Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, two influential voices in the debate about energy and climate policy will speak at Gustavus Adolphus College Tuesday, April 19. Shellenberger and Nordhaus are president and chairman, respectively, of The Breakthrough Institute, a policy think tank advocating an innovation-centered approach to climate and energy issues. Their free, public address will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Alumni Hall, located in the College’s O.J Johnson Student Union.
The duo shook up the environmental world with their 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” in which they argued that the mainstream environmental movement was, and would continue to be, ineffective in the face of global environmental challenges including climate change. They later expanded on their argument for an alternative approach based on technical innovation in the book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
More recently, Shellenberger and Nordhaus continued the theme in a November 2010 Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that society should combat climate change through clean energy innovation. This clean energy innovation argument was featured prominently in President Obama’s January 2011 State of the Union address.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s visit to Gustavus is co-sponsored by the Evironmental Studies Program, the Department of Economics and Management, the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation, and the Gustavus Lecture Series.
For more information, please contact James Dontje, Director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at jdontje@gustavus.edu or 507-933-7206.
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Media Contact: Director of Media Relations and Internal Communication Luc Hatlestad
luch@gustavus.edu
507-933-7510