Michael Shellenberger

Michel Gelobter, as well as other environmental experts and academics, wrote The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century as a response that criticized "Death" for demanding increased technological innovation instead of addressing the systemic concerns of people of color.

Matthew Yglesias of The New York Times said that "Nordhaus and Shellenberger persuasively argue...environmentalists must stop congratulating themselves for their own willingness to confront inconvenient truths and must focus on building a politics of shared hope rather than relying on a politics of fear."

Michael D. Shellenberger (born June 16, 1971) is an American author and journalist who writes about politics, the environment, climate change, and nuclear power.

He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition.

He is a 1989 graduate of Greeley Central High School.

He earned a BA degree from the Peace and Global Studies program at Earlham College in 1993.

Subsequently, he earned an MA degree in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996.

After graduation, Shellenberger moved to San Francisco to work with Global Exchange, where he founded a number of public relations firms, including "Communication Works," "Lumina Strategies" and "American Environics" with future collaborator Ted Nordhaus.

Shellenberger co-founded in 2003 the Breakthrough Institute with Nordhaus.

While at Breakthrough, Shellenberger wrote a number of articles with subjects ranging from positive treatment of nuclear energy and shale gas to critiques of the planetary boundaries hypothesis.

He worked to burnish the reputations of prominent clients including Venezuelan President and strongman Hugo Chavez.

In 2004, Nordhaus and Shellenberger co-authored "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World."

The paper argued that environmentalism is incapable of dealing with climate change and should "die" so that a new politics can be born.

The paper was criticized by members of the mainstream environmental movement.

Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, called the essay "unclear, unfair and divisive," claiming it contained multiple factual errors and misinterpretations.

However, Adam Werbach, another former Sierra Club president, praised the paper's arguments.

John Passacantando, the former Greenpeace executive director, said in 2005 that Shellenberger and Nordhaus "laid out some fascinating data, but they put it in this over-the-top language and did it in this in-your-face way."

Shellenberger founded the pro-nuclear non-profit Environmental Progress in 2016.

An iconoclastic figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over impending threats and the best policies for addressing them.

He argues that global warming is "not the end of the world," and that GMO, industrial agriculture, fracking, and nuclear power are important tools in protecting the environment.

His writing on climate change and environmentalism has been criticized by environmental scientists and academics, who have called some of his arguments "bad science" and "inaccurate".

Response to his work from journalists has been mixed.

In a similar manner, many academics criticized Shellenberger's positions and writings on homelessness, and he has received a mixed reception from writers and journalists on the topic.

In February 2016, Shellenberger left Breakthrough and founded Environmental Progress, which is behind several public campaigns to keep nuclear power plants in operation.

Shellenberger has also been called by conservative lawmakers to testify before the U.S. Congress about climate change and in favor of nuclear energy.

In December 2022, Shellenberger was one of the authors who released sections of annotated internal Twitter Files authorized by new owner Elon Musk.

As of December 2022, he is a writer for The Free Press.

In October 2023, Shellenberger was among the signatories of the Westminster Declaration, warning the public of theoretical increasing censorship by governments, media companies and NGOs, that signatories alleged would endanger freedom of speech and undermine the foundational principles of democracy.

As of November 2023, Shellenberger is the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin.

"By exposing students to historical and recent manifestations of censorship, the Chair will facilitate the responsible exercise of free speech in a pluralistic society."

University of Austin is not a school recognized by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics.

In that same month he was the key note speaker at a Genspect conference.

In this speech he emphasized on the current increase of gender dysphoria being the result of the gender affirming culture: “We are creating, through ideological means and social media, gender dysphoria.

… These are ideologically driven failures of civilization,”

Shellenberger is the co-founder of "Public", a newsletter on Substack that covers "… stories on the most important issues of the day, from censorship and cities to mental health and addiction to energy and the environment."

In January 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle credited Public with breaking the story that illegal drug abuse was being tolerated at a recently-opened San Francisco social services facility.

In December the same year, having become became de-facto a federally prohibited supervised injection site and failing at its mission of linking people to housing and treatment, the facility closed.

In 2023, Public was credited by the Wall Street Journal for publicly identifying three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were allegedly working on Coronaviruses and had taken ill near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shellenberger ran unsuccessfully for Governor of California in 2018 and 2022.

Shellenberger was born and raised in Colorado to Mennonite parents.