The Death of Environmentalism
Global warming politics in a post-environmental world
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.
Foreword
By Peter Teague, Environment Program Director, Nathan Cummings FoundationAs 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.
Acknowledgements
This 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 assumptionsIntroduction
To not think of dying is to not think of living.-- Jann Arden
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.
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 Interest
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
-- Norman Cousins
Those 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.1
Even 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 Think
If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
-- Karl Popper
One 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 Warming
Calculative 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 Address
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." 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.
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 Efficiency
Great doubt: great awakening.
Little doubt: little awakening.
No doubt: no awakening.
-- Zen koan
By 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."6
Some 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 Losing
Failure is an opportunity.
-- Tao Ti Ching
In 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 Matter
With 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 Lincoln
Ross 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 Issues
To 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 Center
The 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 Offensive
Far 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, 1899
Industry 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 Crossing
Our 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 Corporation
While 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."7
Pew'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.
Footnotes
1 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 Authors
Michael 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.