by Naomi Klein
The big, corporate-affiliated green groups don’t deny the reality of climate change, of course—many work hard to raise the alarm. And yet several of these groups have consistently, and aggressively, pushed responses to climate change that are the least burdensome, and often directly beneficial, to the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet—even when the policies come at the direct expense of communities fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rather than advancing policies that treat greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants demanding clear, enforceable regulations that would restrict emissions and create the conditions for a full transition to renewables, these groups have pushed convoluted market-based schemes that have treated greenhouse gases as late-capitalist abstractions to be traded, bundled, speculated upon, and moved around the globe like currency or subprime debt.
And many of these same groups have championed one of the main fossil fuels—natural gas—as a supposed solution to climate change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it releases, particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us into catastrophic levels of warming (as explained in chapter four). In some cases, large foundations have collaborated to explicitly direct the U.S. green movement toward these policies. Most infamously within the movement, a 2007 road map titled “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”—which was sponsored by six large foundations—advocated carbon trading as a response to climate change and supported both natural gas and expanded nuclear power. And as these policies were being turned into political campaigns, the message sent to green groups was essentially “step in line, or else you’re not going to get your share of the money,” recalls Jigar Shah, a renowned solar entrepreneur, former Greenpeace USA board member, and one-time director of the industry-focused Carbon War Room.21
The “market-based” climate solutions favored by so many large foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole. For one, they succeeded in taking what began as a straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through a jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue came to seem too complex and arcane for nonexperts to understand, seriously undercutting the potential to build a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters. As Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle has observed, “The movement to technical and market-based analyses as the core of reform environmentalism gutted whatever progressive vision” the movement had previously held. “Rather than engaging the broader public, reform environmentalism focuses debate among experts in the scientific, legal, and economic communities. It may provide technical solutions to specific problems but it neglects the larger social dynamics that underlie environmental degradation.”22
These policies have also fed the false perception that a full transition to renewable energy is technically impossible—since if it were possible, why would all these well-meaning green groups be spending so much of their time pushing trading schemes and singing the praises of natural gas, even when extracted through the ecologically destructive method of fracking?
Often these compromises are rationalized according to the theory of “low-hanging fruit.” This strategy holds, in essence, that it’s hard and expensive to try to convince politicians to regulate and discipline the most powerful corporations in the world. So rather than pick that very tough fight, it’s wiser and more effective to begin with something easier. Asking consumers to buy a more expensive, less toxic laundry detergent, for instance. Making cars more fuel-efficient. Switching to a supposedly cleaner fossil fuel. Paying an Indigenous tribe to stop logging a forest in Papua New Guinea to offset the emissions of a coal plant that gets to stay open in Ohio.
With emissions up by about 57 percent since the U.N. climate convention was signed in 1992, the failure of this polite strategy is beyond debate. And yet still, at the upper echelons of the climate movement, our soaring emissions are never blamed on anything as concrete as the fossil fuel corporations that work furiously to block all serious attempts to regulate emissions, and certainly not on the economic model that demands that these companies put profit before the health of the natural systems upon which all life depends. Rather the villains are always vague and unthreatening—a lack of “political will,” a deficit of “ambition”—while fossil fuel executives are welcomed at U.N. climate summits as key “partners” in the quest for “climate solutions.”23
This upside-down world reached new levels of absurdity in November 2013 at the annual U.N. climate summit held in Warsaw, Poland. The gathering was sponsored by a panoply of fossil fuel companies, including a major miner of lignite coal, while the Polish government hosted a parallel “Coal & Climate Summit,” which held up the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels as part of the battle against global warming. The official U.N. climate negotiation process gave its tacit endorsement of the coal event when its highest official—Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—agreed to deliver a keynote address to the gathering, defying calls from activists to boycott. “The summit’s focus on continued reliance on coal is directly counter to the goal of these climate negotiations,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “which is to dramatically reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”24
A great many progressives have opted out of the climate change debate in part because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars, had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake. To understand why, it’s necessary to return, once again, to the epic case of bad historical timing that has plagued this crisis since the late eighties.
The Golden Age of Environmental Law
I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today’s standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals. Galvanized by the 1962 publication of Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (the Deepwater Horizon disaster of its day), they launched a new kind of North American environmentalism, one far more confrontational than the gentlemen’s conservationism of the past.
In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson’s warnings. The group’s unofficial slogan was, “Sue the bastards,” and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle.25
This was a time when intervening directly in the market to prevent harm was still regarded as a sensible policy option. Confronted with unassailable evidence of a grave collective problem, politicians across the political spectrum still asked themselves: “What can we do to stop it?” (Not: “How can we develop complex financial mechanisms to help the market fix it for us?”)
What followed was a wave of environmental victories unimaginable by today’s antigovernment standards. In the United States, the legislative legacy is particularly striking: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the Water Quality Act (1965), the Air Quality Act (1967), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the revised Clean Air Act (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976). In all, twenty-three federal environmental acts became law over the course of the 1970s alone, culminating in the Superfund Act in 1980, which required industry, through a small levy, to pay the cost of cleaning up areas that had become toxic.
These vic
tories spilled over into Canada, which was also experiencing a flurry of environmental activism. The federal government passed its own Water Act (1970) and Clean Air Act (1971), and gave teeth to the nineteenth-century Fisheries Act a few years later, turning it into a powerful force for combating marine pollution and protecting habitats. Meanwhile, the European Community declared environmental protection a top priority as early as 1972, laying the groundwork for its leadership in environmental law in the decades to follow. And in the wake of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm that same year, the 1970s became a foundational decade for international environmental law, producing such landmarks as the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (1973), and the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979).
Although robust environmental law would not begin to take hold in much of the developing world for another decade or so, direct environmental defense also intensified in the 1970s among peasant, fishing, and Indigenous communities across the Global South —the origins of what economist Joan Martínez Alier and others have described as the “environmentalism of the poor.” This stretched from creative, women-led campaigns against deforestation in India and Kenya, to widespread resistance to nuclear power plants, dams, and other forms of industrial development in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.26
Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation: ban or severely limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the polluter to pay for the cleanup. As journalist Mark Dowie outlines in his history of the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground, the real-world results of this approach were concrete and measurable. “Tens of millions of acres have been added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now required for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living again. . . . Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere; DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in either cows’ milk or mothers’ milk.” And Dowie stressed: “What all these facts have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or production of the substances in question.”III27
These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then suing corporations for violating them, as well as challenging governments for failing to enforce them. In rapid fashion, what had been a rabble of hippies became a movement of lawyers, lobbyists, and U.N. summit hoppers. As a result, many of these newly professional environmentalists came to pride themselves on being the ultimate insiders, able to wheel and deal across the political spectrum. And so long as the victories kept coming, their insider strategy seemed to be working.
Then came the 1980s. “A tree is a tree,” Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a pitched battle over logging rights. “How many more do you need to look at?” With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, and the ascendency of many think-tank ideologues to powerful positions in his administration, the goalposts were yanked to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.” Using messaging that would have fit right in at a Heartland conference three decades later, James Watt, Reagan’s much despised interior secretary, accused greens of using environmental fears “as a tool to achieve a greater objective,” which he claimed was “centralized planning and control of the society.” Watt also warned darkly about where that could lead: “Look what happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the forces that this thing can evolve into.”28
For the Big Green groups, all this came as a rude surprise. Suddenly they were on the outside looking in, being red-baited by the kinds of people with whom they used to have drinks. Worse, the movement’s core beliefs about the need to respond to environmental threats by firmly regulating corporations were being casually cast into the dustbin of history. What was an insider environmentalist to do?
Extreme 1980s Makeover
There were options, as there always are. The greens could have joined coalitions of unions, civil rights groups, and pensioners who were also facing attacks on hard-won gains, forming a united front against the public sector cutbacks and deregulation that was hurting them all. And they could have kept aggressively using the courts to sue the bastards. There was, throughout the 1980s, mounting public concern even among Republicans about Reagan’s environmental rollbacks (which is how Planet Earth ended up on the cover of Time in early 1989).IV29
And some did take up that fight. As Reagan launched a series of attacks on environmental regulations, there was resistance, especially at the local level, where African American communities in particular were facing an aggressive new wave of toxic dumping. These urgent, health-based struggles eventually coalesced into the environmental justice movement, which held the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991, a historic gathering that adopted a set of principles that remains a movement touchstone to this day.30 At the national and international levels, groups like Greenpeace continued to engage in direct action throughout the 1980s, though much of their energy was understandably focused on the perils of both nuclear energy and weapons.
But many green groups chose a very different strategy. In the 1980s, extreme free market ideology became the discourse of power, the language that elites were speaking to one another, even if large parts of the general public remained un-persuaded. That meant that for the mainstream green movement, confronting the antigovernment logic of market triumphalism head-on would have meant exiling themselves to the margins. And many of the big-budget green groups—having grown comfortable with their access to power and generous support from large, elite foundations—were unwilling to do that. Gus Speth, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and served as a top environmental advisor to Jimmy Carter during his presidency, described the problem like this: “We didn’t adjust with Reagan. We kept working within a system but we should have tried to change the system and root causes.”31 (After years in high-level jobs inside the U.N. system and as a dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Speth has today thrown his lot in with the radicals, getting arrested to protest the Keystone XL pipeline and co-founding an organization questioning the logic of economic growth.)
Part of what increased the pressure for ideological conformity in the 1980s was the arrival of several new groups on the environmental scene, competing for limited philanthropic dollars. These groups pitched themselves as modern environmentalists for the Reagan era: pro-business, nonconfrontational, and ready to help polish even the most tarnished corporate logos. “Our approach is one of collaboration, rather than confrontation. We are creative, entrepreneurial, and partnership-driven. We don’t litigate,” explains the Conservation Fund, founded in 1985. Two years later came Conservation International, which claims to have “single-handedly redefined conservation” thanks largely to a philosophy of working “with companies large and small to make conservation part of their business model.”32
This open-for-business approach was so adept at attracting big donors and elite access that many older, more established green groups raced to get with the agreeable program, taking an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude to brazen extremes.
It was in this period that the Nature Conservancy started loosening its definition of “preservation” so that conservation lands would eventually accommodate such dissonant activities as mansion building and oil drilling (laying the foundation for the group to get in on the drilling action itself). “I used to say that the only things not allowed on Nature Conservancy reserves were mining and slavery, and I wasn’t sure about the latter,” said Kierán Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Now I may have to withdraw the former as well.”33
Indeed the pro-corporate conversion of large parts of the green movement in the 1980s led to deep schisms inside the environmental movement. Some activists grew so disillusioned with the willingness of the big groups to partner with polluters that they broke away from the mainstream movement completely. Some formed more militant, confrontation-oriented groups like Earth First!, whose members attempted to stop loggers with sabotage and direct action.
The debates, for the most part, took place behind the scenes but on April 23, 1990, they spilled into the headlines. It was the day after Earth Day—at that time an annual ritual of mass corporate greenwashing—and around one thousand demonstrators stormed the New York and the Pacific Stock Exchanges to draw attention to the “institutions responsible for much of the ecological devastation which is destroying the planet.” Members of grassroots groups like the Love Canal Homeowners Association, the Bhopal Action Resource Group, and the National Toxics Campaign handed out pamphlets that read in part, “Who is destroying the earth—are we all equally to blame? No! We say go to the source. We say take it to Wall Street!” The pamphlets went on: “The polluters would have us believe that we are all just common travelers on Spaceship Earth, when in fact a few of them are at the controls, and the rest of us are choking on their exhaust.”34
