Discussion Group Report

"The Death of the Environmentalism: Global warming in a Post-environmental World" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus and an in-depth response "There is Something Different about Global Warming" by Carl Pope are reviewed this month.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus interviewed more that twenty-five of this Country's leading environmental progressive leaders, which was the basis of their article "The Death of Environmentalism" and was presented to the Environmental Grantmakers Association in October 2004.There are three main premises that their article focuses on: 1. Is it time to reexamine everything we think we know about global warming and environmental polices? 2. Has environmentalism become too much of a special interest? 3. What does and doesn't get counted as "environmental" to the movement's small-bore approach to policymaking?

Over the last 15 years environmental organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming, from the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties. Yet there is little to show for it. The public campaigns of America's environmental leaders in articulating a vision of the future commensurate the magnitude of the crisis. Instead they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards--proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political alliances the community needs to deal with problems. By failing to question their most basic assumptions about the problem and the solution, the community's political strategy has become focused around using science to define the problem as "environmental" and crafting technical policy proposals as solutions.

What the environmental movement needs more that anything else right now is to take a collective step back to rethink everything. Shellenberger and Nordhaus believe it will never be able to solve the problem of global warming unless we understand our failures as essentially tactical and make proposals that are essentially technical. Shellenberger and Nordhaus point to the three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making that hasn't changed in forty years: First: define a problem as "environmental," second: craft a technical remedy, and third: sell the technical proposal to legislators. The arrogance here is that environmentalists are asking not what we can do for non-environmental constituencies, but what non-environmental constituencies can do for environmentalists.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim that for the environmental community the answer is easy when it comes to addressing the global warming issue: too much carbon in the atmosphere. They recommend the forming of coalitions. But the problem according to authors is that environmental leaders have persuaded themselves that it's their job to worry about "environmental" problems and that it's the labor movement's job to worry about "labor" problems. If there's overlap, they say, great. But we should never ever forget "who we really are." They concluded by stating that environmentalism should die out and be reformed.

In response to Shellenberger and Nordhaus, Carl Pope, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, who was one of the environmentalists that Shellenberger and Nordhaus interviewed, replied. Pope claims that the premises of Shellenberger and Nordhaus are troublesome and their conclusions are very much flawed. This may distract us from the real work at hand.

The Sierra Club, as early as the Carter Administration, sought an alliance with the United AutoWorkers on domestic content legislation to free the union up to becomes again an advocate for change among the domestic manufacturers.

On the issue of should we junk our environmental institutions, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim, because environmentalists are framing the issue around too narrow of a technical solution, they ask then who will craft the proposals around vision and values? The full record which Shellenberger and Nordhaus negate is to show that in the summer of 2002 the Sierra Club joined the Steelworkers in calling for federal action to relieve steel companies of their legacy pension and health care costs, for which the Sierra Club received a lot of praise.

Pope claims the Shellenberger and Nordhaus failed to provide answers to some very basic and troublesome questions. They do not seem to have sorted out whether they think the environmental movement should abandon or embrace the "tell the world how many of its problems are due to global warming frame" or what role technological optimism should play in our efforts and communications strategies. Shellenberger and Nordhaus have not touched on the thorny question of how they stand on the long dialogue among social change theorists about whether incremental behavioral changes leads to newer and eventually larger changes in thinking, which then enables new behavior changes. Unfortunately, by failing to offer their own ideas for scrutiny they rendered their report nihilistic--able to destroy but not create.

Some of the solutions that environmentalists have to offer are multitude. For example: policy-based interest group advocacy; creating community vision and have value-driven "wrong" industrial practices or technologies banned or eliminated world wide; creating new forms of rights such that citizens could assume more control over a wider range of decisions which have impacts on them, to name a few. The conflict in solving the global warming issues is the conflict between prudence/prevention versus risk/retaliation. Environmentalists have been pretty consistent in taking the side of traditional--prudence, the precautionary principle, prevention--against the hard libertarian right. Environmental disclosure gives us tools we can use effectively to move the public conversation on global warming--even though they are not the tools of interest-group lobbying.