Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, after careers in the traditional environmental movement, opened up a firestorm of controversy among environmentalists when they published their 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism”. Their thesis that traditional environmentalism was not capable of dealing with the current ecological crises led to outpourings of both passionate criticism and support. Their new book, “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility”, follows up on that original essay and promises to lead to 
further intense discussion. After hearing them speak at the Los Angeles Public Library ALOUD Series last week, I was full of questions. Ted was kind enough to answer some of them for me during an hour long interview last Wednesday.
Leslie Berliant: Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, once said that he never met an ex-environmentalist; do you and Michael prove him wrong?
Ted Nordhaus: Great question! We call ourselves post-environmentalists and in so far that it means that we aren’t environmentalists anymore, I guess you could say that, but we see post-environmentalist as an evolution, not a repudiation of what has come before.
LB: You get a lot of both flack and support for talking openly about the death of the traditional environmental movement and the need to move away from policy advocacy. In your mind, what does today’s post-environmental movement need to look like?
TN: We don’t say that we need to not be involved in policy advocacy, but that we need to do a different kind of advocacy. We need to advocate different policies in the context of larger political and social forces to move society in the direction that we want it to move. There are a whole set of policies we prescribe, but they are less obsessively focused on regulation. Regulation is a part of the solution, but not the entire or even most important part. We focus more on building a clean energy economy and not just on tearing down the old energy economy. We believe that for this to happen we will need to build the social and political capital to make those things possible and we need to advocate policies that are consistent with the values of the American people. It’s about focusing on the critical political, economic and social components that will get us there.
Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger |
TN: No. Nader has a laundry list of fairly typical progressive issues that he talks about. A lot of people really misread our essay and understood it to mean that we were advocating for all of these progressive issues to have a common agenda - take some environmentalism, sprinkle in a little social justice, spice it up with health care and there you have your agenda. What we were saying is that these old issue categories themselves don’t serve us well. Just aggregating them together is not sufficient. We really need to start to realize the ways in which a new century demands a new way of thinking. Literally, we believe that the opportunity at the heart of the global warming crisis is to bring prosperity and opportunity to every corner of the globe. If we understand the climate crisis as a failure of economic opportunity and growth instead of a product of consumption, than solving climate change is as easily understood to be about shared opportunity, and extraordinary investments that transcend categorical lines that progressives have drawn to define themselves.
LB: I’m glad to hear you talk about investment. One thing that really irks a lot of people, me included, about folks like Bjorn Lomborg, is that he has an underlying premise that confronting environmental crises will only cost us money without looking at how it might benefit the economy. You write in the book about the need for big technology breakthroughs that will pay off in terms of economic growth. Are any companies or scientists poised for those breakthroughs any time soon?
TN: Obviously, there’s a huge amount of attention and focus on the opportunities presented by new green technology among VCs and others in the business community. Vinod Khosla, for example, claims to be close to breakthroughs on thermal, solar and cellulosic fuels. So there is stuff happening, but not enough and not on a large enough scale which is why we call for such large public investments. There is an extraordinary opportunity here. Lomborg takes the worst case scenario in cost and the best case scenario in terms of the impact of climate change and it creates a problem with his whole framework. At the same time, when we say that this is a planetary emergency but that solutions are easy and not costly, that’s a problem too. But if we understand solutions as investments not just in the survival of the planet, but 
in a more prosperous economic future, that is the framework in which we need to see the entire effort.
LB: By the way, I discovered today that Lomborg is tied to three organizations that are funded by Exxon.
TN: I didn’t know that.
LB: Within the framework of investment in the green economy and cross-sector collaboration, what is the role of personal responsibility?
TN: First of all, those personal actions are great. Recycle, buy the light bulbs, buy more fuel efficient cars, these are all wonderful things. But most people, including the people taking these actions, realize that making better consumer choices is not going to get us to 80% reductions in greenhouse gases any time soon. Those choices are best understood as personal practices that are quite important in establishing a particular identity. When someone starts to make those choices, they internalize a whole set of ideas about themselves. It’s a personal statement that one makes that one is in fact conscious of their impact and behaviors. Where it can become problematic is when people start to moralize about it. It’s like they call it on South Park, it’s that smug factor, that smug cloud that descends upon the people of South Park because everyone is so self satisfied about owning a Prius. Buying a Prius is great because it’s supporting the beginning of breakthrough technology that will move us away from the combustion engine, but when one starts to feel morally superior for driving a Prius as one pulls up to the stop sign next to a guy in a pick up truck or SUV and then drives to ones 3000 or 4000 square foot home while that guy goes to the trailer he lives in, it’s deeply problematic, politically, economically and socially. When making those personal choices becomes associated with personal virtue, it can become quite toxic politically.
LB: You talk a lot about the connections between issues, but when Michael started talking about poverty and hunger the other night at LA Library, for example, he was challenged on several counts when talking about the situation in Los Angeles. Do you think that some of the narrow focus among progressive movements is about staying within an area of expertise and perhaps about being able to reach consensus?
TN: There’s a tendency to define a lot as being outside of the field of concern in order to get things done and there are times when doing that is extremely useful. It gets really problematic, however, when trying to figure out how to save a rainforest in a place like Brazil, with extreme poverty, high national debt and incredibly inequitable land distribution and a failing economy beyond the resource extractive sectors that you are trying to constrain. The idea that you can ignore all that and just focus on saving the rainforest is problematic. Deforestation is driven by factors outside of the forest. These are the same reasons we criticize the environmental justice movement, which has defined its field of interest as those problems which can both be traditionally understood as environmental problems and which inequitably effect non-white populations. This has not been particularly effective or powerful because they too often speak to problems that just aren’t particularly high priorities to those communities. Talking about toxic contamination in communities where people can’t send their kids to schools with any confidence that they will learn is not going to be a particularly powerful agenda for those communities.
LB: One criticism of the Death of Environmentalism is the lack of prescription. The politics of possibility described in your new book, Breakthrough, seems to be that prescription. Can you define the ‘politics of possibility’ for those folks that haven’t read the book yet?
TN: Fundamentally, it’s a creative endeavor. We are basically focused on creating the economies, societies and social institutions that we want to live in rather than stopping the bad stuff we don’t like. In order to do that, we have to make a big investment in the energy sources we want to use, consistent with creating greater equity and economic development. We have a set of specific policies we prescribe to do that. It’s aspirational, solution oriented and asset based, looking at and focusing on the things that we are good at, finding our best selves and building our societies and politics around the things we know how to do well. In the U.S., we are really good at innovating and creating, so we focus there.
LB: Can you better explain why it takes prosperity to move towards the politics of possibility and what that means for the majority of the world that lacks prosperity?
TN: What we say is that ecological concern as expressed in US, Europe and other developed countries is a function of prosperity. A set of pre-conditions exist that allow us to look at world in that way. People move through the process of having their basic survival needs met and then start getting further material and status needs met and then they move to having their inner-directed fulfillment needs met. It’s basically Maslow’s needs concept, and while you can quibble about components of it, the larger theory is pretty widely accepted by social scientists. There’s a process of development that societies need to go through before we see movement toward things like environmental protection. We have to help people move through those stages as quickly as possible so that we can all be post-materialists and focus on creating the kinds of societies we want to live in, focusing on who we are and creating identities that are not just about survival but in order to flourish and live happy, rewarding and self creating lives.
LB: You also talk about needing “an inspiring vision” as opposed to just policy solutions, do you think any of the current activists, organizations or candidates even, are poised to offer that vision?
TN: It’s funny. Obama talks about the ‘Audacity of Hope’ and some of it gets close to it, although I’m not sure what it really is or means and I’m not convinced that he does either, which is the problem for Obama. The idea of an inspiring vision is that there must be some compelling vision of what’s in it for all of us other than simply avoiding the end of the world. For those of us living in post material prosperity, it really starts with gratitude, with not seeing prosperity as an illness, but as a gift. We are part of between half a billion and a billion people in the world that are the most prosperous, autonomous and healthy human beings ever to set foot on planet. That’s a remarkable thing! Instead of insisting that it is unsustainable, we ought to express our gratitude and desire that every person on the planet has the same freedom and prosperity that we have. That is an expansive dream. Despite all of the talk of limits to growth and the capacity of the planet, we believe that this is quite achievable, and in ways that are sustainable, but it requires big changes and investments. There are lots of good reasons to believe that we are capable of it. Look at all we have overcome. There are 7 billion people on the planet and more and more of us are prosperous and free than ever before.
LB: Do you think that the environmental movement has gained back any of its political power in recent years, particularly following the ’06 elections?
TN: One of things that happened and I hope that our essay contributed to it, is that the environmental movement got more political and started putting more resources into communications and organizing. But environmentalism didn’t play a big part in the ’06 election; a lot of it was really about the Iraq war. People did not vote the Democrats into power because of global warming; it was mostly out of opposition to the war and other things that were happening. Global warming was about the last item on the list of what they were opposed to. Our prospects are better than they’ve ever been in Congress, and it has lots to do with the massive incompetence and over reach by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, but global warming still ranks as one of the lowest issues on the list.
LB: It’s shocking.
TN: Particularly considering what’s at stake and what has happened. Global warming has as much media coverage as any issue out there and almost all along the lines that environmentalists want, but that has had virtually no impact on public opinion.
LB: But what about someone like Al Gore being on Oprah, doesn’t that show a shift?
TN: It’s remarkable that Al Gore was on Oprah, but polls show, look at any poll out there, that public opinion on global warming and support for the government taking immediate action is unchanged. The impact of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has been widely misunderstood. It’s had little impact on public opinion, which has stayed at around 60 to 70 % support for action to address global warming, but has had a huge impact on elite opinion, thus his appearance on Oprah, which can drive tremendous change.
LB: You have said that environmentalists don’t engage in debate, but what about the IPCC, some of the more provocative sessions at the TED conference or, perhaps more accurately, what happens in the blogosphere?
TN: Unfortunately, the blogosphere is as often an echo chamber as anything else. Frankly, much of the debate is pretty tactical. When you go to big liberal and environmental blogs, there’s not a lot of debate over principles. Is it cap and trade or just cap? Not bigger questions about the way in which we understand and think about these issues. Which was essentially our argument in ‘Death of Environmentalism’; there’s lots of tactical debate but not a lot of talk of thinking about this problem differently and that is still largely the case today.
LB: Your argument that progressives keep losing the message game is widely accepted by progressives, in fact. What nobody seems to be able to figure out, though, is how to change that. Case in point, this Congress keeps caving in to a president with a 24% approval rating because they are so afraid of losing the messaging war. How can we start to reframe the public debate to favor progressive causes?
TN: We have always argued that reframing that didn’t get to underlying policies would fail, and it has. Much of what has passed for reframing and rethinking progressive message is really trying to come up with new magic words. When you look at the Apollo Project, that was a real effort in truly reframing. It was an effort to rethink the conceptual approach to global warming and put investments at the center of the proposal to create jobs, new economies and energy independence in order to get out of the public opinion ghetto that environmentalism has been in. You can’t do that by calling cap and trade an investment. You can still cap and regulate a part of that, but investment needs to be at the center. There is still a lot of resistance to this, but that’s starting to change. Joe Lieberman just sponsored legislation that, if it passes, will raise $100 billion annually for energy investment and they still talk about it as pollution regulation when it’s really a massive investment in industrial policy. We would be well suited to talk about it that way.
LB: You bring psychology into your work and talk about how people shut off when all they hear is how bad things are. But hadn’t we been hearing for decades, especially the 80’s, how great and prosperous the US was and didn’t that in some ways feed our over consumption?
TN: The 80’s seem a long time ago, but what was powerful about the Reagan revolution was the story he told about America and what it could accomplish. It was a very compelling narrative for many Americans and was an effective way to mobilize support for winning the cold war. A lot of consumption is not driven by narrative, but by affluence. The real big jump in consumption actually happened in the 90s due to affluence. People were more affluent but also more insecure as we moved toward a global economy. That insecurity drives materialistic, outer directed and status directed behaviors.
LB: Something you said at the LA Library the other night that resonated with me was that in order to really solve the environmental crises, we would need more equity in global living standards. Do you think that we can move toward that realistically and how do we get people to stop associating the accumulation of wealth with the need to buy bigger, more, better?
TN: What we say is that there is a point where people start to go “I don’t need more stuff, I’ve accumulated enough. In fact, I want less stuff. I want to live a life that people think of as simpler (though it isn’t). I might be better off and happier in 1000 square foot apartment instead of a 4000 square foot home. I might be happier with fewer, better things that last longer.” This happens as people move through materialism and modernity. More and more people are seeing the world like that in the US, Europe and other developed countries. People have to go through materialism to get to post-materialism. It’s one thing to have a lot of stuff and then choose to give it up because you think it makes life better to give it up. It’s another thing to never have had those things. Whether we like or not, most people need to go through the process of having that choice, so we should take people through that as quickly as possible. But a lot of social science increasingly suggests that people do get to the point of post-materialism.
LB: Can you spend some more time in Los Angeles so that you can convince people that they are better off in the smaller apartment?
TN: Some of us may not be quite there. To the degree that we have severed the relationship between energy production and pollution, it’s reasonable to think that many more of us can live in a great degree of comfort. At the end of day, for reasons outside of environmental concerns, we’re probably going to be better off as people move to living in smaller places in dense urban environments rather than a 4000 square foot home in a subdivision. It’s not about affluence, it’s about lifestyle. Look, particularly in the US, all those beliefs that pricing energy correctly will lead to reductions didn’t happen. We saw gas triple in price and it had only a modest impact on the cars we bought and almost no impact on how much we drive. The footprints of communities are not amenable to any other way of getting around. And some, like Los Angeles, are worse than others. Once people start valuing different things about how to live, and that becomes aspiration, then things will change.
LB: At the LA Library the other night, you talked about natures in the plural and that the idea of nature is really a human construct. You also said that the natures of our future will be whatever we decide they should be. It starts to sound like you are embracing human dominance over the natural world. Is there a balance between the natural world and human interaction with it?
TN: It’s not to say that we reign supreme, but a question of distinction. Who’s to say that what we do isn’t natural or an expression of nature? The real question is what are we going to do? Nature isn’t going to dictate that to us as a singular thing with a particular agency. Nature has many answers for us as to what kinds of answers we are going to pursue. We’re as natural as a hurricane. The concept of being superior or subordinate to nature is problematic. If we are going to live in balance with nature, we will need to live in balance with ourselves and that could mean lots of things. We talk a lot in the book about human and non-human natures. None of this is to deny the materiality of the world or that there are things out there that aren’t us, but the meaning in those things, we create.
LB: It starts to sound like nature as a religion.
TN: What is really parallel to religion is imagining a capital ‘N’ Nature telling us what to do. You simply substitute nature as interpreted by science for God as interpreted by scripture. Then we start telling stories about falling from or becoming out of balance with nature. It picks up a very old narrative about a time when we believe we lived in harmony with nature. We create meaning in the world through lots of things; science, religion, the stories we tell. There’s a whole world out there and we are constantly organizing it into narrative and stories. That’s how we navigate the world and we will probably always do that. So the real question is what narratives, stories and ideas best serve how we want to live and our aspirations for ourselves and our future?
