The Penn Environmental Group had extra special plans for the last night before spring break.

Environmental activists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger presented a lecture on new ways of approaching the issue of global warming last night in Huntsman Hall.

Nordhaus began the talk by explaining "post-environmentalism" which came into existence after 9/11. Post-environmentalism is an approach that emphasizes innovation as a means to solving climate change problems, according to Nordhaus.

"Global warming is a relatively low priority for most people," he said, "But building a new energy economy is the solution to a whole set of other concerns."

On the topic of global warming, Shellenberger discussed how they changed to a more positive mentality about the situation after looking at social science experiments.

These experiments showed that frightening evidence of global warming - such as documentaries like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth - actually produce negative effects by scaring people into buying more environmentally detrimental products in order to protect themselves from impending disasters.

Shellenberger argued that many people care about the issue, but it will take governmental investments on the order of $300 billion to achieve any degree of real success in the anti-global warming efforts.

"These issues are fundamentally a problem of older technology, and cannot be regulated away," Shellenberger said. "It's an engineering problem."

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have been on a college tour - which included stops at MIT, Yale and Princeton-- - trying to "spark an energy revolution."

The tour is part of a campaign to recruit for Breakthrough Generation, a youth-directed initiative that is designed to engage young people in the new approach to environmentalism.

College junior Ashley Templeton, PEG vice president of external education, outreach and service, said she found the talk "inspiring" and was very happy about the "great turnout."

"It's always good to hear where these people began," she said. "Especially because they started in college."

College freshman Melissa Braff - who heard about the event in her "Oil, Energy and Global Warming" class- also enjoyed the discussion, saying she liked their ideas about investment. "You don't hear about that very often," she said.