ted nordhaus

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the 2008 International Global Energy Prize award ceremony The Christmas to New Year period is traditionally ‘hibernation mode’ for blogs, when page views and comment counts plummet (my hits have dropped about 70% compared to early December!). I suppose this is a time when people find better things to...[read more]

By Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Jesse Jenkins If there's one thing everyone knows for certain, it's that energy efficiency reduces energy consumption. President Obama, Steven Chu, Fortune 500 chieftains, Silicon Valley VCs, the U.N. and McKinsey all say it. This view has become so common-sensical to be nearly tautological....[read more]

By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus Japan's blunt declaration last week that it was walking away from the Kyoto climate treaty marked the end of an era. Since Copenhagen, international climate negotiations have proceeded on two parallel tracks, with most major emitting nations simultaneously participating in efforts to extend Kyoto...[read more]

By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus The failure of the U.N. climate process is proof that shared economic sacrifice cannot be the basis of global action. Nations will not scale up clean energy as long as it remains so much more expensive than fossil fuels. Thinking past talks in Cancun, nations should focus instead on energy...[read more]

In late September, Breakthrough Institute Chairman Ted Nordhaus gave the keynote address at the World Climate Solutions conference--northern Europe's biggest annual clean tech event. The conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in the Bella Center, the very place where the international climate negotiations collapsed less than one year...[read more]

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger A shorter version of this article appears in the October 28, 2010 print edition of The New Republic (and online here, subscription required) In August 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama traveled to Lansing, Michigan, to lay out an ambitious ten-year plan for revitalizing, and fundamentally...[read more]

Nuclear power might just be energy's version of the phoenix -- rising from the metaphoric ashes to play a key role in the solution to climate change. That's the gist of a Wall Street Journal feature that points out that as climate concerns rise a number of environmentalists are rethinking their position on the viability of nuclear...[read more]

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have an essay up at Yale e360 arguing that in the wake of Climategate, energy policy should be made independent of climate science. The piece is already beginning to set the climate blogosphere aflutter, with coverage from the National Journal, E&E News (subs. req'd) and The Hill. While...[read more]

That's the question explored by the Breakthrough Institute's Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in a new column in Foreign Policy that chronicles the climate odyssey of the past year - from President Obama's campaign and election through Congressional climate debates and the chaos in Copenhagen. Take a gander at the in-depth...[read more]

Originally posted at the Breakthrough InstituteMore than a year after Breakthrough's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger pronounced the Kyoto Protocol dead in "Scrap Kyoto," the rest of the world may be catching on as pressure mounts to produce a workable climate treaty that will encourage global action. National Public Radio wrote...[read more]

I have spent the last two days talking to and listening to the Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and the question they always are asked is, what is your positive vision for the future? Well, I will be doing a full review of the book soon, but the question is being asked of the wrong people. Tom Friedman got it seriously wrong, as...[read more]

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger released their provocative and much-discussed essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," in which they criticized the environmental movements lack of progress towards global warming solutions and argued that a fundamental shift in philosophy, messaging and tactics was necessary to capture...[read more]