Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company (https://www.idealog.com) and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. In his nearly 50 years in publishing, he has played almost all the roles: bookseller, author, agent, production director, sales and marketing director, and, for the past 30 years, consultant. His insights about how the industry functions and how it accommodates digital change form the basis of all of the company’s consulting efforts.
He co-founded Climatechangeresources.org in 2017. It is a website aggregating trustworthy information on global warming to inform and create routes for action.
MIKE SHATZKIN BLOGS
The global heating catastrophe being fostered by humanity’s proclivity to burn fossil fuels for energy is an emergency. An all-hands-on-deck emergency. An employ-every-tool-in-the-toolbox emergency. Despite that, a myth persists that blocks humankind’s use of the most powerful possible energy source that won’t add to the CO2 load. The energy source…
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Mike Shatzkin and 04/09/21
I was delighted to be given the opportunity to sponsor this Our Energy Policy session on nuclear power. I want to tell you why. In 2016 I decided to devote most of my time to climate change. I had come to the conclusion that greenhouse gases would, if unchecked, be…
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Mike Shatzkin and 11/17/20
It was in a blog post in February of 2017 that I first wrote about Climate Change Resources, the passion project that I and Lena Tabori, another publishing lifer, were building to fight the human-caused proliferation of CO2 that is threatening us all, using our personal skills and networks. I’m proud to say that…
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Mike Shatzkin and 02/19/20
Two nuclear reactors at Indian Point, about an hour north of New York City, provide about 25% of the city’s electricity and about 80% of downstate New York’s “clean” (i.e. carbon-free) energy. At the end of this coming April, one of those two reactors will shut down. A year later,…
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Mike Shatzkin and 12/10/19
A bit over three years after having been able to shift things around in my life to dedicate serious time and effort to fighting climate change, I’ve digested a lot of new information and come to a few conclusions. There is plenty to debate among climate change believers. People who…
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Mike Shatzkin and 05/09/19
When you are obsessed by climate change and start to learn more about it and invest time trying to address it, no issue is more vexing than nuclear power. Growing up in a house about a mile or two as the crow flies from Indian Point influences your thinking. Even before Three Mile…
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Mike Shatzkin and 02/22/19
If you are convinced that the need to decarbonize our energy systems and our ecosystems is, literally, existential, there are two urgent items worthy of ongoing political attention. One is that we must institute carbon-fee-and-dividend, with 100 percent of the proceeds being distributed back to each of us in equal…
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Mike Shatzkin and 01/02/18
There is very broad acceptance of the idea that we have to “put a price on carbon” — meaning tax fossil fuels — to make markets work against the CO2 loading of our ecosystem that is warming the planet, changing our climate, and, ultimately, threatening human civilization. Despite that, Federal legislation to levy such…
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Mike Shatzkin and 12/13/17
Two remarkably similar proposals for “putting a price on carbon” have been put forward from very different sources. Both constructive and well thought out, both would initiate a cycle profoundly changing the political landscape in ways neither organization spells out in their advocacy. It is a bit startling that the…
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Mike Shatzkin and 11/27/17
On Election Day 2016, when all our attention was focused on the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency, another event occurred that should have been equally startling but was little-noticed. On that same day, while Trump was getting trounced by 16 points in Washington State, the same voters defeated…
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Mike Shatzkin and 02/14/17
Lena Tabori is, like me, a book publishing lifer who wants to work on climate change. She was an executive at Abrams when I met her and went on to be a founder of illustrated book publisher Stewart Tabori & Chang and then Welcome Books, the book publishing arm of her…
