Our Independence

We are independent thinkers. That means we accept no contributions from anyone with a financial or business interest in our work. We are grateful to our donors:

• Elizabeth Lafayette Fund

• Snider Family Foundation

• Crary Family Foundation

• Winkler Family Foundation

• Jim and Susan Swartz Foundation

• Carl Wurtz

• Raul Brenner

• Gary Kahanak

• Mountain Fund

• Michael Pelizarri

• Rodel Foundation

• Norman Rogers

• Harry White

Tax disclosure

Click below to see our 990 forms.

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Nature, Peace, and Prosperity for All

Our Mission and Strategy

Environmental Progress (EP) was founded in 2016 with the mission of achieving nature, peace and prosperity for all. We believe everyone has a right to affordable energy, a healthy planet, and urban environments that enable citizens to thrive. Our strategy has been to organize grassroots movements to defend these rights, and to fund research into why they are threatened.

Caring, Fairness, & Openness

Our Values and Our Heterodoxy

We are motivated by our care for people and nature and thus the institutions, including cities, and values, including rule of law, public health, and public order, which make them livable. Civilization depends on cheap energy, economic growth, stable government, democracy, freedom, and equal justice under the law. Our society depends on rule by law and individual responsibility. EP thus affirms those constitutive and foundational values.

Humans are fallible and so we are fallible. When we are wrong we admit it by writing about it and speaking about it, which is a core EP practice and value. We approach our work in a spirit of open inquiry. We think about psychology because it reminds us of our blind spots. Of how we are motivated to reinforce existing beliefs and are thus biased against evidence that disconfirms our beliefs. We thus seek to debate our opponents rather than seek to discredit, dismiss, or defame them.

We arrived at our heterodoxical positions organically through careful analytical, archival, and field research. We are committed to solving big problems, without regard for ideology.

Our Victories

Thought Leadership

EP’s Founder and President testifies regularly to governments around the world on energy and environmental policies. In 2020 and 2021, Shellenberger testified before the U.S. Senate and House Six times. In 2017, he testified for the Blue Ribbon Commission on Energy and Climate Change for the Japanese Government. He has been called a “climate guru” and “environmental guru” and spoken in Brussels, Seoul, Manila, and many other national capitals. Shellenberger’s 2020 best-selling book, Apocalypse Never, received stronger positive reviews and sales than any environmental book in recent memory. It is the first of a trilogy Shellenberger is completing on the threats to peace, prosperity, and the environment.

San Fransicko has received similarly strong pre-publication reviews, with Pulitzer-winning historian Richard Rhodes describing it as “outstanding and myth-shattering,” Harvard University’s Steven Pinker calling it “humane and reasoned,” and Yale’s Sally Satel saying it is “compassionate, pragmatic, and truly indispensable.”

Pro-nuclear movement

Some of Environmental Progress's biggest victories have been saving the world’s most important source of energy, nuclear power, including in specific places, including Illinois, New York, Connecticut, France, South Korea, Taiwan, and New Jersey. We did so by building a humanistic environmental movement demanding energy justice for all, and telling the truth about nuclear to policymakers, journalists, and the public directly.

The New Yorker affirmed our strategy in a February 2021 article called, “The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power.” Wrote the author, "Much of what we think we know about nuclear is wrong. Instead of being the most dangerous energy source, it is one of the safest…. To be fervently pro-nuclear is to see in the peaceful splitting of the atom something almost miraculous. It is to see an energy source that has been steadily providing low-carbon electricity for decades—doing vastly more good than harm, saving vastly more lives than it has taken—but which has received little credit and instead been maligned. It is to believe that the most significant problem with nuclear power, by far, is public perception.” 

Anti-Drug Deaths Movement

Our more recent victories were in the Spring of 2021 helping to motivate the Los Angeles City government to take action to deal with the violent and unsafe open drug scene in Venice Beach, and in the summer of 2021 co-founding the California Peace Coalition (CPC). The CPC and its members, including Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Deaths, have successfully pressured local and state politicians to shut down drug markets and close illicit supervised consumption sites.

In January 2023 our work grew to include over 20 organizations across the U.S. and Canada in a new coalition, North America Recovers. Like the CPC, this coalition advocates shutting down open-air drug markets, getting people the psychiatric and addiction care they need, and providing sufficient emergency shelter for all with a requirement to use it.

North Atlantic Right Whale Conservation

In 2021 we also co-founded the Save Right Whales Coalition, a group of citizens, scientists, and conservationists who are concerned about the impact of industrial offshore wind projects on the critically-endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. In 2022 the Coalition published a report revealing that many venerable conservation nonprofits accept donations from offshore wind companies — a clear conflict of interest.

In 2023 the Save Right Whales Coalition is expanding its membership, funding research into whale strandings and population data, and increasing public awareness through investigative journalism and an advertising campaign.