Breakthrough Institute  The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Oakland, California. The Breakthrough Institute is "committed to modernizing environmentalism for the 21st century.” Founded in 2003 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Breakthrough Institute has policy programs in energy and climate, economic growth and innovation, conservation and development. It publishes a policy journal, organizes an annual conference, and offers a fellowship program for recent college graduates and graduate students. Breakthrough Institute's analyses of energy, climate, and innovation policy have been cited by "The New York Times", NPR, "The Wall Street Journal", and C-SPAN. Philosophically, the Breakthrough Institute is associated with ecomodernism. Breakthrough promotes technological solutions to environmental problems, especially nuclear energy and industrial agriculture. Breakthrough's executive director is Ted Nordhaus. Breakthrough also has a number of senior fellows including sociologist Bruno Latour, journalist Gwyneth Cravens, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter, political scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr., sociologist Dalton Conley, Oxford professor Steve Rayner, plant geneticist Pamela Ronald, sociologist Steve Fuller, and environmental thought leader Stewart Brand. Breakthrough Institute maintains programs in energy, conservation, and food. Their website states that the energy research is “focused on making clean energy cheap through technology innovation to deal with both global warming and energy poverty.” The conservation work “seeks to offer pragmatic new frameworks and tools for navigating" the challenges of the Anthropocene, offering up nuclear energy, synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified foods as solutions. In 2004, Breakthrough founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger coauthored the essay, “Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.” The paper argues that traditional environmentalism must die so that a new kind of politics can be born. The essay sparked a large debate in the environmental community, which was covered by the "New York Times" and "Salon". In 2007, Nordhaus and Shellenberger published their book "Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility", which was called "prescient" by "Time" and "the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring"" by "Wired Magazine." Breakthrough has gone on to argue that climate policy should be focused on making clean energy cheap through technological innovation and has been critical of climate policies like cap and trade and carbon pricing that are focused primarily on making dirty energy expensive.