by Naomi Klein
This confrontational rhetoric—a foreshadowing of Occupy Wall Street two decades later, as well as the fossil fuel divestment movement—was an explicit critique of the corporate infiltration of the green movement. Daniel Finkenthal, a spokesperson for the anticorporate protests, declared, “Real environmental groups are disgusted with the corporate buyout of Earth Day,” telling one journalist that sponsors are “spending more money on Earth Day promotion than they are on actual corporate reform and the environment.”35
Climate Policy and the Price of Surrender
Of all the big green groups that underwent pro-business makeovers in the 1980s, none attracted more acrimony or disappointment than the Environmental Defense Fund, the once combative organization that had spent its early years translating Rachel Carson’s ideas into action. In the mid-1980s, a young lawyer named Fred Krupp took the reins of the organization and he was convinced that the group’s “sue the bastards” motto was so out of step with the times that it belonged at a garage sale next to dog-eared copies of The Limits to Growth. Under Krupp’s leadership, which continues to this day, the EDF’s new goal became: “creating markets for the bastards,” as his colleague Eric Pooley would later characterize it.36 And it was this transformation, more than any other, that produced a mainstream climate movement that ultimately found it entirely appropriate to have coal and oil companies sponsor their most important summits, while investing their own wealth with these same players.
The new era was officially inaugurated on November 20, 1986, when Krupp published a cocky op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. In it he announced that a new generation of pro-business environmentalists had arrived and with it “a new strategy in the movement.” Krupp explained that his generation rejected the old-fashioned idea that “either the industrial economy wins or the environment wins, with one side’s gain being the other’s loss. The new environmentalism does not accept ‘either-or’ as inevitable and has shown that in many critical instances it is a fallacy.” Rather than attempting to ban harmful activities, as Krupp’s own organization had helped to do with DDT, the EDF would now form partnerships with polluters—or “coalitions of former enemies”—and persuade them that there are cost savings as well as new markets in going green. In time, Walmart, McDonald’s, FedEx, and AT&T would all enjoy high-profile partnerships with this storied environmental pioneer.37
The group prided itself on putting “results” above ideology, but in truth Krupp’s EDF was highly ideological—it’s just that its ideology was the pro-corporate groupthink of the day, one that holds that private, market-based solutions are inherently superior to simple regulatory ones. A turning point came in 1988 when George H. W. Bush came to power promising action on acid rain. The old way of addressing the problem would have been straightforward: since sulfur dioxide emissions were the primary cause of acid rain, the solution would have been to require their reduction by a fixed amount across the board. Instead, the EDF pushed for the first full-fledged cap-and-trade system. These rules did not tell polluters that they had to cut their sulfur emissions but, instead, set a nationwide cap on sulfur dioxide, beneath which big emitters like coal-fired power plants could do as they pleased—pay other companies to make reductions for them, purchase allowances permitting them to pollute as much as they had before, or make a profit by selling whatever permits they didn’t use.38
The new approach worked and it was popular among foundations and private donors, particularly on Wall Street, where financiers were understandably attracted to the idea of harnessing the profit motive to solve environmental ills. Under Krupp’s leadership, the EDF’s annual budget expanded from $3 million to roughly $120 million. Julian Robertson, founder of the hedge fund Tiger Management, underwrote the EDF’s work to the tune of $40 million, a staggering sum for a single benefactor.V39
The Environmental Defense Fund has always insisted that it does not take donations from the companies with which it forms partnerships—that, writes EDF senior vice president for strategy and communications Eric Pooley, “would undermine our independence and integrity.” But the policy doesn’t bear much scrutiny. For instance, one of the EDF’s flagship partnerships is with Walmart, with whom it collaborates to “make the company more sustainable.” And it’s true that Walmart doesn’t donate to the EDF directly. However, the Walton Family Foundation, which is entirely controlled by members of the family that founded Walmart, gave the EDF $65 million between 2009 and 2013. In 2011, the foundation provided the group with nearly 15 percent of its funding. Meanwhile, Sam Rawlings Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on the EDF’s board of trustees (identified merely as “Boatman, Philanthropist, Entrepreneur” on the organization’s website).40
The EDF claims that it “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.” Which, judging by Walmart’s rather dismal environmental record since this partnership began—from its central role in fueling urban sprawl to its steadily increasing emissions—is not a very high standard at all.41
Nor is the Environmental Defense Fund the only environmental organization to have benefited from the Walton family’s largesse. Their foundation is one of the top green funders, handing out more than $71 million in grants for environmental causes in 2011, with about half of the money going to the EDF, Conservation International, and the Marine Stewardship Council. All have partnerships with Walmart, whether to lower emissions, stamp an eco label on some of the seafood the company sells, or to co-launch a line of “mine to market” jewelry. Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, observes that having large parts of the green movement so dependent on the scions of a company that almost singlehandedly supersized the retail sector and exported the model around the world has had profound political implications. “Walmart’s money is exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems, and elevating certain kinds of approaches—notably those that reinforce, rather than challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society,” she writes.42
And this is the heart of the issue—not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be “win-win.” And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.
This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as “serious” in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line—fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.VI
The effect of this “bounding of the debate,” as the Scottish author and environmentalist Alastair McIntosh describes it, reaches far beyond a few U.S. groups. “In my experience,” writes McIntosh, “most international climate change agency personnel take the view that ‘we just can’t go there’ in terms of the politics of cutting consumerism.” This is usually framed as an optimistic faith in markets, but in fact it “actually conceals pessimism because it keeps us in the displacement activity of barking up the wrong tree. It is an evasion of reality, and wi
th it, the need to fundamentally appraise the human condition in order to seek the roots of hope.”43 Put another way, the refusal of so many environmentalists to consider responses to the climate crisis that would upend the economic status quo forces them to place their hopes in solutions—whether miracle products, or carbon markets, or “bridge fuels”—that are either so weak or so high-risk that entrusting them with our collective safety constitutes what can only be described as magical thinking.
I do not question the desire on the part of these self-styled pragmatists to protect the earth from catastrophic warming. But between the Heartlanders who recognize that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social systems and therefore deny its scientific reality, and those who claim climate change requires only minor tweaks to business-as-usual and therefore allow themselves to believe in its reality, it’s not clear who is more deluded.
Shopping Our Way Out of It
For a few years around the 2006 release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, it seemed as if climate change was finally going to inspire the transformative movement of our era. Public belief in the problem was high, and the issue seemed to be everywhere. Yet on looking back on that period, what is strange is that all the energy seemed to be coming from the very top tier of society. In the first decade of the new millennium, climate talk was a strikingly elite affair, the stuff of Davos panels and gee-whiz TED Talks, of special green issues of Vanity Fair and celebrities arriving at the Academy Awards in hybrid cars. And yet behind the spectacle, there was virtually no discernible movement, at least not of the sort that anyone involved in the civil rights, antiwar, or women’s movements would recognize. There were few mass marches, almost no direct action beyond the occasional media-friendly stunt, and no angry leaders (other than a former vice president of the United States).
In a sense, the period represented a full-circle return to the gentlemen’s clubhouse in which the conservation movement began, with Sierra Club cofounder John Muir persuading President Theodore Roosevelt to save large parts of Yosemite while the two men talked around the bonfire on a camping trip. And though the head of Conservation International did not go camping on the melting glaciers with George W. Bush in order to impress upon him the reality of climate change, there were plenty of postmodern equivalents, including celebrity-studded eco-cruises that allowed Fortune 500 CEOs to get a closer look at endangered coral reefs.
It wasn’t that there was no role for the public. We were called upon periodically to write letters, sign petitions, turn off our lights for an hour, make a giant human hourglass that could be photographed from the sky. And of course we were always asked to send money to the Big Green groups that were supposedly just on the cusp of negotiating a solution to climate change on our behalf. But most of all, regular, noncelebrity people were called upon to exercise their consumer power—not by shopping less but by discovering new and exciting ways to consume more.VII And if guilt set in, well, we could click on the handy carbon calculators on any one of dozens of green sites and purchase an offset, and our sins would instantly be erased.44
In addition to not doing much to actually lower emissions, these various approaches also served to reinforce the very “extrinsic” values that we now know are the greatest psychological barriers to climate action—from the worship of wealth and fame for their own sakes to the idea that change is something that is handed down from above by our betters, rather than something we demand for ourselves. They may even have played a role in weakening public belief in the reality of human-caused climate change. Indeed a growing number of communications specialists now argue that because the “solutions” to climate change proposed by many green groups in this period were so borderline frivolous, many people concluded that the groups must have been exaggerating the scale of the problem. After all, if climate change really was as dire as Al Gore argued it was in An Inconvenient Truth, wouldn’t the environmental movement be asking the public to do more than switch brands of cleaning liquid, occasionally walk to work, and send money? Wouldn’t they be trying to shut down the fossil fuel companies?
“Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: ‘It’s easy to be healthy—smoke one less cigarette a month.’ We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail,” wrote British climate activist and author George Marshall. “The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off.”45
It would be one thing if, while individuals were being asked to voluntarily “green” the minutiae of their lives, the Big Green NGOs had simultaneously gone after the big polluters, demanding that they match our individual small cuts in carbon emissions with large-scale, industry-wide reductions. And some did. But many of the most influential green groups did precisely the opposite. Not only did they help develop complex financial mechanisms to allow these corporations to keep emitting, they also actively campaigned to expand the market for one of the three main fossil fuels.
Fracking and the Burning Bridge
The gas industry itself came up with the pitch that it could be a “bridge” to a clean energy future back in the early 1980s. Then in 1988, with climate change awareness breaking into the mainstream, the American Gas Association began to explicitly frame its product as a response to the “greenhouse effect.”46
In 1992, a coalition of progressive groups—including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action, and Public Citizen—officially embraced the idea, presenting a “Sustainable Energy Blueprint” to the incoming administration of Bill Clinton that included a significant role for natural gas. The NRDC was a particularly strong advocate, going on to call natural gas “the bridge to greater reliance on cleaner and renewable forms of energy.”47
And at the time, it seemed to make a good deal of sense: renewable technology was less mature than it is now, and the gas in question was being extracted through conventional drilling methods. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically on both counts. Renewable technologies have become radically more efficient and affordable, making a full transition to the power they provide both technologically and economically possible within the next few decades. The other key change is that the vast majority of new gas projects in North America rely on hydraulic fracturing—not conventional drilling—and fracking-based exploration and production are on the rise around the world.48
These developments have significantly weakened the climate case for natural gas—especially fracked natural gas. We now know that fracked natural gas may leak enough methane to make its warming impact, especially in the near term, comparable to that of coal. Anthony Ingraffea, who coauthored the breakthrough Cornell study on methane leakage and describes himself as “a longtime oil and gas engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy Department,” wrote in The New York Times, “The gas extracted from shale deposits is not a ‘bridge’ to a renewable energy future—it’s a gangplank to more warming and away from clean energy investments.”49
We also know, from experience in the U.S., that cheap and abundant natural gas doesn’t replace only coal but also potential power from renewables. This has led the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin Anderson to conclude, “If we are serious about avoiding dangerous climate change, the only safe place for shale gas remains in the ground.” Biologist Sandra Steingraber of New Yorkers Against Fracking puts the stark choice like this: we are “standing at an energy crossroads. One signpost points to a future powered by digging fossils from the ground and lighting them on fire. The other points to renewable energy. You cannot go in both directions at once. Subsidizing the infrastructure for one creates disincentives for the other.”50
Even more critically, many experts are convinced that we do not need unconventional fuels like fracked gas to make a full transition to renewables. Mark Z. Jacobson, the Stanford engi
neering professor who coauthored the road map for reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, says that conventional fossil fuels can power the transition and keep the lights on in the meantime. “We don’t need unconventional fuels to produce the infrastructure to convert to entirely clean and renewable wind, water, and solar power for all purposes. We can rely on the existing infrastructure plus the new infrastructure [of renewable generation] to provide the energy for producing the rest of the clean infrastructure that we’ll need,” he said in an interview, adding, “Conventional oil and gas is much more than enough.”51
How have the Big Green groups responded to this new information? Some, like the NRDC, have cooled off from their earlier support, acknowledging the risks and pushing for tougher regulations while still advocating natural gas as a replacement for coal and other dirty fuels. But others have chosen to dig in even deeper. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy, for example, have responded to revelations about the huge risks associated with natural gas by undertaking a series of initiatives that give the distinct impression that fracking is on the cusp of becoming clean and safe. And as usual, much of the funding for this work has strong links to the fossil fuel sector.
The Nature Conservancy, for its part, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from JP Morgan to come up with voluntary rules for fracking. JP Morgan, unsurprisingly, is a leading financier of the industry, with at least a hundred major clients who frack, according to the bank’s top environmental executive, Matthew Arnold. (“We are number one or number two in any given year in the oil and gas industry worldwide,” Arnold told The Guardian in February 2013.) The conservancy also has a high-profile partnership with BP in Wyoming’s Jonah Field, a huge fracking-for-gas operation in an area rich with vulnerable wildlife. The Nature Conservancy’s job has been to identify habitat preservation and conservation projects to “offset the impacts of oil and gas drilling pads and infrastructure.” From a climate change perspective, this is an absurd proposition, since these projects have no hope of offsetting the most damaging impact of all: the release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Which is why the most important preservation work that any environmental group can do is preserving the carbon in the ground, wherever it is. (Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy, which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas).52
