Shellenberger opined in in mid-January, 2022 that the success of Environmental Progress (EP) in winning hearts and changing minds proves it. Now watch what happens next, he says. Not that long ago ago it appeared that most of the trends relating to the issues that Environmental Progress and he care about were headed in the wrong direction. Congress was poised to pour more subsidies into renewables at the expense of nuclear energy. San Francisco and other big cities were locked into progressive dogma around drugs, crime, and homelessness. And many journalists were repeating outmoded and debunked orthodoxies about everything from energy and the environment to drugs and homelessness.
All of that has changed dramatically over the last few weeks. Senator Joe Manchin is still opposing the Build Back Better legislation citing the risk of the United States becoming overly dependent on renewables. San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a crackdown on open air drug use and drug dealing. And mainstream news media are increasingly acknowledging the essential role of nuclear energy, the limits of weather-dependent emergencies, and rising crime and violence.
Not everything is going our way. Many progressives argue that Manchin’s concern has been more about protecting the coal industry from competition than protecting cheap and reliable electricity from price spikes and blackouts. Progressives on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors weakened Breed’s crackdown by preventing expanded police funding. And mainstream news media refuse to accurately cover rising resilience to climate change, or acknowledge the need for a Shelter First policy to dealing with homelessness.
But those are small steps backward compared to the progress we are making going forward. Manchin last week gave lie to the claim that he only cares about coal when he announced support for expanding support for nuclear power plants, none of which exist in West Virginia. “I’m big on nuclear,” he told reporters.
The New York Times yesterday published a long interview with Mayor Breed where she harshly criticized progressives as out-of-touch elitists. And progressive newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, and some progressive academics, are finally acknowledging that drug addiction is a major driver of homelessness, and that police are essential to preventing crime.
And many of the arguments that Environmental Progress and Shellenberger have made are becoming mainstream. New polling shows that public support for nuclear power grew from 49% to 59% between 2018 and 2021 while support among Democrats grew from 37% to an astonishing 60% (see Figure).
Translations of Apocalypse Never have recently won top awards in Israel, Sweden, and South Korea, and a German version of Apocalypse Never will be published in March. And, in a sign of growing receptivity to Shellenberger's message, San Francisco’s liberal Commonwealth Club invited me to speak about what he covered in the his book: San Fransicko at a public talk on Monday, January 24, which most characters from the book will attend, and whose afterparty will inspire greater collaboration.
There is great pessimism in the U.S. and the developed world as a whole about the future of America and humankind, but EP has a plan to take our work to the next level and achieve significant changes to collective thinking and public policies. What does that look like? How will we achieve those goals? And why will we be able to? Those are important questions to ask, particularly in the month of January, a time traditionally dedicated to reflecting on the past as a guide to creating the future.
Looking Back to Look Forward
There is a tendency among public intellectuals, particularly when feeling insecure, to seek out information that reinforces our existing beliefs, to change our views in order to get along with people around us, and to only associate with people in our tribe. It is difficult to remain loyal to the truth when so many people around you are threatened in one way or another by it. Admitting that you were wrong, and saying unpopular things, require, on the one hand, great self-confidence and, on the other, great humility.
EP’s success lies in large part from being willing to follow the truth wherever it might lead. We are most famous in having done so by speaking up for nuclear energy. But even after changing his mind about nuclear energy Shellenberger became heretics among heretics by: advocating standard, high-experience nuclear plants as opposed to futuristic designs; criticizing renewables rather than repeating the myth that they are somehow necessary; and defending fossil fuels as essential for economic development by poor nations and, in the case of natural gas, reducing emissions from coal.
Another aspect of EP’s success comes from being willing to talk to almost everyone, including people who are frequently demonized, such as Trump-supporting Republicans like Tucker Carlson, who many progressives believe is racist, but also socialists like former British Labor Party head Jeremy Corbyn, who many conservatives view as anti-Semitic. Shellenberger has long been of the opinion that speaking to a wide variety of people is essential to EP’s pro-human project, and to our shared humanity.
The final aspect of why EP has succeeded is because we have sought to tell the truth in ways that people who hold a wide variety of perspectives can hear it. If you read Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and the articles Shellenberger writes, you’ll see that he take pains to accurately represent his opponent’s views. He takes pride in “steel-manning” rather than “straw-manning” his opponents. This is, on the one hand, an effort to persuade. But it is also a sign of respect, and a recognition of our shared humanity.
Even so, EP has paid a heavy price for our heretical views. As a consequence of telling the truth about nuclear, renewables, and fossil fuels we saw a decline by two-thirds of our organizational funding between 2017 and 2021. The New York Times and other major publications outright ignored Apocalypse Never in 2020 and published a review of San Fransicko last year that claimed, absurdly, that the book did not represent the views of homeless people.
But George Bernard Shaw was right when he said that all great truths are first ridiculed, then violently opposed, and then accepted as self-evident. Nuclear energy is increasingly being accepted, including by long-time skeptics of the technology, as self-evident, as is the relationship between drug addiction and homelessness. Despite its obnoxious misrepresentation of San Fransicko, The New York Times nonetheless named it a year-end “Editor’s choice.” Meanwhile, some progressive reporters have obliquely acknowledged the book’s contribution to forcing change in San Francisco.
Incubating Ideas, Leaders, and Movements
In the coming months and years Environmental Progress and Shellenberger will push further on the issues central to our mission including nuclear energy and drug policy. He will continue to fight to save nuclear plants in California, Germany, and Belgium, where governments are moving forward with plans to shut them down, and to make the case for expanding the standardized nuclear plants we have. And we will continue to fight for the changes to drug, crime, and homelessness policies in the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, and nationwide, since the drug addiction crisis is spreading across the United States.
While EP will remain on the cutting-edge of research and policy advocacy we are also actively advising policymakers around the world, and in the U.S., as they make decisions relating to the environment and cities. As an independent and nonpartisan nonprofit, we advise policymakers, politicians, and nonprofit organizations from both political parties, as well as independents. While Shellenberger has testified to governments around the world for the last six years, he is delighted to report a significant increase in interest from policymakers in the three months since the publication of San Fransicko, as they seek to deal with the worsening drug, crime, and homeless crisis.
EP and he will thus play both an insider and an outsider role in many of these battles. On the inside, EP will increasingly advise policymakers, philanthropists, and other activists about how to turn obstacles into opportunities. We will incubate new leaders, and build new movements, from the pro-nuclear movement globally to the pro-drug peace movement in California, and beyond. And so, in addition to conducting our own research and analysis, EP will also make more seed grants to individuals, to both get the work done and develop the capacity of our movements.
Shellenberger pays a lot of attention to policymakers like Mayor London Breed and Senator Joe Manchin, but more often than not they are responding to real-world events, and the interpretation of those events, in the media. As such, it’s essential that we bring insight and clarity into understanding major problems, from energy and the environment to drugs and homelessness. The commitment EP has brought to following the truth wherever it might lead is now one we intend to bring to the movements we cofounded, and to the policymakers we advise.
As such, Shellenberger expects to see even more significant change over the next six years than what we saw over the last six. Nuclear energy, which has gone from being viewed as unnecessary to necessary, will increasingly be seen as essential, while renewables, which have gone from being viewed as essential to problematic, will increasingly be viewed as unnecessary. Cities, which for 30 years have been locked into Housing First and Harm Reduction, will increasingly embrace Shelter First, Treatment First, and Housing Earned. And many of the trends that have been going in the wrong direction will, finally, reverse themselves, and start heading in the right one.
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