Michael ShellenbergerRezensionen

The crises we face don’t require us to deal with reality but to dream differently, in a lucid reasoned dream.

An old book now, from 2004 but still inspiring and relevant to the world in 2018.

Sadly little transformation has taken place since, and the concept of an environmentalist has nor moved past into the practical.

I couldn't give this 5 stars because it is missing what is, to me, perhaps the most important part: a non-catastrophizing description of climate change and trade-offs. I agree that much of the discussion has been politicized, with one side 'denying' climate change in almost any shape or form (outside of admitting that it exists, but that it doesn't actually matter), and one side increasingly unable to brook any dissent from the 'extinction' and '100% green renewables by 2030' lines (or else you are, ipso facto, a climate change denying right-wing nutjob).

Fine. And detailing how ridiculous much of the exaggeration is, and how damaging, and how neo-colonial, and how anti-science and etc. is very important (especially given the overlap with people who tend to claim loudly how opposed to all those things they are.)

But what about setting the record straight, or at least conveying what e.g. the IPCC consensus on "business as usual", progress at the current rate, etc. are? A couple of chapters laying that out, toward the end, would serve very well. Without it, the hints and suggestions sprinkled throughout the book as to what those are (or might be) are underwhelming and leaves the overall tone of the book closer to that of just yet another volley in the socio-political war that has eaten (along with everything else) discussion of climate change.

An excellent book about how foolish many of today’s perceived “fixes” for climate change are and how they are doing more harm than good. Shellenberger is not a climate change “denier”. He is a strong environmentalist and has been most of his life; yet, through very detailed research and extraordinary documentation, he proves his case that we need to move to strong nuclear and hydroelectric sources of energy. Use of any other sources (fossil fuels, solar, wind) will not reduce but could make it worse, not better. Unfortunately, our news media and politicians do not understand these issues and continue to push foolish choices. So many of those that should read his book and truly research what he is saying, will condemn it or totally ignore it. Our “Green New Deal” is idiocy, and we will suffer the consequences – of course, our continuing to ruin the climate and cause additional climate change by following foolish paths pointed out by Shellenberger will simply be used by the news media and politicians to push for more spending on non-nuclear sources of energy. We cannot get where we need to get by relying on solar and wind.

If you care about climate change and the need to change our ways, read his book and then try to prove his arguments wrong.

Incredibly good read. My husband wanted to read it but never got the chance so I decided to once I could get it from the library.

First things first, this book is not claiming that environmentalism is dead. It is making the equally contentious but distinct claim that environmentalism, as it currently stands, should die.

To understand why Nordhaus and Shellenberger make this claim, it is first necessary to understand what they mean by environmentalism. According to the authors, environmentalism today is based on a "politics of limits". The mode of operation for environmental organizations is to limit or prohibit activities that are seen as harming the environment. This in itself is not problematic, but what is problematic, according to Break Through, is that modern environmentalism limits itself to these sorts of activities.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger given the example of harmful development in Brazil. They describe the environmentalist approach to saving the rain forest as limited trying to pressure the Brazilian government to pass laws that are beneficial to the rain forest. However, these actions ignore the reasons for Brazilian deforestation. Brazil actually has some protections in place (e.g., some percent of land must be left in tact by the owners), but those protections are not enforced (it is not easy to police a giant remote forest). Furthermore, violations of those protections are almost encouraged by other laws which say that homesteaded land can only be kept if it is used, leading people to large scale clearing of the land to show they are "using" it.

The second issue that the authors claim is ignored by environmentalists is the widespread poverty in Brazil. Going out and destructively homesteading the rain forest is appealing to many because there are not opportunities for them to make a good living in the cities.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger do not think that laws limiting destruction of the rain forest should be completely ignored. However, they criticize environmentalists for thinking that issues such as stable governments, poverty, and enforcement of the law are outside of the interests of environmentalists. Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate policies that get at the root cause of environmental problems, not just the symptoms.

The authors claim that the politics of limits work even worse when it comes to solving a problem like global climate change. Deforestation, air pollution, water pollution, and other traditional environmental problems are very visible and, therefore, very easy to make people aware of. However, global climate change is not very visible. There are images of the effects of global climate change, but images (however sad) of polar bears lacking ice are not nearly as visceral are images of rivers on fire or pollution over Los Angeles.

The authors also claim that the politics of limits is a politics that only work when people feel secure. When people feel their job is secure, their mortgage will be paid, and they can put food on the table, they are willing to address at issues with more long term negative effects such as pollution or global climate change. When they fear for their jobs, homes, ability to put gas in their cars, as has recently been and currently is the case in the United States, they tend to focus on those primary needs and to reject anything that could threaten those needs in the short term (such as environmental limits). Nordhaus and Shellenberger are claiming here that modern environmentalism, despite its sometimes anti-development stance, is actually a product of prosperity and security.

This is why they propose replacing the "politics of limits" of current environmentalism with a "politics of possibility". They propose that environmentalism should have a wider range of interests that appeal to people's desire to have physical and emotional security. Thus, they propose shifting some, if not most, of the focus of environmentalism from limits to things like job creation and clean energy. These are things that people can get behind because they make them feel better about their lives, and they address root problems of many environmental problems. People in developing nations are not (and should not) going to accept being told that they have to continue living in poverty so that pollution does not increase. People in those countries, will support initiatives that help get them out of that poverty, and saving the world, under hopeful conditions, will just increase support.

I really enjoyed the core message of Break Through. I do agree that environmentalism should be about assessing and addressing root causes as well as obvious problems, and I do agree that a politics of possibility has a lot more potential than a politics of limits. However, I do have some criticisms of the book. The tone the authors use often implies that those people who are part of the politics of limits did a little that was useful and are now completely useless. I disagree with this implication. It is not bad for existing organizations to feel that they should stay focused on their mission statement. Instead of criticizing them, the authors should show them that there are more effective methods and they will either change or obsolete the existing organizations (note that the authors have started the Break Through Institute, so they are doing something. It is just their sometimes tone I find off putting).

My second criticism is of their desire for the "death of environmentalism". First, I do not think they really believe it. I think it is mostly attention grabbing rhetoric. However, if they do mean it, I do not think it is called for. I think that the actions of current environmentalism have a place in a new environmentalism. That place may be less central, but the types of problems current environmentalism is effective at solving have not been completely solved, so the organizations are not obsolete.

However, overall Break Through is a very interesting and insightful read and was certainly worth my time.

This book is a great read for someone who is looking to understand the problems facing big cities. The author does a great job describing the policies and attitudes that are contributing to the increase of homelessness, drug use and crime. However the solutions suggested are unrealistic and ignore the reality of California politics.

Both informative and provocative. Shellenberger is most convincing at the small scale, and least convincing when he tries to draw large conclusions about, e.g., wokeness and victimization culture. I still appreciate the perspective, but would rather the pages had been spent investigating homelessness policies in more concrete detail.

> starting in the late 1960s, Baby Boomers and the New Left turned against redevelopment. They were inspired by an influential 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which blamed redevelopment, like that which had occurred in the Fillmore neighborhood of San Francisco, for destroying neighborhoods with freeways and high-rises, evicting low-income residents, and making them unlivable, as compared to highly walkable neighborhoods like Greenwich Village.

> There is a provision in Care Not Cash that allows recipients to get full payment if they agree to work for a nonprofit homeless service provider. “If you identify as homeless, you only get $60 per month plus food stamps because of Care Not Cash,” noted Tom Wolf. “But if you volunteer at a non-profit for twelve hours per month, you get full General Assistance payment. You collect three months before they kick you off and you never volunteered.” That’s what Tom did. “[The homelessness nonprofits’] whole intention is to keep more people in this cycle,” he said, “because they’re getting money for it.”

> There is evidence that privacy and solitude created by Housing First make substance abuse worse. A study in Ottawa found that, while the Housing First group kept people in housing longer, the comparison group saw greater reductions in alcohol consumption and problematic drug use, and greater improvements to mental health, after two years.

> California has a 30 percent higher rate of mentally ill people in jails, and a 91 percent higher rate of mentally ill people on the streets or in homeless shelters, than the nation as a whole, despite spending $7,300 per patient on mental health services, which is 50 percent more than the national average.

> for Mizner and the ACLU, the mentally ill are too impaired to be held accountable for breaking the law but not impaired enough to justify the same kind of treatment we provide to other people suffering mental disabilities, such as dementia. Understanding this, and the power of the ACLU in progressive cities and states such as San Francisco and California, goes a long way toward understanding the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homelessness crisis.

> Just 2 percent of Americans who graduate from high school, live in a family with at least one full-time worker, and wait to have children until after turning twenty-one and marrying, in what is known as the “success sequence,” are in poverty. According to research by the Brookings Institution, 70 percent of those who follow the success sequence enjoy middle-class or higher incomes, defined as at least 300 percent of the poverty line.

> There is evidence that probation programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use in probationers, in contrast to traditional programs, which tend to be arbitrary and slow with punishments. One such program is Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement. It incentivized offenders to follow probation rules by applying guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test. One study found that HOPE reduced drug use by 72 percent, future arrests by 55 percent, and incarceration by 48 percent.
… The state of Washington implemented it for 70,000 of its inmates, which reduced jail stays by two-thirds. One researcher estimated that swift, certain, and fair could halve the United States’ prison population

> The decline of traditional religion has allowed for the rise of untraditional ones. Unlike traditional religions, many untraditional religions are largely invisible to the people who hold them most strongly. A secular religion like victimology is powerful because it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers, but also because it appears obvious, not ideological, to them

> Between 2010 and 2020, the number of homeless rose by 31 percent in California but declined 19 percent in the rest of the United States.2 As a result, there were, as of 2020, at least 161,000 total homeless people in California, with about 114,000 of them unsheltered,

> it also has to do with the neoliberal model of outsourcing services. Instead of governments providing such services directly, they give grants to nonprofit service providers who are unaccountable for their performance. “There is no statutory requirement for government to address homelessness,” complained University of Pennsylvania researcher Dennis Culhane. “It’s mainly the domain of a bunch of charities who are unlicensed, unfunded, relatively speaking, run by unqualified people who do a shitty job. There’s no formal government responsibility.

> They divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent supportive housing, resulting in insufficient shelter space. They defend the right of people they characterize as Victims to camp on sidewalks, in parks, and along highways, as well as to break other laws, including against public drug use and defecation. They intimidate experts, policy makers, and journalists by attacking them as being motivated by a hatred of the poor, people of color, and the sick, and as causing violence against them. They reduce penalties for shoplifting, drug dealing, and public drug use. They prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and addicted. And their ideology blinds them to the harms of harm reduction, Housing First, and camp-anywhere policies, leading them to misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and to policies and politicians dating back to the 1980s.

> What California needs is a new, single, and powerful state agency. Let’s call it Cal-Psych. It would be built as a separate institution from existing institutions, including state and county health departments and health providers. Cal-Psych would efficiently and humanely treat the seriously mentally ill and addicts, while providing housing to the homeless on a contingency-based system. Cal-Psych’s CEO would be best-in-class and report directly to the governor

> Too often progressive idealism creates greater loyalty to a highly romanticized view, one that allowed progressives to justify defunding and shutting down core institutions, including psychiatric hospitals, police stations, and homeless shelters

This book saved my life.

A full review soon...

Pretty good argument from someone who is an environmentalist about how the religion of climate change hurts the both human development and the overall environment. There were a few areas which were weak or incorrect (vegetarianism presented vs. standard diet with the argument of "animals take up less space than plants" or something like that, not factoring in the land for growing animal feed...), but most of it was pretty good. Exposing anti-nuclear as basically fearmongering or politics (anti-weapons people transitioning to anti-power), the essential racism/etc. of forcing people in developing economies to do with less, and the massive benefits of natural gas (or even coal) vs. a lot of traditional power sources for people seemed good. I think someone could probably write a better book on this topic, but this is the best one I've found so far.

Most of the targets of the book were "activist organizations" vs science, although there is an allegation that IPCC is primarily activist vs. scientific in how it presents reports to policymakers (so, it's hybrid; decent science, but unconnected policy recommendations). The primary targets were weird self-flagellationists like Greta and Extinction Rebellion, so that's mostly attacking strawmen. My biggest problem with this book is it seems to use a broad brush for both these activists and real science. I'm torn between 3 and 4 stars as a result; it does some good (especially the pro-nuclear parts), but also gets enough wrong to cause some harm, and probably should be held to a higher standard.

Hell hath no fury like a cultist who has left the cult.

Personally I actually agree that we should have built more nuclear reactors. But that ship has sailed. Maybe for security issues.

Shellenberger is a reformed environmentalist, rejecting the apocalyptic predictions of the world’s demise unless we de-populate, de-industrialize, de-capitalize and eliminate our use of oil and gas. He recognizes growth results in a cleaner environment and better lives for all.

He does a good job of showing the corruption of the current environmental movement and how the IPCC has become political and less scientific.

Here are my favorite quotes from the book and makes up most of the last chapter about the psychology of the current climate change movement:

Page 263
Environmentalism today is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations. It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose. It designates good guys and bad buys, heroes and villains. And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy. [51]

. . . it is a kind of new Judeo-Christian religion, one that has replaced God with nature.

Page 265.
The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.

Anyone unduly worried about a climate change cataclysm should read this book. I was considering the purchase of rooftop solar panels until I read Shellenberger's thoughtful analysis and realized they made no sense for me to acquire, i. e., the break even point and the end of depreciation point fall uncomfortably close together.
The author puts solutions to climate change in a sobering perspective. The manufacturers of wind turbines have thwarted census efforts for the birds, bats and insects killed by these structures. Antinuclear hysteria has been fanned by those who stand to profit by replacing nuclear energy with inadequate renewables that will inevitably cause greater carbon emissions. Many climate alarmists are elitists who distain the poor of the third world and dismiss out of hand their desire for reliable, abundant and practical ("real" is their idiom) electricity.

I quit the Nature Conservancy after reading this book.

Profound and persuasive. It is ;provocative in that the book challenges my belief system. Required reading.

Well written look at the way the desire for most people to have a clean world gets hijacked. He takes a very consistent approach in the construction of his chapters which makes for good flow of information. His writing is clear and straightforward and very readable.
The author shows clearly the law of unintended consequences as it pertains to first world activists dictating conduct and policy to the developing world. The self serving conduct of Jerry Brown’s closing of nuclear power plants is worth the book alone. His family provided the oil and gas imports from Indonesia.
Excellent book, worth anyone’s time.½

A few interesting ideas and some interesting thoughts floating in a see of self-righteous, liberal (american sense) bromides, such as saying that those which support free markets are "market fundamentalists". The book reminded me, in some aspects, of the third way books by Anthony Giddens. It attempts to criticize present day environmentalism without breaking away from the liberal (again in the american sense) world view, just as Giddens attempted to criticize socialism without really leaving it.½

Nietzsche-inspired! I think even free-market-hate-the-earth types could feel the pull of this book's arguments. This is the most rhetorically effective pitch for environmentalism I've heard. If nothing else, you may enjoy the insider descriptions of the environmentalist movement, especially the self-misunderstandings that have given rise to the not-very-persuasive public image it's been saddled with for so long.

Part 1 http://russelldad.blogspot.com/2008/03/book-review-break-through-part-1.html
Part 2 http://russelldad.blogspot.com/2008/05/book-review-break-through-part-2-of-2.htm...

nominated by Tad