Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent nonprofit research organization that incubates ideas, leaders, and movements. Michael is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," and Green Book Award winner.
Price range
- $40,000
Expert
- Agriculture
- Environmental Policy
- Green/Environment
- Politics
- Sustainability: Environment
Experience
- Energy
- Government
- Politics
Career
- 34 Years
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About
Shellenberger is a leading investigative journalist who has broken major stories on crime and drug policy; homelessness; Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California fires. And he testifies and advises governments around the world including in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
Michael has been called an “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.
Shellenberger has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors worldwide, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.
In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocated for decriminalization and harm reduction policies. In the 2000s, Michael supported a“new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in cleantech between 2009 and 2015.
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Video Clips
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Topics
Why renewables can’t save the planet
Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine’s “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment.
Why I changed my mind about nuclear power
Over the last decade, Michael and his colleagues have constructed a new paradigm that views prosperity, cheap energy, and nuclear power as the keys to environmental progress. A book he co-wrote (with Ted Nordhaus) in 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, was called by Wired magazine “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” while Time Magazine called him a “hero of the environment.” In the 1990s, he helped protect the last signi cant groves of old-growth redwoods still in private hands and bring about labor improvements to Nike factories in Asia.
How Fear of Nuclear Ends
Michael Shellenberger shows us how the fear of nuclear power was created by people who had ideological fears or sought to exploit it for political gain, including California’s former and current Governor, Jerry Brown. Indeed, even the Sierra Club was pro-nuclear in the 1960s.