Michael D. Shellenberger (born June 16, 1971) is an American author and journalist who writes on a wide range of topics including free speech, homelessness, and the environment.

[2][3][4] He contends that while global warming is a concern, it is "not the end of the world",[4] and advocates for the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), industrial agriculture, fracking, and nuclear power as tools for environmental protection.

[29] While at Breakthrough, Shellenberger wrote a number of articles with subjects ranging from positive treatment of nuclear energy and shale gas,[30][31][32][33] to critiques of the planetary boundaries hypothesis.

[47] Shellenberger is the co-founder of Public, a newsletter that covers "stories on the most important issues of the day, from censorship and cities to mental health and addiction to energy and the environment".

[49] In December 2022, having become became de-facto a federally prohibited supervised injection site and failing at its mission of linking people to housing and treatment, the facility closed.

[59] Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, called the essay "unclear, unfair and divisive", stating it contained multiple factual errors and misinterpretations.

[60] John Passacantando, the former Greenpeace executive director, said in 2005 that Shellenberger and Nordhaus "laid out some fascinating data, but they put it in this over-the-top language and did it in this in-your-face way.

[2] The Wall Street Journal wrote that "(i)f 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.

Sze and Ziser asserted that Break Through failed "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.

Furthermore, Sze and Ziser claim that Shellenberger and Nordhaus advocate technology-based approaches that miss entirely the "structural environmental injustice" that natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina make visible.

"[5] Joseph Romm, a former US Department of Energy official now with the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, argued that "(p)ollution limits are far, far more important than R&D for what really matters – reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and driving clean technologies into the marketplace.

"[64] 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.

It proposed dropping the goal of "sustainable development" and replacing it with a strategy to shrink humanity's footprint by using natural resources more intensively through technological innovation.

[73] In an article titled "Manifesto Calls for an End to 'People Are Bad' Environmentalism", Slate's Eric Holthaus wrote "It's inclusive, it's exciting, and it gives environmentalists something to fight for for a change.

"[9] Environmental and Art historian T.J. Demos agreed with Caradonna, and wrote in 2017 that the Manifesto "is really nothing more than a bad utopian fantasy," that functions to support oil and gas industry and as "an apology for nuclear energy."

Demos continued that "What is additionally striking about the Ecomodernist document, beyond its factual weaknesses and ecological falsehoods, is that there is no mention of social justice or democratic politics," and "no acknowledgement of the fact that big technologies like nuclear reinforce centralized power, the military-industrial complex, and the inequalities of corporate globalization.

"[8] In June 2020, Shellenberger published Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, in which the author argues that climate change is not the existential threat it is portrayed to be in popular media and activism.

[16] In The Wall Street Journal, John Tierney wrote that "Shellenberger makes a persuasive case, lucidly blending research data and policy analysis with a history of the green movement and vignettes of people in poor countries suffering the consequences of "environmental colonialism.

"[10] Similarly, environmental and technological social scientists Taylor Dotson and Michael Bouchey have argued that as an "Environmental activist" and "ecomodernist", Shellenberger's writing in his books and on his foundation's website "bombards readers with facts that are disconnected, out of context, poorly explained, and of questionable relevance," and ultimately, his "fanatic, scientistic discourse stands in the way of nuclear energy policy that is both intelligent and democratic.

"[6] Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy for The Breakthrough Institute, wrote that Shellenberger "includes a mix of accurate, misleading, and patently false statements.

[81] Benjamin Schneider, writing in the San Francisco Examiner, described the book's thesis as "[P]rogressives have embraced 'victimology,' a belief system wherein society's downtrodden are subject to no rules or consequences for their actions.

This ideology, cultivated in cities like San Francisco for decades and widely adopted over the past two years, is the key to understanding, and thus solving, our crises of homelessness, drug overdoses and crime.

"[82] Wes Enzinna, writing in The New York Times, charged that Shellenberger "does exactly what he accuses his left-wing enemies of doing: ignoring facts, best practices and complicated and heterodox approaches in favor of dogma.

"[84] During the November, 2024, US House of Representative Oversight Committee hearing entitled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about UAP."

"[86] A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization.

[90] In 2024, Environmental Progress published "The WPATH Files", a leaked collection of internal discussions among people who maintain the medical standards of transgender health care.