Following is a key excerpt:

By its very nature, the environmental movement has always been antitechnology and antigrowth. Bikes are better than cars; open space is better than development; less is always more. As a result, its leaders have focused most of their antiglobal warming political energies on regulating carbon emissions and limiting domestic energy consumption. Noble aims, to be sure. There's just one problem: In dealing with global warming, these strategies haven't worked in the past and will not work any better in the future.

Consider the evidence: Since the Kyoto agreement, many of the 36 industrialized countries that committed to reducing emissions are not on track to meet even minimal goals — since 2000, their emissions have gone up, not down. And both China and India are building a slew of coal-burning plants as their economies explode. "If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050," Shellenberger says, "we are super-deeply fucked."

Even if every American SUV owner were to buy a hybrid tomorrow, that wouldn't come close to offsetting the environmental damage being perpetrated around the globe. In fact, all the standards, cap-and-trade limits, and emission reductions that environmentalists have been pushing for may slow, but will never reverse, global warming. And that is Nordhaus and Shellenberger's inconvenient truth. "There is simply no way we can achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions," they write in their introduction, "without creating breakthrough technologies that do not pollute."

Environmentalists, therefore, have missed a huge opportunity. Rather than being leaders in solving the global climate crisis, they are content to be doomsayers and scolds. What Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate is what might be called post-environmentalism, an ambitious new philosophy that isn't afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth — neither of which environmentalists have been very good at. Their vision cuts across traditional political divides: It's pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-environment. They have specific proposals about Brazilian rain forests, the auto industry, and global warming preparedness.

Coming from two advocates hailed/maligned as visionaries/crazies out to radically overhaul the environmental movement, much of this message sounds totally prosaic in 2007. In 2004, Wall Street investors, Silicon Valley scientists and TV personalities were only starting get excited about "green technology" and a proactive vision to solve environmental problems by appealing to industry -- rather than halting or slowing these problems by shrinking the responsible industries. These days one is hard-pressed to find an environmental group that's not talking to the business sector and pushing for more renewable energy incentives from government.

If a primitive form of guilt-ridden environmentalism was dying when Nordhaus and Shellenberger (N&S) wrote their paper in 2004, it has already passed from the public eye as we look to 2008. Over the past three years, the leadership torch for environmental advocacy passed from sloganeering hippies to to the powerful and the actually hip: Arnold Schwarzenegger is on Greenpeace's side, for goodness sake. What was visionary then is mostly obvious now.

Of course, as Tom Friedman (whose columns sound eerily similar to N&S these days) ably demonstrates, it's often useful -- and certainly profitable -- to sum it all up with a big idea. And N&S have a pretty compelling idea: solving environmental problems is fundamentally about innovation rather than changing minds and behaviors. It's not that the old-guard of environmental advocates were wrong about what needs to change (people do need to use less and reduce our impact on the planet) but rather in how we get there; even in the area of conservation, N&S's model seems to prevail over resounding exhortations to do the responsible thing.

There are still outstanding battles to be fought. I'm curious what sort of treaty or legal instrument (if any) N&S support to deal with climate change since they seem to be unimpressed by current talk of cap-and-trade or carbon tax plans. And even I -- a firm believer in the power that markets have to incentivize otherwise-disinterested parties to solve common problems -- see some merit in the arguments that Robert Reich makes in his new book, "Supercapitalism" (see his summary article). It's hard to shake the feeling that while innovative products and models are the biggest piece of this puzzle, to some degree Reich is correct to warn us that these things have no moral bearings of their own.

What is desperately needed is a clear delineation of the boundary between global capitalism and democracy—between the economic game, on the one hand, and how its rules are set, on the other. If the purpose of capitalism is to allow corporations to play the market as aggressively as possible, the challenge for citizens is to stop these economic entities from being the authors of the rules by which we live.

I wonder what the "bad boys of environmentalism" would say to Robert Reich.