Fellow Researchers Profile

Ted Nordhaus

Ted Nordhaus

International Research Fellow

the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute

Expertise

  • Energy, Environment, Climate, Human Development, Politics

Columns

2019.12.05

Using Technology to Address Climate Change

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Profile

Career

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 is executive editor of the Breakthrough Journal, which The New Republic called "among the most complete efforts to provide a fresh answer" to the question of how to modernize liberal thought, and the National Review called "The most promising effort at self-criticism by our liberal cousins in a long time."

Publications

  • 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

Papers

  • 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