Is Environmentalism Dead?

Blogger's Note: Due to the commercialism of the environmental movement, a question was raised: is Environmentalism is Dead? I hope this article will spark an exchange of ideas among environmentalists and thinkers.

The Death of Environmentalism
Global warming politics in a post-environmental world
By Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, 13 Jan 2005

This essay by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus was released at an October 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and it's been ruffling feathers ever since. Get the backstory here.

ForewordBy Peter Teague, Environment Program Director, Nathan Cummings Foundation
As I write this, the fourth in a series of violent hurricanes has just bombarded the Caribbean and Florida. In Florida, more than 30 are dead and thousands are homeless. More than 2,000 Haitians are dead. And ninety percent of the homes in Grenada are destroyed.

As Jon Stewart deadpanned on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, "God, you've made your point. You're all-powerful."

Yet it isn't God we need to be addressing our concerns to -- it's us.

Scientists have long said that stronger and more frequent hurricanes would be a result of global warming. It's an effect of warmer oceans. Yet no prominent national leader -- environmental or otherwise -- has come out publicly to suggest that the recent spate of hurricanes was the result of global warming. That's in part due to the fact that the conventional wisdom among environmentalists is that we mustn't frighten the public but rather must focus its gaze on technical solutions, like hybrid cars and fluorescent light bulbs. In this remarkable report on how environmentalism became a special interest, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus suggest that it's time to reexamine everything we think we know about global warming and environmental politics, from what does and doesn't get counted as "environmental" to the movement's small-bore approach to policymaking.I suggest we also question the conventional wisdom that we can't talk about disasters like the unprecedented hurricanes that devastated Florida and the Caribbean. The insurance industry says that, at $20 billion, the hurricanes will surpass the costliest disaster in US history -- Hurricane Andrew. At what point have we become Pollyanna fearing that we'll be called Chicken Little?I have spent most of my career working in the environmental movement, as have Nordhaus and Shellenberger. They care deeply about environmentalism. It is for that reason that their critique cuts so deeply.The environmental community can claim a great deal of credit for what are significant advances over a relatively short period -- advances won against well-financed campaigns of disinformation and denial. Yet despite all the recent support from the media, from Business Week to National Geographic to the New York Times, we are still a long way from achieving serious action on global warming. It's time to ask: has the U.S. environmental community's work over the past 30 years laid the groundwork for the economic, cultural and political shifts that we know will be necessary to deal with the crisis? Of the hundreds of millions of dollars we have poured into the global warming issue, only a small fraction has gone to engage Americans as the proud moral people they are, willing to sacrifice for the right cause. It would be dishonest to lay all the blame on the media, politicians or the oil industry for the public's disengagement from the issue that, more than any other, will define our future. Those of us who call ourselves environmentalists have a responsibility to examine our role and close the gap between the problems we know and the solutions we propose. So long as the siren call of denial is met with the drone of policy expertise -- and the fantasy of technical fixes is left unchallenged -- the public is not just being misled, it's also being misread. Until we address Americans honestly, and with the respect they deserve, they can be expected to remain largely disengaged from the global transformation we need them to be a part of.To write this article Shellenberger and Nordhaus interviewed more than 25 of the environmental community's top leaders, thinkers and funders. You may disagree with their conclusions. You may dismiss their recommendations. But none of us should deny the need for the broader conversation they propose. This article should prompt those of us in the world of philanthropy to engage with each other and with the groups we fund in an honest evaluation of our present situation.The stakes are too high to go on with business as usual.
AcknowledgementsThis report would not have been possible had many of the country's leading environmental and progressive leaders not been courageous enough to open up their thinking for public scrutiny: Dan Becker, Phil Clapp, Tim Carmichael, Ralph Cavanaugh, Susan Clark, Bernadette Del Chiaro, Shelly Fiddler, Ross Gelbspan, Hal Harvey, David Hawkins, Bracken Hendricks, Roland Hwang, Eric Heitz, Wendy James, Van Jones, Fred Keeley, Lance Lindblom, Elisa Lynch, Jason Mark, Bob Nordhaus, Carl Pope, Josh Reichert, Jeremy Rifkin, Adam Werbach, Greg Wetstone, V. John White, and Carl Zichella. We are especially grateful to George Lakoff for teaching us how to identify category mistakes and to Peter Teague for continually challenging us to question our most basic assumptions
IntroductionTo not think of dying is to not think of living.-- Jann ArdenThose of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us. The clean water we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilderness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The two of us have worked for most of the country's leading environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the environmental community. They have worked hard and accomplished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful.At the same time, we believe that the best way to honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis. Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.We have strikingly little to show for it. From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties, environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, people in the environmental movement today find themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half decades ago. Yet in lengthy conversations, the vast majority of leaders from the largest environmental organizations and foundations in the country insisted to us that we are on the right track. Nearly all of the more than two-dozen environmentalists we interviewed underscored that climate change demands that we remake the global economy in ways that will transform the lives of six billion people. All recognize that it's an undertaking of monumental size and complexity. And all acknowledged that we must reduce emissions by up to 70 percent as soon as possible. But in their public campaigns, not one of America's environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards -- proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political alliances the community needs to deal with the problem.By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war -- in particular the war they fought and won for basic environmental protections more than 30 years ago. It was then that the community's political strategy became defined around using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical policy proposals as solutions. The greatest achievements to reduce global warming are today happening in Europe. Britain has agreed to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent over 50 years, Holland by 80 percent in 40 years, and Germany by 50 percent in 50 years. Russia may soon ratify Kyoto. And even China -- which is seen fearfully for the amount of dirty coal it intends to burn -- recently established fuel economy standards for its cars and trucks that are much tougher than ours in the US. Environmentalists are learning all the wrong lessons from Europe. We closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible. Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power. When you look at the long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement's approach to problems and policies hasn't worked particularly well. And yet there is nothing about the behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our interviews with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a community are ready to think differently about our work. What the environmental movement needs more than anything else right now is to take a collective step back to rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things around as long as we understand our failures as essentially tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical. In Part II we make the case for what could happen if progressives created new institutions and proposals around a big vision and a core set of values. Much of this section is aimed at showing how a more powerful movement depends on letting go of old identities, categories and assumptions, so that we can be truly open to embracing a better model.We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of this report to say more about what we think must now be done because we believe that the most important next steps will emerge from teams, not individuals. Over the coming months we will be meeting with existing and emerging teams of practitioners and funders to develop a common vision and strategy for moving forward. One tool we have to offer to that process is the research we are doing as part of our Strategic Values Project, which is adapting corporate marketing research for use by the progressive community. This project draws on a 600 question, 2,500-person survey done in the U.S. and Canada every four years since 1992. In contrast to conventional opinion research, this research identifies the core values and beliefs that inform how individuals develop a range of opinions on everything from the economy to abortion to what's the best SUV on the market. This research both shows a clear conservative shift in America's values since 1992 and illuminates many positive openings for progressives and environmentalists. We believe that this new values science will prove to be invaluable in creating a road map to guide the development of a set of proposals that simultaneously energizes our base, wins over new allies, divides our opponents, achieves policy victories and makes America's values environment more progressive. Readers of this report who are interested in learning more about the Strategic Values Project -- and want to engage in a dialogue about the future of environmentalism and progressive politics -- should feel welcome to contact us.
PART I
Environmentalism as a Special InterestDeath is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.-- Norman CousinsThose of us who were children during the birth of the modern environmental movement have no idea what it feels like to really win big. Our parents and elders experienced something during the 1960s and 70s that today seems like a dream: the passage of a series of powerful environmental laws too numerous to list, from the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts to the National Environmental Policy Act. Experiencing such epic victories had a searing impact on the minds of the movement's founders. It established a way of thinking about the environment and politics that has lasted until today. It was also then, at the height of the movement's success, that the seeds of failure were planted. The environmental community's success created a strong confidence -- and in some cases bald arrogance -- that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level. The environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of "the environment" has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level. We believe that the environmental movement's foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn't as "environmental." Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing. Environmentalism is today more about protecting a supposed "thing" -- "the environment" -- than advancing the worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who nearly a century ago observed, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."Thinking of the environment as a "thing" has had enormous implications for how environmentalists conduct their politics. The three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making hasn't changed in 40 years: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as "environmental." Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g., cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators through a variety of tactics, such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, advertising, and public relations. When we asked environmental leaders how we could accelerate our efforts against global warming, most pointed to this or that tactic -- more analysis, more grassroots organizing, more PR. Few things epitomize the environmental community's tactical orientation to politics more than its search for better words and imagery to "reframe" global warming. Lately the advice has included: a) don't call it "climate change" because Americans like change; b) don't call it "global warming" because the word "warming" sounds nice; c) refer to global warming as a "heat trapping blanket" so people can understand it; d) focus attention on technological solutions -- like fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars. What each of these recommendations has in common is the shared assumption that a) the problem should be framed as "environmental" and b) our legislative proposals should be technical.1Even the question of alliances, which goes to the core of political strategy, is treated within environmental circles as a tactical question -- an opportunity to get this or that constituency -- religious leaders! business leaders! celebrities! youth! Latinos! -- to take up the fight against global warming. The implication is that if only X group were involved in the global warming fight then things would really start to happen. The arrogance here is that environmentalists ask not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists. As a result, while public support for action on global warming is wide it is also frighteningly shallow. The environmental movement's incuriosity about the interests of potential allies depends on it never challenging the most basic assumptions about what does and doesn't get counted as "environmental." Because we define environmental problems so narrowly, environmental leaders come up with equally narrow solutions. In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C.The entire landscape in which politics plays out has changed radically in the last 30 years, yet the environmental movement acts as though proposals based on "sound science" will be sufficient to overcome ideological and industry opposition. Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we like it or not. It's a war over our core values as Americans and over our vision for the future, and it won't be won by appealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-interest. We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live. Those of us who pay so much attention to nature's cycles know better than to fear death, which is inseparable from life. In the words of the Tao Ti Ching, "If you aren't afraid of dying there is nothing you can't achieve."
Environmental Group ThinkIf we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.-- Karl PopperOne of the reasons environmental leaders can whistle past the graveyard of global warming politics is that the membership rolls and the income of the big environmental organizations have grown enormously over the past 30 years -- especially since the election of George W. Bush in 2000.The institutions that define what environmentalism means boast large professional staffs and receive tens of millions of dollars every year from foundations and individuals. Given these rewards, it's no surprise that most environmental leaders neither craft nor support proposals that could be tagged "non-environmental." Doing otherwise would do more than threaten their status; it would undermine their brand. Environmentalists are particularly upbeat about the direction of public opinion thanks in large part to the polling they conduct that shows wide support for their proposals. Yet America is a vastly more right-wing country than it was three decades ago. The domination of American politics by the far-right is a central obstacle to achieving action on global warming. Yet almost none of the environmentalists we interviewed thought to mention it.Part of what's behind America's political turn to the right is the skill with which conservative think tanks, intellectuals and political leaders have crafted proposals that build their power through setting the terms of the debate. Their work has paid off. According to a survey of 1,500 Americans by the market research firm Environics, the number of Americans who agree with the statement, "To preserve people's jobs in this country, we must accept higher levels of pollution in the future," increased from 17 percent in 1996 to 26 percent in 2000. The number of Americans who agreed that, "Most of the people actively involved in environmental groups are extremists, not reasonable people," leapt from 32 percent in 1996 to 41 percent in 2000.The truth is that for the vast majority of Americans, the environment never makes it into their top ten list of things to worry about. Protecting the environment is indeed supported by a large majority -- it's just not supported very strongly. Once you understand this, it's much easier to understand why it's been so easy for anti-environmental interests to gut 30 years of environmental protections. The conventional criticism of the environmental movement articulated by outsiders and many funders is that it is too divided to get the job done. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan argues in his new book Boiling Point, "Despite occasional spasms of cooperation, the major environmental groups have been unwilling to join together around a unified climate agenda, pool resources, and mobilize a united campaign on the climate."Yet what was striking to us in our research was the high degree of consensus among environmental leaders about what the problems and solutions are. We came away from our interviews less concerned about internal divisions than the lack of feedback mechanisms.Engineers use a technical term to describe systems without feedback mechanisms: "stupid." As individuals, environmental leaders are anything but stupid. Many hold multiple advanced degrees in science, engineering, and law from the best schools in the country. But as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we mean by "the environment" -- a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate "thing" and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the "natural world." The concepts of "nature" and "environment" have been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic and debilitating power within the environmental movement and the public at large. If one understands the notion of the "environment" to include humans, then the way the environmental community designates certain problems as environmental and others as not is completely arbitrary. Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like global warming -- which may kill hundreds of millions of human beings over the next century -- considered "environmental"? Why are poverty and war not considered environmental problems while global warming is? What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem -- and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to "environmentalists"?Some believe that this framing is a political, and not just conceptual, problem. "When we use the term 'environment' it makes it seem as if the problem is 'out there' and we need to 'fix it,'" said Susan Clark, Executive Director of the Columbia Foundation, who believes the Environmental Grantmakers Association should change its name. "The problem is not external to us; it's us. It's a human problem having to do with how we organize our society. This old way of thinking isn't anyone's fault, but it is all of our responsibility to change."Not everyone agrees. "We need to remember that we're the environmental movement and that our job is to protect the environment," said the Sierra Club's Global Warming Director, Dan Becker. "If we stray from that, we risk losing our focus, and there's no one else to protect the environment if we don't do it. We're not a union or the Labor Department. Our job is to protect the environment, not to create an industrial policy for the United States. That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting workers."Most environmentalists don't think of "the environment" as a mental category at all -- they think of it as a real "thing" to be protected and defended. They think of themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing. Environmentalists do their work as though these are literal rather than figurative truths. They tend to see language in general as representative rather than constitutive of reality. This is typical of liberals who are, at their core, children of the enlightenment who believe that they arrived at their identity and politics through a rational and considered process. They expect others in politics should do the same and are constantly surprised and disappointed when they don't.The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-sclerosis2 -- the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal "truth to power." Literal-sclerosis can be seen in the assumption that to win action on global warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say, the economy, industrial policy, or health care. "If you want people to act on global warming" stressed Becker, "you need to convince them that action is needed on global warming and not on some ulterior goal."
What We Worry About When We Worry About Global WarmingCalculative thinking computes ... it races from one prospect to the next. It never stops, never collects itself. It is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning that reigns in everything there is ... Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what, at first sight, does not go together.-- Martin Heidegger, Memorial AddressWhat do we worry about when we worry about global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn't our focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster preparedness? Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced agricultural production? If so, shouldn't our focus be on increasing food production? Is it the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario suggests, world war? Most environmental leaders would scoff at such framings of the problem and retort, "Disaster preparedness is not an environmental problem." It is a hallmark of environmental rationality to believe that we environmentalists search for "root causes" not "symptoms." What, then, is the cause of global warming? For most within the environmental community, the answer is easy: too much carbon in the atmosphere. Framed this way, the solution is logical: we need to pass legislation that reduces carbon emissions. But what are the obstacles to removing carbon from the atmosphere?Consider what would happen if we identified the obstacles as:
The radical right's control of all three branches of the US government.
Trade policies that undermine environmental protections.
Our failure to articulate an inspiring and positive vision.
Overpopulation.
The influence of money in American politics.
Our inability to craft legislative proposals that shape the debate around core American values.
Poverty.
Old assumptions about what the problem is and what it isn't. The point here is not just that global warming has many causes but also that the solutions we dream up depend on how we structure the problem. The environmental movement's failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to deal with global warming is directly related to the movement's reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g., "too much carbon in the atmosphere") of any given environmental problem. The problem is that once you identify something as the root cause, you have little reason to look for even deeper causes or connections with other root causes. NRDC attorney David Hawkins, who has worked on environmental policy for three decades, defines global warming as essentially a "pollution" problem like acid rain, which was addressed by the 1990 Clean Air Act amendment. The acid rain bill set a national cap on the total amount of acid rain pollution allowed by law and allowed companies to buy pollution credits from other companies that had successfully reduced their emissions beyond the cap. This "cap-and-trade" policy worked well for acid rain, Hawkins reasons, so it should work for global warming, too. The McCain-Lieberman "Climate Stewardship Act" is based on a similar mechanism to cap carbon emissions and allow companies to trade pollution rights. Not everyone agrees that the acid rain victory offers the right mental model. "This is not a problem that will be solved like acid rain," said Phil Clapp, who founded National Environmental Trust a decade ago with foundations that recognized the need for more effective public campaigns by environmentalists."Acid rain dealt with a specific number of facilities in one industry that was already regulated," Clapp argued. "It took just 8 years, from 1982 to 1990, to pass. Global warming is not an issue that will be resolved by the passage of one statute. This is nothing short of the beginning of an effort to transform the world energy economy, vastly improving efficiency and diversifying it away from its virtually exclusive reliance on fossil fuels. The campaign to get carbon emissions capped and then reduced is literally a 50-year non-stop campaign. This is not one that everybody will be able to declare victory, shut up shop, and go home."That lesson was driven home to Clapp, Hawkins, and other leaders during the 1990s when the big environmental groups and funders put all of their global warming eggs in the Kyoto basket. The problem was that they had no well-designed political strategy to get the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty, which would have reduced greenhouse gas reductions to under 1990 levels. The environmental community not only failed to get the Senate to ratify Kyoto, industry strategists -- in a deft act of legislative judo -- crafted an anti-Kyoto Senate resolution that passed 95 -- 0. The size of this defeat can't be overstated. In exiting the Clinton years with no law to reduce carbon emissions -- even by a miniscule amount -- the environmental community has no more power or influence than it had when Kyoto was negotiated. We asked environmental leaders: what went wrong?"Our advocacy in the 1990s was inadequate in the sense that the scale of our objectives in defining victory was not calibrated to the global warming need," answered Hawkins. "Instead it was defined by whatever was possible. We criticized Clinton's proposal for a voluntary program to implement the Rio convention agreement [that preceded Kyoto] but we didn't keep up a public campaign. We redirected our attention to the international arena and spent all of our efforts trying to upgrade President Bush Sr.'s Rio convention commitments rather than trying to turn the existing commitments into law. We should have done both."Responding to the complaint that, in going 10 years without any action on global warming the environmental movement is in a worse place than if it had negotiated an initial agreement under Clinton, Clapp said, "In retrospect, for political positioning we probably would have been better off if, under the Kyoto protocol, we had accepted 1990 levels by 2012 since that was what Bush, Sr. agreed to in Rio. I don't exempt myself from that mistake."After the Kyoto Senate defeat, Clapp and others focused their wrath on Vice President Al Gore, who was one of the country's strongest and most eloquent environmentalists. But Gore had witnessed Kyoto's 95 -- 0 assassination in the Senate and feared that the tag "Ozone Man" -- pinned on him for his successful advocacy of the Montreal Protocol's ban on ozone-destroying CFCs -- would hurt his 2000 presidential campaign. The environmental hit on Al Gore culminated in an April 26, 1999 Time magazine article titled, "Is Al Gore a Hero Or a Traitor?" In it the Time reporter describes a meeting where environmental leaders insisted that Gore do more to phase out dirty old coal power plants. Gore shot back, "Losing on impractical proposals that are completely out of tune with what is achievable does not necessarily advance your cause at all." The public campaign against Gore generated headlines but inspired neither greater risk-taking by politicians nor emboldened the Vice President. Instead, the author of Earth in the Balance spent much of the 2000 race downplaying his green credentials in the false hope that in doing so he would win over undecided voters. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about.
Everybody Loses on Fuel EfficiencyGreat doubt: great awakening.Little doubt: little awakening.No doubt: no awakening.-- Zen koanBy the end of the 1990s, environmentalists hadn't just failed to win a legislative agreement on carbon, they had also let a deal on higher vehicle fuel efficiency standards slip through their fingers. Since the 1970s environmentalists have defined the problem of oil dependency as a consequence of inadequate fuel efficiency standards. Their strategy has rested on trying to overpower industry and labor unions on environmental and national security grounds. The result has been massive failure: over the last 20 years, as automobile technologies have improved exponentially, overall mileage rates have gone down, not up. Few beat around the bush when discussing this fact. "If the question is whether we've done anything to address the problem since 1985, the answer is no," said Bob Nordhaus, the Washington, D.C. attorney who served as General Counsel for the Department of Energy under President Clinton and who helped draft the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or "CAFE" (pronounced "café") legislation and the Clean Air Act. (Nordhaus is also the father of one of the authors of this report.)The first CAFE amendment in 1975 grabbed the low-hanging fruit of efficiency to set into place standards that experts say were much easier for industry to meet than the standards environmentalists are demanding now. The UAW and automakers agreed to the 1975 CAFE amendment out of a clearly defined self-interest: to slow the advance of Japanese imports. "CAFE [in 1975] was backed by the UAW and [Michigan Democrat Rep. John] Dingell," said Shelly Fiddler, who was Chief of Staff for former Rep. Phil Sharp who authored the CAFE amendment before becoming Chief of Staff for the Clinton White House's Council on Environmental Quality. "It got done by Ford and a bunch of renegade staffers in Congress, not by environmentalists. The environmental community didn't originate CAFE and they had serious reservations about it." Thanks to action by US automakers and inaction by US environmental groups, CAFE's efficiency gains stalled in the mid-1980s. It's not clear who did more damage to CAFE, the auto industry, the UAW or the environmental movement. Having gathered 59 votes -- one short of what's needed to stop a filibuster -- Senator Richard Bryan nearly passed legislation to raise fuel economy standards in 1990. But one year later, when Bryan had a very good shot at getting the 60 votes he needed, the environmental movement cut a deal with the automakers. In exchange for the auto industry's opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentalists agreed to drop its support for the Bryan bill. "[I]t was scuppered by the environmentalists, of all people, " New York Times auto industry reporter Keith Bradsher notes bitterly.3 Tragically, had Bryan and environmentalists succeeded in 1991, they would have dramatically slowed the rise of SUVs in the coming decade and reduced the pressure on the Refuge -- a patch of wilderness that the Republicans again used to smack around environmentalists under President George W. Bush. The environmental community's failure in 1991 was compounded by the fact that the Bryan bill "helped scare Japanese automakers into producing larger models," a shift that ultimately diminished the power of both the UAW and environmentalists. "Where was the environmental movement?" asks Bradsher in his marvelous history of the SUV, High and Mighty. "[A]s a slow and steady transformation began taking place on the American road, the environmental movement stayed silent on SUVs all the way into the mid-1990s, and did not campaign in earnest for changes to SUV regulations until 1999."Finally, in 2002, Senator John Kerry and Senator John McCain popped up with another attempt to raise CAFE standards. Once again environmentalists failed to negotiate a deal with UAW. As a result, the bill lost by a far larger margin than it had in 1990. The Senate voted 62-38 to kill it. From the perspective of even the youngest and greenest Hill staffer, the political power of environmental groups appeared at an all-time low.Environmental spokespersons tried to position their 2002 loss as a victory, arguing that it provided them with momentum going forward. But privately almost every environmental leader we interviewed told us that CAFE -- in its 2002 incarnation -- is dead. Given CAFE's initial 10 years of success, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it made sense that environmentalists saw CAFE as a good technical tool for reducing our dependence on oil and cutting carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the best technical solutions don't always make for the best politics. Senators don't vote according to the technical specifications of a proposal. They make decisions based on a variety of factors, especially how the proposal and its opposition are framed. And no amount of public relations can help a badly framed proposal.Bradsher argues pointedly that "Environmentalists and their Congressional allies have wasted their time since the days of the Bryan bill by repeatedly bringing overly ambitious legislation to the floors of the House and Senate without first striking compromises with the UAW. The sad truth is that by tilting the playing field in favor of SUVs for a quarter of a century, government regulations have left the economy of the Upper Midwest addicted to the production of dangerous substitutes for cars. Any fuel-economy policy must recognize this huge social and economic problem." In light of this string of legislative disasters one might expect environmental leaders to reevaluate their assumptions and craft a new proposal.4 Instead, over the last two years, the environmental movement has made only the tactical judgment to bring in new allies, everyone from religious leaders to Hollywood celebrities, to reinforce the notion that CAFE is the only way to free America from foreign oil. The conventional wisdom today is that the auto industry and the UAW "won" the CAFE fight. This logic implies that industry executives represent what's best for shareholders, that union executives represent what's best for workers, and that environmentalists represent what's best for the environment. All of these assumptions merit questioning. Today the American auto industry is in a state of gradual collapse. Japanese automakers are eating away at American market share with cleaner, more efficient, and outright better vehicles. And American companies are drawing up plans to move their factories overseas. None of the so-called special interests are representing their members' interests especially well.There is no better example of how environmental categories sabotage environmental politics than CAFE. When it was crafted in 1975, it was done so as a way to save the American auto industry, not to save the environment. That was the right framing then and has been the right framing ever since. Yet the environmental movement, in all of its literal-sclerosis, not only felt the need to brand CAFE as an "environmental" proposal, it failed to find a solution that also worked for industry and labor. By thinking only of their own narrowly defined interests, environmental groups don't concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry. As a consequence, we miss major opportunities for alliance building. Consider the fact that the biggest threat to the American auto industry appears to have nothing to do with "the environment." The high cost of health care for its retired employees is a big part of what hurts the competitiveness of American companies. "G.M. covers the health care costs of 1.1 million Americans, or close to half a percent of the total population," wrote the New York Times' Danny Hakim recently.5 "For G.M., which earned $1.2 billion [in profits] last year, annual health spending has risen to $4.8 billion from $3 billion since 1996 ... Today, with global competition and the United States health care system putting the burden largely on employers, retiree medical costs are one reason Toyota's $10.2 billion profit in its most recent fiscal year was more than double the combined profit of the Big Three." Because Japan has national health care, its auto companies aren't stuck with the bill for its retirees. And yet if you were to propose that environmental groups should have a strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards, you'd likely be laughed out of the room, or scolded by your colleagues because, "Health care is not an environmental issue."The health care cost disadvantage for US producers is a threat that won't be overcome with tax incentives for capital investments into new factories, or consumer rebates for hybrids. The problem isn't just that tax credits and rebates won't achieve what we need them to achieve, which is save the American auto industry by helping it build better, more efficient cars. The problem is also that these policies, which the environmental community only agreed to after more than two decades of failure, have been thrown into the old CAFE proposal like so many trimmings for a turkey.Environmentalists -- including presidential candidate John Kerry, whose platform includes the new turkey trimmings -- as well as industry and labor leaders, have yet to rethink their assumptions about the future of the American auto industry in ways that might reframe their proposal. Some environmental "realists" argue that the death of the American auto industry -- and the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying union jobs -- isn't necessarily a bad thing for the environment if it means more market share for more efficient Japanese vehicles. Others say saving the American auto industry is central to maintaining the Midwest's middle class."I don't like to bribe everyone into good behavior, but it's not bad to help the unions," said Hal Harvey. "We need jobs in this country. Union members are swing voters in a lot of states. And a livable wage is ethically important." Like Harvey, most environmental leaders are progressives who support the union movement on principle. And though many have met with labor leaders about how to resolve the CAFE quagmire, the environmental movement is not articulating how building a stronger American auto industry and union movement is central to winning action on global warming. Rather, like everything else that's not seen as explicitly "environmental," the future of the union movement is treated as a tactical, not a strategic, consideration.California's recent decision to require reductions in vehicle greenhouse gas emissions over the next 11 years was widely reported as a victory for environmental efforts against global warming. In fact, coming after over two decades of failure to reverse the gradual decline of fuel efficiency, the decision is a sign of our weakness, not strength. Automakers are rightly confident that they will be able to defeat the California law in court. If they can't, there is a real danger that the industry will persuade Congress to repeal California's special right to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. If that happens, California will lose its power to limit vehicle pollution altogether. Today's fleet-wide fuel efficiency average is the same as it was in 1980, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. This quarter century of failure is not due to one or two tactical errors (though there were plenty of those, as we describe above). Rather, the roots of the environmental community's failure can be found in the way it designates certain problems as environmental and others as not. Automakers and the UAW are, of course, just as responsible as environmentalists for failing to form a strategic alliance. The lose-lose-lose that is the current situation on automobiles is the logical result of defining labor, environmental and industry self-interests so narrowly. Before his death, David Brower tried to think more creatively about win-win solutions. He spoke often about the need for the environmental community to invest more energy in changing the tax code, a point reporter Keith Bradsher emphasized in High and Mighty. "Environmentalists have a history of not taking notice of tax legislation, and paid no attention whatsoever to the depreciation and luxury tax provisions for large light trucks. More egregiously, environmental groups ignored SUVs in the 1990 battle over the Bryan bill, and even disregarded the air-pollution loopholes for light trucks in the 1990 clean air legislation."6Some in the environmental community are trying to learn from the failures of the last 25 years and think differently about the problem. Jason Mark of the Union of Concerned Scientists told us that he has begun the search for more carrots to the Pavley stick. "We need to negotiate from a position of strength. Now is the time for us to propose incentive policies that make sense. We've been working on tax credits for hybrids. Now we need to come up with tax credits for R&D into reduced emissions, and something to ease the industry's pension and health burdens. No one has yet put a big pension deal on the table for them. None of this has yet been explored."In the end, all sides are responsible for failing to craft a deal that trades greater efficiency for targeted federal tax credits into R&D. One consequence of Japan's public policies that reward R&D with tax credits, suggests Mark, is that Japanese automakers are run by innovation-driven engineers whereas American automakers are run by narrowly focused accountants. For Pavley to inspire a win-win-win deal by industry, environmentalists and the UAW, all three interests will need to start thinking outside of their conceptual boxes.
Winning While Losing vs. Losing While LosingFailure is an opportunity.-- Tao Ti ChingIn politics, a legislative defeat can either be a win or a loss. A legislative loss can be considered a win if it has increased a movement's power, energy, and influence over the long-term. Witness the religious right's successful effort to ban partial-birth abortions. The proposal succeeded only after several failed attempts. Because it was anchored to core values, not technical policy specs, the initial defeats of the ban on partial-birth abortions paved the way for eventual victory.The serial losses on Rio, Kyoto, CAFE, and McCain-Lieberman were not framed in ways that increase the environmental community's power through each successive defeat. That's because, when those proposals were crafted, environmentalists weren't thinking about what we get out of each defeat. We were only thinking about what we get out of them if they succeed. It's this mentality that must be overthrown if we are to craft proposals that generate the power we need to succeed at a legislative level.The thing everyone from the Pew Charitable Trusts to Rainforest Action Network agrees on is the size of the problem. "What we are trying to achieve is a fundamental shift in the way this country (and the world) produces and consumes energy," said Pew's Environment Director Josh Reichert. "I am confident that we will get there, primarily because I believe that we have no choice. But how long it will take, and how much will be sacrificed because of the delay, remains to be seen."Greg Wetstone of the NRDC concurred. "There's an awareness in the scientific community and the public that this is the most important and difficult environmental challenge we've ever faced. We're not, unfortunately, seeing progress yet in Congress or the Bush Administration."After the Senate voted against McCain-Lieberman 55 to 43 in October 2003, Kevin Curtis of the National Environmental Trust spoke for the community when he told Grist Magazine that "It's a start. This may seem to be a defeat now, but in the end it's a victory. A bill that gets at least 40 votes has a fair chance of passing if it's reintroduced."Not everyone agrees that McCain-Lieberman is helping the environmental community. Shelley Fiddler said, "It is completely spurious for anyone to call this loss a victory." Even though Senators McCain and Lieberman have watered down the carbon caps to win more votes, it's not clear that environmentalists can muster the strength to pass the Climate Stewardship Act through the Congress. Reichert predicts that McCain Lieberman will pass the Senate by the end of 2005, but acknowledges that the House will be much harder.The political calculation environmentalists are making now is how subsidies for cleaner coal and carbon sequestration could win over the coal and electric industries, as well as the United Mineworkers. While we believe that the situation in China and other developing countries makes investments into cleaner coal technologies and sequestration an urgent priority, it is a disturbing sign that, once again, environmentalists are putting the technical policy cart before the vision-and-values horse. Investments in cleaner coal should be framed as part of an overall vision for creating jobs in the energy industries of the future, not simply as a technical fix.In some ways McCain-Lieberman offers the worst of all worlds. Not only does it fail to inspire a compelling vision that could change the debate and grow the political power of environmentalists, it also disappoints at the policy level. "Even if McCain-Lieberman were enacted it wouldn't do a hell of a lot of good," said one well-known Washington energy attorney. "It's a minor decrease in carbon. If you look at what's necessary, which is stabilizing emissions, McCain-Lieberman isn't going to make a dent. We need 50 -- 70 percent reductions. Part of the job is to stay the course and keep pushing. But another part of the job is to come up with a more thought-through program."Passing McCain-Lieberman will require more than buying off or out-flanking industry opponents. It will also require beating savvy neocon strategists who have successfully turned the regulation of carbon emissions into the bête noire of the conservative movement.And if the political prospects for action on global warming appear daunting in the U.S., don't look to China for uplift: the 1.2 billion person country, growing at 20 percent a year, intends to quadruple the size of its economy in 30 years and bring 300 gigawatts -- nearly half of what we use each year in the US -- of dirty coal energy on-line. The challenge for American environmentalists is not just to get the US to dramatically overhaul its energy strategy but also to help developing countries like China, India, Russia and South Africa do so as well. That means environmental groups will need to advocate policies like technology transfer, ethical trade agreements, and win-win joint ventures. The carbon threat from China and other developing countries drives home the point that a whole series of major policies not traditionally defined as "environmental," from industrial policy to trade policy, will be needed to deal with global warming. The question that must be put to proposals like McCain-Lieberman is this: will its continuing defeat -- or its eventual passage -- provide us with the momentum we need to introduce and pass a whole series of proposals to reshape the global energy economy? If not, then what will?
Environmentalism as Though Politics Didn't MatterWith public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.-- Abraham LincolnRoss Gelbspan captured the pragmatic sentiment held by most environmentalists when he told us, "I view McCain-Lieberman like Kyoto: ineffectual but hugely important and indispensable for setting up a mechanism to regulate carbon." When we told him that Eric Heitz, executive director of the Energy Foundation, predicted to us that the US will have a "serious federal carbon regime in five years," Gelbspan replied, "It can't wait even a couple of years. The climate is changing too quickly. We have to start faster."In Boiling Point Gelbspan accuses environmental leaders of "being too timid to raise alarms about so nightmarish a climate threat" and for settling for too little. "Take the critical issue of climate stabilization -- the level at which the world agrees to cap the buildup of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere," Gelbspan writes. "The major national environmental groups focusing on climate -- groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the World Wildlife Federation -- have agreed to accept what they see as a politically feasible target for 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide ... [That] may be politically realistic, it would likely be environmentally catastrophic."In our interview, Gelbspan told us that environmentalists' failure to achieve more is "because they operate in Washington and they accept incremental progress. If they can get two more miles on a CAFE standard that would be a huge accomplishment for them. But compared to the need to cut emissions 70 or 80 percent it's nothing. They're scared they'll be marginalized by calling for big cuts. They are taking the expedient route even as we see the scientists sounding the alarms and saying it's too late to avoid the significant disruptions."The alternative Gelbspan advocates is the unfortunately titled "WEMP" proposal -- the World Energy Modernization Plan -- to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent worldwide in three ways: 1) shifting subsidies from polluting industries to clean industries; 2) creating a fund to transfer clean technology to the developing world; and 3) ratcheting up a "Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard" by five percent per year. It's a program Gelbspan says is strong enough to deal with the global warming crisis while creating millions of good jobs around the world. It might even, he writes, help "create conditions supportive of a real peace process in Israel" (though he acknowledges that the latter is a "highly improbable fantasy").Intrigued by this big vision, we asked him about the political strategy for passing WEMP."It's not a hard one," he answered. "You have to get money out of politics. If you did that you would have no issue. I don't see an answer short of real campaign finance reform. I know that sounds implausible, but the alternative is massive climate change."We asked, "Are you saying we have to get campaign finance reform before we can get action on global warming?" At this Gelbspan backed down. "I don't know what the answer to that is. I really don't."What is so appealing about Boiling Point is Gelbspan's straight-talk when it comes to the size of the crisis: we must cut carbon emissions by 70 percent as soon as possible or it's the end of the world as we know it. In his book Gelbspan positions himself as something of a Paul Revere attempting to wake the legions of sleeping environmentalists. Yet none of the environmental leaders we interviewed expressed any denial about what we're facing. On the contrary, they all believe the situation is urgent and that big steps must be taken -- at least eventually. Their point is that you have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run. What's frustrating about Boiling Point and so many other visionary environmental books -- from Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins to Plan B by Lester Brown to The End of Oil by Paul Roberts -- is the way the authors advocate technical policy solutions as though politics didn't matter. Who cares if a carbon tax or a sky trust or a cap-and-trade system is the most simple and elegant policy mechanism to increase demand for clean energy sources if it's a political loser? The environmental movement's technical policy orientation has created a kind of myopia: everyone is looking for short-term policy pay-off. We could find nobody who is crafting political proposals that, through the alternative vision and values they introduce, create the context for electoral and legislative victories down the road. Almost every environmental leader we interviewed is focused on short-term policy work, not long-term strategies. Political proposals that provide a long-term punch by their very nature set up political conflicts and controversy on terms that advance the environmental movement's transformative vision and values. But many within the environmental movement are uncomfortable thinking about their proposals in a transformative political context. When we asked Hal Harvey how he would craft his energy proposals so that the resulting political controversy would build the power of environmentalists to pass legislation, Harvey replied, "I don't know if I want a lot of controversy in these packages. I want astonishment."
PART II
Going Beyond Special Interests and Single IssuesTo be empty of a fixed identity allows one to enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful, and tragic contingencies of the world.-- Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the CenterThe marriage between vision, values, and policy has proved elusive for environmentalists. Most environmental leaders, even the most vision-oriented, are struggling to articulate proposals that have coherence. This is a crisis because environmentalism will never be able to muster the strength it needs to deal with the global warming problem as long as it is seen as a "special interest." And it will continue to be seen as a special interest as long as it narrowly identifies the problem as "environmental" and the solutions as technical. In early 2003 we joined with the Carol/Trevelyan Strategy Group, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the Common Assets Defense Fund, and the Institute for America's Future to create a proposal for a "New Apollo Project" aimed at freeing the US from oil and creating millions of good new jobs over 10 years. Our strategy was to create something inspiring. Something that would remind people of the American dream: that we are a can-do people capable of achieving great things when we put our minds to it.Apollo's focus on big investments into clean energy, transportation and efficiency is part of a hopeful and patriotic story that we are all in this economy together. It allows politicians to inject big ideas into contested political spaces, define the debate, attract allies, and legislate. And it uses big solutions to frame the problem -- not the other way around.Until now the Apollo Alliance has focused not on crafting legislative solutions but rather on building a coalition of environmental, labor, business, and community allies who share a common vision for the future and a common set of values. The Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the country's leading labor unions and environmental groups ranging from NRDC to Rainforest Action Network.Whether or not you believe that the New Apollo Project is on the mark, it is at the very least a sincere attempt to undermine the assumptions beneath special interest environmentalism. Just two years old, Apollo offers a vision that can set the context for a myriad of national and local Apollo proposals, all of which will aim to treat labor unions, civil rights groups, and businesses not simply as means to an end but as true allies whose interests in economic development can be aligned with strong action on global warming. Van Jones, the up-and-coming civil rights leader and co-founder of the California Apollo Project, likens these four groups to the four wheels on the car needed to make "an ecological U-turn." Van has extended the metaphor elegantly: "We need all four wheels to be turning at the same time and at the same speed. Otherwise the car won't go anywhere." Our point is not that Apollo is the answer to the environmental movement's losing streak on global warming. Rather we are arguing that all proposals aimed at dealing with global warming -- Kyoto, McCain-Lieberman, CAFE, carbon taxes, WEMP, and Apollo -- must be evaluated not only for whether they will get us the environmental protections we need but also whether they will define the debate, divide our opponents and build our political power over time. It is our contention that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its vision for the future and the values it carries within it than on its technical policy specifications. What's so powerful about Apollo is not its 10-point plan or its detailed set of policies but rather its inclusive and hopeful vision for America's future. "There was a brief period of time when my colleagues thought I was crazy to grab onto Apollo," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, a co-chair of the Apollo Alliance. "They kept looking at Apollo as a policy outcome and I viewed it as a way of reframing the issue. They kept asking, "How do you know [Teamsters President] Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. is going to get the issue?' I answered, 'Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. isn't! I'm not doing policy mark-up here, I'm trying to get the people that work for Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. to do something different.'"Getting labor to do something different is no easier than getting environmentalists to. Its problems are similar to those of the environmental movement: lack of a vision, a coherent set of values, and policy proposals that build its power. There's no guarantee that the environmental movement can fix labor's woes or vice versa. But if we would focus on how our interests are aligned we might craft something more creative together than apart. By signifying a unified concern for people and the climate, Apollo aims to deconstruct the assumptions underneath the categories "labor" and "the environment."Apollo was created differently from proposals like McCain-Lieberman. We started by getting clear about our vision and values and then created a coalition of environmentalists, unions, and civil rights groups before reaching out to Reagan Democrats and other blue-collar constituents who have been financially wrecked by the last 20 years of economic and trade policies. These working families were a key part of the New Deal coalition that governed America through the middle of the last century. Though ostensibly liberal on economic issues, Reagan Democrats have become increasingly suspicious of American government and conservative on social issues, including environmentalism, due in no small part to the success of conservatives in consistently targeting this group with strategic initiatives. And yet more than 80 percent of Reagan Democrats, our polling discovered, support Apollo -- higher rates even than college-educated Democrats.Irrespective of its short-term impact on US energy policy, Apollo will be successful if it elevates the key progressive values noted above among this critical constituency of opportunity. Viewed as part of a larger effort to build a true, values-based progressive majority in the United States, Apollo should be conceived of as one among several initiatives designed to create bridge values for this constituency to move, over time, toward holding consistent and coherent views that look more and more like those of America's progressive and environmental base.Despite Apollo's political strengths, it irked many environmental leaders who believe that if we don't talk about regulation we won't get regulation. Nowhere does policy literalism rear its head more than in arguments against Apollo's focus on investment. That's because instead of emphasizing the need for command-and-control regulations, Apollo stresses the need for greater public-private investments to establish American leadership in the clean energy revolution -- investments like those America made in the railroads, the highways, the electronics industry and the Internet. "We've been positive publicly about Apollo," Hawkins said, "but not positive policy-wise because it doesn't have binding limits, either on CAFE or carbon." Van Jones believes Apollo represents a third wave of environmentalism. "The first wave of environmentalism was framed around conservation and the second around regulation," Jones said. "We believe the third wave will be framed around investment."The New Apollo Project recognizes that we can no longer afford to address the world's problems separately. Most people wake up in the morning trying to reduce what they have to worry about. Environmentalists wake up trying to increase it. We want the public to care about and focus not only on global warming and rainforests but also species extinction, non-native plant invasives, agribusiness, overfishing, mercury, and toxic dumps. Talking at the public about this laundry lists of concerns is what environmentalists refer to as "public education." The assumption here is that the American electorate consists of 100 million policy wonks eager to digest the bleak news we have to deliver.Whereas neocons make proposals using their core values as a strategy for building a political majority, liberals, especially environmentalists, try to win on one issue at a time. We come together only around elections when our candidates run on our issue lists and technical policy solutions. The problem, of course, isn't just that environmentalism has become a special interest. The problem is that all liberal politics have become special interests. And whether or not you agree that Apollo is a step in the right direction, it has, we believed, challenged old ways of thinking about the problem.
Getting Back on the OffensiveFar better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.-- Theodore Roosevelt, 1899Industry and conservative lobbyists prevent action on global warming proposals by framing their attacks around an issue of far greater salience for the American people: jobs. The industry opposition claims that action on global warming will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. They repeat this claim, ad nauseum, through bogus studies, advertisements, lobbying, public relations, and alliance building among businesses and labor unions. The environmental leaders we interviewed tended to reinforce the industry position by responding to it, in typical literal fashion, rather than attack industry for opposing proposals that will create millions of good new jobs. In a written statement, Pew's Josh Reichert said, "Ultimately, the labor movement in this country needs to become positively engaged in efforts to address climate change. They need to recognize that, if done properly, reducing greenhouse gases will not be detrimental to labor. On the contrary, it will spawn industries and create jobs that we don't have now."The unspoken assumptions here are a) the problem, or "root cause," is "greenhouse gases", b) labor must accept the environmental movement's framing of the problem as greenhouse gases, and c) it's the responsibility of labor to get with the program on global warming. The problem is that environmental leaders have persuaded themselves that it's their job to worry about "environmental" problems and that it's the labor movement's job to worry about "labor" problems. If there's overlap, they say, great. But we should never ever forget who we really are."Global warming is an apt example of why environmentalists must break out of their ghetto," said Lance Lindblom, President and CEO of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. "Our opponents use our inability to form effective alliances to drive a wedge through our potential coalition. Some of this is a cultural problem. Environmentalists think, 'You're talking to me about your job -- I'm talking about saving the world!' Developing new energy industries will clearly help working families and increase national security, but there's still no intuition that all of these are consistent concerns."The tendency to put the environment into an airtight container away from the concerns of others is at the heart of the environmental movement's defensiveness on economic issues. Our defensiveness on the economy elevates the frame that action on global warming will kill jobs and raise electricity bills. The notion that environmentalists should answer industry charges instead of attacking those very industries for blocking investment into the good new jobs of the future is yet another symptom of literal-scleroris. Answering charges with the literal "truth" is a bit like responding to the Republican "Swift Boats for Truth" ad campaign with the facts about John Kerry's war record. The way to win is not to defend -- it's to attack.Given the movement's adherence to fixed and arbitrary categories it's not surprising that even its best political allies fall into the same traps. At a Pew Center on Global Climate Change conference last June, Senator John McCain awkwardly and unsuccessfully tried to flip the economic argument on his opponents: "I think the economic impact [of climate change] would be devastating. Our way of life is in danger. This is a serious problem. Relief is not on the way." Senator Lieberman did an even worse job, as one might expect from someone who makes conservative arguments for liberal initiatives: "Confronting global warming need not be wrenching to our economy if we take simple sensible steps now."There is no shortage of examples of environmentalists struggling to explain the supposed costs of taking action on global warming. A June poll conducted for environmental backers of McCain-Lieberman found that 70 percent of Americans support the goals of the Climate Stewardship Act "despite the likelihood it may raise energy costs by more than $15 a month per household." In the online magazine Grist, Thad Miller approvingly cites a study done by MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change that "predicts household energy expenditures under the bill would increase by a modest $89." More good news from the environmental community: not only won't we kill as many jobs as you think, we only want to raise your energy bill a little bit! For nearly every environmental leader we spoke to, the job creation benefits of things like retrofitting every home and building in America were, at best, afterthoughts. A few, however, like Eric Heitz of the Energy Foundation, believe that the economic development argument should be front and center. "I think the Apollo angle is the best angle," he said. "There are real economic benefits here. The environmental community is focused too much on the problem. It's a shift we've only started to make, so it's not unexpected that it's happening slowly. The pressure becomes overwhelming as Canada and Japan begin to move on us."When asked what excites him the most about the movement against global warming, Hal Harvey, too, pointed to economic development. "Let's go for the massive expansion of wind in the Midwest -- make it part of the farm bill and not the energy bill. Let's highlight the jobs and farmers behind it," he said.Talking about the millions of jobs that will be created by accelerating our transition to a clean energy economy offers more than a good defense against industry attacks: it's a frame that moves the environmental movement away from apocalyptic global warming scenarios that tend to create feelings of helplessness and isolation among would-be supporters. Once environmentalists can offer a compelling vision for the future we will be in a much better position to stop being Pollyanna about the state of their politics. And once we have an inspiring vision we will have the confidence we need to "take a cold, hard look at the facts," in the words of Good to Great author Jim Collins. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream speech" is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an "I have a nightmare" speech instead.In the absence of a bold vision and a reconsideration of the problem, environmental leaders are effectively giving the "I have a nightmare" speech, not just in our press interviews but also in the way that we make our proposals. The world's most effective leaders are not issue-identified but rather vision and value-identified. These leaders distinguish themselves by inspiring hope against fear, love against injustice, and power against powerlessness. A positive, transformative vision doesn't just inspire, it also creates the cognitive space for assumptions to be challenged and new ideas to surface. And it helps everyone to get out of their "issue" boxes. Toward the end of his life, King began reaching out to labor unions and thinking about economic development. He didn't say, "That's not my issue," as today's liberal leaders do. He didn't see his work as limited to ending Jim Crow.Environmentalists have a great deal to learn from conservatives. Today, when right-wing strategist Grover Norquist proposes a big agenda like sweeping tax cuts, his allies understand that his unspoken agenda is to cripple the federal government's ability to pay for services like health care, public education, and the enforcement of labor and environmental laws. Special interests seeking cuts to worker safety programs are, for example, more likely to join alliances around Norquist's vision of less taxes than an alliance built around "somebody else's issue," like cutting investments into clean energy. Because today's conservatives understand the strategic importance of tax cuts for killing social programs, never do they say, "That's not my issue."
A Path for the CrossingOur company has, indeed, stumbled onto some of its new products. But never forget that you can only stumble if you're moving.-- Richard Carlton, former CEO, 3M CorporationWhile it's obvious that conservatives control all three branches of government and the terms of most political debates, it's not obvious why. This is because environmentalists and other liberals have convinced themselves that, in politics, "the issues" matter and that the public is with us on categories such as "the environment" and "jobs" and "heath care." What explains how we can simultaneously be "winning on the issues" and losing so badly politically?One explanation is that environmentalists simply can't build coalitions well because of turf battles. Another says that environmentalists just don't have enough money to effectively do battle with polluting industries. Another says that we environmentalists are just too nice. These statements all may be true. What's not clear is whether they are truly causes or rather symptoms of something far deeper.Issues only matter to the extent that they are positioned in ways linking them to proposals carrying within them a set of core beliefs, principles, or values. The role of issues and proposals is to activate and sometimes change those deeply held values. And the job of global warming strategists should be to determine which values we need to activate to bring various constituencies into a political majority.For social scientists, values are those core beliefs and principles that motivate behavior -- from who you vote for to which movie to see. These values determine political positions and political identities (e.g., environmentalist or not, Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive).The scientists who study values understand that some values are traditional, like so-called "family values," others are modern, like "liberal" enlightenment values, and others (like consumer values) fit into neither category. These values inform how individuals develop a range of opinions, on everything from global warming to the war in Iraq to what kind of SUV to buy. Conservative foundations and think tanks have spent 40 years getting clear about what they want (their vision) and what they stand for (their values). The values of smaller government, fewer taxes, a large military, traditional families, and more power for big business are only today, after 40 years of being stitched together by conservative intellectuals and strategists, coherent enough to be listed in a "contract with America." After they got clearer about their vision and values, conservatives started crafting proposals that would activate conservative values among their base and swing voters. Once in power, conservatives govern on all of their issues -- no matter whether their solutions have majority support. Liberals tend to approach politics with an eye toward winning one issue campaign at a time -- a Sisyphean task that has contributed to today's neoconservative hegemony.Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years defining themselves against conservative values like cost-benefit accounting, smaller government, fewer regulations, and free trade, without ever articulating a coherent morality we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff environmental groups are so repelled by the right's values that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a serious way. Environmentalists and other liberals tend to see values as a distraction from "the real issues" -- environmental problems like global warming. If environmentalists hope to become more than a special interest we must start framing our proposals around core American values and start seeing our own values as central to what motivates and guides our politics. Doing so is crucial if we are to build the political momentum -- a sustaining movement -- to pass and implement the legislation that will achieve action on global warming and other issues."Most foundations accept these categorical assumptions just as our grantees do," said Peter Teague, the Environment Director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. "We separate out the category of 'the environment.' We assign narrowly focused issue experts to make grants. We set them up to compete rather than cooperate. And we evaluate our progress according to our ability to promote technical policy fixes. The bottom line is that if we want different results we have to think and organize ourselves in a dramatically different way."Environmental funders can take a page from the world of venture capitalists who routinely make and write-off failed investments, all while promoting an environment of vigorous debate over what worked and what didn't. Just as the craziest ideas in a brainstorming session often come just before a breakthrough, some of the business world's most spectacular failures (e.g. Apple's Newton handheld) come just before it's most stunning successes (e.g., the Palm Pilot). It is this mentality that inspired one prominent business strategist to suggest that the motto for CEOs should be, "Reward success and failure equally. Punish only inaction."7Pew's Josh Reichert deserves credit for learning from the venture capitalist model. Pew commissions serious research, pays for top legal, public relations and advertising talent, and funds campaigns that achieve results. To no small extent, Reichert shares the credit for the public vigor of grantee Phil Clapp and the National Environmental Trust. But bringing in top talent is pointless if we are unwilling to critically examine the assumptions underneath our strategies.Kevin Phillips recently argued in Harper's Magazine that the decline of liberalism began because "liberal intellectuals and policy makers had become too sure of themselves, so lazy and complacent that they failed to pay attention to people who didn't share their opinions."Environmentalists find themselves in the same place today. We are so certain about what the problem is, and so committed to their legislative solutions, that we behave as though all we need is to tell the literal truth in order to pass our policies. Environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be. Above all else, we need to take a hard look at the institutions the movement has built over the last 30 years. Are existing environmental institutions up to the task of imagining the post-global warming world? Or do we now need a set of new institutions founded around a more expansive vision and set of values?If, for example, environmentalists don't consider the high cost of health care, R&D tax credits, and the overall competitiveness of the American auto industry to be "environmental issues," then who will think creatively about a proposal that works for industry, workers, communities and the environment? If framing proposals around narrow technical solutions is an ingrained habit of the environmental movement, then who will craft proposals framed around vision and values?One thing is certain: if we hope to achieve our objectives around global warming and a myriad of intimately related problems then we need to take an urgent step backwards before we can take two steps forward. Anyone who has spent time near wide and wild rivers know that crossing one on stepping stones requires first contemplating the best route. More often than not you must change your route halfway across. But, at the very least, by planning and pursuing a route you become conscious of the choices that you are making, how far you've really come, and where you still must go.We in the environmental community today find ourselves head-down and knee-deep in the global warming river. It's time we got back to shore and envisioned a new path for the crossing.
Footnotes1 The term "framing" -- once associated with activities like "framing the constitution" or "framing legislation" -- is today being used by environmentalists and other progressives as a more sophisticated-sounding term for "spinning." The work of linguist George Lakoff on how conservatives more effectively frame public debates than liberals is being badly misinterpreted. Lakoff argues that progressives need to reframe their thinking about the problem and the solutions. What most within the community are saying is that we simply need to use different words to describe the same old problems and solutions. The key to applying Lakoff's analysis is to see vision, values, policy, and politics all as extensions of language.2 This apt term was coined by a Packard program officer.3 Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty, Perseus: New York, 2002. Bradsher also cites historian Jack Doyle's Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: 2001).4 Bradsher, as well as many other observers, has faulted the environmental community for doing next to nothing to tap into a concern about SUVs that is far more salient among the public than efficiency: safety. Environmentalists never ran a serious anti-SUV campaign based on the thousands of dead Americans who would have been alive today had the industry produced cars instead of SUVs. Apparently, in the minds of the community's leaders, safety is "not an environmental issue."5 September 16, 2004.6 Page 77.7 Quoted in Jim Collins' Good to Great.
About the AuthorsMichael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus look forward to hearing from readers of this report and meeting with teams interested in their Strategic Values Project, as described in the introduction. They can be emailed at Michael@TheBreakthrough.org and Ted@EvansMcDonough.com.Michael Shellenberger is a strategist for foundations, organizations and political candidates. He is executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, an organization advancing strategic initiatives to build a progressive majority, and president of Lumina Strategies, a political consulting firm. In 2003 Michael co-founded the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, environment, business, and civil rights leaders working to win passage of a New Apollo Project to create three million new energy jobs and free America from foreign oil in ten years. Also in 2003 Michael co-founded the Business Ethics Network, which is organizing a nation-wide campaign to hold Wal-Mart accountable for its labor and environmental practices. He is the author of "Race to the Top: A Report on Ethical Business Campaigns." And in early 2004 Michael launched a campaign to put Martin Luther King, Jr. on the twenty-dollar bill -- PutKingonthe20.com. Michael is a co-founder with Ted Nordhaus of the Strategic Values Science Project.In 1996 Michael co-founded and grew Communication Works to be California's largest public interest communications firm. Michael's work at Communication Works focused on publicizing the plight of Nike's factory workers with Global Exchange. He oversaw strategic communications for the campaign to protect the Headwaters redwood forest and in 1997 helped defeat a federal initiative that would have increased the incarceration of children in adult jails and prisons. In 2001 he merged Communication Works with Fenton Communications, which is the country's largest progressive PR and advertising agency.Michael has written articles on issues on the economy, energy, and foreign policy for L.A. Times, the American Prospect, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Diego Union Tribune. Michael is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and holds a Masters Degree in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in El Cerrito, California.Ted Nordhaus is vice president of Evans/McDonough, one of the country's leading opinion research firms with offices in Washington, D.C., Oakland and Seattle. Ted specializes in crafting strategic initiatives aimed at reframing old debates in ways that build power for his clients. In 2003, Ted helped the Apollo Alliance to frame its proposal for a "New Apollo Project," which has brought together the country's leading environmental groups and labor unions around a bold vision of energy independence. Ted is also the co-founder and director of Strategic Values Science Project, a joint venture of Evans/McDonough, the Canadian market research firm Environics, and Lumina Strategies, a political strategy firm. Strategic Values has been commissioned to use corporate marketing research to create a Values Road Map for creating a progressive majority around core values, not political issues. Ted got his start in politics with the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), where he served as campaign director for California. Later, as campaign director for Share the Water, a coalition of environmentalists, fishermen, farmers, and urban water agencies, Ted oversaw campaigns to reform federal water policies in California. For two years Ted served as executive director of the Headwaters Sanctuary Project where he played a critical role in securing landmark environmental protections for the Headwaters Redwood Forest in Northern California. Before turning to polling Ted was a political strategist for Next Generation where his clients included Environmental Defense, the California Futures Network, and Clean Water Action. At Evans/McDonough, Ted specializes in land use and transportation issues, and brings more than 10 years of experience to interpreting survey research and moderating focus groups. His other clients include Oakland's Safe Passages program to keep youth in school and out of trouble, the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, the Contra Costa and Solano County transportation authorities, and the San Francisco Water Transit Authority.Ted holds a BA in history from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Death Wish
An interview with authors of the controversial essay "The Death of Environmentalism"
By Amanda Griscom Little, 13 Jan 2005, www.grist.org

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus stirred up quite a fuss when they unveiled their essay "The Death of Environmentalism" last fall, declaring the environmental movement kaput and calling for a more visionary and inspiring progressive movement to take its place. In an interview with Grist, Shellenberger and Nordhaus talk about their ideas, the responses they've gotten (or haven't), and what comes next. Get the backstory here.

What exactly do you mean by the death of environmentalism? Are you proposing that all existing environmental organizations should be shuttered, or that they should just nudge their strategies in a new direction?

Shellenberger: Neither. We need to create a set of very different institutions and, at the same time, not just nudge but transform existing environmental institutions into something more powerful. We are not saying that Natural Resources Defense Council or any of the big national environmental groups need to close their doors. We're saying that the environmental identity should be updated into something more relevant. What needs to die is a particular conception of what environmentalism is and how environmental advocacy and campaigns are organized and run.

In other words, you believe the current strategies are archaic, but the groups that built the movement will survive?

Nordhaus: They could, but they need to be radically reconceptualized. The very DNA of these institutions was constructed around a particular idea and model of doing politics, largely based on successes that the environmental movement had in the early '70s. They were developed to use scientific and legal expertise to identify a problem, craft a very specific technical policy solution to address that problem, and then go hire communications specialists and lobbyists and organizers to go sell that technical policy solution.

Shellenberger: That approach is failing for two reasons: First, the values, mindsets, frames of reference, and belief systems Americans use to make sense of the world have changed dramatically over the last 12 years, but the strategies of the environmental movement have not.

Second, we're faced with a set of massive ecological challenges -- global warming, global habitat destruction, global species destruction, deterioration of the world's oceans, the ozone hole -- that are fundamentally different from the kind of problems the environmental movement was constructed 30 years ago to address. On every one of these emerging issues, our national environmental movement has been strikingly ineffectual.

Your criticisms echo those we're hearing about the progressive movement at large -- criticism that liberals focus too much on precise policy prescriptions rather than communicating a broader values message.

Shellenberger: A critique similar to the one we've made on environmentalism could be made of many other single-issue movements -- women's rights, abortion rights, anti-war, criminal justice, labor, and so on. Each of those so-called movements has turned itself into a special interest in defining the problem so narrowly and offering technical policy solutions instead of an inspiring vision.

Nordhaus: The challenges environmentalists face are very similar to the challenges progressives in general face. Everything environmentalists do going forward needs to be driven not by individual policies, but by the politics -- capital P -- we want to build: the vision and values, the broader political coalition we need to accomplish our long-term social objectives.

Are you saying the environmental movement needs to team up with the other progressive factions to work together on a more holistic vision?

Shellenberger: Well, the issue movements did unite around the effort to get rid of Bush. They came together around a particular political strategy, but they didn't come together around a common vision for the country that's inspirational and aspirational, nor around a common set of core values.

What's an example of a device that could create the right political context?
Shellenberger: Take the proposal for a new Apollo Project. We cofounded the Apollo Alliance by starting first with core values to unify labor, community, civil-rights, and environmental movements around a vision of a new American future based on revitalizing our economic competitiveness and creating good jobs for millions of Americans. And whether or not it passes Congress right away doesn't matter -- Apollo can be used to put anti-environmentalist, anti-labor forces on the defensive. Those who vote against it will confront public scrutiny: "You voted against a program to create 3 million jobs?" By contrast, McCain-Lieberman [aka, the Climate Stewardship Act] doesn't have nearly the same kind of resonance: "You voted against a cap on carbon?" No senator is going to lose reelection for voting against McCain-Lieberman. Even if McCain-Lieberman passes, it will do nothing to strengthen the progressive movement or make a big difference in the debate over advancing our values.Nordhaus: Apollo changes the categories we use to discuss global warming in that it forces us to take off our environmentalist hat. We've got to stop talking about global warming narrowly in terms of carbon emissions and talk about a whole set of very different things -- the economy, people's futures, global trade, and competitiveness.

Shellenberger: The usefulness of any legislative proposal should be determined not just by whether it's going to reduce the level of carbon in the atmosphere, but also whether it's going to create a cultural environment where much more dramatic and sweeping transformations can take place in the future.When the Republicans fought partial-birth abortion, every time they lost legislatively, they gained power in the court of public opinion and in Congress. They got the message out there, they changed people's thinking around abortion. We need to fight political battles that even if we lost for several years running, we may be in a stronger position than we are now.

Nordhaus: We need to start winning even when we lose. Right now, the environmental movement loses when it loses and even loses when it wins.

Interesting point, but the Apollo Alliance example doesn't convince me that environmentalism is dead. Apollo was founded almost entirely by old-guard environmentalists, which means the traditionalists are themselves generating a new vision.

Shellenberger: Of course! Both of us are born of the traditional environmental movement. Ted and I gave the last decade of our lives working as consultants to most of the big environmental organizations and many medium and smaller ones as well. We're not like Bjorn Lomborg or whatever. Still, Apollo isn't a panacea, and we took pains to make that point in "Death of Environmentalism." Apollo was a good start. Now the movement as a whole needs to transcend the moral and intellectual framework that defines modern environmentalism.

Can you give another example of the kind of device or initiative that would move the environmental movement beyond its current framework?

Nordhaus: What if we introduced a constitutional amendment that said that no state shall pay more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in expenditures from the federal government? What does that have to do with global warming? Well, it would tackle the subsidies dilemma that we've been trying to address for years: the federal highway subsidies, the energy subsidies, the coal and oil subsidies. New York and California, for instance, pay vastly more in federal taxes than they receive in federal expenditures and places like Alaska, Alabama, a whole raft of mostly rural and particularly Western and Southern states receive vastly more in federal expenditures than they pay in federal taxes. So this constitutional-amendment approach would take it out of an environmental context and create a political debate that problematizes the politics of subsidies. It recontextualizes the subsidy debate around fairness. Shellenberger: You could poke a hundred holes in it, but it shows that if you get out of your single-issue mindset, if you shake the kind of technical policy approach to this stuff, you can start coming up with creative solutions and campaigns that are both more interesting and, potentially, more powerful politically.

I see your point. Still it doesn't discount the fact that enviros are winning important victories at local levels, waging lawsuits over factory farming and endangered species and pollution that have very real meaning at the grassroots, if not the national, level.
Nordhaus: Consider this: Most of those local lawsuits are litigating the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act. Meanwhile, under the new Republican-dominated Congress, it's not inconceivable that we're going to lose the ESA and NEPA. So while we may win a few more local lawsuits, the entire regulatory framework could get repealed. Shellenberger: Our argument is that you could win all your little lawsuits, we could pass all the legislation we have on the table locally and nationally, but we would be no closer to achieving our larger objectives. Think about how devastating of a critique that is: If we got everything we wanted right now, we would still be hurtling toward global-warming crisis. We would still be destroying the Amazon, the lungs of the planet. Environmentalists offer no inspiring vision for the world or for the country that speaks in any way to the magnitude of the crisis or to the potential of the American people to really make this transformation.
So you're not necessarily opposed to policy proposals like tighter Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and McCain-Lieberman, but you believe they are only baby steps?
Shellenberger: If we could pass McCain-Lieberman tomorrow, should we pass McCain-Lieberman tomorrow? Of course, why not? Do I think that McCain-Lieberman and CAFE on their own are sufficient? No. Would I support passing CAFE if, in the process of doing so, we poisoned the ground for building the alliance with labor and business we desperately need to substantially reduce carbon emissions in the United States? No.
How old are you guys?
Nordhaus: Michael's 33, I'm 39.
Do you consider yourselves next-gen environmentalists?
Nordhaus: No. There are 22-year-olds who think like Carl Pope and there are 60-year-olds who think like we do. We were criticizing a set of institutions and an intellectual framework, not a generation. Shellenberger: I consider myself a progressive, not an environmentalist. I'm done with "ists" and "isms" generally. I thought the most bizarre part of Carl's response to our paper was the accusation of patricide. Both of our parents have been involved in environmental policy. Ted's dad wrote significant sections of the Clean Air Act and CAFE. We love our parents and we love what they've done. In order to honor their legacy, we have to update it. Environmentalism is outmoded. Death is a part of the process of life. The idea that somehow the environmental movement is, or should be, immortal goes against everything that it claims to believe.
Are you saying that environmentalism has become a tradition, not a movement?
Nordhaus: Exactly. Movement implies going forward and making progress, tradition implies holding on to the past. After the 2004 [election] defeat there was no admission by environmental leaders that we got our asses handed to us on a platter and that we must rethink everything. Instead what we heard from environmental leaders was that they succeeded in the states and districts they targeted. In his response to our paper, Carl Pope agreed that we're facing a crisis and that enviros are politically weaker than they were 15 years ago, but then he went on to propose the same damn policies and politics that enviros have been pushing for 30 years.
So I take it you didn't find Pope's response to your paper convincing?
Shellenberger: We were baffled by it. Of all environmental leaders, we thought Carl would embrace this. He's the guy that reaches out the most to labor unions, he's the guy that fights anti-immigrant forces. He gave us the most extraordinary interview [when we were conducting research for the paper]. He, more than any other environmental leader, inspired the thesis of this paper.Nordhaus: Carl Pope is the first and, thus far, only major person in the environmental movement to have publicly engaged this discourse at all and for that, if nothing else, we commend him. We emailed all these guys after the article came out and asked if they'd be willing to have a dialogue and the silence has been deafening. Shellenberger: Yeah, it's like, God, please disagree with us. We would be honored.
Would you say that for the sake of creating debate and making your argument, you made exaggerations and generalizations?
Shellenberger: No way. I didn't say anything in there that I regret. Not a single sentence. And we didn't say anything in there that was designed to provoke. Our intention was not to make people angry, it was to start a debate.
Why, then, did you address your complaints directly to funders rather than to the leaders themselves? That seems inherently provocative.
Shellenberger: There is no place for public debate in the environmental movement. Even librarians have much fiercer public debates and dialogues than the environmental community. Or look at the AIDS movement, where public-health organizations and government agencies have fantastic debates every year. They have peer-reviewed journals and panel discussions at international conferences. Look at the intense debates over how to stem the flow of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The environmental movement needs a national or international forum to debate strategy. Nordhaus: We definitely wrote this to be provocative and get their attention. But [the Environmental Grantmakers Association meeting] was the only conference, the only place to really talk to the leaders of the movement. Where else should we have gone? There's no place to go.
What do you say to criticisms that in researching your paper you only interviewed the movement's technicians and not other leaders, like Wendell Berry?
Nordhaus: We interviewed the people in the environmental movement who are deciding how to spend tens of millions of dollars annually. Hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade have been spent to address global warming. I'm sorry, Wendell Berry isn't the person deciding how the enviro movement is going to construct its campaigns to address global warming. The people we talked to are. They are deciding where this movement is going, where the resources are going. They need to rethink their politics to make it morally compelling. They need to start talking about a future people want to be a part of.
Some detractors are saying your paper is nihilistic -- that it offers only criticisms and no real proposals for a rehabilitation plan.
Nordhaus: We know, we've said repeatedly, that our ideas are partially baked and that we need some help in reconstructing a viable political movement. This is not something that we can do in a 30-page pamphlet. We resisted suggestions from early reviewers of the paper to provide specific prescriptions because we wanted to begin a discussion and dialogue, not suggest that we had all the answers. Shellenberger: This paper is about coming to terms with change. Our message is that it's time to acknowledge both an end and a new beginning and not fear it. As the Taoist saying goes, "If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you can't achieve."
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Amanda Griscom Little writes Grist's Muckraker column on environmental politics and policy and interviews green luminaries for the magazine. Her articles on energy and the environment have also appeared in publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The New York Times Magazine.


And Now for Something Completely Different
An in-depth response to "The Death of Environmentalism"
By Carl Pope, 13 Jan 2005

In December 2004, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope distributed this response to the essay "The Death of Environmentalism." Get the backstory here.

There Is Something Different About Global WarmingDear Environmental Grant-Maker:You may have recently received a memorandum entitled "The Death of Environmentalism" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.I was one of the twenty-five people interviewed for this piece. While I personally was treated fairly, I am still deeply disappointed and angered by it. I share the thesis that some fundamental changes are needed in the way environmentalists approach the challenge of global warming. But I believe that their paper, because it is unfair, unclear and divisive, has actually muddied the water and made the task of figuring out a comprehensive and effective set of strategies more difficult.

Points of Agreement
Summed up, Shellenberger and Nordhaus (S&N) argue three relatively established points:a) We are making inadequate progress on global warming.b) We have inadequately mobilized public concerns and values to create political pressure. As a result decision makers have not been forced to confront the need for fundamental changes in the way our society uses carbon (and other greenhouse gasses).c) This inadequacy is related to a common set of failings and weaknesses which afflict progressive social movements in general, by contrast with the reinvigorated and more strategically integrated efforts of the hard right.I agree with these three points; indeed, it is hard to find anyone who doesn't agree with them. These concerns are widely and broadly shared among both environmental advocates and funders. The results of the election undoubtedly reinforced this consensus. There is nothing particularly new or striking, or controversial, about these points.

Where We Diverge
But Shellenberger and Nordhaus frame these three points within a very troublesome and divisive set of conclusions about the broader environmental movement. These conclusions do not flow from their interviews. They are not documented or justified in their paper. My fear is that these conclusions are so fundamentally flawed that they may distract us from the real work at hand -- to craft a set of understandings and approaches that will move us forward towards global warming solutions.

What They Overlook
Environmentalism is a broad, diverse and robust movement. It has provided some of the deepest and most questioning analysis of our ethical relationship to other species of our era. It deploys a wide variety of advocacy paradigms -- policy based interest group analysis is one, but there are also placed-based, values-driven and rights-rooted traditions and models to draw upon.Environmentalists have found it difficult to mobilize public support around global warming issues -- even in times and places when public outrage over issues like mercury poisoning or clear-cutting has been boiling over. There is something different about global warming.Environmentalism is part of a broader progressive movement, which the right has invested enormously in undercutting for the past thirty years. As part of that broader movement, we do have some work to do -- but dying does not seem a particularly helpful form of that work.

Their Argument
Their overall thrust, unfortunately, is summarized by the title of their paper, "The Death of Environmentalism." The arguments are internally contradictory, but the logic runs something like this:i) The leadership of the environmental movement, overall, are a bunch of narrowly focused and politically blinded policy wonks -- individually smart but collectively stupid.ii) This blindness is the result of the very definition of environmentalism. "The environmental community's belief that their power derives from defining themselves as defenders of "the environment" has prevented us from winning major legislation on global warming at the national level."iii) The environmental movement is in denial about the challenges it is facing. "In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C."iv) The history of both Kyoto and CAFE standards reveals a consistent failure on the part of the environmental movement to comprehend that effective strategies to decarbonize the economy must take into account the priorities and needs of other players -- the American auto industry, auto workers, labor in general, and the broader progressive community.v) The environmental movement is incapable of responding to the challenge because its leaders are mired in the successes of the 1970's. "It was then, at the height of the movement's success, that the seeds of failure were planted. The environmental community's success created a strong confidence -- and in some cases bald arrogance -- that the environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a policy level."vi) As a result, we must consider junking the institutional framework of the environmental movement. "We need to take a hard look at the institutions the movement has built over the last 30 years. Are existing environmental institutions up to the task of imagining the post-global warming world? Or do we now need a set of new institutions founded around a more expansive vision and set of values?"vii) The existing leadership is bankrupt and incapable of responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century. They should step aside to allow a new generation of leaders to take over. "Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing."viii) Indeed, the environmental movement itself should pass from the scene. It's time has come and gone. "We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live."

Do Shellenberger and Nordhaus Make Their Case?
This second set of arguments makes a very large set of claims, indeed. Given that they wrote their piece in a few months after only 25 interviews, it may not be surprising that Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to adequately buttress such a far-reaching set of assertions. It is not clear what possessed them to try to build such an ambitious premise on such a flimsy foundation. Boldness and hubris are closely related.Their case is not only flimsy, it is internally contradictory and misleading. I still think it is important to address their arguments because, unchallenged, they may distract us from a set of very real challenges which require extending and rethinking our approach to global warming advocacy, not junking modern environmentalism.

Who Are Environmentalists?
S&N assert, "the environment is a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate "thing" and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the "natural world". The two major ethical streams in modern environmentalism are deep ecology and environmental justice. Neither accepts either of these notions. Who were they thinking of when they made these statements? They offer not a single quote to suggest that anyone they interviewed believes that human beings are "separate from and superior to the natural world." Not one.It would be hard to think of a social movement struggling harder to free itself from these two "notions" than environmentalism. But it is environmentalism whose death they advocate.In other places, S&N appear to define the environmental movement as the 25 people they interviewed. When they urge that "environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but rather to figure out who we are and who we need to be," they utterly ignore such leaders as Wendell Berry, Paul Shepherd, Thomas Barry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Leopold. They interviewed 25 policy people, and then complain that they got only policy expertise from their interviews. Environmentalism has both poets and wonks; you don't go to your legislative counsel for a sonnet, nor to your troubadour for a reply brief.

Is the Definition the Problem?
S&N complain that "Most environmentalists don't think of 'the environment' as a mental category at all -- they think of it as a real "thing" to be protected and defended. They think of themselves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing."So?Without being too precious, the environment is a real thing. There is a global carbon cycle, human interventions are a small if meaningful part of the evolutionary process, homo sapiens depend upon a complex web of both geochemical and biological processes. Natural processes -- eutrophication, competition, speciation, nutrient cycling, sequestration -- continue around us according to their own dynamics. We influence, but do not control, the climate. Of course our understanding of these phenomena proceeds through mental constructs which are not the phenomena themselves -- we've known that since Kant.But I don't think that the definition of what constitutes an environmental problem is the arbitrary and troublesome source of weakness that S&N suggest. They have erected, and then blown aside, a straw man. For example, they assert that "the environmental movement's failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to deal with global warming is directly related to the movement's reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g., "too much carbon in the atmosphere") of any given environmental problem."This charge does not explain why this same inadequate definition of what constitutes environmentalism has proven potent when applied to wilderness preservation, mercury in our waterways, or sewage in our basements. Environmentalism has failed with regard to global warming precisely in contrast to its success in mobilizing public passions on these other problems. This strongly suggests that we need to look not at what these problems have in common -- the movement's definitions of the environment -- but what is unique or different about global warming.

Are Environmental Leaders Clueless and Naive?
S&N argue that environmentalists are living in lotus land about how they are faring. In addition to the claim that our movement believes that better light bulbs will solve the global warming problem, they maintain that "environmentalists are particularly upbeat about the direction of public opinion thanks in large part to the polling they conduct that shows wide support for their proposals. Yet America is a vastly more right-wing country than it was three decades ago. The domination of American politics by the far-right is a central obstacle to achieving action on global warming. Yet almost none of the environmentalists we interviewed thought to mention it."I spend a great deal of my time with environmental leaders. I know of none that I would describe as "sanguine" that technical solutions will solve the problem of global warming. I have participated in dozens of debates about the meaning of public opinion polls, none of which were particularly "upbeat." I can testify that environmental leaders like those S&N interviewed think about the power and success of the right almost obsessively. I seriously doubt that S&N asked any one of their interviewees if they thought this was a problem and got the answer, "No, nothing to worry about."

A Flawed Argument From History
S&N then make an argument from history, saying that there have been no epoch making big wins in recent decades like those of the late 60's and early 70's. They specifically criticize environmentalists for a series of strategic and movement building failures, narrating the history of global warming advocacy since the 1980's. But again they fail to show why if the problem is environmentalism, labor and social justice movements have also done very poorly since 1980.On the specifics of global warming, their historical narrative is sadly incomplete and riddled with inaccuracies and internal inconsistencies. I and the Sierra Club have been part of the CAFE battle longer than any of the sources S&N cite in their history. But in our interview they never asked me any questions about the history of the environmental movement's engagement with either the auto companies or the UAW on fuel efficiency. As a result, they got the story almost entirely wrong.For example, the Sierra Club has consistently understood CAFE as a program which needed to be used to preserve and enhance the US auto industry, the very point they attack environmentalists for ignoring. As early as the Carter Administration the Sierra Club sought an alliance with the UAW on domestic content legislation to free the union up to become again an advocate for change among the domestic manufacturers. Environmentalists have also continuously and intensely explored ways to make the program work for both the unions and the domestic manufacturers by offering tax credits or other mechanisms to finance the necessary catch-up by Detroit.The authors claim that in the 1990's, "having gathered 59 votes -- one short of what's needed to stop a filibuster -- Senator Richard Bryan nearly passed legislation to raise fuel economy standards in 1990. But one year later, when Bryan had a very good shot at getting the 60 votes he needed, the environmental movement cut a deal with the automakers. In exchange for the auto industry's opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentalists agreed to drop their support for the Bryan bill."This is rubbish. This statement appears to be based on a quote in Keith Bradsher's book drawn in turn from an earlier work by Jack Doyle. The reality is that Senator Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, to get an omnibus energy bill which included drilling the Arctic beyond a Senate filibuster and into conference with the House, included a 37 mpg CAFE standard as part of that bill. Auto companies opposed the bill, making it clear that the CAFE proposal would not survive conference with the House. Environmental groups opposed it because it was clear that drilling the Arctic would survive such a conference and would end up on the President's desk to be signed. Senator Bryan, far from being abandoned by environmentalists, was one of the first Senators to sign up for the filibuster against the Johnston-Wallop bill.Johnston offered repeated carrots in exchange for drilling the Arctic; there was never any evidence that he had the capacity or intention to deliver on any of them; environmentalists, wisely in my view, rejected them all.Not only is this rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. Because already, two weeks after the 2004 election, there are discussions that once again environmentalists should abandon their battle to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for some forward progress on reducing carbon emissions.What none of these discussions acknowledge is this: It is the carbon lobby that wants to drill the refuge. It is the carbon lobby that does not want to reduce carbon emissions. If the oil industry, the Bush Administration and the state of Alaska have the votes to drill the Arctic, they will do so -- they have no reason to give environmentalists something in exchange.If environmentalists had the votes to do something to reduce carbon emissions, they should do so. They wouldn't need to trade the Arctic, and they shouldn't. This is not a market where one party owns the Arctic and can sell it in exchange for more fuel efficient trucks. The policy logic of drilling the Arctic and the policy logic of reducing carbon emissions are diametrically opposed. So this is not a rational public policy debate about how to craft a better energy policy by combining different priorities.This is a power struggle about which way to go -- more carbon or less.

Are We Mired In the Past?
The authors assert repeatedly, but never document, that the environmental movement is still approaching things as it learned to do in the early 1970's. All that the authors offer to buttress this crucial claim is the following:"By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are like generals fighting the last war -- in particular the war they fought and won for basic environmental protections more than 30 years ago. It was then that the community's political strategy became defined around using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical policy proposals as solutions."The greatest achievements to reduce global warming are today happening in Europe....."Environmentalists are learning all the wrong lessons from Europe. We closely scrutinize the policies without giving much thought to the politics that made the policies possible."We do need to examine the European experience. But when we do, we find the same definition of global warming as an environmental problem, and the same technical policy solutions. What is different is the politics of carbon. European nations have been carbon importers for much longer than the U.S., and most have nationalized those industries so that they are no longer independent political actors.

Should We Junk Our Institutions?
Here's where shoddy research is so damaging.S&N assert there is a void needing to be filled. "If, for example, environmentalists don't consider the high cost of health care, R&D tax credits, and the overall competitiveness of the American auto industry to be "environmental issues," then who will think creatively about a proposal that works for industry, workers, communities and the environment? If framing proposals around narrow technical solutions is an ingrained habit of the environmental movement, then who will craft proposals framed around vision and values?"Good questions -- IF. But the full record, as I mention above, shows that environmental groups have incorporated competitiveness into their thinking for 26 years. They continue to do so. In the summer of 2002 the Sierra Club joined the Steelworkers in calling for federal action to relieve steel companies of their legacy pension and health costs. This action, which the authors call unthinkable, was fairly routine for us. Contrary to the author's stated assumption, no one in the environmental movement was critical of the Club for taking this stance. In fact, we got a lot of praise.The perception that the movement is overly obsessed with technical solutions appears to be an artifact of S&N having focused their interviews on the movement's technicians. Again, to make such a claim about leaders like Randy Hayes or Dave Foreman is absurd -- but neither of them was interviewed. The author's entire edifice thus rests on sand. The tide is still coming in and out, and the environmental movement, leaders and institutions both, are still growing and changing like the ecosystem they are.

Is the Problem Generational?
The authors start out with an almost ritualized obeisance to earlier generations of environmentalists:"Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us. The clean water we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilderness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The two of us have worked for most of the country's leading environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the environmental community. They have worked hard and accomplished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful."They then move on to an almost equally ritualized sacrifice."Most of the movement's leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing."An anthropologist would be thrilled to find patricide still servings its ritual purpose.Having framed the basic issues as generational, they spend the rest of the paper savaging their "parents and elders." (It's not clear who delegated the two of them to speak for the children in this generationally divided family they have hypothesized.)Yet there's simply no evidence in the paper that there are any consistent differences on the crucial issues between different generations within the environmental movement. I freely grant that there are, and should be, different generational leadership styles, different understandings of how to advance environmental change, different political strategies. But there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever in the S&N paper that on the key issues they raise the differences are generational. Do younger environmental ethicists see issues differently than their predecessors? Is there less interest in the technical issues of carbon trading among younger economists within the environmental movement? Do older environmental justice advocates fail to see the need to be more inclusive?S&N have taken the normal, important, and inevitable segmentation within the environmental movement, and pretended that it can be explained as a matter of generational succession -- without an iota of evidence.

The End of Environmentalism?
Perhaps the most self-serving and damaging paragraph in the paper is the following:"At the same time, we believe that the best way to honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis."I say self serving because, given that the chosen audience of the paper was the funders, it will be hard for many readers to avoid the suspicion that the not so hidden message was "fund us instead."And I say damaging because by mingling the issue of the need for deeper and more effective global warming strategies with an ill-thought out assault on environmentalism, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are likely to create defensiveness, not receptivity; resistance, not movement; back-lash, not progress.

Do They Offer a Better Way?
If the paper offered a clear and constructive path forward, the internal contradictions of the analysis would matter less. They would be offering a better reasoned "what" instead of merely suggesting themselves as "who." Instead, they have offered a hodge podge. They are clear, as others have been, that focusing just on tactics is not enough, that we need to engage people as moral beings and tap into their deepest values. They join the chorus which has pointed out that alliances need to be based on true mutuality, and that environmentalists and progressives need to follow the example of the hard right in doing long range thinking and work. These are all very useful, if not strikingly new concepts. But in their zeal to deconstruct the concept of modern environmentalism, and to proclaim their readiness to offer a better way forward, Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to provide their own answers to some very basic and troublesome questions.They do not seem to have sorted out whether they think we should abandon or embrace the "tell the world how many of its problems are due to global warming frame" or what role technological optimism should play in our efforts and communications strategies. They do not touch the thorny question of how they stand on the long dialogue among social change theorists about whether incremental behavioral change leads to newer and eventually larger changes in thinking, which then enables new behavioral change or whether it is essential to first create new mental maps which enable behavioral change.Shellenberger and Nordhaus defend their failure to come up with a new vision by saying it would be premature and presumptuous:"We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of this report to say more about what we think must now be done because we believe that the most important next steps will emerge from teams, not individuals. Over the coming months we will be meeting with existing and emerging teams of practitioners and funders to develop a common vision and strategy for moving forward."Unfortunately, by failing to offer their own ideas for scrutiny they rendered their report nihilistic -- able to destroy but not create.
An Alternative ViewShellenberger and Nordhaus do make one extremely compelling point:"Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."And buried in their paper's misguided deconstruction of environmentalism are some extremely useful clues they picked up from their interviews about where we might go:1) Environmental advocacy has been dramatically less effective dealing with global warming than with clean air, clean water, wilderness or wildlife. That suggests that part of the problem is not a generic feature of environmentalism, but some specific differences between global warming and these other problems. Such differences are not difficult to identify. The environmental challenges which gave rise to the reforms of the early 1970's, on which the progress of the next 30 years rests, had tangible, local, and immediate consequences for the public. Lake Erie was dying under the boats of fishermen, the Cuyahoga River could be seen to burn by Clevelanders, New Yorkers had to change their shirt in the middle of the day, and children in Los Angeles could not go out and play hundreds of days a year.The problems that environmentalism has failed to get a grasp on, or develop a deep public commitment and attention to, by contrast, are intangible, global and future oriented. Global warming, habitat fragmentation, and the loading of global ecosystems with persistent but toxic and disruptive industrial chemicals are simply harder for an opportunistic, reactive primate species to understand as threats.2) Environmental advocacy has been less potent in the 1990's than in previous decades. So has advocacy for the broader progressive community agenda -- for justice. We have made some progress on the individualistic side of the progressive ledger -- public tolerance for racial diversity has increased, the gay and lesbian community has made dramatic strides.But on questions of justice progressives have been losing. The labor movement, advocates for health care reform, tax justice advocates have all fared as badly as or worse than environmentalists. So whatever ails environmentalism ails these other movements as well.The landscape on which politics has played out has changed radically. Faced with what one commentator called America's first "anti-enlightenment President" sound science alone will not carry the day. We ARE in a culture war, and rational collective self interest IS an inadequate approach.Shellenberger and Nordhaus are thus, it seems to me, correct when they say that environmentalism is falling short because it shares with the rest of the progressive movement a set of increasingly outmoded organizing, advocacy and political approaches. It is strategically disadvantaged when confronted with value based, longer range, and more carefully framed hard-right advocacy. But this is a case for modernizing the left, not for killing environmentalism.3) One element of the left's weakness is its emphasis on technical policy analysis, not values. This weakness goes right back to the technocratic emphasis of the Progressive Movement, and of early conservationists. This approach -- interest group politics -- was codified in the 1920's by Walter Lippman and refined after World War II by writers like John Kenneth Galbraith.Interest group politics assumed that American political parties were loose coalitions, and that the congressional and presidential branches of each party were competing for power. Interest groups could thus recruit support from individual policy makers regardless of their ostensible partisan ties. As American politics, if not the American constitution, has been moved by the right in an ever more parliamentary, party-driven direction, interest group policy advocacy becomes increasingly impotent.
Some SolutionsBut working backward from this last weakness, it is important to remember, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus do not, that policy-based interest group advocacy is only ONE of the major organizing frameworks the modern environmental movement has employed.Much of environmental advocacy has been place based, not policy driven, and involved creating a community vision of the desired state of a landscape, and then creating institutions charged with achieving that set of goals. (The National Park System and the Wilderness Act on the one hand, and such institutions as the California Coastal Commission on the other are prototypes.)Other environmental advocacy has been values driven, with certain "wrong" industrial practices or technologies banned or eliminated. (Most of the current work around genetic engineering is a good example of this, as was the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980's.) And some of the most successful environmental work has aimed to create new forms of rights, so that citizens could assume more control over a wide range of decisions impacting them. (The National Environmental Policy Act, citizens suits provisions, the right-to-know movement, California's Prop 65)These other forms of environmental advocacy are full of promise for global warming.A striking example of one strategy to transform the global warming debate using a different, but entirely familiar form of environmental advocacy, would be to apply the well established values frame of the "polluter pays" principle.From this perspective, at its heart, the global warming debate is not complicated. It is simply very difficult because it is about who is going to pay.Kyoto is an attempt to start down the road that everyone knows will have a very large bill, without ever deciding who will pay for the bill. Which is why, in my view, Kyoto has gone nowhere in the U.S. Confronted with a potential liability, as long as I think I won¹t have to pay the bill, I'll hire my lawyer. That's what the US carbon lobby has done. They know carbon is a liability. They don't want to pay the bill.This understanding that global warming is mainly a problem about who is going to pay -- which in turn depends on who we assume owned the sky to begin with -- has been articulated on the left by Peter Barnes and on the right by Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago School of Law -- normally one of environmentalism's major opponents.But if we frame global warming as pollution, and assert that the polluter should pay, then suddenly this otherwise completely abstruse, overly technical problem becomes much easier for the public to understand.We can then get people to recognize that you shouldn¹t be electrifying villages in India by hanging copper wires between them. You should be electrifying them with methane generators and windmills -- and the polluters, the emitters of carbon, ought to be paying for them.We know that if we lay this necessity on the table, the other side will respond with their own values frame -- one focused on accommodation, not prevention. Here S&N seem to miss the point completely. They again fall back on their lament that the problem is the definition of the environment:"What do we worry about when we worry about global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn't our focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster preparedness? Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced agricultural production? If so, shouldn't our focus be on increasing food production? Is it the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario suggests, world war?"Most environmental leaders would scoff at such framings of the problem and retort, 'Disaster preparedness is not an environmental problem.'"In fact, in refusing to accept accommodation as a proper response, environmentalists have been doing exactly what S&N advocate -- organizing around values. In rejecting accommodation, environmentalists are choosing prevention over compensation, prudence over risk. Environmentalists have repeatedly pointed out that the right's choice of "accommodation" instead of "prevention" as a response to atmospheric greenhouse gas overload is futile -- not because it is not environmental, but because it won't work. We simply won't build a sea wall around Florida, much less around the Gangetic Delta in Bangla Desh -- and a sea wall won't stop a hurricane, or save coral reefs.There is a deep values conflict between the modern hard right on the one hand, and traditional conservatives and environmentalism on the other. It has to do with the conflict between prudence/prevention vs. risk/retaliation. Environmentalists have been pretty consistent in taking the side of traditionalism -- prudence, the precautionary principle, prevention -- against the hard libertarian right. We need to do this more explicitly around global warming.But again, environmental discourse gives us tools we can use effectively to move the public conversation on global warming -- even though they are not the tools of interest-group lobbying.Following this one line of possible alternative reasoning, how do we frame global warming as pollution? More particularly, how do we frame burning fossil fuel as pollution, because that is how the ordinary person will encounter this issue? Here's where it's not enough to think of global warming as a policy, or even a political problem. It's a conceptual problem. And it's a conceptual problem that environmentalism dealt with before, when it encountered the early view that "the smell of pollution is the smell of money."As long as we view developing oil, coal and gas as development, as a form of economic advancement, it will be very hard, simultaneously, to say that we should charge people lots of money for doing so -- it feels like a punishment for success.That's yet another reason why conventional interest group advocacy won't work on this issue -- it's more than the new power of the right. Neither moderate Republicans nor Democrats have been able to shake themselves loose of the regional power of the carbon lobby. No one, environmentalists or some broader group that S&N might imagine, will be able to solve the problem of global warming by persuading members of the House and Senate that there are good alternatives, and that if we do the right things we can get rid of oil and coal and still have a good economy with lots and lots of stuff to consume. That case has been made aptly and effectively, in DC (and elsewhere).What the environmental community must grapple with is, "How do you deal with the reality that not everyone in Washington thinks a world without oil and coal is a good thing?" America's leaders think that, overall, producing fossil fuels is a form of progress. And they have ample incentives to keep on thinking that way. That's why, in my view there is no elite solution. You can't bring the world's leaders together to solve this problem. The world's leaders are the problem.We need to start talking about our current pattern of consuming ever more carbon as a public health problem not an economic solution. A hundred years ago open sewers were common. Today, if we were to see an overflowing open sewer, and someone said make it twice as wide to handle all the new sewage, we would not think that was a good thing (and a mayor who proposed that would be in trouble).We won't make progress as long as we conceptualize fossil fuel consumption as a good thing (along the recent lines laid out by the World Bank) instead of presenting fossil fuel consumption as our century's open sewer. But once we start thinking about fossil fuel consumption in this way, we need to recognize that the political problem gets bigger before it get smaller. We have to deal with the reality that there are win-win solutions for the economy as a whole, but not for Exxon -- (or the Saudis.) We should acknowledge that it's not a win-win for Exxon. (There can be win-wins for General Motors.) The conversation we are having should be about an entirely different energy future, one which will mean a dramatic reconfiguration of the world's wealth. Now how will we get that done?Fully exploiting the potential of the pollution frame is, again, only one potential course for reframing the issue of global warming.Another is to take advantage of place-based environmentalism. One of the major global warming issues is that there are a huge number of coal fired power plants being proposed in the US -- about 112 gigawatts. If approved and built, these will have operating lifetimes in excess of 60 years. Their carbon dioxide emissions alone will drastically impair the US's ability to cut its emissions. They will also preempt the market for wind and solar. So if they are built, we are cooked.But they must be built somewhere. Wherever they are built there are place based advocacy tools to resist, which have been used quite successfully, say, in Colorado, as part of an integrated campaign to encourage wind and solar. So here is another example of reshaping an existing advocacy approach from the traditions of the environmental movement to make effective forward progress on global warming.Again, I would say we did something much like that in the late 60's or 70's with pollution, in the 80's with nuclear power, and have been having surprising success doing it in the last decade with genetically modified foods.Global warming is a more abstract, distant problem; the economic transformation required is bigger; it needs deeper, more robust, more sustained collaborations; it needs to be harnessed to a broader vision of a new economic order. There is more than enough hard work to go around. We ought not to get distracted by conversations about "the death of environmentalism"; we should avoid allowing ourselves to be divided by glib generalizations about generational divides; we should above all be creative, not destructive.

Confusion With the Apollo Alliance
Because I am one of the co-chairs of the Apollo Alliance, and because S&N referred so heavily to the Alliance, I went to the trouble of checking with the other leaders of Apollo to see what their involvement in this piece had been. Their response makes it very clear that Shellenberger and Nordhaus were speaking only for themselves, and that the Apollo Alliance as a whole had not even seen this document before it was distributed:Another unfortunate aspect of the paper was that it left the impression that the Apollo Alliance sanctioned the substance, criticism or tone of the analysis. In fact, Alliance partners such as my fellow Alliance co-chair Leo Gerard (Steelworkers), as well as key partners Robert Borosage (Institute of America's Future), Dan Carol (CTSG), Joel Rogers (Center on Wisconsin Strategy), as well as Alliance Executive Director Bracken Hendricks did not see a copy of the paper until it was released for EGA, nor were they aware of its existence before its release.Of particular concern to Alliance partners is the suggestion in the paper, real or implied, that the Apollo Alliance's model green jobs investment plan released last year, was, in any way, a complete "solution" to the climate change challenge we face. The Apollo vision is animated by the strength of environmental values and the vitality of a popular movement that is one of the great hopes for re-tooling the nation's policies to create clean energy jobs, a sustainable economy, and a safer world.Most disturbingly, to me and the Apollo team, was that the paper was not in the spirit of our project, which has been seeking for the last two years to evangelize and create innovative new alliances and partnerships for tomorrow -- not practice the "push-off" politics of the past.These at-times painstaking efforts have sought to balance the passions of many, many stakeholders; and so it was disappointing to me and the Apollo team to see the passions of a few, however well meant, to raise their voices over others. It is not how we operate, and it's surely not how we will succeed together.Sincerely,Carl PopeExecutive DirectorSierra Club
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