Q&A: Michael Shellenberger

[October 24th, 2007]

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus set off a firestorm among environmental leaders when they argued in their 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism” that the movement’s politics were outdated and doomed to fail in motivating the public to address climate change.

Their new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, expands on that idea. Rather than embracing the old approach of regulating industry, they call for working with corporations and making a $300 billion federal investment in green technologies.

Before Shellenberger arrives next week to discuss the book, WW spoke with him about the Oregon Legislature’s carrot-and-stick approach to promoting green energy, such as requiring that 25 percent of Oregon’s energy come from renewable sources by 2025. He also weighed in on Portland’s reputation as an eco-utopia of biodiesel requirements and recycling mandates, and on Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore’s green cred.

i]WW[/i] : Have environmentalists made global warming worse by alienating the public?
Michael Shellenberger: The environmental movement presents this argument that global warming is a planetary emergency. But then they say it will be really easy to fix—we just put in place some pollution limits and some efficiency regulations. The public says, “Look, you’ve either lied about the size of the problem or you’ve lied about the solutions.” And the right wing says they lied about the problem.

Is Al Gore at least on the right track?
Al Gore has talked about a lot of big solutions, but I still haven’t heard him advocate for a massive investment in clean energy. I certainly didn’t see it in [Gore’s 2006 film,] An Inconvenient Truth.

Are Oregon’s green initiatives counterproductive?
They’re not counterproductive. They’re just extremely limited in what they’re going to be able to achieve. Any regulatory approach creates a Catch-22. The idea of regulations is to increase the cost of dirty energy so that clean energy becomes cost-competitive. But if you increase the cost of dirty energy a lot—which is what you have to do to make things like solar competitive—you’re going to trigger a backlash from consumers and industry.

What about Portland touting itself as an eco-topia?
That’s all fine. I just want to be really clear-eyed about what all that stuff is not going to do. None of it is going to add up to anything sufficient to deal with the crisis we face. It would be irresponsible to act like this will get us where we need to go, when it so clearly won’t.

Isn’t it naïve to think oil and energy companies will be good-faith partners in fighting global warming?
What they want to do is make profits. Their goal is not necessarily to sell coal and oil. If they can make money in some other way, they’ll do it. You’ve had 20 years of failure in trying to get federal legislation on global warming, because the whole thing has gotten constructed as environmentalists versus corporations. It’s never been so simple. It’s always been governments working to create markets and shape markets. If corporations are evil and they’re the problem, you’re stuck in a politics of limits.