Thread by @AlexanderMcCoy4

I think it is simultaneously true that:

1) playing whack-a-mole with various pipelines & FF infrastructure projects was never going to meaningfully make a dent in carbon emissions, even if successful

2) these campaigns’ primary virtue was the created lots of climate activists

https://twitter.com/philaroneanu/status/1557047897941856259

It’s important to remember key context that past top-down technocratic climate attempts like Kyoto failed in part because they failed to incorporate the needs & priorities of frontline, Indigenous, & poor Black & brown people, who revolted against deals that screwed them over.

The climate movement has been grappling with a core strategic challenge for decades: support for climate action is wide, but shallow.

Lots of people understand the need for climate action, but for most people they have more immediate individual needs they have to prioritize.

The environmentalist movement has been critiqued for being disproportionately composed of relatively privileged white people, whose concern for “the environment” is parodied as a luxury belief. For decades it was “the environment” vs “people/jobs”, with predictable results.

What the post-Kyoto climate movement has been attempting to do is recenter the discussion around climate change to be less about “save the rainforests” & more about the self-interest of actual people, as many actual people as can be drawn into a coalition.

This is fundamentally what the Green New Deal was about.

It’s a “New Deal” primarily.

It will provide you with jobs & prosperity.
It will result in your kids not getting asthma & cancer from the pollutants fossil fuels release.
It will make our world more livable & just.

The Climate Movement recognized that in order to win, we needed to have a bigger tent than upper-class white aging-hippie environmentalists.

So many campaigns of the past 20 years have been aimed less at putting points on the board for reducing carbon, but more gaining recruits.

The divest campaigns on college campuses fall into this category too.

The theory for how universities divesting their endowments from fossil fuel stocks (vs, say, being activist investors) would result in lower emissions was always very, very dubious.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point of the college students pushing for endowments to divest was, effectively, about organizing a new cadre of young people to see themselves as climate activists, & to give them a target that was close to home, measurable, & plausible for them to affect.

(Plus some of it was about a narrative intervention to morally stigmatize fossil fuel companies, but the theory of change there was also pretty dubious. People still rely on energy for every basic need, & are willing to overlook a lot of second-order evil in order to meet needs.)

So likewise, strategically, the #KeepItInTheGround movement was an attempt to bring into the tent people for whom *climate change* per say wasn’t at the top of their hierarchy of needs, but for whom things like pollution by nearby infrastructure *was*.

I think that objective has been basically successful. The climate movement has in fact grown, and the coalition is broader today than before, & there is more trust by marginalized communities of climate organizations commitment to not screwing them over.
All wins.

At the same time, I don’t think climate orgs have done enough to reckon with the fact that centering the movement on a strategy that is effectively “NIMBYism” has had bad consequences for emissions.

Too often the anti-pipeline NIMBYs are also anti-wind farm/transmission line.

If we are going to have any chance at a livable future - for ANYONE - we must BUILD like we’ve never built before in human history, build more, build faster, build everywhere.

The challenge is immense, daunting if you look at the big picture numbers. We have no time to spare.

The think about oil & gas - indeed it’s CORE advantage - is that it is easy to transport from wherever it is extracted.

A successful campaign to block a piece of fossil fuel infrastructure does little, because it will just relocate to somewhere else, with less power to oppose.

So these campaigns - often framed in the name of “environmental justice” - simply kick the can further and further down the privilege ladder, to more marginalized & less-organized communities, or through globalization into other countries where people have less rights & freedoms.

But even if that weren’t the case, supply-side reduction campaigns seem to me to be fatally flawed in that, even if they won beyond their wildest dreams, what you’d in effect be doing is denying ordinary people the energy that all of modernity depends upon.

You’d be causing rolling blackouts, fuel shortages, etc.

This has real consequences for vulnerable people.

You’d be stealing air conditioning from people during a unprecedented heat wave, you’d be preventing working class people from getting to work, there’d be food shortages.

I’ve found it challenging to address these contradictions because I run into a sort of New Age woowoo magical thinking where people basically deny the reality of our energy dependence, or unrealistically assert working folks should revert to a lifestyle they see as more virtuous.

It’s also caused an unneeded & unhelpful wedge between the Climate Movement and Organized Labor who ought to be natural allies in this project, and who more accountably represent the interests of the working class.

That’s why I think the IRA’s overwhelming prioritization of massively increasing Renewable Energy SUPPLY was absolutely the correct approach, even at the cost of declining to do much to rein in fossils.

We can only rein in fossils to the extent that renewables can replace them.

A massive build-up of Renewables is the base building block for EVERYTHING else we need to achieve.

It’s the foundation on which every single other objective depends, including fighting for environmental justice.

This said, the bill should have been bigger. It should have had other parts of the strategy included too.

Every gallon of oil we burn makes the problem worse, increases the difficulty of what we must do.

But without this bill we would be much, much, much more fucked.

The Climate Movement is stronger now than it has ever been. But it must grow much bigger still for what we need to achieve.

And the Green companies will grow more powerful & wealthier because of this bill. They must be forced to help us destroy fossil fuels, not just coexist.

Let’s try to be as kind to each other as we can, particularly folks who are frustrated that harmful projects in their home community they thought had been stopped are now going to move forward.

Getting to Net-Zero isn’t the same as getting to Justice. But we need both.