Michael Shellenberger

He is author of the best-selling new book, Apocalypse Never (Harper Collins June 30, 2020), which has received strong praise from scientists and scholars including Harvard’s Steven Pinker, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel, and the former CEO and Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” writes leading climate scientist Tom Wigley.

“Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” says historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “Within its lively pages, Michael Shellenberger rescues with science and lived experience a subject drowning in misunderstanding and partisanship. His message is invigorating: if you have feared for the planet’s future, take heart.”

The book is being translated into over 10 languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish.

Michael has been called a “environmental guru,” “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and “high priest” of the environmental humanist movement for his writings and TED talks, which have been viewed over five million times.

Shellenberger advises policymakers around the world including in the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In January, 2020, Shellenberger testified before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change invited Michael in 2019 to serve as an independent Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report.

Shellenberger has been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, thereby preventing an increase in air pollution equivalent to adding over 24 million cars to the road.

Michael is a leading environmental journalist who has broken major stories on Amazon deforestation; rising climate resilience; growing eco-anxiety; the U.S. government’s role in the fracking revolution; and climate change and California’s fires.

He writes on housing and homelessness, and has called for California to declare a state of emergency with regards to its addiction, mental health, and housing crises. He has authored widely-read articles and reports on the topic including “Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse,” “California in Danger.”

His articles for Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and his TED talks (“How Fear of Nuclear Hurts the Environment,” “Why I Changed My Mind About Nuclear Power” and “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet”) have been viewed over five million times.

Michael was featured in “Pandora’s Promise,” an award-winning film about environmentalists who changed their minds about nuclear, and appeared on “The Colbert Report.” He debated Ralph Nader on CNN’s “Crossfire” and Stanford University’s Mark Jacobsen at UCLA .

He is co-founder of Breakthrough Institute, where he was president from 2003 – 2015, and served as an advisor to MIT’s “Future of Nuclear Energy” task force.

He is coauthor of visionary books and essays including “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” “The Death of Environmentalism,” Love Your Monsters, and Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to Politics of Possibility, which was called “prescient” by Time Magazine, and “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring” by Wired Magazine. He has been profiled in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, National Review,  New Republic, and NPR.

Michael’s research and writing have appeared in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology, The New Republic, and cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News, The New Republic.

Michael has been an environmental and social justice advocate for over 25 years. In the 1990s he helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, and inspire Nike to improve factory conditions in Asia. In the 2000s, Michael advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.

Michael lives in Berkeley, California and travels widely. You can hear him speak at an event listed here. You can email him by clicking here. You can download a high resolution photo of him by clicking here and you can download photos from Apocalypse Never, including a high-resolution image of the cover, by clicking here.