Despite a huge upsurge in media attention to global warming in 2006, driven largely but not exclusively by Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth", and the changed dynamics in Congress the climate movement remains far from where it needs to be. Public opinion has shifted but not nearly what we need. There is some momentum building in Congress. Champions like Boxer and Pelosi are making a heroic effort but while it appears that there may be some progress the scale of changes required are opposed even among some key Democrats like Levin and Dingell. With the divided Senate and BushCo it’s unclear if anything good will happen before 2009. The question here is what are the gaps we need to fill?
Federal action is hugely important. Not surprisingly the bulk of action by the large environmental organizations is focused there as I diaried earlier this month (there are of course other notable players missing such as RAN and Greenpeace doing direct action, CERES leading shareholder efforts, various small groups doing community based green teams and others).
But we are faced with a series of problems at this stage. As Gore has been stating at every opportunity "At the present time, the maximum that is politically feasible still falls short of the minimum that is really effective in reversing this global climate crisis."
But this is not just a problem for getting national legislation passed, the problem runs much deeper. Strong federal legislation is necessary but insufficient. The financial markets need to change, we must make new technologies quickly accessible both domestically and internationally, stop cutting down major forests, and foster individuals to become highly motivated to make changes at personal and institutional levels.
Ken Ward’s compelling Brightlines piece discusses aspects of the strategy gap, that the problem is getting away from us even as we become more focused on it – noting for example that even as BP is making investments in renewables of over a billion dollars, well above its competitors, its petroleum investments are over 7 trillion. Similarly in California despite the nation’s leading global warming legislation - AB32 the Global Warming Solutions Act - the state is ramping up carbon based power:
Of the seven new plant applications the California Energy Commission has approved for construction within the next two years, six are fossil-fuel-based natural gas plants and one is a geothermal plant that uses the Earth's core heat to produce steam energy. An additional 14 power plants are under review and could be built by the end of 2010. All of those would use natural gas.
Ward argues that we are not working backwards from the problem. The solutions we’re offering are not of the scale of the challenge and the environmental community is reluctant to speak about both the severity of the issue and the scale of the solutions needed. This is true.
Ward argues for dramatically aligning all the major environmental organizations and focusing intensively on a coordinated initiative:
US environmentalists must take three quick actions: acknowledge that cataclysm is probable; withdraw from what we are doing now and focus all our resources and energies in one cooperative and desperate effort to win a sea change in American social and political view. If we think in terms of joint, strategic action within a 3 year timeframe, the realm of the possible is significantly expanded beyond our present aims. US environmentalists have sufficient resources, for example, to use the 2008 Presidential race to completely rewrite the US climate narrative. We cannot do so, however, if our agenda is dictated by what is winnable this year in Congress.
Softpeddling the Problem?
Ward furthermore suggests that the environmental organizations have been soft peddling the problem to avoid alienating people. A great example is this clip from Environmental Defense that has some good elements in terms of public education but has an unfortunate tone of suggesting little is needed to solve the problem. "Does that mean you have to give up your SUV or your truck? The answer is no. If your lifestyle demands that then get that." Ward makes the same point about An Inconvenient Truth, which after describing in terrific detail the scientific basis for the calamities we face ends with an appeal to install CFLs.
Putting aside the structural issues which make Ward’s alignment across the organizations difficult, it’s still worth asking what’s going on. While there may be some ‘cognitive dissonance’ as Ward suggests the greater issue lies around the effort to answer the question of how to grow the political base sufficiently to make the kinds of required actions politically feasible.
Differences in Strategy
The communications approach which surfaces in various degrees among the other big players is predicated on trying to build the base by moving people incrementally without alarming them and risking being ignored. The trajectory of this strategy appears in part dependent on the assumption that political and legal action will move the bigger pieces. The risk here is that the bar be set so low on individual action that people assume any other requests that may come to them will be viewed as extreme and be rejected – such as voting for funds for renewables or energy efficiency.
Ward argues that more to worry less about broad public opinion and "focus on building a smaller, tougher and highly motivated climate action core." He proposes depth over breadth to build a critical mass and ultimately a "tipping point."
Risks in the Shifting Debate
But both of these approaches may be exposing us to significant risks. The 'debate' is rapidly shifting – some Republicans are starting to get it, mainstream media has blanketed the country in largely accurate coverage in recent months, some initiatives are making progress. However, the whole movement could be at risk of a backlash – it's already starting to show up with messages of: alarmism, elitism, and hypocracy – much of this coming as a "rear-guard" movement – less in the mainstream press and more in the blogosphere and other parallel vehicles (ex: "The Great Global Warming Swindle" movie). Evidence Drudge’s "cracking down on residents" spin on Denver’s climate action plan earlier this month or YouTube where 50% of the videos are denier clips (where I suspect a concerted campaign is trying to reach an audience "below the radar").
The risk is that the steps to address global warming could be subverted by a populist movement like "wise use" – in fact from the same quarters. Van Jones makes this case in his excellent essay The Unbearable Whiteness of Green and recent interview on Grist.
Even if you can get all your policies passed without building a broader coalition, the policies you're likely to get passed won't work. You could wind up with a thin layer of eco-elite corporations doing their parts and services differently, but most people don't give a damn about the issue and are still involved in work and consumption that is undermining your efforts.
Also of course we can add to this simple political opposition like what we’re seeing with CAFÉ standards:
Fundamentally the risk comes from the lack of a broader grassroots base active on an 'everyday' level and a diverse constituency. Essentially, there is a risk of a power vacuum if the movement is not sufficiently broad. And we should expect a full court press on bad alternatives from the oil and coal companies (full page ads, 'experts', etc). With the reduced impact of mainstream media and the passing of the 2006 media flash on global warming this should be cause for concern.
Prospects for this risk are going to climb – especially if peak oil scenarios begin to come into play (and more "mainstream" attention is being directed at this question.
(As a side note however it’s worth pointing out that the idea of "supply-side caps" discussed in the Brightlines paper – wherein controls would be placed not on output of carbon but its extraction - merits attention.)
Building a Movement
That of course is why Gore has been doing the Climate Project, LiveEarth. But there remain very significant gaps in building consistent movement. Part of the problem may be that it isn’t clear that the climate movement is synonymous with the progressive movement (case in point, the roles that business and evangelicals are each playing). What are the elements? Vision, partnerships, broad spectrum of engagement. These elements must be brought together in a ‘game changing’ combination.
Vision
There has been a good bit of discussion around the role of vision. Shellenberger and Nordhous sounded that chord in "Death of Environmentalism". The Sierra Club has taken some steps in addressing that with its shift to speaking about solutions but others speak to it much better, notably Apollo Alliance and Van Jones.
We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future -- things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.
All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?
That's one component: rather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.
That vision has to be meaningful across the range of constituencies we need to engage not just to get legislation passed but to enculturate the needed changes in the society.
Partnerships
Van Jones’ call has been picked up by the Campus Climate Coalition but some of the big enviros will part company. Notably Environmental Defense, as represented by its work with Wal-Mart. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The movement shouldn’t be monolithic, as Ward notes in his response to Shellenberger and Nordhaus we should take care not to view climate’s position in politics too narrowly:
We have watched two Democratic presidential candidates who by background and inclination might have been environmental champions walk away from the role. While we may aspire to such leadership (in a blue-green alliance which contends for real control of the Democratic Party, for example) we should do nothing that forfeits our ability to speak from outside the right/left spectrum.
But somehow we need to make sure essential bases are being covered with sufficient strength. Currently, Jones’ vision is not well represented. Another similar gap appears to be the limited activation of the religious community. There is some – Interfaith Power & Light, the Unitarian Green Sanctuary efforts, a statement by some conservative evangelicals which included Rick Warren – but much of it is under the radar. Not much presence of faith communities with major decision-makers.
Broad Spectrum of Engagement
There is also a major gap at the most grassroots level. Do people have ready locations to ‘plug in’ to action at the most basic level (change CFL) to progressively more significant opportunities? There’s lots of the "10 things you can do" and sign this internet petition for state or national action but after that it’s a jump. There was StepItUp but that was a one shot deal. In some places you have Green Teams. There is Sierra Club’s Cool Cities but not everyone can make that jump. There’s almost nothing in between – green your business, green your apartment building, green your school. And currently no organization is offering the kind of support, peer-to-peer sharing and communication to build this.
So the question is – how do we close those gaps?