Global Warming After Gore
By Teryn Norris
Published: Alternet.org, Nov 10th
Al Gore’s Nobel Prize was a momentous event we should all applaud. Now it is time to move on and get smart about the climate movement’s next steps. First, we should deal with some of our own inconvenient truths: global warming continues to rank extremely low among voter priorities, and Congress is going nowhere fast. The question we should ask ourselves is, how can the climate movement retool its politics for the post-Gore era?
It is high time for global warming activists to leave behind their focus on the “planetary crisis” and the regulatory-centered agenda, and embrace an energetic and inspiring vision that captures people’s minds, hearts and votes.
Despite last year’s “tipping point” in public attitudes toward climate change, Pew polls find that it still ranks dead last among voter concerns. It is of little surprise, then, that the Washington Post ran a front-page article on recently titled “Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats.” Nor is it surprising that the best provisions of today’s congressional energy bill would still allow U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030, effectively making the recommendations of the world’s leading scientists unattainable.
One of the most hopeful signs is young activists, who are already making the breakthroughs necessary to build an expansive climate movement. The Campus Climate Challenge has rapidly grown to include over 500 colleges and achieved hundreds of innovative clean energy policies across the country. Power Shift 2007, the first-ever national youth summit on global warming, drew 6,000 students to Washington, D.C., last weekend and featured guests ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Van Jones. Indeed, the youth movement is quickly becoming the largest and most influential student movement in nearly a half century.
How can young activists best capture the moment? Thomas Friedman offered some ideas in his recent op-ed, “Generation Q.” He said that today’s young adults are “too quiet, too online, for [their] own good, and for the country’s own good.” We’ve got to wake up, he said, and reform our tactics: “Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall.”
But Friedman is mistaken. It is easy to get nostalgic for the ’60s, but the direction of today’s youth movement must be profoundly different from that of the baby-boomer era. Vietnam was about stopping a war. Civil rights were about equalizing freedoms. The energy and climate movement, in contrast, is about creating an entirely new clean energy economy — a fundamentally different undertaking that requires us to transcend the models of the past.
The “old-fashioned” tactics of protest, demand and complaint just aren’t enough. Global warming is one of the most complex challenges the world has ever faced, vastly different from those of the 1960s. It calls upon us to innovate, politically and economically, at an unprecedented scale. Our politics must be retooled, not only to achieve immediate policy changes but to create new and lasting political majorities. And instead of constraining our economy, we need to unleash it, driving our engineers, scientists and manufacturers to hone their skills and knowledge, and put these forces to work toward building the next energy economy.
A powerful climate movement — one capable of capturing the public imagination, defining new political identities and fully unleashing our economy — should put forth an even stronger vision of American greatness than the neoconservatives once offered. It must tap the optimism and can-do spirit embedded in our nation’s history that has driven us to overcome the daunting crises of the past. “A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting and inventing the future,” argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of Break Through. “First we dream — and then we invent.”
An “American Power” program would advance a massive public investment project — $300 billion to $500 billion — to develop and deploy clean energy technology, revitalize the economy, achieve energy independence and create millions of new jobs. Its politics would thus begin from a position of strength — innovation, economic growth and national security — speaking to the aspirations and securities that we all value as our birthright. And it would renew America’s global leadership by dedicating us to responsible energy use and creating drastically cheaper forms of clean technology for the developing world.
The opportunity for such a resounding vision couldn’t be greater. The failure of the Iraq War and the collapse of the Bush presidency have left the American public hungry for an inspiring message that gives us new direction. Redefining American greatness around our inventiveness can unite us behind a common purpose, invigorating us to unleash our forces of innovation.
Today the climate movement faces a choice. As it begins to emerge from the margins of the national debate, it can revitalize itself to become potent and expansive, or it can continue to define itself by an old-fashioned activism. Whether the movement will fully seize the moment is uncertain. But one thing is clear: Young people must begin advancing a new politics if we are to overcome this challenge and achieve a more secure and prosperous future.
Teryn, I think you area dead-on, that the politics of protest will be insufficient – critical to the cause, yet insufficient. We must not only protest what we do not want – no coal, no new fossil fuel infrastructure, no risky nukes – or cry out about what we want to avoid – the climate crisis, a global warming apocalypse, mass species extinction, biblical weather events. These prohibitions and motivating nightmare future scenarios will help guide our solutions to the climate crisis, but they are insufficient to the task on their own.
We need more than just a frightening vision of the world we wish to avoid. Gore has done us a service in painting that picture. We know we don’t want to let climate change run amok and descend into a global warming apocalypse. But we need more than that.
What we need is a compelling vision of where we want to go, the future we wish to inhabit.
We caught a glimpse of that compelling future at Power Shift. Van Jones has a vision of that future. Green for All has a vision. Many of use have a vision. It’s a vision of a sustainable, just, and prosperous future; an America – and indeed a world – unshackled from the chains of fossil fuel dependence, with an economy both prosperous and truly sustainable, re-invigorated by the creation of a booming green economy, and full of new pathways out of poverty and into the middle class, opportunities for all to live the American dream.
It is this vision that will ultimately form the backbone of the broad-based movement that will – that must – form to rise to the climate challenge and make that vision a reality.
Friedman and Gore are both certainly wrong – we need to be more than just loud protesters and we need to do much more than simply encircle bulldozers. We need to be visionaries, innovators, thought leaders, and pioneers.
As Richard Graves wrote in response to Friedman’s op ed, to build a bright new future, we need to use our brains, not just our bodies.
Richard writes (check out the full post if you haven’t read it):
“Friedman wants us to hit the streets, Gore wants us to encircle bulldozers. Sure, done that. Will, do more. But they value us for our passion, our bodies, our commitment. But they don’t value us for our ideas, our minds. That just makes us feel like exploited dates. The diversity of solutions launched by the Campus Climate Challenge, by our efforts to challenge the rest of society to act by building carbon neutral campuses and a clean energy economy, is awe inspiring.
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A word of caution, Big NGOs, talking heads, and others will want us to protest, to act, to support their ideas [Jesse: sound like anything you heard this weekend at Power Shift? From certain members of Congress or national green groups perhaps]. But policies like Cap and Auction or even a Big Federal Investment in Clean Energy RnD, while they have tremendous value, leave the job of innovation, launching the projects, ideas, businesses, and community efforts, to others. They want to light the spark of creative imagination, but they don’t always value those who have already lit it and and are showing it to the world.
Hold your head up high, whether you take an internship or a job where you aren’t valued because you are young, learn as much as you can but remember you can build a brilliant future, with the power of your ideas.”
So what’s your vision of a sustainable, just, and prosperous future? Time to start dreaming and visioning. Our futures depend on it.
This is exactly what we need: to begin visioning. I’ve been advocating for the elimination of “greenhouse gas targets” in our movement. What we really want is a world without more warming, where people can have a predictable climate and a fair shot at prospering. That’s the just world we need to envision. Let’s fight for what we envision, not for what some people are telling us. Who knows whether 80% by 2050 or even climate neutrality by 2030 is enough? Our goal should be make sure that we prevent further warming. We need to figure out how to stop further warming by bringing CO2 levels down. This is not impossible. We need “to unleash our economy,” like you point out very nicely. I love this point:
“It calls upon us to innovate, politically and economically, at an unprecedented scale. Our politics must be retooled, not only to achieve immediate policy changes but to create new and lasting political majorities. And instead of constraining our economy, we need to unleash it, driving our engineers, scientists and manufacturers to hone their skills and knowledge, and put these forces to work toward building the next energy economy.”
Please, please, please! Let’s get everybody in this movement to understand this well. At least our leaders should get this point and start messaging in this way. Thanks so much!
Teryn, I will join many others in thanking you for this post. It won’t be possible to mobilize vast segments of the population with depressing statistics about the future. Instead, we need to create a positive message, something that gives hope and inspiration, not fear and anxiety.
I think that was one of the most positive and beautiful things about Power Shift was that you felt that it was totally possible for us to achieve this transformation. Unlike watching the Inconvient Truth, which left me feeling depressed and helpless, I felt even more empowered after Power Shift than ever before. Lets all make sure that we incorporate this positive, hopeful, encouraging vision into all that we do.