzed data from “The American Freshman” survey run out of the University of California, Los Angeles, see: Jean M.

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“Bill Gates: Innovating to Zero!” TED Talk, February 12, 2010, http://www.ted.com; Levitt and Dubner, SuperFreakonomics, 199. 45. Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies as We Do Our Children,” in Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, ed. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (Oakland: Breakthrough Institute, 2011); Mark Lynas, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans (London: Fourth Estate, 2011). 46. Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering, 111. 47. Italics in original. Ed Ayres, God’s Last Offer (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999), 195. 48.

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

The late Ted Rockwell shared his experiences working with Hyman Rickover and building the first US commercial nuclear power plant. I benefited from correspondence with Cesare Marchetti and from discussions present or past with Harold Agnew, Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, Thomas Graham Jr., David Rossin, Michael Shellenberger, Stanislav Shushkevich, Charles Till, Eugene Wigner, and no doubt others whose names escape me. I thank them all. Anne Sibbald, my agent, represented me with her unfailing intelligence and professionalism. Ben Loehnen, my editor at Simon & Schuster, wielded his keen Occam’s razor to make a better (and shorter) book.

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Niering, William A. “Forces That Shaped the Forests of the Northeastern United States.” Northeastern Naturalist 5, no. 2 (1998): 99–110. [Nixon, George] An Enquiry into the Reasons of the Advance of the Price of Coals, Within Seven Years Past. London: E. Comyns, 1739. Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Norman, Oscar Edward. The Romance of the Gas Industry. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1922. Norris, Robert S., and Hans M. Kristensen. “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010.”

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

I also profited from comments by experts who read chapters or excerpts, including Scott Aronson, Leda Cosmides, Jeremy England, Paul Ewald, Joshua Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Joshua Greene, Cesar Hidalgo, Jodie Jackson, Lawrence Krauss, Branko Milanović, Robert Muggah, Jason Nemirow, Matthew Nock, Ted Nordhaus, Anthony Pagden, Robert Pinker, Susan Pinker, Stephen Radelet, Peter Scoblic, Martin Seligman, Michael Shellenberger, and Christian Welzel. Other friends and colleagues answered questions or made important suggestions, including Charleen Adams, Rosalind Arden, Andrew Balmford, Nicolas Baumard, Brian Boutwell, Stewart Brand, David Byrne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Gregg Easterbrook, Emily-Rose Eastop, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Jennifer Jacquet, Barry Latzer, Mark Lilla, Karen Long, Andrew Mack, Michael McCullough, Heiner Rindermann, Jim Rossi, Scott Sagan, Sally Satel, and Michael Shermer.

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Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”2 Recently an alternative approach to environmental protection has been championed by John Asafu-Adjaye, Jesse Ausubel, Andrew Balmford, Stewart Brand, Ruth DeFries, Nancy Knowlton, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and others. It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.3 Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

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The long death of environmentalism. The Breakthrough. http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/the_long_death_of_environmenta. Nordhaus, T., & Shellenberger, M. 2013. How the left came to reject cheap energy for the poor: The great progressive reversal, part two. The Breakthrough. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/the-great-progressive-reversal. Nordhaus, W. 1974. Resources as a constraint on growth. American Economic Review, 64, 22–26. Nordhaus, W. 1996. Do real-output and real-wage measures capture reality? The history of lighting suggests not. In T. F. Bresnahan & R. J. Gordon, eds., The economics of new goods.

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

., “High Tech Indicators: Technology-Based Competitiveness of 33 Nations” (Atlanta, GA: Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Tech University, 2008), http://​www.​tpac.​gatech.​edu. 40 Ranked the United States fifth “U.S. Falls to 5th in Global Competitiveness, Survey Shows,” Associated Press, September 7, 2011. 41 The trends in patents National Academy of Sciences, Gathering Storm, Revisited. 42 The United States will soon be importing Rob Atkinson, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, et al., “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States,” Breakthrough Institute and Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, November 2009, http://​www.​thebreak​through.​org. 43 It will take dramatically expanding government funding National Academy of Sciences, Gathering Storm, appendix E, recommendations called for $13 billion a year in government spending for a decade, starting in 2007. 44 Obama provided a kick start President Barack Obama, remarks, National Academy of Sciences, April 27, 2009; “Fact Sheet: A Historic Commitment to Research and Education,” April 27, 2009, http://​www.​whitehouse.​gov. 45 Obama put $400 million Matthew L.

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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Washington, DC, March 29, 2007. Atkinson, Robert D., and Scott M. Andes. “The Atlantic Century II: Benchmarking EU and U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness.” Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Washington, DC, July 2011. Atkinson, Rob, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, et al. “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant: Asian Nations Set to Dominate the Clean Energy Race by Out-Investing the United States.” Breakthrough Institute; Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Washington, DC, November 2009. Baker, Dean. “The Productivity to Paycheck Gap: What the Data Show.”

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Jason DeParle, “Western Union Empire Moves Migrant Cash Home,” The New York Times, November 22, 2007. 10. Ibid., “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” The New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007. Chapter Ten: Your Planet, Your Choice 1. Scott Borgerson, “Sea Change,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2008, 88–89. 2. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, “Scrap Kyoto,” Democracy, Summer 2008. 3. Lydia Polgreen, “Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power,” The New York Times, September 9, 2007. 4. Adapted from SustainAbility, http://www.sustainability.com. 5. Benedict Kingsbury, Nico Krisch, and Richard Stewart, “The Emergence of Global Administrative Law,” Law and Contemporary Problems 68 (Summer/Autumn 2005).

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

“nature is thriving”: Thomas’s book is Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), and while it offers not so much a full-throated celebration of what he calls an “age of extinction” but a more modest proposal that we view the positive, generative effects of climate change alongside its crueler impacts. This is a note of contrarian optimism echoing Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene; and the Canadian, Swedish, and South African academics behind the research collaboration “Bright Spots,” who, despite considerably more concern about the effects of global warming, nevertheless keep a running list of positive environmental developments they believe makes the case for what they call a “good Anthropocene.”

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 418. 9 Frederick Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 13. 10 Matthew Continetti, “Our Bankrupt Elite,” Washington Free Beacon, March 15, 2019, https://freebeacon.com/columns/our-bankrupt-elite/. 11 “Democrats: The Real Party of the Rich,” Investor’s Business Daily, April 2, 2014, https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/democrat-political-donations-outstrip-republicans/; Rupert Durwall, “Behind the Green New Deal: An elite war on the working class,” New York Post, March 26, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/03/26/behind-the-green-new-deal-an-elite-war-on-the-working-class/. 12 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the Revolution (London: Penguin, 2008), 144. 13 John Hinderaker, “Exposing the Real Costs of ‘Green’ Energy,” Power Line, March 12, 2019, https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/exposing-the-real-costs-of-green-energy.php. 14 Anastasia Lin, “The Cultural Revolution Comes to North America,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cultural-revolution-comes-to-north-america-11554661623. 15 Rebecca Ratcliffe, “Record private jet flights into Davos as leaders arrive for climate talk,” Guardian, January 22, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jan/22/record-private-jet-flights-davos-leaders-climate-talk; Michael Shellenberger, “The Real Reason They Behave Hypocritically On Climate Change Is Because They Want To,” Forbes, August 20, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/08/20/the-real-reason-they-behave-hypocritically-on-climate-change-is-because-they-want-to/#5e242363185a. 16 Eliza Relman, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said billionaires shouldn’t exist as long as Americans live in abject poverty,” Business Insider, January 22, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-thinks-billionaires-shouldnt-exist-2019-1; Walter E.

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

Tim Knauer’s article on Syracuse.com has a picture of part of the scene at the rally: “Dozens of CNY residents flood Albany meeting on nuclear subsidies.”189 I had the good luck to get a seat in the Public Service Commissioner meeting room itself: the department had to open three “overflow” rooms with video feeds because of the large crowd. I heard the historical decision to support all kinds of clean energy—renewable and nuclear. I love the picture of us celebrating after the rally (figure 14). We are gathered outside the building in which the meeting was held. Michael Shellenberger has opened a bottle of non-alcoholic bubbly. He shook it first, so it is spraying all over. Eric Meyer’s face is partially hidden by the bubbles. Rod Adams is at the right, with his fist in the air in joy. Sarah Woolf is holding her “Mothers for Nuclear” sign at the left. I’m there with my pro-nuclear T-shirt from my own rallies.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

This is not to mention the issue of mass extinction and loss of biodiversity of other species. Robert Watson, “Loss of Biodiversity Is Just as Catastrophic as Climate Change,” Guardian, May 6, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/06/biodiversity-climate-change-mass-extinctions; Michael Shellenberger, “Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong,” Forbes, November 25, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why-everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#5cea81cb12d6; Chris Mooney, “Scientists Challenge Magazine Story about ‘Uninhabitable Earth,” Washington Post, July 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/07/12/scientists-challenge-magazine-story-about-uninhabitable-earth/; Jen Christensen, “250,000 Deaths a Year from Climate Change Is a ‘Conservative Estimate,’ Research Says,” CNN, January 16, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/climate-change-health-emergency-study/index.html; “The Impact of Global Warming on Human Fatality Rates,” Scientific American, June 7, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-warming-and-health/. 25.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

On top of the opportunities to listen, talk and socialise at various geoengineering meetings and summer schools in Asilomar, Berlin, Big Sur, Calgary, both Cambridges, Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Lisbon, Oxford, Potsdam, Santa Cruz and Waterloo, I have enjoyed similar stimulation at the Breakthrough Dialogues convened by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. I am also very grateful to NCAR for a media fellowship in 2009 and to the Skoll Foundation and Sundance Institute for their ‘Stories of Change’ project. At a number of these venues it has been a pleasure to work alongside various other writers interested in this most fascinating topic, including Catherine Brahic, Jamais Cascio, Christopher Cokinos, Jeff Goodell, Eli Kintisch, Fred Pearce, Andy Revkin, Jon Vidal and Gaia Vince.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As the global economy continues to shift, cheap energy will allow more people to travel farther to find jobs. And, as always, cheap energy will allow for greater increases in productivity. But the United States must not only aim to have cheap energy at home, it must pursue that goal globally. As Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute have declared, “we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”9 The pursuit of cheap energy means pursuing N2N. Natural gas and nuclear power offer the best no-regrets energy policy because they reduce the volumes of neurotoxins released into the environment, cut solid waste production, slash greenhouse gases, eliminate air pollution, and obviate the need for carbon capture and sequestration.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Schwartz went public first beginning in 2003 with an article in Wired arguing that nuclear could be a “stopgap” while other sustainable energy sources matured.[6] Two years later he gave a more full-throated endorsement of nuclear power with another article, coauthored with Spencer Reiss, that proclaimed “Nuclear Now!”[7] In 2003, two renegade environmental activists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, had created the Breakthrough Institute to promote technological solutions to environmental problems, departing from the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power. The next year they published a manifesto titled “Is Environmentalism Dead?” that touched off a heated debate about nuclear power within the American environmental movement, with Shellenberger and Nordhaus being attacked by a range of mainstream environmentalists led by Carl Pope, the president of the Sierra Club.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“Ongoing Global Biodiversity Loss and the Need to Move Beyond Protected Areas: A Review of the Technical and Practical Shortcomings of Protected Areas on Land and Sea.” Marine Ecology Progress Series. doi: 10.3354/meps09214. Moreland, Scott, Ellen Smith, and Suneeta Sharma. “World Population Prospects and Unmet Need for Family Planning.” Washington, DC: Futures Group, April 2010. Nordhaus, Ted, Michael Shellenberger, and Linus Blomqvist. The Planetary Boundaries hypothesis: A Review of the Evidence. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute, June 11, 2012 “Obama Administration: Health Insurers Must Cover Birth Control with No Copays.” Huffington Post, August 1, 2011. O’Neill Brian C., Michael Dalton, Regina Fuchs, Leiwen Jiang, Shonali Pachauri, and Katarina Zigova.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Matt Taibbi, “Note from San Francisco,” TK News, Substack, Dec. 29, 2022; Matt Taibbi, Twitter File threads, TK News; Matt Taibbi, “America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on Russiagate,” TK News, Jan. 12, 2023; Matt Taibbi, Twitter threads, Dec. 2022–Jan. 2023; Cathy Young, “Are the Twitter Files a Nothingburger?,” The Bulwark, Dec. 14, 2022; Tim Miller, “No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter,” The Bulwark, Dec. 3, 2022; Bari Weiss, “Our Reporting at Twitter,” The Free Press, Dec. 15, 2022; Bari Weiss, Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger, and Nellie Bowles, “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists,” The Free Press, Dec. 15, 2022; David Zweig, “How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate,” The Free Press, Dec 26, 2022; Freddie Sayers and Jay Bhattacharya, “What I Discovered at Twitter HQ,” unherd.com, Dec. 26, 2022. 91. Rabbit Holes: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Claire Boucher (Grimes), Kimbal Musk, James Musk, Ross Nordeen, Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowle, Yoel Roth, David Zaslav.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

tab=table&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tsdpc310. 122. The size of the rebound effect and how to measure it remains a subject of considerable controversy. The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook in 2012, reckoned it to be a modest 9%. Other experts reach 50%: e.g. Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger & Jesse Jenkins, Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena (Oakland, MD, 2011). 123. 2011 ‘Consommation durable’ fair, Paris: ADEME (French environment and energy management agency), Petites réponses, 9. 124. 1993: 10.01 quadrillion Btu vs 10.17 quadrillion Btu in 2009: US Energy Information Administration, Residential Energy Consumption Survey, 2009. 125.