Climate Activism Fail from the Inside

Ed. Note: With the multi-decade climate movement in crisis, the blame game is on. Today’s post follows a similar one earlier this week, Climate Messaging: The Alarmists are Alarmed.

Nathan Truitt, executive vice president of climate funding at the American Forest Foundation (a ‘carbon management’ entity), explained his “theory of what’s wrong with the climate action community and how to fix it.” He began:

First off, why do I think something is wrong? Well, we are facing an existential threat to human civilization, but the community that works to promote climate action is riven with internal disagreements, easily spending more time arguing with itself than trying to convince others.

Really? An existential crisis? Will he read the new DOE report on climate science and economics? Truitt continues in fantasy land:

This shouldn’t be the case. The climate action community should be one that everyone is psyched to join, because it’s full of amazing, dedicated people working on cool things. For example:

– There are people designing frameworks and systems to push companies to decarbonize. Which is awesome.
– There are people constructing an entire industry from scratch in order to suck excess CO2 out of the air and put in back underground. Which is awesome.
– There are people working on the next generation of renewable energy and all the associated technology. Which is awesome.
– There are people using nature’s engineered solution – photosynthesis – to capture unprecedented amounts of CO2 in the biosphere. Which is awesome.
– There are people designing public policies to accelerate our transition away from burning fossil fuels. Which is awesome.

And this is just scratching the surface. Heck, there are people cloning wooly mammoths to help restore the Arctic’s carbon sequestration capacity!

Who wouldn’t want to be part of such a community, where every day you are exposed to innovative ideas, and where you can spend your time solving difficult problems with an immense impact?

I can think of a lot of people: the silent majority of climate/energy realists who have shifted the debate from alarmism to understanding and optimism.

Well unfortunately the climate action community doesn’t just come up with awesome ideas. It is obsessed with an additional question: “Of all the awesome things we are doing, what is the AWESOMEST? Better yet, let’s create a hierarchical list of awesomeness.”

Once we’ve asked this question, what could be a unified and inviting group becomes one roiled with constant disagreement, as practitioners constantly punch “up” or “down” in defense of their corner of the movement. And if you are not judged to be working on one of the AWESOMER ideas, you are likely to be ignored or treated with disdain.

This is not the kind of group people want to join. And as a result, the climate action community continues to be way smaller and less influential than it could be (and needs to be).

The fix is easy: let’s stop asking which idea amongst the community is the “best.” They’re all good. They’re all needed. The question of which one is the best is one for historians 200 years from now (if we make it that far). We’ll be dead and won’t care.

If we are serious about climate action, we have to be serious about ALL climate action, not just the piece we work on. We have to be supportive and encouraging of our colleagues throughout the movement, even if their theory of change is different from ours. If we make this community an inviting and exciting place, it will grow and we will succeed!

I commented:

It’s a wasteful, futile crusade. How many more years of accumulating failure will it take to realize that climate and energy reality is different that what the Deep Ecologists dream about?

Another discouraged activist commented:

The Carbon community is its own worse enemy:
1. Always overly critical (a lot of people “have a problem for every solutuon”)

2. Too ideologically/virtue driven (you cannot start by saying “offsetting is bad” or “corporations are evil because they emit Co2” – particularly because they emit to produce the goods and services WE buy)

3. Always reinventing the wheel: there are thousands of examples of similar instruments, contracts that are PERFECTLY UNDERSTOOD by markets. Yet they insist on “new” (often worse thought out) approaches. Normally because the world of carbon is full of actors with very little experience in the “real world of finance”

Final Comment

Read between the above lines. So-called ‘carbon management’ is receiving withering criticism from climate activists who see carbon credits as untrustworthy and a license for ‘polluting’. Let’s-all-be-friends in our rent-seeking, Truitt is saying. Keep me in business, in other words. This is hardly convincing….

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