Break Through was born from an essay, "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World," that we wrote in the fall of 2004. After all was said and done, the passages of our essay that seemed to resonate the most with readers were those that criticized environmentalists for their doomsday discourse. The most quoted lines in the essay were these:

What we didn't know at the time we wrote those words was that King had given an "I have a nightmare" speech. In fact, he had given it just moments before he gave his "I have a dream" speech.
 
Read more in the Introduction to Break Through.
 

On June 22, 1969, oil and debris on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames and burned for twenty-five minutes. The burning river quickly became national news. Time magazine published an article headlined "The Price of Optimism," complete with a spectacular photo of the river aflame. Randy Newman wrote a song about the famous fire.
 
Decades later, environmental leaders remembered the fire as an emblematic cause of the burgeoning environmentalist movement. "I will never forget a photograph of flames, fire, shooting right out of the water in downtown Cleveland," President Clinton's EPA administrator Carol Browner said years later. "It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning."
 

But the famous photograph that appeared in Time was not of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969. It was of a far more serious fire in 1952 that burned for three days and caused $1.5 million in damage. In fact, the Cuyahoga had caught fire on at least a dozen occasions since 1868. Most of those earlier fires were much more devastating than the 1969 blaze: A fire on the Cuyahoga in 1912 killed five people. A fire in 1936 burned for five days. The 1969 fire, by contrast, lasted just under thirty minutes, caused only $50,000 in damage, and injured no one. The reason Time had to use the photograph of the 1952 fire is that the 1969 fire was out before anyone could snap a picture of it.
 
For at least a hundred years before 1969, industrial river fires were a normal part of American life. In his scrupulous reconstruction of the era, the environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes,

The first reported Cuyahoga River fires were well over a century ago. Indeed, it appears that burning oil and debris in rivers was somewhat common. Due to the volume of oil in the river, the Cuyahoga was "so flammable that if steamboat captains shoveled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames."

Like the sad and largely unacknowledged history of the Cuyahoga, smog in Los Angeles and other cities was bad in 1970 but hardly worse than the foul air Americans breathed in earlier eras. All of which begs the question: if modern environmentalism was born in response to the dramatic visual evidence of industrial pollution, why wasn't it born in 1868, 1912, or 1952?
 

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the standard of living for virtually every American improved consistently and dramatically. By 1970, affluent, comfortable, and secure Americans were strongly interested in quality-of-life concerns, which included things like clean air; clean water; and local, state, and national parks. America's unprecedented postwar prosperity created rising expectations for greater personal fulfillment and a sense that greater material wealth alone could not provide it. Social scientists often label these quality of life concerns postmaterial, because they emerge only after individuals and societies have met their basic material needs.
 
The connection between affluence and the birth of environmentalism goes a long way toward explaining why environmentalism in the United States emerged in the 1960s and not in the 1930s. It also explains why ecological concern remains far weaker in Brazil, India, and China than in the United States, Japan, and Europe. And it explains why, when environmentalism does emerge in developing countries, such as Brazil, it does so in Rio de Janeiro's most affluent neighborhoods, where people have met their basic material needs, and not in its slums, where people live in fear of hunger and violence.

Read more in Chapter One, "The Birth of Environmentalism," in Break Through.

ON JULY 24, 1993, millions of people worldwide awoke to newspaper photographs of dead children wearing little more than rags lying in copious amounts of blood in the shadow of Nossa Senhora da Candelária, one of Rio de Janeiro's most cherished cathedrals.
 
The children, some of whom had been on the streets since they were three years old, dozed each night in front of the cathedral located in the heart of downtown Rio. Whether for lack of food or fear of violence, they could no longer sleep at home. Huddled together for warmth on flattened cardboard boxes and soiled newspapers, the children thought they were safe under the protective arches of the church.
 
For Officer Marcos Emmanuel and seven other off-duty cops, the children who took refuge each night at the Candelária were nothing more than filthy street vermin. It was obvious to him and everyone else that they were behind the street crime in the area-the indecorous begging, the stealing from merchants, the stickups of tourists. When word got out that a pack of them had pummeled a local patrol car with rocks, trying to shatter the windows and the resolve of the men inside, Emmanuel and the other officers decided to take dramatic action.
 
The children were asleep when the cops pulled up. Emmanuel and another officer grabbed three of the older kids who they suspected were the gang's ringleaders, shoved them into the car, and shot each of them in the head three times. They dumped the bodies on a lawn across from the Museum of Modern Art a short distance away and sped back to the Candelária. On their return they found that the other officers had nearly finished shooting forty children. By the end of the evening, eight of the children were dead.
 
The colossus of the south today continues to offer up sensational killings that occasionally attract international attention, and the street children's movement is a firmly established and respectable interest group. But more often than not, everyday acts of terrorism, from the murder of small children to the police shootings of bystanders, are, like the burning of the Amazon, little more than background noise in our cacophonous modern world.
 

The killing of street children is but one manifestation of the violence that keeps half of all Brazilians living in poverty. Most street children are not orphans. They have parents and even homes. They just can't, for lack of food or the certainty of abuse, live in them.
 
The everyday violence in Rio de Janeiro is a mirror of the destruction in the Amazon. Both are manifestations of extreme poverty and inequality. And yet Brazil is a fantastically wealthy country. Larger in size than the continental United States, it boasts sophisticated manufacturing, mining, biotechnology, and agricultural industries. It is a major exporter of coffee, soybeans, iron ore, orange juice, steel, and even high-tech airplanes, which it manufactures for companies like the U.S. airline JetBlue.
 
Brazil's richest 10 percent of the population has an annual income nineteen times higher than that of the poorest 40 percent. For poverty to be managed in a society as wealthy as Brazil, what's required is, in the words of the police chief, an institution "designed to be violent and corrupt."
 
It is through this prism of violence, poverty, and inequality that the destruction of the Amazon must be understood.

Read more in Chapter Two, "The Forest for the Trees" in Break Through.

In the Book of Genesis, the Fall from Eden occurs because Adam and Eve eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In the environmentalist's telling of our fall, humans are being punished by Nature with ecological crises like global warming for our original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge-thus acting equal or superior to Nature. Our fall from Nature was triggered by our control of fire, the rise of agriculture, the birth of modern civilization, or sometimes, as in the case of Silent Spring, by modern science itself-which is ironic, given the privileged role the so-called natural sciences played in inventing the idea of a Nature as separate from humans in the first place.
 
The eco-tragedy narrative imagines humans as living in a fallen world where wildness no longer exists and a profound sadness pervades a dying Earth. The unstated aspiration is to return to a time when humans lived in harmony with their surroundings. That tragic narrative is tied to an apocalyptic vision of the future-an uncanny parallel to humankind's Fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis and the end of the world in the final Book of Revelation.

Read more in Chapter Five, "The Death of Environmentalism" in Break Through.

There is a story that can be told about human history that is very different from the tragic story of humankind's fall. It is a story that embraces human agency and power, and that is the story of constant human overcoming. Whereas the tragic story imagines that humans have fallen, the narrative of overcoming imagines that we have risen.
 
Consider how much our ancestors — human and nonhuman — overcame for us to become what we are today. For beginners, they were prey. Given how quickly and efficiently humans are driving the extinction of nonhuman animal species, the notion that our ancestors were food seems preposterous. And yet, understanding that we evolved from being prey goes a long way to understanding some of the feelings and motivations that drive us into suicidal wars and equally suicidal ecological collapses.
 
Against the happy accounts of harmonious premodern human societies at one with Nature, there is the reality that life was exceedingly short and difficult. Of course, life could also be wonderful and joyous. But it was hunger, not obesity, oppression, not depression, and violence, not loneliness, that were primary concerns.
 
Just as the past offers plenty of stories of humankind's failure, it also offers plenty of stories of human overcoming. Indeed, we can only speak of past collapses because we have survived them. There are billions more people on earth than there were when the tiny societies of the Anasazi in the North American southwest and the Norse in Greenland collapsed in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. That there are nearly seven billion of us alive today is a sign of our success, not failure.
 
The narrative of overcoming helps us to imagine and thus create a brighter future. Human societies will continue to stumble. Many will fall. But we have overcome starvation, disease, deprivation, oppression, and war. We can overcome ecological crisis.

Read more in Chapter 5, "The Death of Environmentalism," in Break Through.
 

When it comes to the state of the American economy, the left insists that Americans are insecure while the right insists that they are affluent. The truth is, Americans are both. How is it possible for people to become richer and more insecure at the same time? Part of the answer is that American society has undergone a profound transformation, from an industrial to a postindustrial economy. The economic boom of the late 1990s was characterized by both extraordinary economic expansion and massive corporate downsizing and outsourcing.
 
The new jobs, however high paying, were less secure. While a few individuals might hit the jackpot playing the Internet startup lottery, lifetime employment on the General Motors assembly line where your father spent his entire career was a thing of the past. The right wing continued its thirty-year attack on the industrial-era social safety net begun in the Reagan years. And while Clinton-era liberals recognized the need to replace it with a new postindustrial safety net, they made very little headway actually doing so.
 
Poor Americans during the Great Depression developed a sense of solidarity, in large measure because there was no denying their fall. Materialist appeals worked because people could see that they weren't alone. Fortunes evaporated, in some cases literally overnight. One-third of the work force was unemployed. Standing in a breadline, pleading with your neighbors for food, and walking all over town looking for work-these were public acts of poverty.
 
If waiting in a breadline was humiliating, then you could at least be comforted by the fact that so many of your neighbors were standing in line with you. "When one-fourth of the entire country's labor force is unemployed at once, and a much larger fraction suffers joblessness at one time or another during the course of the crisis," Friedman noted, "people have a tendency to think that, whatever is happening, they are in it together."

Today, life for the poorest Americans is quite different. Thanks to cheap foreign labor, new supply-chain efficiencies, and increased productivity, even the poorest American has seen his purchasing power rise greatly over the past twenty years. The prices of many consumer products, from televisions to video games to air conditioners, fell dramatically, allowing the low-income Americans to purchase products that just a few decades earlier would have been prohibitively expensive.
 
As a result, when Americans look around today, they don't see the suffering of their fellow man, as they did during the Great Depression. They don't see the Joneses family's credit card bills, mounting debt, and rising anxiety. Instead, they see the Jones family buying an even bigger SUV and moving into a larger house. An American today can be poised on the edge of bankruptcy and have a brand-new pickup truck in his driveway for all the neighbors to see.
 
The problems of insecure affluence are exacerbated by America's failure to create a new social contract appropriate for our postindustrial economy. For the last twenty-five years, conservatives have led the political effort to cut America's industrial-era social safety net. Democrats, progressives, and liberals have either uncritically resisted those efforts or uncritically implemented them. What they haven't done is acknowledge the ways in which the new needs are postindustrial not industrial, postmaterial not material, in order to create a compelling agenda for a new social contract on everything from health care to retirement security to child care.

Read more in Chapter Seven, "Status and Security," in Break Through.

In early 2007, there was a spate of breathless media reports announcing that clean energy would be to the early twenty-first century what computers and the Internet were to the late twentieth. The coverage described venture capitalist investments in everything from biofuels made from bioengineered algae to nanotech-based solar cells to next-generation ethanol as evidence that the transition to a clean-energy economy was already under way.
 
What was largely missing from the hoopla was the recognition that none of the private sector investments in high-tech, computers, and the Internet would ever have occurred had the U.S. government not invested billions of the public's money in research and development and infrastructure in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
 

The Internet (originally Arpanet) was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was set up in response to the Soviet Union's launching of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. In the 1970s, the Defense Department effectively guaranteed the market for microchips. And the field of computer science would today be a marginal discipline had the federal government not spent billions on academic scholarships, fellowships, and other training programs, to lure the best and brightest young minds into the field. It wasn't just computers. The invention of today's giant wind turbines was stimulated by incentives in the United States and Denmark in the seventies and eighties. And the first solar photovoltaic cells were created for the U.S. space program in the 1950s.
 
Big, long-term investments in new technologies are made only by governments and are almost always motivated largely by concerns about national security or economic competitiveness, from the threat of the Soviet Union in the 1950s to OPEC in the 1970s. Governments make the long-term investments in R&D and infrastructure, and the private sector capitalizes on them to develop specific products.
 
The problem is that similarly big, long-term investments are not being made in clean energy. The Stern Review notes that the roughly $33 billion invested each year on supporting clean-energy technological deployment (that amount includes nuclear) is "dwarfed by the existing subsidies for fossil fuels worldwide that are estimated at $150 billion to $250 billion each year." It is for this reason that today, non-hydropower sources of clean energy-biomass, wind, geothermal, and solar-still represent only 2 percent of the world's electricity.
 

While pushing for R&D investments in clean — energy technology might seem an obvious job for the environmental lobby in Washington, the truth is that pollution — oriented environmental groups have never prioritized those investments. As a result, public investment in energy research and development in the United States dropped from an already modest $8 billion in 1980 to $3 billion in 2005 (in 2002 dollars). Less than a half billion is for clean energy. In energy, as in computers and biotechnology, private investment capital follows public investment. Private venture capital during the same period dropped from $4 billion in 1980 to a paltry $1 billion in 2005. By way of comparison, a single biotechnology firm, Amgen, invested more than $2.3 billion in R&D in 2005.
 
What's needed is a portfolio of strategic, long-term investments. Government procurement of new technologies should be dramatically increased, public-private partnerships pursued, training programs created, prizes offered for technological breakthroughs, and international research collaboration encouraged. It's not just research and development that needs funding, but also the creation of pilot projects, and the deployment of new technologies, ramping them up over time. With computer science and, more recently, biotechnology as the models, these public investments offer the promise of creating a vibrant new industry capable of driving economic growth for decades to come.

Read more in Chapter Five, "The Death of Environmentalism" in Break Through.

Why do Democrats continue to put policies like minimum-wage increases and carbon caps rather than muscular investments at the center of their agendas? There are three reasons. The first is that small, incremental policies such as modest increases to the minimum wage, modest caps on carbon emissions, and extending health care to children (but not their parents) are the top priorities of the liberal interest groups that define the Democratic agenda. For these groups, bold, innovative, aspirational proposals to dramatically transform the economic and political landscape are seen, as distractions from their attempts to advance their small, incremental policies.
 
The second reason for the dominant liberal politics of timidity and the aversion to investment is that many Democrats have come to believe, erroneously, that it was President Clinton's 1993 balanced budget that caused the economic boom of the 1990s. The consensus of economists, however, is that the balanced budget of 1993 had little or nothing to do with the high economic growth of the 1990s. Rather, it was due to a surge in productivity from the expanded use of personal computers and the Internet, supply-chain efficiencies, the globalization of production, a boom in investment, and other factors. Yet leading Democrats continue to believe that deficit reduction was the key to the economic expansion of the 1990s, because without this revisionism, the Clinton presidency would have, with the exception of welfare reform, no significant domestic policy or political legacy to speak of.
 
Democrats, historically the party of social investment, are today the party of fiscal parsimony and deficit reduction. This is widely seen as a strength, despite scant evidence that it has ever been a particularly powerful political asset for Democrats. Deficit reduction served Republicans in the late 1980s and early 1990s because it was code for cutting taxes and social programs. It allowed Republicans to attack government spending without attacking specific social programs that were popular among voters. And Republicans quickly abandoned the discourse of deficit reduction once they were in control and it no longer served their purposes.
 
By contrast, it is not clear how the discourse of deficit reduction has served either Democratic electoral prospects or progressive social ends. Yet Democrats, even as they seized control of both houses of Congress in 2006, still hew to Clinton-era deficit dogma.
 
The third reason for continuing opposition to an investment-centered agenda is the dead weight of the pollution paradigm and the politics of limits. One can scarcely imagine a CEO who looks only at costs and debts and not at revenues and investments, and yet this is the mental model that several hundred members of Congress take to work every day. Market fundamentalists say that it is not the role of government to pick winners and losers in the economy. But through everything from tax policy to social policy, the government is always picking winners and losers in the economy. Nowhere is that more true than in the energy sector, where the government has for years been subsidizing coal, oil, and gas companies and virtually ignoring clean-energy companies. The problem is not that the essential market is being distorted by old energy subsidies and improper accounting, but rather that a market created to serve the old energy economy can no longer serve our present energy and ecological needs.
 
While "internalizing externalities" through carbon taxes and pollution limits is a part of the solution, without major new investments, it alone amounts to tearing down the old energy economy before building the new one.
Read more in Chapter 10, "Greatness," in Break Through..

In 1946, Winston Churchill stood before an audience in Zurich to give his famous "United States of Europe" speech, which outlined his vision for the European Union. To fully appreciate how much more compelling Churchill's vision of a united, peaceful, and prosperous Europe is in comparison to the environmentalist vision for regulating greenhouse gases, it is worth quoting Churchill at length:

We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future... I am going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany...
 
Time may be short. At present there is a breathing space. The cannons have ceased firing. The fighting has stopped; but the dangers have not stopped. If we are to form the United States of Europe, or whatever name it may take, we must begin now... In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America and I trust Soviet Russia — for then indeed all would be well — must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine.
 
Therefore I say to you: let Europe arise!

In the sixty years after Churchill's speech, the European Union emerged as the most powerful economic force ever organized by humankind. Churchill proposed a simple first step that, magnanimously and strategically, put France and Germany — not Britain — at the center of the new union. It was a speech that helped inspire the United States to invest more than $12 billion between 1947 and 1951, the equivalent of an astonishing $500 billion in today's dollars, into rebuilding Europe and Japan.
 
Laboring under a common vision for Europe's future, French and German leaders spent the next several years looking for a joint economic venture that could be the basis for peace and prosperity. In 1950, France, Britain, and the United States agreed to allow Germany to start producing steel once again, with France and Belgium providing the coal, under the condition that none of the steel be used for military purposes. The energy and steel operation was wildly successful, inspiring participating nations to accelerate cooperation and integration.
 
When historians look back on that historic joint venture they emphasize the crucial role played by the mass manufacture of steel, which was vital in rebuilding Europe. But the most salient lesson for today's leaders is the importance of common investments in new energy sources, which have historically been crucial drivers of economic development.
 
The national security motivations for the European Coal and Steel Community, its aspirational architecture, and the economic powerhouse that is the European Union are all reasons that Winston Churchill's United States of Europe speeches are a parable for a future international agreement on clean energy, energy security, and global warming.
 

Read more in Chapter 10, "Greatness," in Break Through.

Click here to buy T.R. Reid's excellent history of this period, The United States of Europe.

As surely as postwar prosperity gave birth to environmentalism, global warming is transforming it. Any successful effort to stabilize the climate will destroy the distinctions between environmental protection, economic development, and global equity. China, India, Brazil, and the rest of the developing world will not agree to any international approach that constrains the economic aspirations of their people.
 
A successful effort to stabilize the climate will thus almost certainly result in a rough equalization of per capita carbon emissions globally. Given the close connection between energy use, emissions, and living standards, the implications of this are momentous: to equalize global carbon emissions is, in the end, to equalize global living standards.
 
And so we arrive at the intersection of prosperity and ecological concern. But whereas postwar prosperity in the developed world created the conditions for ecological concern, ecological concern today must create the conditions for prosperity in the developing world. What were once preconditions for environmentalism must become the explicit objectives of the new politics. For environmentalism to realize its potential to transform the energy economy, it must evolve into something new. As it does, it will also transform American political life.
 

The new vision of prosperity will not be the vision of economic growth proposed by those who worship at the altar of the market. It will define wealth not in gross economic terms but as overall wellbeing. Wealth will be defined as that which provides us with the freedom to become unique individuals. It will embrace our power to create new markets. And it will turn the environmental movement's conditional support for economic development on its head. Developing economies will be sustainable precisely to the extent that we invest in their development.
 
And just as dealing with global warming will become inseparable from creating global prosperity, preparing for global warming will become inseparable from preparing for the natural disasters that disproportionately plague the vulnerable global poor. While forward-thinking environmentalists recognize the need for global investment and preparation, they have not yet created a political agenda that takes these challenges seriously.
 
Climate change and the political response to it is already defining a new fault line in the culture. On one side of that line will be a global NIMBYism that sees the planet as too fragile to support the hopes and dreams of seven billion humans. 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. This politics of limits will be anti-immigration, anti-globalization, and anti-growth. It will be zero-sum, fiscally conservative, and deficit-oriented. It will combine Malthusian environmentalism with Hobbesian conservatism.
 
On the other side will be those who believe that there is room enough for all of us to live secure and free lives. It will be pro-growth, progressive, and internationalist. It will drive global development by creating new markets. 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. It will embrace technology without being technocratic. It will seek adaptation proactively, not fatalistically. It will establish social and economic security as preconditions for ecological action. It will be large and transformative, but not millenarian.
 

Read more in Chapter 10, "Greatness," in Break Through.