There Ought To Be A Law

Making a splash as the wised-up critics of the US green movement with their "death of environmentalism" essay in 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger try to make a bigger splash with their new book, "Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility" (Houghton Mifflin). They don't' succeed finds Nancy Anderson in her November 2007 Torchlight column, "Possible But Not Probable," for the Sallan Foundation.

Break Through's authors are deft polemicists who create a shimmering piece of eco-sociology about current climate politics that's easy to read. Emerging from the shimmer is a vision of harnessing the idea of slashing the planet's carbon footprint to the sturdy muscle of economic growth and new technologies.

Stripped of its shine, Nordhaus & Shellenberger argue that political solutions to climate change are stymied by business-as-usual environmentalists who rely on nightmare visions of a world threatened by rising temperatures and rising sea levels to wrest change from the political system. Instead, a winning strategy for eco-activists is accentuating the positive in order to obtain hundreds of millions in public funding for a new generation of clean technologies.

Sounds good, writes Anderson, but if climate change politics only accentuates the positive will it be up to the hard job of saving the planet? She also questions whether all our investment eggs should go in the clean technology basket. It's indisputable that monitoring, verification and enforcement pack quite a punch when they are done right.

It's crystal clear that Break Through is no breakthrough. It fails because it does not map out a coherent, credible strategy for shrinking our carbon footprint while growing our economy and expanding opportunities for good jobs. It fails because it does not understand how politics gets done and how policy gets carried out. For Anderson, the risk of climate change is also crystal clear and there ought to be a law equal to the task at hand.

Link to the full column from the Sallan Foundation. http://www.sallan.org/newviews/archives/torchlight/index.php

About the Sallan Foundation: The Sallan Foundation improves the urban environment by advancing useful knowledge for greener, high performance cities.