MIT Lecture Series Committee

Clean Energy Revolution: Creating a Transformational Student Movement

An Event with Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" & Break Through

Co-sponsored with MIT Students for Global Sustainability.

How can we create a breakthrough politics to build the power we need to spark an energy revolution and win on global warming? Conventional wisdom says global warming is one big pollution problem that can be dealt with by pollution limits. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argue that it cannot, as it is a fundamental consequence of the global energy economy. In terms of birthing a new energy economy, regulatory solutions like cap and trade are important -- they're just not the most important thing, particularly for the developing world. Shellenberger and Nordhaus will present the case that we need a new paradigm -- and a new student movement -- centered on economic opportunity and technological innovation, not on nature preservation and ecological limits.

If today's generation of young adults is to overcome the central challenge of our time, they will argue, it must seize its present moment of opportunity to lead a new and powerful movement that breaks with the politics of the past and embraces a positive vision of the future -- one capable of capturing the public imagination, defining new political identities, and fully unleashing our creative and innovative capacity to build the new economy and achieve a more secure and prosperous world. Shellenberger and Nordhaus will discuss Breakthrough Generation, their new student movement, which is currently establishing a group of the country's top young organizers and thinkers and awarding ten $5,000 Fellowships this spring. [www.thebreakthrough.org]

"The two have reimagined the underlying philosophy of environmentalism in a way that could win over many of its natural skeptics... Green groups may carp, but the truth is that the book could turn out to be the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring."
      -- Mark Horowitz, Wired Magazine. Read this article.

"If heeded, Nordhaus and Shellenberger's call for an optimistic outlook -- embracing economic dynamism and creative potential -- will surely do more for the environment than any U.N. report or Nobel Prize."
      -- Jonathan H. Adler, Wall Street Journal. Read this article.