Getting Back on Target: The Climate Movement Needs to Shift to Centering People

By Aiko Schaefer

Climate change, data centers, the war in Iran, and more are all contributing to the energy affordability crisis. As these problems deepen, we cannot help but wonder “what if.” What if we, as a culture and as an economy, had made different and deep investments in renewable clean energy in ways that reduced pollution and brought broad economic prosperity to communities that historically shoulder the greatest burdens of our addiction to fossil fuels? Unfortunately, we did not. And now we’re stuck in an energy, political, and economic system that incentivizes corporate profit-making while perpetuating our current energy crisis.  We must do something radically different.  The answers lie not in technology or tax breaks, but in connecting people to politics, public provisioning, and a transformation in our mindset towards a reverence for the gifts of Mother Nature and collaboration across differences.

In 2015, I was asked by mainstream green groups in the Pacific Northwest to help build a broader, more inclusive climate movement. The stated motivation was to build the political strength needed to win, but at the time, we were also witnessing a public fight in California between environmental groups and environmental justice groups over the creation of a new carbon market. The Pacific Northwest’s mainstream environmental movement, like pretty much everywhere, was largely white, affluent, and politically connected. Yet the voter demographic represented by environmental justice organizations - Black and brown - was growing in numbers and in some ways political strength, especially in states like California. Working across race and class differences was becoming necessary. 

A very short version of a very long story - we created a large table of the most diverse set of organizations and interests Washington state had ever seen.  Then we spent two years developing a broad-based, equitable climate policy and put it on the ballot. We got handily defeated at the polls because of a record-setting $30 million campaign of lies by Big Oil. It did not take long for the political calculations of mainstream environmental groups to pivot toward policy designs more palatable to business interests investing large sums of money in elections and lobbying, and who had a stake in controlling climate policy. This partnership between green groups and businesses was fundamentally at odds with the interests of environmental justice communities hit hardest by climate change and pollution caused by large corporate polluters. Yet the promise of carbon revenue that could be “invested” in disadvantaged communities was the ticket to establish and justify a carbon market. 

Albert Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Our climate crisis is caused by and continues to be driven by corporate interests, excessive profits, and disregard for near- and long-term harm to people, communities, and the planet. 

The modern environmental movement began in the 1960s and 70s by organizing regular people on college campuses and in communities, fueled by science, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and often driven by people who were directly impacted, like Lois Gibbs, a resident of Love Canal. They successfully overcame strident opposition by industry and passed federal landmark policies to protect the public interest, including the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, which established foundational protections for the public interest and helped build a powerful movement for change. 

By the 1990s, however, the mainstream environmental movement was on its heels and began to move away from regulation and from curtailing or punishing detrimental corporate actions. They had largely abandoned deep and broad community organizing. They had shifted, aligning with the Democrats’ political flank toward a neoliberal orientation that emphasized subsidies for corporations. The message was that we cannot be successful in passing policy without business support. 

Environmental groups brought corporate leaders and other wealthy and disassociated people onto their Boards of Directors. The motivation was to raise funds to sustain their organizations, but intentionally or not, this culture and internal power shift also facilitated a pivot toward capitalistic growth that viewed “clean energy economy” as the pathway for addressing climate change. The approach had shifted from corporate accountability and regulation to market incentives to reduce pollution. It worked.  Rich celebrities became big proponents. Billionaires like Musk grew their wealth by selling luxury, high-priced cars to those who could afford them, while he received federal and state taxpayer-funded incentives. 

A flagship incentive approach is the policy “cap and trade”, a market-driven approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Another was the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a centerpiece of President Biden's agenda, heralded as a pinnacle of success by the big green groups, but it further advanced the corporate-interest model. While the IRA did provide funding for lower-income communities on a historic scale, the fundamental strategy was to place faith in corporations' profit motive to solve our climate crisis. The near-complete and total dismantling of that policy by President Trump was a great loss, to be sure, and it is still too soon to do a post-mortem on the IRA. But we must consider how the ease and speed with which the IRA was dismantled showcases how mainstream environmental organizations mistakenly confuse “access”–a feel-good-about yourself notion that your seat at the table is power, with “real power”–a much deeper ability to control the agenda at the table others sit at.

We are witnessing a swift and shocking erosion of climate and environmental policy, and a rudderless and stunned climate movement, with little effective, visible, public opposition to the actions of President Trump. Even the opposition from Democratic governors and legislators is not only muted, but these elected Democrats are also pulling away from their support for climate action and policies they previously supported. Many have accepted the false narrative that strong climate action is at odds with affordability. They have adopted a policy approach that prioritizes corporate interests and, in turn, the interests of the wealthiest few over the needs of regular working people. It is a trickle-down economics approach applied to climate policy that has failed to create the durable public support needed to sustain policies against political wind shifts. It has also failed to generate direct, universal, and targeted economic opportunity. 

A challenge is that from the very beginning, electricity was not typically provided through a publicly owned system like water, roadways, or general infrastructure. For the most part, private interests used electricity as a source of generating and concentrating wealth. In the early days of bringing electricity into homes, the novelty of this new technology advanced the interests of investors and those who could afford it. While electricity is more widely available, investor-owned utilities still provide most of our service, motivated by profits with insufficient regard for those who cannot afford it. 

Utility customers with lower incomes often have to go to extreme lengths to keep their lights on, forgoing other necessities, driving a debt spiral. While we widely accept the necessity of electricity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal, state, and local governments went to extraordinary lengths to keep people connected, especially amid remote learning, work, and critical medical needs. The pandemic forgotten, every day, many thousands of customers are routinely shut off from electricity service. 

Our need for energy is growing exponentially, and current federal policies stand to further drive an overreliance on fossil fuels that has propelled climate change and shortened the lives of frontline communities living nearest to the pollution they create. The addiction also drives our foreign policy toward conflicts and war. It is not sustainable. Tech corporations are exacerbating the energy demand crisis by fast-tracking the domination of AI, a sort of technological revolution synonymous with the industrial revolution.  It is once again driving a prioritization for corporate interests and profit over the public’s, with promises to policymakers of state revenue and jobs, while omitting the massive job losses in other sectors and likely revenue losses.

People are beginning to have enough with technology billionaires and are seeing that corporations and utilities are not good actors. Corporate promises do not deliver on jobs, and the corporate polluters strap ratepayers with costs, while directing excessive profits to a few, mostly white, wealthy men. The political left, however, has been reticent to accept the real experience and feeling of the electorate that the “system is rigged” against them; a sentiment that Trump successfully co-opted to blame the Democrats, while he also joins in the lining of his pockets and tech billionaires cozying up to him. 

So what is the strategy? A comparison of the healthcare organizing that brought us the Affordable Care Act (or ObamaCare) is an important case study of both investing in community organizing led by those directly impacted and acknowledging the immediate threat to people’s health and economic security with a targeted, universalistic solution. It’s connecting people to politics. For more than a decade, ObamaCare’s central policies had the durability to withstand countless attacks by Republicans in Congress, Trump’s first full term in office, and, in many cases, the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court.

We have to stop putting all our faith in privately owned technology to save us, when their motivation is to make billions. Advancing the continued privatization of our energy systems will enrich a few and allow a status quo of power and influence in the political systems to maintain all the control. It is antithetical to the caring and nurturing required when we broadly agree that access to reliable and affordable energy is a fundamental need. What we know from looking at other systems focused on the common good–public education, space exploration, public health–is that when they are adequately funded, and owned by us, the public, we get closer to reliable and broadly shared benefits. Not coincidentally, those three historically honored public goods have also been increasingly co-opted by extremely wealthy private interests for profit while compromising public benefit.  

We also have to stop fearmongering or driving a scarcity mindset. Fear and disconnection foster a public culture for paternalism and authoritarianism to protect and “save us”. We are witnessing over the past decade Trump’s rise to, and ongoing, stronghold of political power and a cult-like control over much of Congress, the media, and the judicial branch. 

We can and must offer a vision for a transformational future. One that can break through the noise and inspire. All around us are sources of energy that Mother Nature gives freely, democratically, and in abundance. Wind, solar, wave, motion, the rhythms of nature are truly limitless. Coupled with equitable and community-based uses of proper technologies, we can break free from our reliance on fossil fuels and foster decentralized, cheaper, locally owned and controlled electricity, building wealth and prosperity for everyone. 

Finally, we have to be able to work across differences, not just some days when it is expedient, but every day, especially when it is inconvenient. It’s the toughest work there is, but it is where we make true and resilient change. It is worth giving up some of your access and power. We must learn about each other's cultures and how they meet and make decisions differently, and get new ideas to solve our pressing problems. The possibility of people coming together across identity and class scares the crap out of corporations and the right wing. It always has. It is why they have historically worked so hard to divide us, and still do today. It does not really matter if you are unsure if this strategy is for you; the reality is that the U.S. has always been, and is becoming more diverse every day. So, even for the sake of relevance and effecting change, the climate movement needs to get with the program and better safeguard and leverage our democracy because our lives depend on it.