Climate Hawks: To Arms

What advocates can learn from the American Revolution.

What’s the path forward for those who support a robust response to the danger of rising greenhouse emissions? It’s always fun to toss ideas around, and I look forward to reading my fellow participants’ contributions. To be more than an intellectual exercise, though, policy development must issue from a clear understanding of power dynamics. Climate hawks’ fatal weakness has always been their attitude toward power, which has wavered between naiveté, diffidence, and disdain.
Conservatives have successfully demonized cap-and-trade, rendering it politically toxic for at least the next several years. In response, the new vogue in energy circles is to campaign for massive public investment in cleantech R&D. And who could oppose that? It sounds reasonable and bipartisan. Then again, so did cap-and-trade in the 1990s, when centrist environmentalists and Republicans developed it as a market-based alternative to command-and-control regulations. Will public investment meet the same sorry fate?
A resilient movement will conduct guerrilla warfare. Diverse groups and coalitions must defend the EPA, develop innovative clean energy financing mechanisms or smarter market rules, go directly after the nation’s biggest polluters in boardrooms and courtrooms, work to raise gas taxes or roll back fossil fuel subsidies, defend and expand state climate programs like California’s or smart-growth plans like Portland’s, start or fund cleantech businesses, and advocate for feed-in tariffs, a national smart grid, electric vehicles, and new building efficiency standards.
The effects of a distributed, networked insurgency are impossible to predict and difficult to discern even as they unfold. It’s impossible to know in advance where resistance might give way or ground might be gained, so profligacy and opportunism—not parsimony and efficiency—are the watchwords.
There may come a time to muster back together behind a single, dramatic, sweeping plan for change, but not until the coalition has built considerably more bottom-up power. What climate hawks need most now is a nimble, networked pragmatism, focused ruthlessly on wrenching power from the hands of fossil fuel incumbents and deploying it on behalf of a healthier, more democratic energy regime.

It is a war – a just war for Mother Earth!

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