By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

ROBERT GOTTLIEB ENDS his review of Break Through exhorting us to "take a long hard look at other people's ideas, even if they seem dead wrong." If only he had taken his own advice. From beginning to end, Gottlieb misses the point, not simply misunderstanding our book but outright misrepresenting it.

Gottlieb accuses us of "a rather simpleminded confidence that prosperity once achieved can never go away" when in fact we dedicate an entire chapter of our book to documenting the ways in which Americans over the last three decades have become ever more insecure socially and economically even as they have become more affluent. Moreover, we explicitly reject the notion that progress and prosperity "can never go away" and criticize environmentalists for imagining that they could effectively advocate for environmental action without tending to the social, economic, cultural, and political conditions that make such action possible.

He further projects upon us his own "crude cultural chauvinism." We criticize environmentalists for conflating developed world environmentalism with social movements in the developing world that happen to have ecological elements but typically are centrally focused upon improving economic and social conditions. We contrast western conservationists who pay little attention to the macro drivers of Brazil's deforestation--debt, inequitable land distribution, and lack of economic development--with the martyred Amazonian activist Chico Mendes, who was first, foremost, and to the end a labor organizer whose primary battle with landowners was to defend the rights of rubber tappers to make a living from the forest. Similarly, the famous tree huggers of India were hugging trees to protect them from outside loggers because they wanted to log the trees themselves. Cultural chauvinism, on the other hand, suggests that there is a metaphysical and transcendent environmentalism linking wealthy environmentalists in the United States worried about global warming to indigenous people who are as often at war with nature as they are in harmony with it.

Finally, Gottlieb suggests that we argue that all we need do is wait for innovation and technological fixes like catalytic converters to fix global warming just as we have fixed past environmental problems. This is precisely the opposite of our argument. One of the central premises of our book is that global warming is a profoundly different problem, in scale and in kind, than past environmental problems and will demand of us profoundly different solutions. Carbon emissions will not be regulated away--they are too centrally connected to the very basic functioning of our economy and our societies. Global energy use will double and probably triple over the next century as China, India, and the rest of the developing world make the long climb out of subsistence poverty that most Western environmentalists consider a birthright. This will be so no matter how much New England philosophy professors lecture the global poor about the emptiness of materialism and consumption and even if every American and every member of every other affluent society chooses to live like Saint McKibben.

Solving global warming will require us to invent and build an entirely new global energy economy and do so as quickly as possible. There will be great opportunity for human societies that take up this challenge and there is great danger should we fail to do so. Placing a vision of our collective future at the center of our politics--one that embraces human agency, ingenuity, and opportunity rather than hectoring Americans with visions of ecological apocalypse and moralizing against the evils of modernity--is what will be necessary to call Americans to this challenge.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are chairman and president, respectively, of the Breakthrough Institute and co-authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.