On the Benefits of Changing One's Mind in Public
I've been thinking a lot lately about how zero-sum people tend to get about various messages in the climate space, how much people get caught up in cosplaying political strategist instead of just following their own moral compass. And I've been reflecting on times when I've been that way too, and when it was wrong. Or if not wrong, at least not very helpful.
I started thinking about this initially in the context of a story I'm working on about the massive LNG build-out in Baja, Mexico—driven by the LNG boom in the U.S., and permitted by the U.S. government because it's U.S. gas (from the Permian, in Texas) that's being piped to Mexico for export. One of the largest projects (Saguaro) is being developed on the coast of the Gulf of California, a world-renowned breeding ground for whales that's often referred to as "the whale nursery." So, sure, let's throw some massive LNG tankers in there, what could go wrong? The group Conexiones Climáticas has been protesting the project by focusing on the whales. One campaigner told me they were inspired in part by the success that anti-offshore-wind groups were having by leaning on the idea that "wind kills whales" (so we're clear, it doesn't—but the number-one killer of whales is boat strikes, so...). Initially there was something sort of delightful about that, taking a bad faith argument and using it for a good faith one. Then I asked longtime climate disinfo expert Phil Newell about it and he reminded me that (duh, of course) whales had been a pretty big part of environmental campaigning for a long time.
Which got me thinking about the moment in climate campaigning maybe a decade ago when people decided it was wrongheaded to focus on charismatic megafauna—whales, polar bears—when so many humans were being directly harmed by fossil fuel projects, that it was symptomatic of broader elitism within the climate movement to focus on one and not the other, to make climate about nature and leave environmental justice to worry about people. An accurate critique, but one that somehow got turned into "stop talking about whales," opening up a vacuum for fossil fuel defenders like Marc Morano to somehow position themselves as whale protectors. It's a good example of what happens when we take what I call the magpie approach to messaging, flitting around from one shiny object to the next and discarding everything that came before. When I asked various climate folks what it would take for the climate movement to stick with messages that worked and keep adding onto them rather than trying to get everyone to coalesce around only one or the other message at a time, the answer was quick and uniform: consistent funding.
The problem with treating everything like a campaign is that campaigns are short-lived and this problem is not. Those opposing climate action seem to get that intrinsically. The same people have been pushing the same arguments against action for decades; adding new flourishes here and there, sure, but never getting rid of the greatest hits: climate action is Marxist, the cure (energy transition) is worse than the illness (runaway climate change), technology will fix it all anyway, economic growth is the solution to everything.
Another example: the whole individual vs. systemic debate. I was wrong, wrong, wrong on this, oooh so wrong, but so were a lot of people; many of them continue to be. For a long time, I really bought into the idea that the only ones accountable for climate change were oil companies and politicians, the people with the power to give or take away choices from the rest of us. And there's some truth to that, they do have an awful lot of responsibility. But it's also true that if the 10% of the world that consumes the most--and if you're reading this from a Global North country, chances are high that's you—reduces their consumption, it has a meaningful impact on climate emissions and sends a signal to both governments and companies that we don't want what they're selling. Is that enough for them to stop shoving fossil fuels down our throats? No, they like to find new ways to do that when demand decreases. But these things are not mutually exclusive and every little bit helps, not just for emissions reductions but also for things like building credibility and political will. Shout out to Kristian Steensen Nielsen, Kimberly Nicholas and Ketan Joshi, whose work over the years prompted me to re-think this.
I spent most of the past couple months channeling my anxiety over the U.S. election not into anything I have a deadline for, but instead into a big sprawling spreadsheet of all 109 organizations involved in Project 2025 and what their fucking deal is. By which I mean, who's funding them, who works for them, what networks they're part of, where there are overlaps between them and so forth. And it got me thinking about all of this again. Almost 20 percent of the organizations on Project 2025's advisory board are anti-abortion orgs, most of them religious. They've been working on one issue for decades and have been massively well funded to do that work, and now they've won. So, what's next? Sure there's the post-Dobbs work of passing state laws criminalizing abortion, but these folks need a new cause to keep the donor dollars rolling in. So far they seem to have found it in the suppression of trans rights, but it's unlikely to stay there, particularly when almost no one with power is putting up a fight for the trans community...as though maybe if we give them a sacrificial lamb they'll stop there, a thought that is both morally repugnant and plain old dumb. Sorry folks, but a very well-funded right-wing apparatus looking for a target doesn't bode well for anything, and especially anything that requires regulating corporations.
Which brings me to some of the reactions I've been seeing from climate folks to the re-election of Trump. It's deeply disturbing to see some people taking all the wrong lessons here, from rolling their eyes at young voters who were too apathetic to vote to discounting the way that everything from trans rights to Gaza to inflation both impacted the vote and intersects with climate. Even at the most basic level of just getting the person most likely to do anything at all on climate elected I'm not sure how people miss the connections here, but still, they persist. To me, I look at the voter turnout in the U.S. and the 7-percent drop in Gen Z voters voting for the Democrats as a clear sign that the continued shift to the right, and insistence on stripping climate away from any other social issues people are grappling with, is a losing strategy.
When AOC and Senator Ed Markey first announced the Green New Deal, and the Sunrise kids started sitting in the offices of Democratic representatives to push them to act on climate, a whole lot of people thought it was unhinged and radical, and it got loads of scary right wing press...but it worked. It normalized the idea of connecting climate to racial justice and labor rights, and broke down a lot of the class and race barriers that had kept the climate movement too small to win for too long. Those kids knocked doors and made calls and delivered the House to the Dems, who then promptly disappointed them by doing nothing on climate; they needed more, the Senate, the White House, all of it. So those kids rallied their peers and delivered the White House to Biden by the skin of his teeth, too, and the Senate and the House. Even after having their lives upended by Covid, they did that shit and said okay, how about now? Now can you protect our futures?
Then they felt let down by the administration. They told us two years ago they'd have a hard time voting for Biden again. They told us again amidst what's happening in Gaza that they weren't sure about endorsing him. They were told to shut up and get in line. Surely, the winningst of all strategies! People who registered their dissatisfaction with how the Inflation Reduction Act was whittled down, how fossil fuel handouts kept getting added to it, were told the same thing, that this is how politics works and they needed to get in line, that we don't have time to address racial and gender and class inequality, that we have to get the energy transition done first and then we can get to everything else. As if these are all separate things and not layered issues in most people's lives. When Kamala Harris backed fracking, a whole lotta people convinced themselves that she needed to say that to win Pennsylvania. Well, she lost Pennsylvania anyway and now she and the rest of the centrist Dems have once again proven that they don't stand for anything at all.
In chasing the support of this imaginary "moveable middle" we all keep hearing about (which by the way is also an obsession of the fossil fuel industry's), the climate movement, much like the Democratic Party, seems to have lost sight of what it actually wants, what kind of world it wants to live in and leave behind. Perhaps it has lost its soul. It has me hoping that all these strategists, self-appointed and otherwise, might consider the possibility that they have miscalculated. That even a "never Trump" Republican is probably not going to vote Democrat and shouldn't be pandered to. That the Cheneys are terrible campaign mates for a Dem. That a real left in the U.S. would be a good thing and maybe we should stop being scared that people "perceive" a leftward turn and just take one already. That people who have never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from are never going to know how to communicate well with those who have (again, for the folks in the back, build a bigger more representative movement!). That progressives are actually great organizers who will get out the vote if they don't feel like they're being completely ignored. That working on voting rights and, oh I don't know packing the court and getting rid of the electoral college are definitely tied to climate action. That people do actually need to see and hear all of their lives acknowledged if you want them to stick with you; it's tough to ask people to show up to support a solar project if they're worried about paying rent next week or that their marriage might get dissolved by the Supreme Court next year or their trans kid is being harassed at school.
I see a lot of fear in the wake of this election and it scares me. I don't mean the very justified fear that people feel about their basic rights being stripped, about being targeted by their government or harassed by emboldened racists, I am not trying to police that reaction, it makes perfect sense. I mean the weak sort, the kind that keeps people doubling down on the status quo, shrinking away from speaking up for themselves and others. Those are not the sorts of leaders we need. If you don't have a plan for fighting Trump in America other than trying somehow to make solar financially appealing, what the heck is your plan for dealing with the other global petrostates?
If you've read any of the research on social change or the history of social movements (highly recommend Dana Fisher's Saving Ourselves if you haven't), you'll know that what's coming is probably going to be hard and pretty ugly. Protest tactics are likely to get more disruptive and violent, and state- and corporate-backed suppression will respond in kind; eventually that will either get "average" people mad enough to get out in the streets too or destabilize the economy enough to make governments and corporations behave differently, or both. In the face of all that, we need people with moral clarity, people who can envision a just world and chart a path to building it leading the climate movement.
People who think we need to suck up to fascists need not apply.
Latest Climate Must-Reads
- "‘Money in Exchange for Silence’: Behind Neom’s Green Image, Western Firms Cash in on Saudi Commitment to Oil," by Adam Lowenstein for DeSmog.
- "A Climate Scientist on What Trump's Victory Means for Global Warming," by Bob Kopp for The New Republic
- "The Real Reason Harris and the Democrats Were Always Doomed," by David Wallace Wells for The New York Times
- "‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win," by Jeff Tollefson for Nature
- "TotalEnergies chief warns Trump against cutting climate rules," by Jamie Smyth and Miles McCormick for the FT
- "Exit Right," by Gabriel Winnent for Dissent.
