The book's authors reiterated this argument in a September 2008 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, arguing for $30–$50bn in annual research subsidies for clean energy.
This was also the case with the white supporters of the civil rights movement, who tended to be more highly educated and more affluent than the general American population.
Chapter two criticizes conservation efforts in Brazil, suggesting that nature protection cannot save the Amazon unless environmentalists provide an alternative way for the country to prosper.
One of Kuhn's most famous examples was of the revolution led first by Copernicus and later by Galileo to overthrow the Earth-centered view of the solar system and replace it with our current sun-centered one.
It will seek to establish and enforce the equivalent of an international caste system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to energy poverty in perpetuity.
It will see in institutions like the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund not a corporate conspiracy to keep people poor and destroy the environment, but an opportunity to drive a kind of development that is both sustainable and equitable.
"[9] The Wall Street Journal wrote, "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".
Joseph Romm, a former US Department of Energy official now with the Center for American Progress, argued that "Pollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters -- reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and driving clean technologies into the marketplace.
"[13] Environmental journalist David Roberts, writing in Grist, argued that while the BTI and its founders garner much attention, their policy is lacking, and ultimately they "receive a degree of press coverage that wildly exceeds their intellectual contributions.
The authors asserted that Break Through fails "to incorporate the aims of environmental justice while actively trading on suspect political tropes," such as blaming China and other nations as large-scale polluters.
They claimed that Shellenberger and Nordhaus advocate technology-based approaches that miss entirely "the "structural environmental injustice" that natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina make visible.