Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

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Break Through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger Published Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Comments on Break Through

Thesis

Traditional environmentalism, claim authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, will not succeed in dealing with global climate change. They discard:

• environmentalism through regulation and litigation.
• pollution-control models that may have worked in specific cases, but (they claim) will not solve problems of human-caused global warming.
• limits to growth particularly doom-and-gloom scenarios.
• environmental rhetoric of the last thirty years.
• liberal special interest groups.

• Labor and environmental groups for stifling economic growth.
• Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy.
• The Kyoto Protocol, or at least the lack of meeting its goals.
• Social critics Thomas Frank and Jared Diamond.

But do they suggest more than:

• adopting an affirmative outlook
• celebrating human creativity
• creating breakthrough technologies (hello, aren't we all waiting for the miracle to come?) that don't pollute and are alternatives to carbon-based fuel.
• promoting economic growth and gigantic technology investments in energy.
• using an aggressive, adversarial tone as they do.

Practical advice seems thin. They don't have a proposal for how to halt global warming.

As Rich Sweeney blogged on March 1, 2008 http://commontragedies.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/no-breakthroughs-here-a-review-of-break-through-by-nordhaus-and-shellenberger/:

I realized that no major insight or concrete ideas were coming.

Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: Past
  • The birth of environmentalism
  • Brazil
  • Race
  • Place
  • The pollution paradigm
  • The death of environmentalism
• Part II: Future
  • Security
  • Belonging and fulfillment
  • Pragmatism
  • Greatness

	The Abstract Wild by Jack Turner. This is terrific. A page-turner by a Deep Ecologist who advocates that we get out into the wild and be there ... versus what he calls "shallow ecologists" — including Environmental Ethicists — who make the Wild into an Abstraction. Further comments on The Abstract Wild
	Break Through: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger Published Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Comments on Break Through

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