Ted Nace

Ted Nace (born 1956) is an American writer, publisher, and environmentalist, known for his criticisms of corporate personhood and his support of a fossil fuel phase out.

[4] In the 1970s, Nace worked for the Environmental Defense Fund and analyzed how to replace coal–fired power plants with alternative energy programs through computer simulations.

He reflected on his own career as a business owner: Something complex and even alive has come into existence, but it is no longer governed by intuitively familiar human motives and values.

[10][11] In an interview, he explained that the modern corporation was a structure that "gelled about a century ago", and that it is a "sort of life form" which has "persistence, metabolism, reproduction, adaptation".

[11] A New York Times critic found Nace's Gangs of America to be well-researched and made a compelling case that corporations have too much political power, but the reviewer faulted Nace for ignoring the benefit to American shareholders and for slighting "the contributions the corporate form has made to average Americans' prosperity.

"[11] Alan T. Saracevic, a reviewer at the San Francisco Chronicle, writes that Gangs of America makes a case that corporations have evolved to an "abusive state of being.

"[12] From a climate perspective, coal is far and away our worst problem because the remaining reserves are so much larger than those of other fossil sources like conventional oil and gas.

"[1] In 2007, Nace founded CoalSwarm, a website affiliated with Earth Island Institute, to share information similar to Wikipedia and Citizendium, but focused on coal.

In 2009, Coalswarm started a tracker database of global coal-fired power stations that became "widely respected" by academic researchers, media outlets, and governments.