Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, and the founder and president of Environmental Progress. He is the best-selling author of the critically acclaimed books “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” (HarperCollins 2021) and “Apocalypse Never” (HarperCollins 2020).

“Apocalypse Never” has been translated into 15 languages including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, and Polish.

Shellenberger 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.

He 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 Shellenberger in 2019 to serve as an independent Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report.

He has been a climate, environmental, and social justice activist for over 30 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, Shellenberger advocated for a “new Apollo project” in clean energy, which resulted in a $150 billion public investment in clean tech between 2009 and 2015.

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.

Shellenberger 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 regarding 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,” and “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," “How Fear of Nuclear Ends,” and “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet”) have been viewed over seven million times.

Shellenberger 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.

Shellenberger’s research and writing have appeared in The Harvard Law and Policy Review, Democracy Journal, Scientific American, Nature Energy, PLOS Biology, and The New Republic, and cited by the New York Times, Slate, USA Today, Washington Post, New York Daily News, and The New Republic. He regularly appears on national television and has been a guest on major podcasts, including the Joe Rogan Experience, the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, and the Megyn Kelly Show.

Shellenberger lives in Berkeley, California and travels widely.

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