Ted Nordhaus

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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

But these steps can be dead ends, the experts say, rather than on-ramps, for integrating people at the bottom of the pyramid into the modern economy.7 Becoming productive members of that economy, and reaping its benefits, tend to go hand in hand with a threshold level of annual electricity consumption—on the order of several thousand kilowatt-hours per capita, which far exceeds the amount of electricity that simple off-grid solar systems can deliver. Morgan Bazilian at the World Bank argues that on top of increasing the number of people with an electrical connection, it is crucial to increase the quantity of electricity used in homes and businesses to power economic growth.8 Taking all this into account, Ted Nordhaus, Shaiyra Devi, and Alex Trembath at the Breakthrough Institute argue that “decentralized renewable and off-grid energy technologies … cannot, however, substitute for energy and other infrastructure necessary to support industrial-scale economic enterprise. Microfinance, microenterprise, and microenergy are no substitute for industry, infrastructure, and grid electricity.”9 I respect the judgment of these experts, and, through many conversations, they have certainly convinced me that off-grid solar has played a negligible role in the tremendous progress made to date in lifting people out of poverty in the industrializing world.

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., “Our High Energy Planet,” Breakthrough Institute, April 2014, http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Our-High-Energy-Planet.pdf. 8.  Morgan Bazilian and Roger Pielke, “Making Energy Access Meaningful,” Issues in Science and Technology 29 (4): 74–78, http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/2013.22.pdf. 9.  Ted Nordhaus, Shaiyra Devi, and Alex Trembath, “Debunking Microenergy: The Future Lies with Urbanization,” Foreign Affairs, August 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-08-30/debunking-microenergy. 10.  Peter Alstone, Dimitry Gershenson, and Daniel M. Kammen, “Decentralized Energy Systems for Clean Electricity Access,” Nature Climate Change 5, no. 4 (2015): 305–314, doi:10.1038/nclimate2512. 11.  

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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.  

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

An Economic Analysis of 20th Century Whaling,” Biodiversity and Conservation 13 (2004): 453–562, https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIOC.0000009489.08502.1a. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Tønnessen and Johnsen, The History of Modern Whaling, 136. 36. Viktoria Schneider and David Pearce, “What Saved the Whales? An Economic Analysis of 20th Century Whaling.” 37. Davis et al., In Pursuit of Leviathan, 512. 38. Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger, Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation, The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, accessed December 5, 2019, 29, https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/legacy/images/pdfs/Nature_Unbound.pdf. 39. Schneider and Pearce, “What Saved the Whales? An Economic Analysis of 20th Century Whaling.”

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., “Estimated Association Between Dwelling Soil Contamination and Internal Radiation Contamination Levels After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident in Japan,” BMJ Open 6, no. 6 (June 29, 2016), https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/6/6/e010970.full.pdf. 116. Michel Berthélemy and Lina Escobar Rangel, “Nuclear Reactors’ Construction Costs: The Role of Lead-Time, Standardization and Technological Progress,” Energy Policy 82 (July 2015): 118–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.03.015. 117. Jessica R. Lovering, Arthur Yip, and Ted Nordhaus, “Historical Construction Costs of Global Nuclear Power Reactors,” Energy Policy 91 (April 2016): 371–81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.01.011. When the reactors in this study are grouped by reactor type, the average overnight capital costs are lowest for pressurized and boiling-water reactors and greater for heavy-water reactors and gas-cooled reactors.

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John van Zalk and Paul Behrens, “The spatial extent of renewable and non-renewable power generation: A review and meta-analysis of power densities and their application in the US,” Energy Policy 123 (2018): 83–91, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.08.023. 97. Ibid., 83–91. 98. Jesse Jenkins, Mark Moro, Ted Nordhaus et al., Beyond Boom & Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence, Breakthrough Institute, April 2012, https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads.thebreakthrough.org/articles/beyond-boom-and-bust-report-overview/Beyond_Boom_and_Bust.pdf, 18. 99. Tom Jackson, “PacificCorp Sues to Block Release of Bird-Death Data at Wind Farms,” Sandusky Register, November 17, 2014, http://www.sanduskyregister.com. 100.

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 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

This Is Why,” Global Citizen, April 25, 2018, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/india-day-zero-clean-water-access-shortage/; Hannah Daly, “1.1 billion people still lack electricity. This could be the solution,” World Economic Forum, June 20, 2018, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/1-billion-people-lack-electricity-solution-mini-grid-iea/. 37 Ted Nordhaus, “Impossible Environmentalism: Green groups promote utopian fantasies,” USA Today, September 7, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/07/impossible-environmentalism-does-not-address-sustainability-ted-nordhaus-column/570651001/. 38 Lewis Page, “Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top google engineers,” Register, November 21, 2014, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/; Lewis Page, “Renewable energy can’t do the job.

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Leaders in countries such as India tend to be more concerned about the availability of energy than about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.36 Investing in Resilience In order to ind effective solutions to climate change and other problems, the environmental movement needs to give up “utopian fantasies,” writes Ted Nordhaus, a longtime California environmentalist, and “make its peace with modernity and technology.”37 Given existing technologies, the much-anticipated shift to solar and wind energy seems largely impractical as a way of cutting emissions without dramatically raising energy costs, reducing reliability, and increasing poverty.

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.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

But once we’re in it, the process of matching who we are to content streams can lead to the erosion of common experience, and it can stretch political leadership to the breaking point. Discourse and Democracy The good news about postmaterial politics is that as countries become wealthier, they’ll likely become more tolerant, and their citizens will be more self-expressive. But there’s a dark side to it too. Ted Nordhaus, a student of Inglehart’s who focuses on postmaterialism in the environmental movement, told me that “the shadow that comes with postmaterialism is profound self-involvement.... We lose all perspective on the collective endeavors that have made the extraordinary lives we live possible.” In a postmaterial world where your highest task is to express yourself, the public infrastructure that supports this kind of expression falls out of the picture.

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Harris, “Facebook’s Advertising Fluke,” TechRepublican, Dec. 21, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2011, http://techrepublican.com/free-tagging/vincent-harris. 155 have the ads pulled off the air: Monica Scott, “Three TV Stations Pull ‘Demonstrably False’ Ad Attacking Pete Hoekstra,” Grand Rapids Press, May 28, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/05/three_tv_stations_pull_demonst.html. 157 “improve the likelihood that a registered Republican”: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 195. 157 “likely to be most salient in the politics”: Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10. 159 Pabst began to sponsor hipster events: Neal Stewart, “Marketing with a Whisper,” Fast Company, Jan. 11, 2003, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, www.fastcompany.com/fast50_04/winners/stewart.html. 159 “$44 in US currency”: Max Read, “Pabst Blue Ribbon Will Run You $44 a Bottle in China,” Gawker, July 21, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2011, http://m.gawker.com/5592399/pabst-blue-ribbon-will-run-you-44-a-bottle-in-china. 160 “I serve as a blank screen”: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 11. 161 “We lose all perspective”: Ted Nordhaus, phone interview with author, Aug. 31, 2010. 162 “the source is basically in thought”: David Bohm, Thought as a System (New York: Routledge, 1994) 2. 163 “participants in a pool of common meaning”: David Bohm, On Dialogue (New York: Routledge, 1996), x–xi. 164 “define and express its interests”: John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927), 146.

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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“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.

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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Most important, the sacrifice needed to bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero is far greater than forgoing jewelry: it would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing. Climate justice warriors, indulging the fantasy that the developing world will do just that, advocate a regime of “sustainable development.” As Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus satirize it, that consists of “small co-ops in the Amazon forest where peasant farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and Jerry’s for their ‘Rainforest Crunch’ flavor.”61 They would be allowed solar panels that could light an LED or charge a cell phone, but nothing more.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Arguments in the form of ‘only the capacity of capitalism to innovate technological solutions can now save us’ therefore neglect the fact that the social and economic logic underlying modern societies continues to generate GHGs despite these societies’ high levels of innovativeness. In a recent article, Ted Nordhaus put his finger on the dilemma: ‘the only remotely plausible path to the sorts of changes that many environmentalists now demand, such as zero net emissions by 2030, or stabilizing global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Centigrade above preindustrial levels, would require top-down, centralized, technocratic measures that most environmentalists are unwilling to seriously embrace’.27 That’s probably true.

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As ex-CIA director James Woolsey has written, in a world with a 2 metre (~6 foot) sea level rise – which is eminently likely within a century under current emissions trends – ‘it will take extraordinary effort for the United States, or indeed any country, to look beyond its own salvation’.36 In other words, political uncertainties are looming that undermine confidence in the possibilities for centralised, technocratic climate change mitigation of the kind favoured by Ted Nordhaus. So, short of some eleventh-hour techno-fix, the present climate crisis suggests a need to think seriously about local, labour-intensive, small-scale farming economies as an adaptive response. One aspect of this thinking is suggested by Emma Marris when she equates consumption and morality. If it requires an ‘unprecedented improvement in our moral character’ to consume less, this suggests that consuming large quantities of material things must be morally suspect, but also an unavoidable human failing.

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.

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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, Da Capo Press Inc. (2009). 3. 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.

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.

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.

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).

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

As I mentioned in the introduction, Jesse Ausubel’s essay “The Return of Nature,” published in the Breakthrough Journal, got me started down the path of investigating how we were able to turn the corner and start getting more from less. Jesse provided advice and encouragement, and answered many questions, as did his collaborators at Rockefeller University, Iddo Wernick and Alan Curry. At the Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus, Alex Trembath, Linus Blomquist, and Rachel Pritzker were beyond welcoming. Back home at MIT my colleagues at the Initiative on the Digital Economy created an ideal environment for this work and lots of other research. David Verrill and Christie Ko kept the place running smoothly, Adjovi Koene took a lot of tasks off my plate, and Seth Benzel and Daniel Rock were great sounding boards for the work as it progressed.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

For various sorts of information, inspiration and practical help, I would like to thank Oded Aharonson, Eric Asphaug, Stewart Brand, Holly Jean Buck, Niall Campbell, Andrew Chaikin, Carissa Christensen, Charles Cockell, Ashley Conway, Olaf Corry, Ian Crawford, Martin Elvis, Jeff Foust, Mike French, Trevor Hammond, Bill Hartmann, Jim Head, Tracy Hester, Scott Hubbard, Laura Joanknecht, Roz Kaveney, John Kessel, Jeff Lewis, Simon Lewis, Simon Lock, John Logsdon, Neil Maher, Will Marshall, Chris McKay, Jay Melosh, Farah Mendelsohn, Philip Metzger, Clive Neal, Ted Nordhaus, Ted Parson, Stephen Pumfrey, Bob Richards, Paul Robbins, Stan Robinson, Simon Schaffer (as always), Jean Schneider, Rusty Schweickart, Sarah Stewart, Timothy Stubbs, Bron Szerszynski, David Waltham, Dennis Wingo, Nick Woolf, Pete Worden and Kevin Zahnle. Three meetings held during 2018 were extremely helpful to me in shaping the book’s themes: I am very grateful to the organisers of and participants at the 49th Lunar and Planetary Science Symposium in Houston and its preceding Brown/Vernadsky micro symposium; to Daniel Zizzamia and the participants at the Planetary Designs workshop at Harvard; and to Bron Szerszynski, Katarina Damjanov and the participants at the Multiplanetary Futures meeting at the University of Lancaster.

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 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.

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

Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Shapin, Steven. “The Invisible Technician.” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989): 554–63. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus. “Environmental Apocalypse Is a Myth.” San Francisco Chronicle online, June 7, 2013. Sheppard, Muriel Earley. Cloud by Day: The Story of Coal and Coke and People. Uniontown, PA: Heritage, 1947. Sherman, William H. “Patents and Prisons: Simon Sturtevant and the Death of the Renaissance Inventor.”

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

Department of Energy and Climate Change, ‘Energy Consumption in the United Kingdom’, 2012; Eurostat: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?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.