The monthly interview.

• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Ted Nordhaus - Interview

A conversation with Ted Nordhaus, the head of a green think tank who thinks that environmentalism is dead, nuclear energy and gas are alive, and maybe the conservatives had it right all along.

In 2007, when Ted Nordhaus, who's now the head of the Breakthrough Institute, published his first book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, he became simultaneously one of the most despised and one of the most revered figures in the U.S. environmental movement. The book, coauthored by Michael Shellenberger, was a seething indictment of the sort of traditional environmentalism that prizes renewable energy, condemns fracking and nuclear plants, and threatens global apocalypse should we fail to address climate change. Five years later, he hasn't backed down. What follows is an edited interview based on two recent conversations with Nordhaus.

WM: You've made enemies with many environmentalists over the years by arguing that the environmental movement has damaged the cause of real environmentalism. What do you mean by that?

TN: Environmentalists have defined the issue of environmentalism very narrowly. They're always coming up with these apocalyptic scenarios--"If we don't fundamentally change the way we live, human civilization will end, and if you don't agree, you're a science denier." And then there's all this hand waving about living harmoniously with nature. And they've defined the solutions very narrowly, too. There's this idea that renewable technologies like solar and wind are good and other technologies like gas and nuclear are bad. The effect of all that has been incredibly polarizing and counterproductive.

The truth is, living harmoniously with nature and having solar panels on your roof and shopping at your farmer's market doesn't have much to do with actually helping soon-to-be nine billion people live sustainably on earth. If you want to save ancient forests around the world, you need more intensive agriculture, not less. I'm sorry, but the Brazilians are not going to develop their economy by harvesting nuts in the Amazon for the Body Shop. That was really an idea for sustainable development that came out of Rio this year! The point is, the environmentalists are talking about the wrong things. Imagine how different the politics of climate change would look if, back in 1992, the [George H. W.] Bush administration and the environmental movement had said, "We have this climate thing we've got to deal...