Breaking Things at Breakthrough

A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing about the Death of Environmentalism controversy with Adam Werbach. Adam had followed up the original essay with a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club that was no less controversial, not least because Adam had just a few years before been handpicked by David Brower to become the boy president of the Sierra Club at the age of 23, in hopes of putting a youthful face on an institution that, even thirty years ago, was obviously geriatric.

The ideas in The Death of Environmentalism and Is Environmentalism Dead? had been well received by a lot of people, particularly of Adam and my generation. But the negative reactions and lectures that we got from the Baby Boom leadership of the environmental movement were intense. Every major environmental NGO and philanthropy was still run by that generation. For Boomers whose identities had been forged in youthful rebellion, getting out of the way so a new generation could remake the movement most definitely wasn’t on the agenda.

This dynamic was broadly true of all of the social movements that were born in the Baby Boomer’s coming of age moment in the 1960s and built in the decades that followed. Boomers had systematically and singularly transformed America’s institutions and culture to a degree that no generation, before or since, has. If you came of age in their shadow, it was hard to get a word in edge-wise, much less drive real change in any of the institutions that they had built.

There is a broader lesson here. Like science, progress and social movements advance one funeral (or at least retirement) at a time. Institutions need to continually renew themselves or they stagnate. That is especially true for those of us in the ideas business. And it is no less true of my own institution than the institutions that I have long criticized for their failure to evolve. I turned 60 in October and have spent the last 20 years building the Breakthrough Institute. This coming year, I’ll begin the process of getting out of the way.

On January 1st, I will become President of the Breakthrough Institute and Alex Trembath will become the Executive Director. To the relief of some and consternation of others, I have no plans to retire. I’ll continue to work with Alex to set the strategic and political direction of the organization and with Adam Stein to oversee our nuclear work. There is also ongoing work to build Breakthrough and the ecomodernist movement internationally, to put boots on the ground at the local level to build an abundant energy future here in the United States, and, perhaps, a book project that Alex and I have been hatching over the last few years. But I will be handing over a lot of the day to day responsibilities to Alex.

Alex likes to say that he worked his way up from the factory floor. And it’s true. He started as a Breakthrough Generation summer research fellow in 2011. He has been an analyst, our communications director, and our deputy director. His is a singular public voice in the climate and clean energy discourse and, more recently, the Abundance movement.

Over the last decade, Alex has helped me build Breakthrough from what was still a rather tenuous startup to the force that it has become in both the climate, energy, and environmental debates and Washington policy-making circles today. When I started Breakthrough with Michael Shellenberger almost twenty years ago, there were two of us, part-time, and a couple of college students. Today, we have 25 full-time staff, many with advanced degrees and long publication records. Increasingly over the last few years, Alex has been my peer and partner in that effort. It is time to recognize him formally as such, not least because founder-centered organizations often founder over succession and I’m determined that Breakthrough will not succumb to that particular pathology.

Alongside new leadership at the staff level, we’ll also be making a big change at the Board level. Our long-time board chair, Rachel Pritzker, will be stepping down at the end of the year. Tisha Schuller, who has served on the Breakthrough board since 2017 will be moving into that role.

Rachel has been our first and only board chair. Her influence in the worlds of climate, nuclear, and democracy philanthropy has been remarkable and without her leadership, Breakthrough surely wouldn’t exist. Rachel has been no less a partner in this quixotic enterprise than Michael was at the beginning and Alex is now, and while she will no longer serve as board chair, she will continue to support our work as a board member and funder.

Tisha tracked me down over a decade ago, a few years after she had ditched her career as an environmental consultant to take the job as the director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. We bonded over our shared beliefs that the coal to gas transition would be a key driver of emissions decline and a key enabler for wind and solar generation and that cheap, abundant energy holds the key to both human thriving and environmental protection. We both have taken a lot of grief for those heresies, as the climate movement predictably chose to look the gift horse that is the shale gas revolution in the mouth. But the view that natural gas is a crucial bridge fuel in the transition toward a low carbon future, in Colorado, the United States, and globally, was correct then and is still correct today and the imperative to end energy poverty is today broadly recognized as a key global priority.

Tisha now runs her own consultancy and is the author of four books about energy, the environment, and human development. As the U.S., the Democratic Party, and the world wake up from the millenarian fever dream that has informed climate politics and policy over the last decade, I’m thrilled to have Tisha as our board chair and my partner alongside Alex as we figure out what comes next.

Change and renewal, of course, are easy enough to talk about, far harder to enact. Installing Adam as a figurehead thirty years ago—as anyone who has kept up with the Sierra Club’s more recent travails will recognize—was no fix for an organization that in the intervening years has managed to become increasingly sclerotic while entirely losing its way at the same time. Renewal, by contrast, tends to succeed, at both the personal and institutional level, when it becomes an ongoing practice, one that balances continuity with transformation and cultivates the wisdom to tell them apart.

What has kept Breakthrough unique, unclassifiable, and consistently at the cutting edge of climate and energy discourse and policy over the last twenty years has been a willingness to creatively destroy our own work, whether that was a long-standing event like the Breakthrough Dialogue or a long-standing idea, such as the notion that climate change is an existential risk or that the world can be powered predominantly with variable renewable energy. It has also been due to a willingness to give dynamic young leaders the platform, permission, and support to undertake intellectually and politically challenging work.

What has remained unchanged is an abiding faith in the power of the human spirit, technology, and modernization to remake our worlds and a determination to remain intellectually honest, epistemically open, and politically unclassifiable. As I, and Breakthrough, embark on this new era, I will be as excited as anyone to see what comes next.