Ted Nordhaus is a leading global thinker on energy, environment, climate, human development, and politics. He is the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto.
Over the last decade, he has helped lead a paradigm shift in climate, energy, and environmental policy. He was among the first to emphasize the imperative to "make clean energy cheap" in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, explained why efforts to establish legally binding international limits on greenhouse gas emissions would fail in The Washington Post and Democracy Journal, made the case for nuclear energy as a critical global warming solution in The Wall Street Journal, has written on the limits to energy efficiency and the need to prepare for climate change in The New York Times, and has argued for the importance of intensifying agricultural production in order to spare land for forests and biodiversity in Scientific American and The Guardian.
His 2007 book Break Through, co-authored with Michael Shellenberger, was called "prescient" by Time and "the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring" by Wired. (An excerpt in The New Republic can be read here.) Their 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times, sparked a national debate, and inspired a generation of young environmentalists.
Over the years, Nordhaus been profiled in The New York Times, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, the National Review, The New Republic, and on NPR. In 2007, he received the Green Book Award and Time magazine's 2008 "Heroes of the Environment" award.
Nordhaus was formerly executive editor of the Breakthrough Journal, the Breakthrough Institute's policy magazine that delivers pragmatic opinion and analysis, grounded in the belief that even our most wicked environmental problems have technological solutions. Under his leadership, The New Republic lauded the Breakthrough Journal as “among the most complete efforts to provide a fresh answer” to the question of how to modernize liberal thought, and the National Review called it “The most promising effort at self-criticism by our liberal cousins in a long time.”
Books
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (eds.), Wicked Polarization, Breakthrough Journal, 2013
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (eds.), Love Your Monsters, Breakthrough Journal, 2011
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, Houghton Mifflin, 2007
Key Recent Writings
Ted Nordhaus, Vihjaya Ramachandran, and Patrick Brown, "The Obvious Climate Strategy Nobody Will Talk About," Foreign Policy, November 6, 2022
Ted Nordhaus, "Twilight of Environmental Idols," Foreign Policy, Sept. 26, 2022
Ted Nordhaus, "Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It," Foreign Policy, June 6, 2022
Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, "How Sri Lanka's Shift to Organic Farming Left It In the Manure," The Times, April 17, 2022
Ted Nordhaus, "Am I the Mass Murderer," Breakthrough Journal, March 29, 2021
Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, "In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong," Foreign Policy, March 5, 2022
Ted Nordhaus and Alex Smith, "The Problem With Alice Waters and the 'Slow Food' Movement," Jacobin, December 3, 2021
Ted Nordhaus, "Ted Nordhaus on how green activists mislead and hold back progress," The Economist, November 19 2021
Ted Nordhaus, "In Global Energy Crisis, Anti-Nuclear Chickens Come Home to Roost," Foreign Policy, October 8, 2021
Ted Nordhaus and Jameson McBride, "California is choosing natural gas over Diablo Canyon’s clean energy," Paso Robles Daily News, June 3, 2021
Ted Nordhaus and Daniel Blaustein-Rejto, "Big Agriculture Is Best," Foreign Policy, April 18, 2021
Ted Nordhaus, "How Serious Are Biden and the Democrats About Fighting Climate Change?" The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2021
Ted Nordhaus and Seaver Wang, "China Breaks Decades of Climate Gridlock," Foreign Policy, January 11, 2021
Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath, "To Fight Climate Change, Get Real," Persuasion, October 2, 2020
Ted Nordhaus and Lauren Anderson, "The Democrats Have Quietly Given Up Their Old Myths About Climate Change," Foreign Policy, October 7, 2020
Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath, "How to Stop the Wildfires," Persuasion, September 29, 2020
Ted Nordhaus and Seaver Wang, "It’s Not Techno-Angst That’s Driving East Asia to Abandon Nuclear Power," Foreign Policy, June 17, 2020
Ted Nordhaus, "Ignore the Fake Climate Debate," The Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2020
Ted Nordhaus, "The Climate Change Apocalypse Problem," Anthropocene, July 7, 2019
Ted Nordhaus, "The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse," Issues in Science and Technology, June 19, 2019
Ted Nordhaus and Jameson McBride, "If California wants to go carbon-free, it needs to end its nuclear moratorium," Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2018
Ted Nordhaus, "The Earth’s carrying capacity for human life is not fixed," Aeon, July 5, 2018
Ted Nordhaus, "On Wizardly Prophets and Prophetic Wizards," Anthropocene Magazine, July 2018
Ted Nordhaus, "Using Technology to Address Climate Change," The Breakthrough, May 16, 2018
Ted Nordhaus, "The Two-Degree Delusion," Foreign Affairs, February 8, 2018
Ted Nordhaus, "Impossible Environmentalism: Green groups promote utopian fantasies," USA Today, September 7, 2017
Ted Nordhaus, "The Future of Food," The Breakthrough, December 6, 2016
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Campaign to stop fracking sacrifices nature for ideology," USA Today, July 16, 2015
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Want to save the planet? Save bye-bye to nature," USA Today, April 22, 2015
John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto, April 2015
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Problem with Energy Efficiency," New York Times, October 8, 2014
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Global Warming Scare Tactics," New York Times, April 8, 2014
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Environmentalists Made a Big Mistake Focusing All Their Attention on Keystone," New Republic, February 6, 2014
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Great Green Meltdown," The Breakthrough, November 13, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Climate Skeptics Against Global Warming," The Breakthrough, September 26, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "How to Advance Nuclear," The Breakthrough, July 18, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "President Obama, Coal Killer," The Breakthrough, July 3, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "On President Obama's Climate Speech," Washington Monthly, June 24, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Environmental Apocalypse is a Myth," San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "No Solar Way Around It," The Breakthrough, June 7, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Has There Been a Great Progressive Reversal? How the Left Abandoned Cheap Electricity," AlterNet, June 3, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Myth of the Lone Inventor," New Republic, May 30, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Going Green? Then Go Nuclear," Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "How Electricity and TV Defused the 'Population Bomb,'" May 13, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "It's Not About the Climate," The Breakthrough, April 29, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Ecology of Obesity," The Breakthrough, March 20, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Wicked Polarization: How Prosperity, Democracy, and Experts Divided America," Breakthrough Journal, Winter 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Against Technology Tribalism," The Breakthrough, January 31, 2013
Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Linus Blomqvist, "Beyond Planetary Boundaries: Environmental Science After Rio+20," The Breakthrough, June 22, 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics," The Breakthrough, Spring 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Beyond Cap and Trade, A New Path to Clean Energy," Yale e360, February 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Introduction," Love Your Monsters: Post Environmentalism and the Anthropocene, Fall 2011
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Evolve: The Case for a Theology of Modernization," Orion and Breakthrough Journal, Fall 2011, Issue 2
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Modernizing Liberalism," Breakthrough Journal, Summer 2011, Issue 1
Collected Writings by Subject
Natural Gas
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Climate Skeptics Against Global Warming," The Breakthrough, September 26, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "EDF: Lock In Soft Energy, Not Coal-Killing Gas," The Breakthrough, March 15, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Fracktivists for Global Warming," The Breakthrough, March 6, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Uniting a Fractured Republic: Pragmatism, Innovation, and the Shale Gas Revolution," a speech to the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, November 7, 2012.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Lessons from the Shale Gas Revolution," The American, February 22, 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Beyond Cap and Trade, A New Path to Clean Energy," Yale e360, February 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds," Washington Post, December, 2011
Nuclear
Ted Nordhaus, "RIP Transatomic Power," The Breakthrough, September 28, 2018
Ted Nordhaus, Jessica Lovering, and Loren King, How to Make Nuclear Innovative, the Breakthrough Institute, March 2017
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Climate Skeptics Against Global Warming," The Breakthrough, September 26, 2013
Ted Nordhaus, Jessica Lovering, and Michael Shellenberger, How to Make Nuclear Cheap, the Breakthrough Institute, July 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Going Green? Then Go Nuclear," Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Fukushima Question," Slate, March 2012
Jessica Lovering, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger, "Out of the Nuclear Closet," Foreign Policy, September 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Fukushima Boosts Green Case for Nuclear," Financial Times, May 2011
Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Jesse Jenkins, "Nuclear as Usual: Why Fukushima Will Change Less Than You Think," The Atlantic, March 2011
Energy Efficiency
Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger, Energy Emergence: Rebound and Backfire as Emergent Phenomena, The Breakthrough, February 17, 2011
Conservation and Development
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "Want to Save the Planet? Say Bye-Bye to Nature," USA Today, April 22, 2015
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, "The Great Progressive Reversal," The Breakthrough, June 10, 2013
Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Linus Blomqvist, "Beyond Planetary Boundaries: Environmental Science After Rio+20," The Breakthrough, June 22, 2012
Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger, The Planetary Boundaries Hypothesis: A Review of the Evidence, The Breakthrough, June 11, 2012.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Introduction," Love Your Monsters: Post Environmentalism and the Anthropocene, Fall 2011
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Wilderness Debate: Conservation and Development in the Amazon," The Economist, October 2011
Energy and Climate – Essays, Speeches, and Reports
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Against Technology Tribalism," Speech at Energy Innovation Conference, Washington, DC, January 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Uniting a Fractured Republic," Speech at Colorado Oil & Gas Association, November 2012
Jesse Jenkins, Mark Muro, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Letha Tawney, and Alex Trembath, Beyond Boom and Bust, the Breakthrough Institute, March 2012
Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Climate Pragmatism, The Breakthrough, July 2011
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Why Climate Science Divides Us But Energy Technology Unites Us,” Speech at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, January 6, 2011
Rob Atkinson, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, "The New Energy Conversation," Energy Innovation 2010 conference, December 13, 2010
Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Steven Hayward, and Mark Muro, "Post-Partisan Power: How a Limited and Direct Approach to Energy Innovation Can Deliver Clean Cheap Energy, Economic Productivity, and National Prosperity, " the Breakthrough Institute, October 2010
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Emerging Climate Consensus: Global Warming Policy in a Post-Environmental World," April 2009
Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Jeff Navin, Teryn Norris and Aden Van Noppen, "Fast, Clean, & Cheap: Cutting Global Warming's Gordian Knot," Harvard Law & Policy Review, January 2008
Energy and Climate – Columns and Articles
Ted Nordhaus, "The Monthly Interview: Ted Nordhaus," Washington Monthly, July/August 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Environmental Apocalypse is a Myth," San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Myth of the Lone Inventor," New Republic, May 30, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Going Green? Then Go Nuclear," Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Should We Swap Energy Subsidies for a Carbon Tax?" The Breakthrough, September 13, 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Revolution Will Not Be Patented," Slate, April 2010
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate," Yale e360, March 2010
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "White House plan to regulate carbon emissions is doomed to fail," Salon, April 22, 2009
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Investment Trumps Environmental Regulation," San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 2009
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Getting Real on Climate Change," American Prospect, December 2008
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Gas-tax Holiday Debate Warns of Fights to Come," San Francisco Chronicle, May 2008
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Look Who's In Denial About Global Warming Now," San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 2007
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Preparing for Nature's Attack," The New York Times, April 2005
International Climate and Energy
Alex Trembath, Ted Nordhaus, et al, Our High-Energy Planet, the Breakthrough Institute, April 2014
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "It's Not About the Climate," The Breakthrough, April 29, 2013
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The End of Magical Climate Thinking," Foreign Policy, January 2010
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Scrap Kyoto," Democracy Journal, June 2008
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "What the U.N. Can Learn from Google," San Francisco Chronicle, December 2007
National Security and Foreign Policy
Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Nick Adams, "Who Killed the War on Terror?," The Atlantic, August 2011
Nick Adams, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Planes, Trains and Car Bombs, the Breakthrough Institute, January 13, 2012
Nick Adams, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Counter-Terrorism Since 9/11, the Breakthrough Institute, March 14, 2011
Economic Growth and Innovation
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics," The Breakthrough, Spring 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Modernizing Liberalism," Breakthrough Journal, Summer 2011, Issue 1
Political Philosophy
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Dark Side of Scientific Rationality," The Breakthrough, June 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Monsters of Bruno Latour," The Breakthrough, Spring 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "A Price Tag on Mother Nature? A Cautionary Tale," The Breakthrough, Winter 2012
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Evolve: The Case for a Theology of Modernization," Orion Magazine and Breakthrough Journal, Fall 2011, Issue 2
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Green Bubble: Why Environmentalism Keeps Imploding," The New Republic, May 2009
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Death Warmed Over," American Prospect, September 18, 2005
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming in a Post Environmental World," The Breakthrough, October 2004
By Ted Nordhaus:
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Think Tank? Or In the Tank?
World Resources Institute conducts ostensibly independent and objective analyses of environmental legislation for…
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The End of Magical Climate Thinking
Originally published at Foreign PolicyThere was good reason to be hopeful in January of 2009 that the election of…
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Energy and Climate
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The End of "Developing Countries"
In 1992, at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the nations of the world agreed that only developed…
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Energy and Climate
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Energy and Climate
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Energy and Climate
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Energy and Climate
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Energy and Climate
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Climate Bill Analysis Part 20: Over-Allocation of Pollution Permits Would Result in No Emissions Reductions
The large decline in U.S. emissions in 2008 and 2009 due to the economic recession ensures that if the House-passed…
