“ACHIEVING DISAGREEMENT”: Culture Wars and Competing Epistemologies of Climate Change Strategies in the “Death of Environmentalism” Debates

Home , Adam Werbach, Breakthrough Institute, Break Through (book), Green Corps, Joe Romm, Michael Shellenberger

Jacqueline Ho

Advisor: M. Dawn King Readers: J. Timmons Roberts David Ciplet

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Environmental Studies

Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2nd, 2014

ABSTRACT

This thesis studies a decade-long debate between the Breakthrough Institute, a small energy and environmental think-tank, and its observers in the American climate movement about the effectiveness of the American climate movement’s strategies. I ask two questions: (1) why a schism between Breakthrough and the movement developed despite their relatively more cooperative relationship in the early years of the debates, and (2) how different worldviews and assumptions have informed how the debate’s participants think about the effectiveness of the climate movement’s strategies. Although Breakthrough’s antagonism towards the climate movement is often interpreted as a reflection of its strategic interest in media and funding opportunities, I argue that this reading is incomplete without a deeper understanding of the processes and consequences of the formation of group identities. By blending social movement theory and social identity theory, I trace how a distinctive Breakthrough identity and discourse emerged from its efforts to contest the dominant frames in the climate movement, and how this identity in turn harmed Breakthrough’s credibility within the movement. I then develop a framework of four questions to understand the substantive differences between the discourses that have shaped the debates, arguing that this bottom-up approach to analysing discourses is both more illuminating and less rigid than the existing typologies of environmental discourses allow for.

2 THANKS

Dawn King, for taking me on as an advisee before realising how busy advising five honors theses would make her, Timmons Roberts, for offering to be a reader before I even asked, Dave Ciplet, for agreeing to be a reader before knowing what that meant, Thank you for being infinitely generous, understanding, interested, and critical. I could not have asked for a better thesis committee.

Jeanne Loewenstein, Jeanne Medeiros, and the Center for Environmental Studies, for your support.

Jim Amspacher, for always having your door open throughout these years, and for connecting me to some of my best interviewees, Jesse Jenkins, former Director of the Energy and Climate Program at Breakthrough, for an exceptional interview, feedback on the structure of this document, and unparalleled insider insight, Aden van Noppen, founding advisor of the Breakthrough Generation program, for being an early source of help and support, All who shared and filled out my surveys, Craig Altemose, Ken Ward, Bill McKibben, Ted Nordhaus, Teryn Norris, Dan Becker, and everyone else who agreed to be interviewed and quoted, for your time and your trust. I had a lot of fun talking to each of you and hope I have done your stories justice.

Karlis Rokpelnis, Roger Nozaki, and Ann Dill, for bouncing ideas in the early stages and for promising me, rightly, that pursuing a thesis would be an experience unlike any other, Charlotte Ong, for helping me understand that the thesis is nothing if not personal, Kara Kaufman, for calling to offer encouragement and to tell me that I had done my job as long as I answered the questions I set out to answer.

Clifton Yeo, for the constant reminders to back up my work, (but actually, for listening, always listening), Joelynn Ng, for being my mother away from home, Gina Roberti, for teaching me the meaning of “intentional,” Katherine Wong and Chia Han Sheng, for thesis-writing companionship, Brett Anders, Abigail Savitch-Lew, Emma Bratton, and David Granberg, for being my intellectual equals, and for some of the most important conversations I have had and will continue to have.

Grace Zhang, Huihui Lan, Estella Ng, residents of Yellow House, Jenna Anders, Marguerite Joutz, and other friends in other corners of the world, for the messages of encouragement.

Finally, Pa and Ma, for starting me down this path, and for always being proud.

3 CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION 10 2. WICKED PROBLEMS 27 3. CONTESTING ENVIRONMENTALISM 42 “Who We Are And Who We Need To Be” 43 “I Am Done Calling Myself An Environmentalist” 45 “The Bad Boys Of The Movement” 49 4. REFORMING ENVIRONMENTALISM 56 “A Politics Of Limits And A Politics Of Possibility” 57 “Foot Soldiers In The Environmental Effort” 62 “Indistinguishable From The Anti-Climate Disinformation Campaign” 66 5. ABANDONING ENVIRONMENTALISM 76 “There's Less Sense That We're All Part Of The Same Movement” 77 “Professional Gadflies” 83 “Environmentalism Really Does Need To Die” 84 6. ACHIEVING DISAGREEMENT 94 “This Common Denominator Of Political Correctness” 95 “We're Talking About The End Of The World As We Know It” 100 “People Wanna Consume Energy” 104 “People Who Care Extremely Passionately That That Last Little Piece Of Forest Doesn't Get Cut Down” 105 “The Magnitude Of The Solutions We Need” 111 7. CONCLUSION 120 8. REFERENCES 125 9. APPENDIX 133

“In a setting in which a plurality of publics is politically pursuing a diversity of goals, how is the larger society to deal with its wicked problems in a planful way? How are goals to be set, when the valuative bases are so diverse?”

- Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (1973)

5 PREFACE

This is me, on November 6, 2011, outside the White House. I was part of a 12,000- person-strong crowd that had turned up to encircle the White House, signalling to President

Obama our hope that he would reject Keystone XL, a pipeline that would snake through

1,833 miles of the United States, carrying tar sands, an unconventional form of oil whose extraction process was environmentally destructive and whose refining process was energy- intensive, from deposits in Alberta to refineries in Texas. On my right is a stranger whose name I do not know. But we were on the same team that Sunday afternoon. We were on the same team, because we had both heard James Hansen, the environmental movement’s most well-loved climate scientist, say that Keystone XL would be “game over” for the climate, we had both listened to leaders of First Nations tribes in Canada exposing the tar sands industry’s destructive practices in indigenous communities in Alberta, and so, we had both come to resent the idea of the pipeline, and thought it our responsibility to fight the good fight, to stand against corporatism and exploitation, to stand up in the name of intergenerational equity, indigenous rights, and democracy.

6 Or at least, presumably we both thought that way, because for the past hour, we had both been marching and shouting, “show me what democracy looks like…this is what democracy looks like!” And, of course, because we were carrying the same backpack that the

Sierra Club had given out for free that year, in exchange for a $15 membership (the whole reason why I asked to take a photo with him in the first place).

I remember well the adrenaline of the week leading up to the protest. The significance that I had imbued the action with, the conviction that this was the most important thing I could be doing with my time, the power that I felt I had whenever I spoke to fellow students on my college’s Main Green about the irresponsibility of the pipeline company, TransCanada.

Strange, then, that two years later, in July 2013, I should feel so out of place as I protested alongside hundreds of others at the Brayton Point coal plant in Somerset,

Massachusetts. When I ran into a climate organiser I had gotten to know as a student activist two summers ago, I was excited, but inexplicably ashamed. This was someone whose house my fellow activists and I had stayed in, who had brought us on a critical mass bike ride in

New Haven, whom we had gone swing dancing with, and whom I respected deeply. Yet this time, I felt a distance between us and could barely maintain a proper conversation with him.

In the two years preceding, I had gradually moved away from activism, partly because I knew I would not be an organiser for life, partly because I was no longer certain whether our strategies were making any difference, and partly because, all of a sudden, activism seemed to me like a space that lacked criticality, that did not reflect on the validity of its claims before making them or the effectiveness of its strategies before launching them.

Keystone XL was but one amongst many pipelines, the Albertan tar sands would find a way to make it to market, pipeline or not, and in any case, China’s oil companies were investing

7 in Venezuela’s tar sands deposits. All of a sudden, the Keystone XL fight seemed to represent three years of wasted resources.

But who was to say what constituted “wasted resources”? In response to the critique levelled above, the dedicated climate activist would not say, you’re right, this fight isn’t worth fighting, indeed he/she would say, this is the reason we need to double down our efforts, join our partners in other countries, and build a truly global movement to solve the climate crisis.

This thesis, for me, has been an effort to find some answers to the question of how the climate movement should play its role in addressing the problem of climate change. As I have learned over the course of a year of research, we can spend a full ten years debating that question and still not be able to arrive at an answer. And we probably never will.

Nonetheless, I have found tremendous value in following the efforts of a small group of very passionate individuals who have each tried to find their own answers to this question, to debate others who have different answers, and to build movements around their own answers in the name of “solving climate change.” Doing so has opened infinitely more questions that I explore, but do not seek to find conclusive answers to, in the following pages: whether climate change is even an environmental problem, whether natural gas is unequivocally better than coal, whether we can depend on energy efficiency and renewables to meet our energy needs, what types of narratives can best galvanise a movement, whether symbolic actions in a movement are worth anything, whether the planet has biophysical limits or whether it can accommodate 9 billion people’s worth of energy needs, whether we fundamentally believe in a future of global capitalism or local economies, and what on earth the “environmental movement” is.

8 Going back and forth between the characters in this story and learning to empathise with each of their perspectives on these questions has doubtless made for a schizophrenic exercise and, disappointingly, has made me none the wiser on the question of whether I should spent my next charitable buck on sending a bus of activists to D.C. to fight the next transnational oil pipeline. In the process, however, I have developed a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play in the short story with which I opened – of how the groups of which we are a part can inform and legitimate what we think is “the most important thing we could be doing with our time,” how the strategies that we believe in influence the way in which we identify ourselves and identify others, and how this in turn can create obstacles to authentic debate.

9 1. INTRODUCTION

In a 2012 article titled “Climate Science as Culture War,” University of Michigan sociologist Andrew Hoffman tells a story of how he had been asked to have coffee with a potential university donor, only to be proselytised to about the invalidity of climate science and the corrupt scientific review process, and invited to attend the Heartland Institute’s

Fourth Annual Conference on Climate Change, a conference for climate sceptics. This encounter inspired Hoffman to begin investigating how he and this donor had come to such vastly different conclusions about the need to act on climate change.

Since then, his research has surfaced a number of insights. “People’s opinions on

[climate change] and other complex scientific issues,” he writes, “are based on their prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values—all of which are heavily influenced by their referent groups and their individual psychology.” Since the beginning of the debate over the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which pitted the concerned citizen against incumbent industry interests, climate change in the United States has become part of the “culture wars,” in which acceptance or rejection of the scientific consensus about climate change has become determined more by one’s political and cultural affiliation than by one’s level of scientific knowledge – along with other “cultural” issues such as abortion and evolution.

Hoffman writes that “science is never socially or politically inert,” particularly when that science is as complex as climate science. In cases like that, we become “cognitive misers,” unable to come to conclusions in a purely cognitive fashion, and instead “employ ideological

10 filters that reflect [our] identity, worldview, and belief systems” to process scientific information.1

It is commonly thought that the polarised debate between climate believers and sceptics is one of the largest communication obstacles to action on climate change. Hoffman himself has conducted research on how the stark differences between the cultural frames used by believers and sceptics to discuss climate change prevent them from being able to talk to one another in the same vocabulary. 2 The Yale Project on Climate Change

Communication seeks to understand the diversity of public opinion on climate change in

America. It finds that different cultural publics (e.g. believers vs. sceptics) are differentially predisposed to receiving and acting upon this scientific knowledge, and recommends that groups interested in communicating climate science recognise that, to improve public belief in climate science, cultural values are as important as, if not more important than, mere proof of scientific validity.3

Yet, were the American public to overcome this obstacle, would it then move in a common direction to advocate for aggressive climate policies? In my thesis, I find that even the conversations amongst those who agree that urgent climate action is necessary are plagued by the same patterns of polarisation. Several of my research questions and findings parallel Hoffman’s insights about cultural groups, and are grounded in the same spirit of seeking a social consensus despite conflicting worldviews.

My research centres on the Breakthrough Institute (henceforth “Breakthrough”), a small energy and environmental policy think-tank in Oakland, California. Their arguments

1 Hoffman, Andrew J. "Climate Science as Culture War." Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/climate_science_as_culture_war. 2 Hoffman, A. J. "Talking Past Each Other? Cultural Framing of Skeptical and Convinced Logics in the Climate Change Debate." Organization & Environment 24.1 (2011): 3-33. Print. 3 "About." Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. http://environment.yale.edu/climate-communication/about.

11 heavily influenced the way in which I viewed the climate movement after I began reading their newsletters the summer after I stopped being involved in student activism. I study a decade’s worth of debates between the Breakthrough community and their observers in the climate movement, examining their back-and-forth about how the climate movement could have been more effective in advocating for action on climate change. I ask why a schism between the two groups developed, as well as what the debates have done to reveal the assumptions and belief systems influencing each group’s theories of change. I find my answers in the distinct group identities that developed as a result of their competing efforts to frame the climate movement’s narratives about climate change, and that began to serve both as “ideological filters” for group members’ opinions on climate change strategies, and as lenses through which group members saw other groups. I also develop a framework of four fundamental questions to understand the thought processes that influence how the debate’s participants come to such different conclusions about how the climate movement can best address climate change.

Background

In October 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two self-identified veterans of the environmental movement, penned an essay titled The Death of

Environmentalism. Their allegation: the environmental movement had failed to address global warming in any meaningful way despite the millions of dollars that had been poured into the effort, and despite, or indeed, because of, its early successes with passing regulations to keep

America’s air and waterways clean. Their diagnosis: the environmental movement had a technocratic, interest group-based approach to advocating for regulations on carbon emissions, an advocacy strategy that was a fossil of the 1960s and 1970s era of American

12 environmentalism. While it may have been effective at enabling the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, it could not inspire the broad, positive vision necessary to deal with the scale of the global warming problem, which at its heart was not a traditional “pollution” problem, but indeed, required a fundamental reworking of the American and global economy.

A year prior, Nordhaus and Shellenberger had co-founded the Breakthrough

Institute, which the New York Times, in early 2005, called “a new organization that advocates putting progressive values to work to solve problems.”4 Breakthrough was to become the institutional home for Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s philosophy of “new environmentalism,” their arguments about the need for federal investment in clean energy research, and their particular brand of provocative criticism. The Death of Environmentalism was but the first of many critiques that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, and later Breakthrough, would launch at the climate movement, and the national controversy that it sparked set the stage for even more heated debates that took place over the next decade. Ten years later,

Breakthrough is known in some circles as “a contrarian environmental think tank whose founders have spent a decade telling other environmentalists that they're doing it wrong for one reason or another.”5

Despite having been discredited by many in the climate movement, Breakthrough still receives considerable media coverage and maintains connections to other thinkers and institutions in the energy policy community. Writing by Breakthrough’s staff members and others affiliated with the Breakthrough community appears frequently in prominent and diverse news outlets such as the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine,

4 Barringer, Felicity. "Paper Sets Off a Debate on Environmentalism's Future." The New York Times, 05 Feb. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/national/06enviro.html. 5 Geman, Ben. "Nate Silver Is Having an Ezra Klein Moment." National Journal. N.p., 20 Mar. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014. .

13 Huffington Post, the New Republic and the Wall Street Journal. Staff at Breakthrough have co-authored reports with representatives of organisations such as the Brookings Institution6, the Clean Air Task Force, and the Center for Global Development7, and with academics from universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Colorado at Boulder, American University, and Arizona State University. Each year,

Breakthrough also names five scholars to serve as Breakthrough Senior Fellows. Notable

Senior Fellows include Richard Lester (2014), Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, social scientists Bruno Latour (2010) and Ulrich Beck (2010), and

Roger Pielke Jr., professor of political science and environmental studies at UC-Boulder

(2008).

At the same time, from Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s simple argument in 2004 that the environmental movement had to improve its messaging around climate change has emerged a multi-layered discourse around the need for government investment in energy innovation, the need for the environmental movement to critically reflect on the validity of its assumptions and the relevance of its values, and the potential for cheap, clean energy technologies to meet the energy needs of a world of 9 or 10 billion people. This discourse provides the foundation on which Breakthrough continues to be critical of the environmental and the climate movement, and on which it builds its advocacy for nuclear and natural gas as necessary energy options in a low-carbon energy economy alongside renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency.

6 Jenkins, Jesse, Mark Muro, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Letha Tawney, and Alex Trembath. Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence. Rep. Breakthrough Institute, Apr. 2012. Web. http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/Beyond_Boom_and_Bust.pdf. 7 Caine, Mark, et al. Our High-Energy Planet. Rep. Breakthrough Institute, Apr. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Our-High-Energy-Planet.pdf.

14 These two dynamics – the break between Breakthrough and the climate movement and its subsequent shift towards a more academic and policy-making audience, and the evolution of Breakthrough’s discourse and policy agenda, form the core of my analysis.

Research questions and core theses

My thesis is guided by two research questions:

1. Why is there an apparent schism between the Breakthrough Institute and the rest of

the climate movement today, when Breakthrough’s co-founders were originally

recognised as part of the same movement?

2. What assumptions and belief systems inform what the participants in the “Death of

Environmentalism” debates think are the most effective ways for the climate

movement to address climate change?

I answer the first question in Chapters 3-5, examining three episodes that trace the history of the debates between the Breakthrough community and leaders in the climate movement. By problematising the current schism between Breakthrough and the rest of the climate movement, I take as my starting point the premise that the debate has historically been more antagonistic than it needed to be, and that in recent years, there has been no debate to speak of even where debates should be happening.

A possible answer to the first question is one I often encountered while conducting my research: that Breakthrough’s co-founders were career opportunists, launching critiques at the environmental movement simply to gain media hits and secure funding for their think- tank. This quote from a 2011 article on environmental news outlet Grist.org captures this interpretation well:

15 “The wonky stuff — and BTI cranks out some genuinely good wonkery — doesn’t get clicks. What gets attention (and thus keeps the appearance of influence alive) are the attacks on hippies doing it wrong. These incentives have led the Breakthrough crowd to meditate endlessly on the failings and failures of others pursuing similar goals by different means.”8

While this reading of Breakthrough as an opportunistic organisation may have some truth, and while a section in Chapter 5 of this thesis does provide evidence for this, I argue that it is inadequate. Using literature from social movement theory and social identity theory,

I argue that competition to articulate the cultural frames of the climate movement and the group identities constructed in the process of this competition also had a part to play in creating the schism between Breakthrough and the climate movement. These processes created two (at-times arbitrary) camps in the movement and widened the rift between them, resulting in the hostility that we observe today.

Each of the three episodes is chronologically distinct and narrates a unique development in the interaction as shown in the diagram below.

Diagram 1. Chronology of events in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates.

Chapter 3, “Contesting Environmentalism,” introduces Nordhaus and

Shellenberger’s first attempt to propose an alternative method of framing the environmental movement’s narratives about climate change in their controversial 2004 essay, The Death of

Environmentalism, earning them the label of “the bad boys of the environmental movement,”

8 Roberts, David. "Why I've Avoided Commenting on Nisbet's 'Climate Shift' Report." Grist. N.p., 27 Apr. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-04-26-why-ive-avoided-commenting-on- nisbets-climate-shift-report/.

16 and provoking debate about the future direction of the movement. “Reforming

Environmentalism” in Chapter 4 documents the evolution of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s thesis into a movement-building tool with their publication of the book Break Through. It is at this point in the story that their arguments develop into a distinct discourse, around which an institutional identity begins to coalesce as Breakthrough’s influence in the environmental movement grows. In this episode, Breakthrough loses credibility as an environmental movement actor on several occasions. Finally, “Abandoning Environmentalism” examines the current intergroup dynamics between Breakthrough and the climate movement. Each group now sees its purpose very differently, and is a distinct epistemic community that informs both how group members come to perceive out-group members, and how they develop opinions on what the climate movement is to do about climate change.

I answer the second question in Chapter 6, “Achieving Disagreement.” Where

Chapters 3-5 seek to understand the “culture wars” in the debates, in Chapter 6 I examine the “competing epistemologies” that have determined the substance of the debates. I ask: when we manage to move out of our polarised camps and see one another’s arguments for what they are, what, at the core, are we disagreeing about? What are our “invisible” epistemic lenses that only surface when we encounter opinions different from ours? In this chapter, I discuss the usefulness of existing literature on environmental discourses in understanding the different worldviews that emerged in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates. I then add to this literature by presenting a series of four questions, the answers to which guide our understanding of what the climate movement should do about climate change. I draw primarily on interview and survey data, examining the diversity of answers that my respondents had to each of these four questions.

17 Research design

To understand the history of the interaction captured in Chapters 3 and 4, I looked at the books, articles, and reports produced by Nordhaus, Shellenberger, and the

Breakthrough community, and the news reports, opinion pieces, and blog posts that emerged in response.

I conducted interviews with the following individuals to shed light on the nuances of the interaction not captured in publicly available materials:

• 11 members of the Breakthrough community, including Ted Nordhaus, co-founder

of Breakthrough, the three co-founders of Breakthrough Generation, the

Breakthrough Institute’s summer fellowship program for young energy policy

analysts founded in 2008, one current Breakthrough staff member and former

Breakthrough Generation fellow, and six former Breakthrough Generation fellows

• 12 self-identified current and former members of the environmental movement with

varying amounts of experience, including Bill McKibben, founder of climate

movement organisation 350.org, Craig Altemose, founder and director of the

350.org-affiliated Better Future Project, Ken Ward, former deputy director of

Greenpeace, and former Green Corps organisers

• An energy and climate program officer at a foundation, who has observed the

debates over the past decade

Additionally, survey data from surveys filled out by 14 former Breakthrough fellows and 49 self-identified members of the environmental movement provided information on the diversity of opinions on climate change strategies captured in Chapter 6. To collect survey data from the environmental movement, I sent my survey to multiple mailing lists, through contacts working in the movement, and to contacts I met at Power Shift 2013, the

18 fourth iteration of the national youth climate change conference. Respondents to my survey thus include student climate activists from various universities and groups including members of the Rhode Island Student Climate Coalition, members of Students for a

Sustainable Stanford, and members of Students for a Just and Stable Future, an alliance of youth climate activists mostly from colleges in Massachusetts; alumni of Greencorps, a yearlong program that trains young people in grassroots environmental organising, and alumni of

New England Climate Summer and Ride for the Future, both summer leadership development programs for college-age students focused on grassroots organising around climate change. My survey results are thus limited in scope mainly to the youth climate movement in the northeast, as a function of the networks that I had access to.

Interview transcripts and survey data were manually coded. Interview and survey questions were based loosely on methods from social identity research and discourse analysis, and were designed to capture such elements as:

• How strongly they identified with their groups and when they were most proud of

their respective groups (“Breakthrough” vs. “the environmental movement”),

• How they would describe the other group,

• Why they thought climate change was an important problem,

• Their thoughts on current energy policy questions such as the role of natural gas and

nuclear energy and the current state of renewable energy technologies.

Definitions

While “Breakthrough” refers to anyone who has been affiliated with the

Breakthrough Institute at some point, it should not be taken to mean that these people were not also affiliated with the climate movement. In fact, several of my Breakthrough

19 interviewees identified as being members of the environmental or the climate movement. It should also be noted that the Breakthrough community is larger than the twelve full-time staff in the Oakland office. Breakthrough has a community of Senior Fellows who hold positions in academia and the energy policy world, hires ten young fellows through the

Breakthrough Generation program every summer who subsequently go on to graduate school or positions in energy and innovation policy, and, as mentioned previously, co- authors publications with other non-profit organisations and think-tanks that work on energy policy.

The definitions of “climate movement” and “environmental movement” are less clear-cut. Strictly speaking, the group I am analysing is the climate movement, i.e. the collection of individuals and organisations whose mission it is to mobilise popular support for action on climate change. In the context of the “Death of Environmentalism” debates, I am specifically interested in the individuals and/or representatives of organisations who responded to Breakthrough’s critiques and arguments. They should by no means be considered a homogeneous group defined by strict boundaries; however, they are still a

“group” to the extent that they are all interested in defining, directing, or executing the strategies of the climate movement, and are not members of the Breakthrough community.

When I use the term “environmentalist” or “environmental movement,” I do so because this is the term used in much of Breakthrough’s writing to refer to the group of organisations and individuals responsible for determining the majority of the climate movement’s agenda on climate change. These include environmental movement organisations such as the Sierra

Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

My use of the terms “mainstream environmental / climate movement” and “youth climate movement” mirror how these terms are used by my research subjects. The

20 mainstream movement comprises the largest U.S. environmental organisations such as the

Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Environmental

Defense Fund (EDF) that have a strong focus on legislative advocacy in Washington.9 The youth movement refers to the mostly college-age young people who began organising themselves around climate action a few years prior to the first Power Shift in 2007. 350.org and Energy Action Coalition are two of the key organisations that led the effort to organise the youth movement in those years.

Finally, the “Death of Environmentalism” debates, while named for the original essay published by Nordhaus and Shellenberger in 2004, refer to the entire decade’s worth of interactions between Breakthrough and others in the climate movement, and not just the debate that resulted from the publication of the essay.

Scope and limitations

Breakthrough has published and cross-posted numerous articles critiquing the climate movement for anything from its advocacy for socially unjust climate policies to the resources it has wasted on fighting the Keystone XL pipeline. Likewise, Breakthrough has consistently been criticised by its observers for being contrarian without being constructive and promulgating falsehoods about the environmental movement. With this in mind, I am not here to write an encyclopaedia of debates between Breakthrough and the climate movement. Instead, I tell only enough of the story to demonstrate how the construction of group identities has created the schism I am interested in explaining. I use a few key debates as sites for my analysis, but these should by no means be seen as the extent of the dispute.

9 Note that the Sierra Club occupies both the “mainstream/Beltway” and “grassroots” segments of the movement given that it has a strong presence in D.C. as well as state chapters that organise locally.

21 Relatedly, Breakthrough’s research spans a wide range of environmental issues. The debates in this thesis only capture the part of their work that is focused on energy and climate issues, the first issues that it began working on. In addition to this, Breakthrough also publishes work on conservation, economic growth and innovation, and environmental philosophy.

In addition, while these debates are situated in the wider context of the shifting political identities of the American climate movement, my thesis by no means captures the vast range of identities in the movement, nor does it attempt to do so. While “the climate movement” may appear homogeneous in some pages of this work, this is a result of the artificial dichotomy that inevitably emerges in any polarised debate. I recognise that there is far more heterogeneity than may be apparent here. For instance, while Chapters 4 and 5 spotlight Bill McKibben and 350.org as having played an integral part in shaping the identity of the grassroots climate movement, I appreciate that some activist communities that are more motivated by environmental justice concerns or anti-capitalist thought may not feel represented in this narrative.

It should also be noted that I analyse the credibility of these social movement actors only as they appear to others in the story, and never make any normative judgment of their objective credibility. In my discussion of the debate about the cap-and-trade bill in Chapter

4, for example, I do not analyse the economic validity of any of the claims made about the effectiveness of the bill. I seek only to understand the implications this debate had for

Breakthrough’s identity, and therefore, for its credibility as a movement actor. Additionally, while the climate movement and Breakthrough have largely discredited one another by the beginning of Chapter 6, both groups still retain considerable influence in other circles, though the details of this are not captured in my thesis.

22 Relatedly, I appreciate that some readers would be interested in an analysis of

Breakthrough’s funding channels for two reasons. One, where Breakthrough receives its funding from may have implications for the objectiveness of its research. Two, an understanding of why the schism between Breakthrough and the climate movement emerged would be incomplete without analysing the extent to which Breakthrough competes for resources with other organisations in the movement, particularly since Nordhaus and

Shellenberger presented their first publication to the largest gathering of environmental funders in the US. While I do not engage in a detailed analysis of Breakthrough’s funding sources, I will respond briefly to these two concerns here.

To the first concern, Breakthrough’s website states that it “only accepts charitable contributions from persons or institutions without a financial interest” in its work. It lists as its funders a collection of foundations that have an interest in addressing the dual problems of energy access and climate change in conjunction with one another10 or in “applying free- market solutions to economic, environmental, and global problems of the 21st century”11.

With this information, I work with the premise that Breakthrough’s funders are philosophically aligned with but not financially interested in its research. To the second concern, I acknowledge that it is a limitation of my research that I do not analyse whether

Breakthrough intentionally competes for funding with other environmental movement organisations or whether Breakthrough has received funding as a result of funders moving away from funding other grantees. My research is intentionally focused on the identity dynamics in the debates for reasons that will become apparent in the conclusions to my chapters.

10 "Climate." Nathan Cummings Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. http://www.nathancummings.org/what- we-fund/our-focus/climate. 11 "History of the Alex. C Walker Foundation." History of the Alex. C Walker Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. http://walker-foundation.org/history.

23 Finally, much of this thesis is a historical account of a debate that began ten years ago. The material that I analyse is therefore necessarily limited to publicly available material, aside from some narrative accounts provided by some of my interviewees. Thus, much of my analysis focuses on the most polarised sites of the debate, and I do not necessarily capture the parts of the debate that may have been more productive and less antagonistic.

My role as a scholar

In Chapters 3-5, I do not aim to take a scientific, micro-level approach to prove that group identities have led the actors in my story to behave towards each other in a certain fashion. Nor am I simply a reporter responsible for gathering stories and narrating them to an interested audience, which would necessarily be a small one. Rather, I seek to add scholarly insight to what would otherwise be a purely journalistic account of the Death of

Environmentalism debates. With these tools from social movement theory, social identity theory, and literature on environmental discourses, I develop (1) a framework for understanding the causes of the schism that moves us beyond a flat understanding of

Breakthrough as a media-addicted organisation and (2) an approach to understanding the substantive differences between the discourses in the debates. By doing so, I hope to lend my readers both the empathy and the cognitive frameworks that I think are necessary for us participants in this essential debate to achieve fewer and better disagreements when encountering discourses, policy prescriptions, and communication styles different than our own.

I speak to a few audiences.

To the individuals who participated in the research process, I hope I have returned your generosity in three ways. First, by writing the story of which you were a part and which,

24 for some of you, hold fond memories from the past decade – as comprehensively as is possible within the scope of my argument, and as objectively as is possible for an outsider who came to know the American climate movement only in 2010. Second, by helping you to see the perspectives of some others in the story whose voices you may not have heard in the debates. And third, by bringing you into conversation with one another once again, and sharing with you my thoughts on why this dialogue continues to be important. Any misrepresentation of any event or any individual’s opinions is a function of my blinkered judgment. Should you find instances of this, I would be very happy to hear from you.

To my more scholarly audience interested in studying the shifting contours of the

American environmental movement, the processes that lead to cultural schisms, and/or the conditions that allow for cross-cultural dialogue, I hope this provides some interesting case material for you to consider with your theoretical lenses.

To my friends and mentors in the climate movement who inspired me to take up climate change as the cause of my choice, I hope this gives you a better understanding of some events in the recent history of the youth climate movement that may otherwise have been invisible to you. More importantly, I hope we can take a step back from the narratives that we have gotten used to, and revisit the set of questions in Chapter 6, “Achieving

Disagreement.” Finding (or reaffirming) our answers to those questions will make us more thoughtful actors as we go about our work.

Finally, to those unfamiliar with the Death of Environmentalism debates, the environmental movement, or the theories I use, I hope that you still find this story readable and relevant. My guess is that you will find the patterns in these debates reflected in the other spaces you belong to – the policy circles, the Thanksgiving dinner table, or the

25 classroom – in which you have attempted, or when you have watched others attempting, to achieve disagreement with those ideologically different than yourself.

26 2. WICKED PROBLEMS

“We’re schizophrenic, partly because we are twenty different organizations that have no common strategy. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. You wouldn’t say we’re schizophrenic on clean water. But we are schizophrenic on climate. I think it’s just because of the emotional and cognitive problems that it raises.”12 - Ken Ward, veteran environmental activist

In their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (1973), Horst Rittel and Melvin

Webber, two American urban planners who sought to understand why problems in urban planning were so difficult for policymakers to tackle, pose this question: “In a setting in which a plurality of publics is politically pursuing a diversity of goals, how is the larger society to deal with its wicked problems in a planful way? How are goals to be set, when the valuative bases are so diverse?”13 Rittel and Webber have been widely credited for pioneering the concept of the “wicked problem” in this essay. Because of the manifold ways in which we can define them, identify their causes, and propose solutions for them, as well as the difficulty in determining whether they have been solved and whether any progress on the problem can be attributed to a given solution, “wicked problems” are impossible to solve. In

Rittel and Webber’s framework, the opposite of a wicked problem is a “tame” problem, in which the goal is clear and it is possible to identify whether or not the problem has been solved, as in many empirical questions in scientific or mathematical inquiry.

The question of what to do about climate change has become increasingly recognised as one such wicked problem.141516 This chapter begins with a discussion of how

12 Ward, Ken. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 13 Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning." Policy Sciences 4.2 (1973): 155-69. Print. 14 Rayner, Steve. "Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions." Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment. Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, ANSW, Sydney. 2006

27 this concept of “wicked problems” helps us to understand why the disagreements between

Breakthrough and the climate movement exist in the first place. Using this concept as a guiding framework, I then introduce the theories around which I centre my arguments – first the literature on social movement theory and social identity theory, followed by literature on environmental discourses.

Rittel and Webber identify ten characteristics of wicked problems, of which three are especially salient for understanding the wickedness of the climate problem.

First, there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem. Is the nature of the climate problem a technological one, such that more research and development will give us the cheap, clean technologies we need to catalyse the growth of the low-carbon economy? Does it reflect a fundamental problem with our consumption-driven capitalist economy, in which case the solution is to grow the scholarship and activism around alternative development models before developing countries follow in the footsteps of the West? Further, is it simply a technical “pollution” problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or is it intertwined with other problems of environmental and social injustice?

Second, there are no true or false answers, there are only “good” or “bad” answers. Different parties are “equally equipped, interested, and/or entitled to judge the solutions, although none has the power to set formal decision rules to determine correctness.” Thus, many parties - international governmental organisations, consortiums of scientists, environmental movement organisations, and economic policy think-tanks - have a stake in proposing and evaluating solutions that span the gamut from creating carbon trading markets to educating

15 Lazarus, Richard. "Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future." Georgetown Law Faculty Publications (2009). Web. 30 Mar. 2014. 16 Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. "Wicked Polarization - How Prosperity, Democracy, and Experts Divided America." The Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-3/wicked-polarization.

28 citizens about climate change to sharing best practices in urban sustainability. While there are some established indicators for evaluating progress on climate change, such as carbon dioxide emissions, attributing any given reduction in carbon emissions or energy consumption to a single solution is a task bordering on impossible. This is further complicated when we consider that it is in the interest of organisations to trumpet the success of the solutions they have proposed.

Third, and relatedly, there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. Upon implementation, solutions will “generate waves of consequences over an extended period of time.” Divestment from coal companies’ stocks may not cause a dip in their revenues in the short term, but it is anyone’s guess whether a widespread and sustained divestment campaign will seed the culture that encourages investors to put their money in clean energy and thus grow the market for renewables.

These three features of the climate problem help us to understand why the division between the two groups I study here exists in the first place. In his interview, Jesse Jenkins, former director of the Climate and Energy program at Breakthrough, suggested that

“frustration at the lack of progress” was a major reason for the conflict. “Political efforts are failing, our New Energy for America message - the stimulus - failed, Democrats are losing seats over a lot of these issues. Everybody’s frustrated, and when you get frustrated you start looking around for reasons why things are going wrong.”17 Thus, there is a perception that the climate problem has not been addressed in any meaningful way, that the solutions that have been previously attempted have failed, and that there exist other solutions that have not yet been tried.

17 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

29 The “plurality of publics”: Social movement and social identity theory

As Rittel and Webber articulate, wicked problems are made even more difficult to solve because there is a “plurality of publics politically pursuing a diversity of goals” interested in addressing these problems. The “Death of Environmentalism” debates are a prime example of this. Against this landscape, I borrow social movement theory and social identity theory to understand why consensus has been so difficult to achieve in the debates. I use these theories in parallel because these dynamics are mutually constitutive in this story: the competition between Breakthrough and other actors to modify the climate movement’s cultural narratives is intertwined with the formation of group identities, which in turn affects the credibility of the frames put forth by Breakthrough. The diagram below shows how I blend these two bodies of theory together:

Diagram 2. Social movement and social identity dynamics in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates. (Don’t be intimidated by how confusing it looks – read on!)

Sociology offers three main theoretical approaches for studying the origins and dynamics of social movements.18 The first studies the political opportunity structure of social movements, examining the “sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that

18 Brulle, Robert J., and Jenkins, J. Craig. 2010. “Civil Society and the Environment; Understanding the Dynamics and Impacts of the U.S. Environmental Movement,” in Understanding 21st Century NGOs, edited by Thomas Lyon. Washington, D.C.: RFF Press.

30 empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action.”19

The second examines the role of cultural beliefs to understand how social movements compete with the dominant cultural worldview by developing alternative cultural narratives. The third studies the resource mobilisation activities of social movement organisations, analysing how the ebb and flow of movements depends on organisations’ ability to leverage resources to create and maintain their organisations and mobilise around strategies. My analysis is situated in the cultural approach, the dynamics of which are captured in the grey box above.

The cultural narratives of a social movement are defined in the literature as collective action frames, “action-oriented sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the campaigns and activities of a social movement organisation.”20 Social movement actors are

“signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders”21 (emphasis added), and collective action frames are their means of packaging and maintaining this meaning. Social movement scholar Mayer Zald writes that in the process of frame construction, there is a “competition for defining the situation and what is to be done […] different movement organisations (MOs) and segments of a movement engage in an intramovement contest over tactics and goals,” which leads to

“changes in the dominant frames of a movement and a succession of MO power and influence.”22

The Death of Environmentalism can be understood as Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s attempt to contest the dominant frames in the environmental movement, and to characterise,

19 Gamson, William A., and David S. Meyer. "Framing Political Opportunity." Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Comp. Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 275-90. Print. 20 Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26.1 (2000): 611-39. Print. 21 Ibid. 22 Zald, Mayer N. "Culture, Ideology, and Strategic Framing." Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. By Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 261-74. Print.

31 and subsequently criticise, the identity of the movement, forcing incumbent actors and observers to rearticulate or modify their frames and to renegotiate the movement’s identity.

Both of these dynamics – frame contestation and identity negotiations – then provided the platform on which the collective identity of the environmental movement could be contested and a new “Breakthrough” identity could be constructed against the “identity” of the “traditional environmental movement.” In social movement scholars Robert Benford and David Snow’s words, inherent in all social movement framing activities are “identity constructions” that manifest in part in “making in-group/out-group distinctions and assigning other organisations to ideological, geographical, and tactical “turfs.”23

With this foundation, I then use social identity theory to illustrate these processes of identity construction. Social identity is “the individual’s knowledge that he/she belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him/her of the group membership.”24 Manifestations of social identity include the feeling of solidarity I felt with the stranger carrying a Sierra Club backpack at the Keystone XL rally, as well as my feeling more ashamed of my activist identity the more I read Breakthrough’s pragmatic analyses.

Abdelal et al. provide a framework for understanding the content of a collective identity as falling on four dimensions, captured in the orange and blue boxes above. Social purposes are “the goals that are shared by members of a group;” cognitive models (“discourse” in the diagram above) are “the worldviews or understandings of political and material conditions and interests that are shaped by a particular identity;” and constitutive norms

(“norms” in the diagram above) are “the formal and informal rules that define group

23 Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26.1 (2000): 611-39. Print. 24 Tajfel, Henri. "Experiments in a Vacuum." The Context of Social Psychology: A Critical Assessment (1972)

32 membership.”25 Finally, relational comparisons refer to “defining an identity group by what it is not, i.e., the way it views other identity groups, especially where those views about the other are a defining part of the identity.” This is captured in the diagram above as the dynamics that lead to the formation of “external images.”

Subsequent chapters will illustrate how these elements of social identity came about as a result of frame contestation and identity negotiations throughout the Death of

Environmentalism debates (dotted arrows in the diagram), influenced the way in which members of each group evaluated one another and interpreted one another’s arguments

(dashed arrows), and gradually resulted in Breakthrough’s loss of credibility in the climate movement (solid red arrow).

I define Breakthrough’s “credibility,” the outcome we are ultimately interested in, on two dimensions: the resonance of its frames with the rest of the climate movement, and the extent to which it is categorised as a member of the climate movement. I trace the changes along each of these dimensions at the beginning and end of Chapters 3 through 5.

In social movement theory, resonance refers to the “effectiveness or mobilising potency”26 of a collective action frame, or the extent to which any given frame is able to galvanise other actors in a social movement. In social identity theory, categorisation of individuals into social groups is a process that “involves the psychological accentuation of differences between categories and the attenuation of differences between objects within categories.”27 In other words, by putting others and ourselves into categories, we see those in our “in-group” as more similar than they would be, and those in “out-groups” as more

25 Abdelal, Rawi, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston, and Rose Mcdermott. "Identity as a Variable." Perspectives on Politics 4.04 (2006) 26 Benford, Robert D., and David A. Snow. "Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26.1 (2000): 611-39. Print. 27 Abrams, Dominic, and Michael A. Hogg. Social Identity Theory: Constructive and Critical Advances. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990.

33 different than they would be in the absence of categorisation. Thus, in tracing this second dimension of Breakthrough’s credibility, I study how and why Breakthrough was considered by some in the climate movement to be part of the “in-group” at the outset, but was later categorised as belonging to an “out-group” on based on the differences in their discourses, norms, and social purposes.

“Valuative bases”: A toolkit of environmental discourses

Rittel and Webber also ask how we can approach our goals “if the valuative bases are so diverse.” To understand the “valuative bases” in the debate between Breakthrough and leaders in the climate movement, I begin by reviewing the existing literature on environmental discourses.

In reflecting on the encounter with the potential university donor who did not believe in the validity of climate science (described at the beginning of the introduction),

Andrew Hoffman wrote, “The more I thought about it, the more I became eager to learn about where he was coming from, where I was coming from, and why our two worldviews clashed so strongly in the present social debate over climate science.” There is an extensive and robust literature on environmental discourses that seeks to understand these clashing worldviews, and the different and often contradictory ways in which environmental problems, not least climate change, are diagnosed and used in service of policy proposals and ideological projects.

John Dryzek, in the introduction to his book Politics of the Earth, articulates the importance of understanding environmental discourses:

“Just because something is socially interpreted does not mean it is unreal. [...] But people can make very different things of these phenomena and – especially – their interconnections, providing grist for political dispute. The

34 existence of these competing understandings is why we have environmental politics (or any kind of politics) to begin with.”28

Our conceptions of the human-nature interaction, our perceptions of risk, the ways in which we place value on different aspects of human and environmental well-being – all elements of the discourses that we (perhaps unconsciously) employ – directly influence the extent to which we are concerned about climate change, why we are concerned about it, and what we think should be done about it. Our environmental discourses therefore have real implications for the politics and policies surrounding climate change.

What constitutes an environmental discourse? Again, Dryzek helps:

“A discourse is a shared way of apprehending the world. Embedded in language [...] discourses construct meanings and relationships, helping define common sense and legitimate knowledge. Each discourse rests on assumptions, judgments, and contentions that provide the basic terms for analysis, debates, agreements, and disagreements.”

In other words, discourses reflect the “valuative bases” on which we create platforms to tackle the wicked problem of climate change. Numerous scholars have written on the topic; here, I introduce three of the more well-known typologies of environmental and climate change discourses, then outline a toolkit of discourse elements most relevant to the case of Breakthrough and the climate movement.

Dryzek develops a typology of four basic environmental discourses as reflected in the two by two matrix below. He explains that environmental discourse necessarily creates alternatives to the ideologies of industrialism, since environmental discourse begins in industrial society and wants to move away from the problems it creates. These shifts away from industrialism can be reformist or radical, or they can be prosaic or imaginative.

28 Dryzek, John S. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

35 Reformist Radical Prosaic Environmental problem solving Limits and survival Imaginative Sustainability Green radicalism

Table 1. Dryzek’s four environmental discourses, Politics of the Earth (2013)

Prosaic shifts take the political economy of industrialism as given, with environmental concerns as in opposition to industrial goals, while imaginative shifts seek to reinvent societal and politico-economic structures, structures under which environmental concerns can be achieved in harmony with industrial goals. The four discourses of environmental problem solving, sustainability, limits and survival, and green radicalism fall along these two dimensions of reformist-radical and prosaic-imaginative.

Environmental problem solving places faith in making adjustments in public policy to cope with environmental problems (reformist) and is based in the assumption that the politico-economic status quo is unchangeable (prosaic). Limits and survival believes that unchecked economic expansion will eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the earth. It seeks a redistribution of power in the industrial political economy (radical) but still sees solutions in terms of the industrial structure (prosaic). Sustainability is imaginative in its attempt to reconcile economic growth with environmental quality, but is not radical because it does not have the apocalyptic view that Limits and survival does. Finally, green radicalism seeks to reinvent industrialism entirely, overturning the way in which the environment is conceptualised in industrial society.

Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne offer another typology of discourses, outlining four environmental worldviews: those of market liberals, institutionalists,

36 bioenvironmentalists, and social greens.29 Market liberals stress the importance of economic growth for the simultaneous achievement of human welfare and environmental goals. Under this worldview, environmental quality cannot be achieved unless poverty is first eradicated.

Institutionalists share the faith in economic growth, technology, and globalisation that market liberals have, but place more emphasis on the need for global norms, institutions, and cooperation to ensure that sustainable development is achieved. Bioenvironmentalists are guided by the laws of physical science and emphasise the biological limits of the earth to support life, stressing that it is the consumption-based model of economic growth that is the root cause of environmental problems. Social greens draw on radical social and economic theories and see environmental problems as closely intertwined with social justice problems.

In a 2006 study of discourses used in global forest management mechanisms through the UN climate change framework, Karin Bäckstrand and Eva Lövbrand identify three climate discourses that sociologist Robert Brulle draws on to classify 21 climate movement organisations. These three discourses are green governmentality, ecological modernisation, and civic environmentalism.3031 The discourses most relevant to this study are ecological modernisation, in its strong and weak variants, and civic environmentalism. Ecological modernisation is the view that economic growth and environmental protection are compatible, akin to the sustainable development discourse that Dryzek identifies and the market liberals and institutionalists discourse in Clapp and Dauvergne’s typology. Weak ecological modernisation does not see a need for a fundamental change in societal institutions, whereas strong ecological modernisation argues

29 Clapp, Jennifer, and Peter Dauvergne. Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. Print. 30 Bäckstrand, Karin, and Eva Lövbrand. "Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism."Global Environmental Politics 6.1 (2006): 50-75. Print. 31 Brulle, Robert J. 2014. The Development, Structure, and Influence of the U.S. National Climate Change Movement in Climate Change Policy and Civil Society, edited by Yael Wolinsky, Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press

37 that dominant policy paradigms and institutions are insufficient for achieving this marriage of economic growth and environmental protection. Civic environmentalism envisions an approach to global climate governance that can take either a radical resistance form or a reformist / participatory governance form. The radical variant of civic environmentalism calls for

“a fundamental transformation of consumption patterns and existing institutions to realize a more eco-centric and equitable world order,” while the reformist variant advocates greater participation by civil society representatives in global climate change negotiations.

With this brief review of the literature on environmental discourses, I have introduced some of the dominant (non-mutually-exclusive and non-exhaustive) ways of thinking about environmental problems and solutions. Some of these modes of thinking will surface in the debates that I study. Most notably, Dryzek has categorised Breakthrough as an institution representing the Promethean discourse in the Limits and survival category – the view that technology can expand the earth’s biophysical limits to an almost infinite extent.

Several of the activists campaigning against Keystone XL would identify as social greens in

Clapp and Dauvergne’s typology, seeing climate change as a yet another justice issue resulting from global capitalism.

There are, clearly, some overlaps within and between these three typologies. Between the typologies, social greens (Clapp and Dauvergne) and green radicals (Dryzek) are inspired by similar bodies of radical theories, although they may differ in the extent to which they stress the importance of the equal treatment of all species versus the treatment of human beings. Another example is how those who belong to the sustainability discourse in Dryzek’s typology, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, are also likely to fall in

Clapp and Dauvergne’s institutionalists worldview, simply because international institutions have been key proponents of the discourse of sustainability. There can also be overlaps

38 within the typologies; by that I mean that a person may identify with select characteristics of different worldviews and not subscribe wholesale to any one worldview. For example, a bioenvironmentalist who believes that the earth has a limited carrying capacity may very well see the need to reduce human beings’ ecological footprint by building global cooperation around shared norms (itself part of the institutionalist worldview).

It is clear then that segmenting environmental discourses into neat categories is a complicated task. Climatologist Mike Hulme offers a more flexible approach to understanding discourses, which also reflects the approach I will take in Chapter 6. Rather than define the boundaries of discourses, Hulme argues that our perceptions of climate change and thoughts on what should be done about it are formed by our unique sets of answers to a series of questions, which in turn are influenced by our underlying ideologies and beliefs. Examples of these questions include: what social meaning does climate hold for us? How do our faiths encourage us to think about the climate and the environment? What are we afraid of and how do we communicate the risk of climate change? What economic development model do we fundamentally believe in? Should we leave the governance of the climate problem to national governments, international processes, or markets?

“Rather than catalysing disagreements about how, when and where to tackle climate change,” Hulme argues, “the idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape.”32 By seeking to understand why we disagree about climate change through the above questions rather than through a strict typology of environmental discourses, we are able to surface the assumptions and lines of reasoning that lead each of us to our answers to the question of what to do about climate change. Further, this approach places the emphasis on

32 Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.

39 each individual’s unique worldview, transcending the tendency to box people into neat identities, itself a core reason for our disagreements.

Other theories

It should be noted that there are any number of other theories and variables that would be helpful for explaining the split between Breakthrough and the climate movement and the implications of this split. A non-exhaustive sample includes:

• Media theories, which would shed light on the production of stereotypes as a result

of communication through mass media,

• Theories on elite framing 33 that determine how much of the debate between

Breakthrough and the climate movement is being shaped primarily by intellectuals in

public spaces, rather than by more peripheral members of the groups, and that

illuminate how Breakthrough frames its arguments strategically in such a way that

predisposes its audience to interpret certain realities (e.g. what values “the

environmental movement” stands for) in particular ways,

• Cultural theories of preference formation,34 which could illuminate the extent to

which the preferences of the individuals in my study for certain policies on climate

change are determined by the communities by which they are surrounded,

• Theories of organisational path dependence, which could capture the growth of an

institution around Breakthrough’s discourse and the dependence of Breakthrough’s

existence on its own philosophy of pushing paradigms,

33 Hess, Jacob, and Nathan Todd. "From Culture War to Difficult Dialogue: Exploring Distinct Frames for Citizen Exchange about Social Problems." Journal of Public Deliberation 5.1: 16 Dec. 2008. 34 Wildavsky, Aaron. "Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation." The American Political Science Review 81.1 (1987): 3. Print.

40 • Literature on the use of “expert” science in claims to objectivity,35 which would help

us understand how the movement actors in this study draw on different information

sources to legitimate their analyses of the risks of each energy policy option,

• Literature on organisational legitimacy, 36 which would offer another approach

alongside the social identity theory I employ here to explain how Breakthrough lost

legitimacy in the eyes of many in the climate movement, and

• Linguistic theories,37 which would be useful for identifying biased and unbiased

language in how each group talks about the other group.

Each of these plays into the dynamics of the Death of Environmentalism debates and I would encourage my more theoretically inclined readers to see how each approach is useful for illuminating a different aspect of the interaction. For the purposes of this analysis, however, I rely only on the theories introduced in this chapter.

35 Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. 36 Deephouse, David, and Mark Suchman. "Legitimacy in Organisational Institutionalism." The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. By Royston Greenwood. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008. The authors review the existing literature on organisational legitimacy in this article. A relevant body of theories for this case would be theories on sociopolitical legitimation, which refers to “the process by which key stakeholders, the general public, key opinion leaders, or government officials accept a venture as appropriate and right, given existing norms and laws.” 37 Kress, Gunther R., and Bob Hodge. Language as Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Print.

41 3. CONTESTING ENVIRONMENTALISM

The story begins in October 2004, at the annual meeting of the Environmental

Grantmakers Association, the largest gathering of environmental funders in the US. Ted

Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, a public opinion consultant and a political strategist who had worked for America’s largest environmental movement organizations for thirty years between them, presented The Death of Environmentalism, their polemical 12,000-word thesis based on interviews with 25 environmental movement leaders that posed the question:

Why had global warming not been addressed in any meaningful way despite the millions of dollars that had been poured into the movement? Their diagnosis laid the blame on the failed strategies and narratives of precisely the mainstream environmental organisations that their audience of funders had been investing in. Their prognosis laid out what they saw as a more effective narrative for mobilising action on climate change.

What were members of the environmental movement to do with this unexpected, sweeping obituary of what, to them, was very much alive, from two little-known environmentalists? In this chapter, I describe how The Death of Environmentalism challenged what its authors perceived as the dominant cultural narratives in the movement, creating a platform on which alternative frames, and subsequently, discourses and identities, could develop. Importantly, in environmental journalist Michael Pollan’s words, the essay was published at a time of “great despondency for the environmental movement, both politically and psychologically.”38 This explains how Nordhaus and Shellenberger came to be perceived as the “bad boys of the movement”: while their critique was controversial, it nonetheless also opened what several other environmental leaders thought was an essential debate about

38 Pollan, Michael, Michael Shellenberger, and Ted Nordhaus. "The Death of Environmentalism." Knight School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, Berkeley. Nov 2007. Web. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwIW6LmEDAU.

42 the future direction of the movement.

“WHO WE ARE AND WHO WE NEED TO BE”

Environmentalists need to tap into the creative world of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell narrow and technical policy proposals but to figure out who we are and who we need to be. Above all else, we need to take a hard look at the institutions the movement has built over the last 30 years. Are existing environmental institutions up to the task of imagining the post-global warming world? Or do we now need a set of institutions founded around a more expansive vision and set of values? - Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, The Death of Environmentalism (2004)

The Death of Environmentalism contested the environmental movement’s dominant frames in two ways. First, the essay’s authors argued, the movement framed global warming as a single-issue pollution problem that was to be fixed with technical policy solutions. The modern American environmental movement, with its roots in the popular movements of the

1960s and 1970s, saw the successful passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act in those years as proof of the success of their “three-part strategic framework for environmental policy-making: first, define a problem (e.g. global warming) as

“environmental”. Second, craft a technical remedy (e.g. cap-and-trade). Third, sell the technical proposal to legislators.”39 In the climate movement, this resulted in a focus on technical policy solutions such as pollution controls and higher vehicle mileage standards,

“proposals that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political alliances the community needs to deal with the problem.”40 Nordhaus and Shellenberger argued that while this approach had been successful in the earlier years of the environmental movement,

39 Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post- Environmental World. Rep. Oakland: Breakthrough Institute, 2004. Print. 40 They further elaborated that environmental leaders were “sanguine that selling technical solutions like fluorescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C.”

43 global warming, unlike clean water, clean air, or the ozone problem, was not strictly a pollution problem; it required a more fundamental shift in the structure of the American economy.

Second, global warming had been framed as an environmental problem. “What are the implications of framing global warming as an environmental problem,” Nordhaus and

Shellenberger asked, “and handing off the responsibility for dealing with it to

‘environmentalists’?” Treating global warming as an environmental problem meant that environmental organisations “[did not] concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry” and “[missed] major opportunities for alliance building,” thus turning global warming into a special interest issue.

Instead, environmental leaders needed to begin “articulating a vision of the future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis.” They needed to “start framing [their] proposals around core American values and start seeing [their] own values as central to what motivates and guides [their] politics.” According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s public opinion research, environmental concern was not one of these “core American values.” In a survey of 1,500 Americans by Shellenberger’s marketing research firm American Environics, the pair quoted, “the number of Americans who agree with the statement, ‘To preserve people’s jobs in this country, we must accept higher levels of pollution in the future,’ increased from 17% in 1996 to 26% in 2000.” Nordhaus and Shellenberger identified the newly launched Apollo Alliance, a partnership of environmental, labour, business, and community organisations united around building a vision of investments in clean energy, transportation, and efficiency, as epitomising the visionary, broad-based approach to inspiring action on global warming that they argued was crucial in the essay.

44 “I AM DONE CALLING MYSELF AN ENVIRONMENTALIST”

How did other environmental leaders respond to The Death of Environmentalism

(“Death”) in late 2004 and early 2005? Some responses to the essay agreed both with

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s evaluation of the state of the movement and with their plan for moving forward. Others agreed that there was a problem, but proposed a different approach to deal with it. Several, particularly the representatives of the organisations that the essay criticised, flatly disagreed with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s reframing of the movement. They argued that the problems with the mainstream environmental movement were by no means as severe as Death made them out to be. These three types of responses are highlighted below.

Death did two things that sparked a frame dispute with incumbent actors in the movement, while providing the foundation on which Breakthrough’s identity and ideology would later be built. First, its framing of global warming provided an outline for an emergent

Breakthrough identity. Although a coherent ideology had not yet coalesced around

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s proposals, their calls for a new politics and a new approach to environmentalism laid the foundation for an ideology to emerge afterwards. In an interview with Grist, Nordhaus offered a preview of this, saying, “we’ve said repeatedly that our ideas are half-baked and that we need help constructing a viable political movement.”41 That

“viable political movement” would emerge in a more concrete form a few years later and will be detailed in the next chapter.

Second, it drew a clear line between two tactical turfs, “traditional” environmentalism and the “new, progressive” environmentalism proposed by Nordhaus and

41 Little, Amanda. "An Interview with Authors of the Controversial Essay "The Death of Environmentalism"" Grist. N.p., 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. .

45 Shellenberger. Adam Werbach, former executive director of the Sierra Club, echoed this dichotomy in a speech titled Is Environmentalism Dead?, which he delivered in December 2004 to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. “Environmentalism is dead,” he said, “in no small part because it could never match the right’s power to narrate a compelling vision of the future.”42 Following ten years of work in the environmental movement, he had come to believe that “success depends not on [the movement’s] ability to shock but rather to inspire.”

Werbach cited a focus group that he had observed Nordhaus conducting on behalf of the Apollo Alliance with a group of “undecided, working-class, swing voters” to understand which types of messages they found the most motivational. According to

Werbach, the idea of a federal investment program in research and development, manufacturing of renewable energy technologies, and energy efficiency, caused so much excitement amongst the audience that “nearly every single person in the room started to sound like Sierra Club members.” Having argued that environmentalism’s narratives were no longer relevant, he declared, “I am no longer an environmentalist,” thus effectively choosing the “new environmentalist” identity and renouncing the “old” environmentalism defined in the essay.

In contrast to Werbach, several incumbent movement actors disagreed that the environmental movement had failed to inspire action on global warming. Frances Beinecke, then-executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, argued that, “on a global scale, on a corporate scale in the U.S. and abroad, and on Capitol Hill, climate is a much more present, obvious, and unavoidable issue today than it was five years ago,”43 and that the leading environmental movement organisations had been “there at every turn forcing it on

42 Werbach, Adam. "Is Environmentalism Dead?" Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, San Francisco. Dec. 2004. Web. http://grist.org/article/werbach-reprint/. 43 Little, Amanda. "Green Leaders Say Rumors of Environmentalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated." Grist. 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/little-responses/.

46 the table.” In a similar spirit, “what the paper fails to recognize,” said Dan Carol, a board member of the Apollo Alliance, “is the progress that’s going on in terms of winning state, local, regional, and binational campaigns, and other emerging strategies beyond

Washington.”44 He argued that the bleak picture presented by Nordhaus and Shellenberger was limited to the case of national environmental legislation. Phil Clapp, then-president of the

National Environmental Trust, chimed in to remind the American movement that their country had played a lead role in designing the Kyoto Protocol, which was to come into force in February 2005.

Clapp also disagreed with the need for new frames, suggesting an alternative diagnosis for why the environmental movement had not yet seen meaningful action on global warming. He called for Death’s audiences to be patient, citing how acid rain protections in the 1980s took almost ten years to pass despite broad public support because of “an administration that disputed the science and a partisan and industry stranglehold.”45

Global warming was no different and faced the same political and industry obstacles, and climate legislation in the form of the McCain-Lieberman bill had been introduced on Capitol

Hill only a year and a half ago. It would take time to mobilise enough support for it, but

Clapp believed that it would be passed in five years. There was nothing wrong with the movement’s cultural narratives; it was simply the nature of national politics for action on global warming to take some time. The movement should thus aim to reinvent itself “not ideologically but geographically,” expanding its movement-building efforts to more regions in order to mobilise greater support for the climate bill.

Ken Ward, a long-time environmental activist, offered yet another perspective, calling attention to far more fundamental problems with the movement’s infrastructure. In a

44 Ibid. 45 Ibid.

47 five-part response to the essay, he agreed with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s characterisation of the environmental movement’s fixation on “narrow policy perspectives, tech-oriented solutions, finely delineated problem statements, and incremental approaches,” but disagreed with their prognosis for how the movement should move forward. In his view, leaving their environmental values behind to pander to “core American values” of economic growth and industrial success was the last thing that environmentalists should do. “Rather than give up our identity as environmentalists,” he wrote, “we should reaffirm green values and, however difficult it may seem today, remember that our mission is to win the world to our view.”46 The environmental movement had to find a way to “reinvigorate [its] core;” giving its activists opportunities to “engage in something powerful.” To achieve this required reinventing environmental foundations’ narrow approach to grant making. Their “myopic attention to narrowly defined, policy-oriented programs,” he argued, “[denied] support to critical infrastructure and [undermined] power-oriented work.” As an example, he pointed to

Green Corps, the yearlong program that has trained grassroots organisers for the American environmental movement over the past 22 years. Green Corps, according to Ward, had to depend mainly on contracts for field campaigns to sustain itself, as less than a quarter of its budget came from foundation funds.

Ward’s emphasis on power-oriented work reflected a growing discourse regarding the need for the movement to build power beyond the policy world in Washington. This discourse represented an approach to redefining the movement’s strategies and identity that was different from that proposed by Breakthrough, which ultimately was more concerned with the movement’s messaging than with its institutional infrastructure. It would later be championed most strongly by Bill McKibben and 350.org, and echoed in the voices of the

46 Ward, Ken. "Environmental Funders Share Blame for Movement's Weak Pulse." Grist. 18 Mar. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/ward/.

48 youth climate movement captured in my survey data.

“THE BAD BOYS OF THE MOVEMENT”

In his response to my invitation to be interviewed, a former Breakthrough fellow said, “The only thing I’d ask for is that we have a framework or operative definition for what counts as ‘the environmental movement.’ The definition has been something of a historical stumbling block and point of serious disagreement in enviro critiques.”47 Indeed the category of “environmentalist,” or even “environmental movement,” is at best arbitrary and can mean multiple different things to different people. If one were to seek an understanding of the

“environmentalist” or “environmental movement” category in Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s essay, one would find that:

● Environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like fluorescent

light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the

necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues

and industry interests in Washington, D.C.

● (In the fight for higher vehicle fuel mileage standards,) environmental groups do not

concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry.

● Environmentalists consistently put the technical policy cart before the visions-and-

values horse.

● (For nearly all 25 environmental leaders Nordhaus and Shellenberger spoke to,) the

job creation benefits of things like retrofitting every home and building in America

47 Personal interview. 13 Jan 2014.

49 were, at best, afterthoughts.48

Building on this characterisation of modern environmentalism as outdated and lacking in vision in his speech, Adam Werbach recounted the origin story of modern

American environmentalism at the first Earth Day: “They attacked the emptiness of materialism by burying a car. It was the dawn of a new, narrow movement. It was at this point that the technocrats and lobbyists took the reins of the environmental movement.

Instead of a narrative for America, instead of a vision, we were preparing for maximum daily allowable loads of toxic chemicals.”49

Besides Werbach, however, few others in the public debate agreed with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s characterisation of the environmental movement.

Disagreeing with the essay’s characterisation of the movement as narrowly focused on environmentalist constituencies, Phil Clapp argued that “efforts to forge coalitions with other parts of the progressive movement [had] been underway for decades.”50 Dan Becker, a former veteran staff member at the Sierra Club whom Nordhaus and Shellenberger had interviewed for the essay, concurred. He had spoken to one of the essay’s authors about a campaign he was about to launch, a core component of which was continuing the outreach to the labour movement that he had been engaged in. “For a number of years,” he said in an interview with me, “I had been meeting with some of the top officials in the AFL-CIO and key unions. We put together something that eventually became the Blue-Green Alliance, which is now a robust alliance between labour and environmental groups.” Yet, the essay still criticised the movement’s leaders for failing to ally with non-environmental interests.

48 Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post- Environmental World. Rep. Oakland: Breakthrough Institute, 2004. Print. 49 Werbach, Adam. "Is Environmentalism Dead?" Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, San Francisco. Dec. 2004. Web. http://grist.org/article/werbach-reprint/. 50 Little, Amanda. "Green Leaders Say Rumors of Environmentalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated." Grist. 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/little-responses/.

50 Frances Beinecke objected to the essay’s characterisation of the movement as overly focused on technical policy fixes. She wrote: “The paper by Shellenberger and Nordhaus has painted us in the policy box. You could have done that 10 years ago, but you can’t do that now. The mid-’90s were a major turning point for NRDC and the movement at large. We’re policy experts at our core, but we realized that you can’t get the policy right without the politics.”51

Perhaps the most vitriolic response came in the form of a 6,000-word essay by Carl

Pope, then-executive director of the Sierra Club, who warned that Nordhaus and

Shellenberger’s false claims and unclear proposals would distract from the real challenges the environmental movement needed to overcome. He accused the pair of ignoring the diversity in the environmental movement, arguing that the movement relied upon a variety of strategies: “policy based interest group analysis is one, but there are also place-based, values- driven and rights-rooted traditions and models to draw upon.” Pope’s critique of the essay’s overgeneralisations is best summed up in one paragraph:

“When they urge that ‘environmentalists need to tap into the creative worlds of myth-making,’ […] they utterly ignore such leaders as Wendell Berry, Paul Shepherd, Thomas Barry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Leopold. They interviewed 25 policy people, and then complain that they got only policy expertise from their interviews. Environmentalism has both poets and wonks; you don’t go to your legislative counsel for a sonnet, nor to your troubadour for a reply brief.”52

These responses were a reflection of how observers had begun to view Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s credibility and role in the environmental movement. In his interview with me, Becker expressed deep offense at being misrepresented in the essay, saying, “That fellow (Shellenberger) is rather duplicitous. He’s a liar. I think that he ignores facts and

51 Ibid. 52 Pope, Carl. "An In-depth Response to “The Death of Environmentalism”." Grist. 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/pope-reprint/.

51 wanted to write something sensational and suckered a foundation into backing him to do it, and nobody except those of us who were the butts of his attacks knew that what he was saying actually wasn’t even true.”53 Echoing this perception of the duo as simply trying to secure funding for their agenda and their newly founded Breakthrough Institute, Carl Pope wrote, “given that the chosen audience of the paper was the funders, it will be hard for many readers to avoid the suspicion that the not so hidden message was ‘fund us instead.’”

Another interviewee of mine, formerly a fundraiser for environmental campaigns, said that his reaction to the essay was “completely visceral” and “emotional.” He explained:

“I was working on environmental issues and all the groups I was helping raise money for were doing it in a way that these guys were saying was not the best way, but was hurting things. I’m sure the first time I read it I read it to pick out the things that I wanted to shred.”

However, after a second reading several years later, the same individual acknowledged,

“there’s a lot about the main centre of their approach that makes sense.”54 Thus, the essay characterised the movement and criticised its organisations in a way that others in the movement perceived as inaccurate and unfair, creating the image of them as contrarian and lacking in rigour. This image would eventually serve as a filter through which others interpreted their arguments, thereby hurting their credibility as movement actors.

Regardless, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were still a part of the climate movement, and were recognised by some as making an important contribution to the movement’s goals.

Despite his critiques of their proposed solutions, Ken Ward appreciated what they had done to open an important conversation, saying in his interview, “I think it was almost entirely positive, and I think ideally we would have had a lot of people from a variety of perspectives saying, here’s a big problem, and there would have been a coherent internal debate to say,

53 Becker, Dan. Personal interview. 10 Feb 2014. 54 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

52 here’s what we need to do.”55

Likewise, Bill McKibben, founder of grassroots environmental organisation 350.org, penned an article on Grist in response to the essay, agreeing that the environmental movement had so far “floundered in its efforts to make progress” on climate change, and calling attention to a conference entitled “What Works?” that was soon to happen in January

2005 at Middlebury College. The conference would host conversations about why the US had lagged behind the rest of the world in addressing global warming, and Nordhaus and

Shellenberger were to host a discussion of their essay at the conference, indicating that they were viewed as an important contributor to the conversation.56 Following the conference,

McKibben called them “the bad boys of the environmental movement,” explaining in his interview:

“I meant it as complimentary and that’s how they took it, I think. Just that they were challenging some of the shibboleths of environmentalism in useful ways. [...] I was struck by the work they’d done with these focus groups. You know, environmentalism in a strange way peaked very early in 1970 at the first Earth Day. There were 20 million Americans down in the streets or something like that. It was very easy for a while to win legislation. But I think the environmental movement got used to the idea that it was very popular and it was hard for it to understand that a lot of people were out of tune with them. It was useful to remind people of that.”57

---

The schematic below highlights the major social movement and social identity dynamics captured in this chapter.

55 Ward, Ken. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 56 McKibben, Bill. "Bill McKibben Sends Dispatches from a Conference on Winning the Climate-change Fight." Grist. 26 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/mckibben3/. 57 McKibben, Bill. Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014.

Diagram 3. Frame contestation, identity negotiations, and implications for social identity dynamics that resulted from the publication of The Death of Environmentalism. Note the dark grey boxes indicate the beginnings of the Breakthrough identity while the light grey box is associated with identities in the rest of the climate movement. The light grey box should not be interpreted as having emerged as a result of the essay; rather, it is a manifestation of a discourse that was already present in the movement at the time and that would later become more prominent and institutionalised.

In presenting their essay, Nordhaus and Shellenberger contested the frames of the climate movement and characterised the movement in a way that provoked a series of identity negotiations. Doing so had two implications for the social identity dynamics that would emerge in later years. One, it sparked a debate in which other actors agreed or disagreed with the frames that Nordhaus and Shellenberger proposed, thus creating a platform on which “turfs” in the environmental movement could be defined, identities could be created, and ideologies could emerge. Adam Werbach’s endorsement of their thesis solidified the distinction between “traditional” and “progressive” environmentalism, while signifying the development of a loose discourse that established a platform for the

Breakthrough discourse to develop later. This discourse characterised the “traditional”

54 environmental movement as having made no progress on global warming thus far due to its exclusive focus on uninspiring pollution regulations, and recommended that global warming be framed in a way that aligned with core American values.

At the same time, Ken Ward’s argument about the need to build a strong grassroots movement was part of a growing discourse about moving the strength of the climate movement beyond Washington, a discourse that would provide the basis for the youth movement that Bill McKibben and 350.org would come to lead.

Second, it provoked heated responses from incumbents in the movement who felt that the movement’s identity had been misrepresented in the essay, and thus felt it necessary to “reclaim” their identity. This diminished Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s credibility in the eyes of some within the movement, and seeded the “Breakthrough brand” of provocative criticism that would later colour the way in which others interpreted Breakthrough’s arguments.

Nonetheless, Nordhaus and Shellenberger were still the “bad boys of the environmental movement” – an ambiguous identity that spoke not just to the vehement opposition to their critiques, but also to the appreciation that others felt for what they had done to open an essential debate in the movement. It should be noted that at this point,

Breakthrough had not yet developed a social identity; Nordhaus and Shellenberger were merely individuals in the climate movement. Subsequent chapters will show how this individual-level identity developed into a collective identity, and how social identity dynamics provided the fuel for the relatively benign debates sparked by The Death of Environmentalism to develop into the more volatile intergroup conflict we see today.

55 4. REFORMING ENVIRONMENTALISM

Our next episode brings us three years forward to October 4, 2007, the publication date of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s first book, Break Through: From The Death of

Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, an extended and updated version of their Death of

Environmentalism thesis that sparked yet another round of debates. The book made an even clearer distinction between the “traditional” and “new” environmentalism that emerged in the previous chapter, equating the former with an excessive focus on pollution regulations, and the latter with a focus on investments in energy innovation. The book marked a significant step in the development of the Breakthrough discourse, colouring the way in which the Breakthrough community perceived the “traditional” movement and creating a set of logics that would guide Breakthrough’s policy advocacy. In the process, Breakthrough developed a distinctive brand as representatives of “the investment perspective” and as uncompromising critics of the environmental movement.

At the same time, Breakthrough was an integral part of the youth climate movement, particularly when it launched the Breakthrough Generation fellowship program for young energy policy analysts and climate activists in 2008. Yet, although Nordhaus and

Shellenberger saw in young activists the potential to develop the type of “progressive” movement they argued was needed, and although Breakthrough Generation was a sincere effort to strengthen the youth movement with rigorous policy analysis, a rift between the

Breakthrough fellows and other young activists nonetheless developed. The chapter closes with a survey of the heated debates around the cap-and-trade bills in Congress in 2009 and

2010, which marked a consequential turning point beyond which Breakthrough was seen by some as no longer a part of the climate movement.

56 “A POLITICS OF LIMITS AND A POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY”

In The Death of Environmentalism, Nordhaus and Shellenberger had proclaimed that

“modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.” Break Through marked their effort to define this “something new,” while also launching a far deeper critique of environmentalism – whereas The Death of Environmentalism found fault with the leading environmental organisations’ strategies, Break Through attacked the very values and identity of environmentalism.

The following paragraph quote from the introduction to Break Through captures the central thesis of their book:

“The story of America as an innovative nation, the increasing importance of high-tech research and development, and the role of strategic public investment have all emerged as key talking points for anyone concerned about global warming or energy independence [...] all of these are the makings of a new dream, and a new story, about America and the world. [...] We must choose between a politics of limits and a politics of possibility; a focus on investment and assets and a focus on regulation and deficits; and a discourse of affluence and a discourse of insecurity. And, most of all, we must choose between a resentful narrative of tragedy and a grateful narrative of overcoming.”58

In Break Through, Nordhaus and Shellenberger retell the birth of modern American environmentalism in the 1960s, examine environmentalism in its different forms including environmental justice activism, place-based activism, advocacy for pollution limits, and the discourse of population limits, and conclude that “yesterday’s narratives, be they of economic inequity, racial discrimination, or belching smokestacks, fail to organise the world

58 Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.

57 into a story of the present that can take us where we need to go.”59 Break Through created a concrete platform on which the Breakthrough discourse could develop. This discourse comprised a number of elements, including (1) an “innovation-centred framework” for action on global warming that was modelled “not on pollution control efforts […] but on past investments in infrastructure, as well as on research and development,” (2) a rhetoric of

“individual freedom” and “possibility”, (3) a characterisation of environmentalism as having a “longstanding position that limits to growth are the remedy for ecological crises”, (4) an insistence that economic concerns precede environmental concerns, and thus, that climate solutions should cater to this desire for material prosperity. The development of this discourse established a particular lens through which the Breakthrough community came to view the environmental movement – a dynamic whose effects will become apparent in

Chapter 5 – and also influenced the types of energy and climate policies that Breakthrough advocated.

Several critics wondered what the fuss was about, accusing Nordhaus and

Shellenberger of making enemies of their allies in the climate movement. In their view, the pair had falsely categorised the movement into two discrete camps; many others in the movement were, in fact, equally supportive of their clean energy investment agenda. Kate

Sheppard, a reporter at Grist and Prospect Magazine, wrote, “environmental groups have been out there pushing for exactly the sort of policies (i.e. federal investment in clean energy

R&D) Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue for.”60 On WattHead, the energy news blog that he founded, Jesse Jenkins, who would later become the director of Breakthrough’s Energy and

Climate Policy program, showed his exasperation with the seemingly unnecessary debate

59 Ibid. 60 Sheppard, Kate. "Life After the Death of Environmentalism." The American Prospect. 11 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. http://prospect.org/article/life-after-death-environmentalism.

58 over the book’s proposals. He pointed out the false dichotomy between a regulation-only agenda and an investment-only agenda, arguing that there was no difference between what either party in the debate was advocating for. Both parties fundamentally agreed on the need for both regulations on carbon and investment in clean energy research, as Jenkins captured in the following paragraph:

“Putting a price on carbon is necessary to send the correct market signals and to spur private sector innovation. But this innovation can and must be accelerated by public-sector research and investment. We've got to make the transition to a carbon neutral, prosperous America as quickly as possible, and that requires public as well as private investment in our common future. Auctioning emissions allowances or taxing emissions can not only send the right market signals to the private sector, but can also raise the necessary billions in funding for massive public investment to drive down the cost of clean energy technologies, a down-payment on a carbon-neutral, prosperous America.”61

In a comment on Jenkins’ post, Shellenberger argued that there was a clear difference between Break Through’s proposal and environmental movement organisations’ agendas. He wrote, “Anyone who looks at the policy agenda of the leading environmental groups who determine global warming strategy in Washington will find that there is no strategy to buy down the price of solar. Nor is there any major investment strategy whatsoever. Don't confuse green rhetoric with policy reality - you have to look at the legislation being pushed in Congress.” In his interview, Jenkins explained how he came around to understanding this difference:

“It came down to what was a matter of priorities – where do we rank these things and where do we devote our institutional and financial resources and our political capital? [...] It’s easy for us all to say in principle that we agree that you need to put a price on carbon, at the same time invest in clean energy research, subsidise clean energy deployment and high-speed rail, and

61 Jenkins, Jesse. "Attention Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Time to Call A Cease-Fire!" Watthead: Energy News and Commentary. 27 Sept. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. http://www.watthead.org/2007/09/attention-nordhaus-and- schellenberger.html.

59 invest in energy efficiency, but it’s another thing to say that given limited financial capital, institutional resources, where are you going to put your efforts?”62

This deliberate distinction between a regulation-only and investment-only environmental agenda influenced the way in which others in the movement came to see

Breakthrough. Nordhaus and Shellenberger had already been labelled the “bad boy” critics following The Death of Environmentalism; now, they and their think-tank were also recognised as champions of the “investment perspective.” Several environmentalists misread Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s agenda as being purely anti-regulation and investment-centric. In his review of the book, Bill McKibben wrote that Nordhaus and Shellenberger had an

“antipathy” towards the idea of regulations on carbon.

Jenkins explains that this misreading of their argument was “understandable [...] when you have to wade past ‘five reasons why setting a price on carbon dioxide, either through a cap and trade approach or an outright tax, cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions anywhere close to what is needed.’”63 Teryn Norris, then a staff member at

Breakthrough, clarified Breakthrough’s position as neither anti-regulation nor investment- only: “We’re spending our lives fighting for a clean energy revolution. We’ve never suggested that regulatory action be delayed. What we’ve said consistently is that regulation isn’t enough.

And we’ve never said that federal investment be limited to R&D. We’ve consistently called for these investments to be distributed along all stages of the innovation chain, including deployment.”

Some who read Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s argument as being anti-regulation then also associated them with not seeing the need to act quickly on climate change. A closer

62 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014. 63 Ibid.

60 look at Bill McKibben’s review of Break Through shows how the investment-only frame ran contrary to his understanding of the urgency of the climate crisis: “The antipathy of

Shellenberger and Nordhaus to placing limits on carbon emissions […] locks them into accepting slower progress than is necessary and possible” (emphasis added). “The IPCC data,” he wrote,

“makes it clear that it is still possible — if we begin immediately and take dramatic steps to limit carbon emissions — to hold (global warming) below the thresholds that signal catastrophe.” 64 McKibben’s logic progresses as such: catastrophic global warming is happening → expert bodies such as the IPCC say that for this to happen, limiting carbon emissions immediately is necessary → therefore, regulations on carbon are essential →

Nordhaus and Shellenberger want to see investments in clean energy over regulations on carbon → therefore, they are content with making slow progress on climate change. This perception of Nordhaus and Shellenberger as not understanding the urgency of the climate crisis has persisted; in his interview, McKibben said, “I disagree with their assessment of how dire the climate crisis is.”65

Indeed, this view of Breakthrough is not uncommon; Ken Ward said in his interview,

“They think you can incrementally solve it and I don’t see any reason to think that or where that thinking comes from.”66 Yet, Breakthrough is quick to disassociate itself from this view.

Jenkins explains, “it’s not because we don’t think there’s urgency, it’s because we know the key to getting as far along that transition as we can isn’t whether we can stop the Keystone

XL pipeline today, it’s what is a viable alternative to oil in the transportation sector.”67 The diagram below illustrates how the layers of Breakthrough’s image developed as a result of

64 McKibben, Bill. "A Review of Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus." Grist. N.p., 19 Sept. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. . 65 McKibben, Bill. Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014. 66 Ward, Ken. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 67 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

61 these dynamics.

Diagram 4. Example of how the Breakthrough identity developed following the book Break Through, beginning with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s existing “contrarian” image as a result of The Death of Environmentalism. Breakthrough’s actual argument about the need for a greater focus on clean energy investment rather than regulation appears to be an argument solely focused on the need for investment, which, when filtered through the climate movement’s belief in the need for urgent climate action, makes Breakthrough appear to be willing to accept slow progress on climate change.

“FOOT SOLDIERS IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL EFFORT”

At the same time that the book was published in 2007, the youth climate movement was growing rapidly, thanks in large part to the work of the Energy Action Coalition (EAC), a coalition of youth social and environmental justice organisations from across the country.

Founded in 2005, EAC led efforts in subsequent years to campaign for clean energy policies on campuses and in communities, organise the biennial Power Shift, the nation’s largest youth climate conference, and launch the Power Vote campaign in 2008 to generate local support for a clean energy agenda in the 2008 presidential campaign platforms. 68 At

Middlebury College in Vermont, the now-famous origin story of 350.org was just beginning.

Bill McKibben, then a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury, was working with seven students to organise Step It Up, a march to demand federal action on climate change.

Prior to the first iteration of Power Shift in 2007, an interview with Bill McKibben

68 "Our Work." Energy Action Coalition. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. http://www.energyactioncoalition.org/about/our-work.

62 was posted on It’s Getting Hot In Here, the blog for the American youth climate movement. In the interview, McKibben encouraged young people to “1-organise, 2-organise, 3-organise,” and “4-if they have some energy left, by all means change the light bulbs.” 69 Almost concurrently, Michael Shellenberger was asked in another interview on the blog if he saw the new generation of youth climate activists as a way to shift the prevailing mindset of the environmental community. He responded, “Yes. Young Americans aren’t yet locked into the older environmental movement’s pollution paradigm and politics of limits, and thus tend to be more open to embracing a more expansive framework for dealing with the challenge.”70

McKibben, Shellenberger, and Nordhaus were all scheduled to speak at Power Shift 2007.

These two interviews captured two very different approaches to defining the identity of the nascent youth movement against that of the incumbent movement. Whereas McKibben saw the youth movement as an opportunity to create a broad political movement rather than an environmentalism that was focused on small behavioural changes, Shellenberger saw the potential to galvanise young people around an investment-focused agenda rather than the regulation-focused agenda that had been dominant.

In addition to attempting to influence the youth movement through its rhetoric, staff at Breakthrough were also direct participants in the youth movement’s activities. Between

2006 and 2008, before and after the book’s publication, Nordhaus and Shellenberger hired three young individuals who were active in the youth climate movement. One of them, Jesse

Jenkins, explained his involvement with the movement in his interview: “We were writing in the same forums and talking to each other and coming from the same background. We were

69 Jenkins, Jesse. "Bill McKibben Says It’s Time to “Organize, Organize, Organize” for a Cleaner Future." It’s Getting Hot In Here, 29 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/29/bill- mckibben-says-its-time-to-organize-organize-organize-for-a-cleaner-future/. 70 Jenkins, Jesse. "Michael Shellenberger Says It’s Time for a Breakthrough on Climate Change (Part 2)." It’s Getting Hot In Here, 31 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/10/31/michael- shellenberger-says-its-time-for-a-breakthrough-part-2/.

63 in one way or another foot soldiers in the environmental effort [...] I’m friends with and know and continue to talk with the organising team at 350 and staff at other environmental groups.”71

Jenkins and the two others played a significant role in bringing the philosophy proposed in Break Through to their networks in the movement, co-founding and then co- directing the Breakthrough Generation (BTG) program, Breakthrough’s summer fellowship program, in 2008. It was originally conceived as a three-day-long youth conference in April

2008 that would lead up to a fellowship that summer and another institute in the fall. The summer fellowship was originally designed to “support Fellows in the pursuit of independent projects that both achieve on-the-ground local green solutions and advance the larger movement for a major national investment in clean energy,” while the conference in

April was aimed at bringing together “the country’s top young progressives and post- environmental thinkers and activists […] to outline a vision and a strategy for a new progressive movement, one that leaves behind the old generation’s narrow and complaint- based politics.”72 In his interview, BTG co-founder Teryn Norris described the excitement he had felt about BTG, explaining that “this was an important strand of the climate movement that we really did want to build out” by “[fostering] a new generation of energy and climate advocates and policy experts and technologists that understood the challenge at a global scale.”73

Breakthrough was also active in designing and campaigning for the types of investment- and innovation-centric solutions called for in Break Through. A 2009 press release on Breakthrough’s website reports that Breakthrough and over a hundred other universities,

71 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014. 72 Norris, Teryn. "$5,000 Breakthrough Generation Fellowships." It's Getting Hot In Here. 21 Feb. 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/02/21/5000-breakthrough-fellowships/. 73 Norris, Teryn. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

64 professional institutions, and student groups co-signed a letter to the U.S. Senate urging it to support the Obama administration’s RE-ENERGYSE initiative, a scheme to develop energy education programs at K-12 schools and universities.74

Additionally, in their interviews, both Norris and Jenkins described Breakthrough’s effort to support the message of clean energy innovation in the 2008 presidential election candidates’ campaign platforms. Norris said, “We wrote a proposal to the Obama campaign suggesting that he essentially adopt a new Apollo project for clean energy as part of the

Obama campaign platform [...] Commit to investing $300 billion over ten years in clean energy [...] it took a little while but he ended up really liking it, October 2007, Obama gave a speech outlining his energy and climate plan, and committed to investing $150 billion.”75

Jenkins corroborated, “We put out a public campaign called New American Energy that was strikingly similar to the eventual theme for Obama’s 2008/09 energy agenda, called New

Energy for America. Cap-and-trade was mentioned but the central message wasn’t about climate change or capping carbon 80 by 50, which is a pretty technocratic message to get

America excited about, it was more about the kind of energy future we wanted to build – an energy future powered by renewable energy, by clean energy sources here in America, built by American industry and installed by American workers, that reduced our dependence on foreign oil and improved public health, and that also helped reduce carbon emissions.”76

74 Jenkins, Jesse. "Press Release: Over 100 Groups Urge Congress to Support Obama’s Energy Education Initiative." Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 21 July 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/over_100_groups_urge_congress. 75 Norris, Teryn. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 76 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

“INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE ANTI-CLIMATE DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN”

Yet, 2008, the year of Breakthrough Generation (BTG)’s launch, saw a growing divide between Breakthrough and the youth climate movement. Two dynamics are worth noting here: the growing perception of the Breakthrough community as policy wonks who criticised the movement from afar but did not participate in movement-building work, and the divisive debate about whether the Waxman-Markey bill, a legislative effort to pass a national cap-and-trade program, was sufficient for reducing carbon emissions in the long- term and therefore worth the movement’s investment in it.

The first section in this chapter described how the publication of Break Through and the debate following it provided a platform on which Nordhaus and Shellenberger and the

Breakthrough community became notorious for their unrelenting criticism of the environmental movement and staunch advocacy for clean energy investment. When BTG was launched, it inevitably became associated with this “brand,” which coloured the way in which other young climate activists perceived the BTG fellows.

Much of the debate about Breakthrough’s role in the youth climate movement was captured on It’s Getting Hot In Here (IGHIH), the online hub for the movement. From the very launch of BTG, there was already evidence that Breakthrough carried a particular brand.

A response to a blog post announcing the launch of the program read, “I really think

Breakthrough is doing more to disrupt the current climate/environmental movement than actually bringing the much-needed, fresh, deeper, systemic analysis that they paint pictures of in their introductions. Shellenberger and Nordhaus display incredible arrogance and an amazing lack of tact.” Another comment on the BTG blog describes the association of BTG

66 with Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s style of criticism: “You at Breakthrough Generation have been handed a formidable challenge. As representatives of Shellenberger and Nordhaus, you are expected to criticise, expected to find fault and not yet expected to present solutions.”77

While it is difficult to ascertain how widely held this view of BTG was, several more posts and comments on the blog throughout the summer of 2008 demonstrated that it was not uncommon. Consider the following comments that reveal a few core reasons why a rift between the BTG fellows and others in the youth movement began to develop (emphases added):

“Do you all ever talk about the ethics/viability of a bunch of people sitting around intellectualising, with the stated goal of overtaking the movement’s paradigm while those of us too busy doing work in communities to intellectualise with you all day have no say?”

“What do the Breakthrough fellows and Institute do other than write blog posts? Seriously? Do you all actually organise in communities and on the street or do you just read policy papers and have heated arguments over Fair Trade mocha lattes? Until you’ve done serious groundwork, I don’t see how you all can add anything to ‘the movement.’”

Breakthrough has essentially funded a small elite group [seemingly affluent from their bios, but I could be wrong] to put out their pro-corp, globalisation and anti-activist message. I don’t see this as developing a progressive intellectual wing of the climate movement, this is more like manufacturing consent with no consideration of power and privilege.”

“I think there is a place for critical dialogue and critique in our movement. We DO need to have our assumptions challenged. I personally would like to have that coming from people whose voices we haven’t heard, people of color, low income people, indigenous peoples and frontline/impacted communities, rather than an assortment of youth who don’t represent a departure from the predominantly white, economically privileged demographic which already

77 Norris, Teryn. "Breakthrough Generation Launches." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 10 June 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/06/10/breakthrough-generation-launches/.

67 overwhelms the youth climate movement.”78

These were comments written in response to a blog post by a BTG fellow who described the fellows’ appreciation for the approach to critical thinking that BTG sought to encourage. She wrote that BTG’s “criticisms of the youth energy movement are motivated by a deep commitment to the actualisation of [the movement’s] goals,” and that she believed that “there are significant problems with the paradigm and approach embodied by pollution- oriented strategies to combat climate change.” These two attributes – a spirit of criticism and an insistence on investment in clean energy research as a more powerful emissions reduction strategy – were in several ways the roots of the growing divide between the BTG fellows and the youth movement.

At the heart of the comments above were negotiations over the identity and norms of the youth climate movement. While the BTG fellows saw their work as “constructive criticism,” others on IGHIH felt that they were taking up excessive space on the blog. One commenter wrote, “since Breakthrough started dominating IGHIH, it has become a much more homogeneous space,” expressing her view that the BTG fellows were eroding the heterogeneity that they wanted their movement to be defined by. This then created the image of BTG as “affluent” and “elite” intellectuals who did not contribute to “real” movement-building work in communities, unlike others in the youth movement. In this negotiation, it became clear what many in the youth movement valued and wanted their movement to be identified by – inclusiveness, justice, and grassroots power – elements that they felt Breakthrough, in their style of criticism, either violated or did not embrace.

Not only was Breakthrough perceived as having violated the norms of the youth

78 Aki, Helen. "Does Unity Demand Uniformity of Thought?" It's Getting Hot In Here. 12 June 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/06/12/breakthrough-and-the-generation-of-dissent-conflict- friction-and-change/.

68 movement, their investment-centred framing of the climate problem also failed to resonate with some in the youth movement. Others in the youth movement were also quick to associate the BTG fellows with embracing a “pro-corporate, neo-liberal ideology,” faulting them for their blind hope that “some future ‘Breakthrough’ technology will solve the climate crisis.”79

In a comment on a blog post, Phil Aroneanu, one of the seven Middlebury College students who helped launch 350.org, explained why this message failed to resonate with him.

Focusing only on investment in clean energy research was a symptom of “techno-optimism,” a false hope that would “undercut real grassroots action for political and cultural change, and add fodder to those pesky conservatives who want nothing more than to give out more money to industry.”80

To those in the youth movement who saw climate solutions as falling into the categories of fundamental political change versus easy technological fixes, of systems change versus status quo solutions, Breakthrough’s excessive focus on pushing for investment in

R&D clearly belonged to the latter category. A comment on a 2010 post on IGHIH that quoted Nordhaus and Shellenberger and advocated for a focus on clean energy investments revealed another reason why this frame failed to resonate with some: “In my opinion, one of the most important outcomes of [the UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen] was the solidification of a global climate justice movement. […] Would a focus on cheap, clean energy alone allow for collaboration with the climate justice (and other justice)

79 Norris, Teryn. "Breakthrough Generation Launches." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 10 June 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/06/10/breakthrough-generation-launches/. 80 Graves, Richard. "Give Me a Break." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 14 Apr. 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/04/14/give-me-a-break/.

69 movements?”81 These comments hint at the growth of a discourse within the youth climate movement focused on climate justice, which would later become a defining feature of the movement that will be revisited in the next chapter. The schematic below captures the dynamics described above.

Diagram 5. How BTG fellows’ interactions with the youth movement led to yet more stereotypes of Breakthrough being created as a result of the misalignment of the two groups’ norms and discourses.

In 2009, the year after the launch of Breakthrough Generation, the site of the debate between Breakthrough and others in the climate movement shifted to the discussions about the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that was moving through the U.S. Congress. In The

Climate War, his account of the environmental NGO-business alliance’s efforts to push cap- and-trade legislation through Congress in the years 2007-2010, journalist Eric Pooley describes the internal debate within the environmental movement over the usefulness of

81 Kimbrell, Mark. "Time for the Climate Movement to Take a Look in the Mirror." It's Getting Hot In Here. 26 Jan. 2010. Web. 01 May 2014. http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/01/26/time-for-the-climate-movement-to- take-a-look-in-the-mirror/.

70 cap-and-trade as a piece of climate legislation. Some within the movement worried that cap- and-trade, as a market-based climate solution, represented “an overeagerness to cavort with the enemy,” and Dr Barry Commoner, one of the early founders of the modern environmental movement, wrote that environmental groups would “become hostage to the corporations’ power” and would “take on the ideology of their captors.”82 Echoing this in an article on Grist, Ken Ward wrote that Waxman-Markey “ought to be opposed by U.S. environmentalists for obvious and pragmatic reasons.” It was a “weak” and “joke” bill that was an example of “mainstream” environmental organisations “making common cause with corporations.” Instead, environmentalists had to “take to the streets” and “draw a line distinguishing functional climate action from window dressing.”83

Likewise, Breakthrough was heavily critical of the bill. On its website, it published a

20-part analysis that projected what impact the bill would have on greenhouse gas reductions and clean energy innovation based on its own analyses and other analyses by organisations including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Union of Concerned Scientists. The articles concluded that the bill would over-allocate pollution permits and therefore “require no reduction in carbon emissions over the first two to five years of the program,” and that the renewable electricity standards specified in the bill would “not increase renewable electricity generation and might actually reduce it.”

Breakthrough’s critiques received heavy coverage in the media, appearing on the

Wall Street Journal, Time, National Public Radio, and the prominent environmental blog,

Yale Environment 360. Paralleling this view, a Grist article by a fellow at the Brookings

Institution wrote that the bill did not do enough to “promote clean energy innovation and

82 Pooley, Eric. The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to save the Earth. New York: Hyperion, 2010. Print. 83 Ward, Ken. "Why Do U.S. Environmentalists Remain Irrationally Committed to a Losing Strategy?" Grist. 10 June 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/2009-06-08-enviros-losing-strategy/.

71 game-changing technology breakthroughs.”84

Two dynamics in this debate are important for our story about the growing schism between Breakthrough and the climate movement. In the opposition to the cap-and-trade bill detailed above, we can detect two key strands of critiques. Both labelled cap-and-trade a meek and insufficient solution. One saw it as a result of the mainstream environmental movement’s willingness to kowtow to interested corporations, and the other blamed it on

U.S. environmentalism’s fixation with the “mental model imposed by the pollution paradigm”85 and failure to recognise the need for breakthrough innovation in clean energy technologies.

According to the first, mainstream organisations such as the Environmental Defense

Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council could no longer be trusted to fight for climate action, and the fight needed to be brought to the grassroots. The second, championed by Breakthrough, recommended that the bill’s advocates recognise that stringent emissions reductions were politically impossible, concede to a low price on carbon credits, and dedicate the revenues generated to developing clean energy technologies and infrastructure.86 Which narrative about cap-and-trade remains dominant in the youth climate movement today will become clear in the next chapter.

Next, although Breakthrough was not the only opponent to the Waxman-Markey bill, it was the one that was labelled “anti-environmental” by Joe Romm, a fellow at the Center for American Progress and founding editor of the blog Climate Progress. Undoubtedly, this was in part because Breakthrough received considerable media coverage for its attacks on

84 Muro, Mark. "Boost Innovation Investments to Make Waxman-Markey Bill a Game-changer." Grist. N.p., 2 June 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://grist.org/article/2009-06-01-boost-innovation-in-aces/. 85 Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. "The Flawed Logic of the Cap-and-Trade Debate." Yale Environment 360. 19 May 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2153. 86 Ibid.

72 the bill, and thus posed a greater threat to advocates of the bill. At the same time,

Breakthrough’s established brand of contrarianism, association with an “investment-only” ideology, and perceived mischaracterisation of the environmental movement – dynamics that have been explored in the preceding chapters – had already placed a dent in Breakthrough’s credibility, to which was now added yet another red mark on their “environmentalist” scorecard.

In one of many articles criticising Breakthrough’s lack of rigour, Romm included a reprint of an article by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle that rebutted an essay by Nordhaus and Shellenberger titled “The Green Bubble: Why environmentalism keeps imploding.” In it, Brulle accused the pair not just of mischaracterising environmentalism as “based in liberal elite circles and searching for social redemption in premodern, aesthetic lifestyles,” but also of creating a false dichotomy between such a romanticist environmentalism and economic modernisation, thus reinforcing

“rigid” and “uncritical” ideologies that would only make the task of finding effective and nuanced climate solutions more difficult.87

Building off this image of Nordhaus and Shellenberger as both (1) inaccurate and (2) a threat to the movement’s goals, Romm labelled Breakthrough “non-credible sources whose core arguments and analyses are indistinguishable from the anti-climate disinformation campaign driven by fossil fuel companies and conservative media, politicians and think tanks,”88 thus decidedly associating Breakthrough with actors who had no place in the climate movement. In another article, he wrote, “Other than anti-science conservatives and

87 Romm, Joe. "Memo to Media: Don’t Be Suckered by Bad Analyses from the Breakthrough Institute the Way Time, WSJ, NPR, and The New Republic Have Been." ThinkProgress. 22 May 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/05/22/204144/waxman-markey-offsets-breakthrough-institute- shellenberger-nordhaus-media/. 88 Ibid.

73 the Breakthrough Institute, I don’t know any independent group who thinks we could possibly stabilize atmospheric concentrations of global warming pollution at safe levels without raising prices for dirty energy.”89 Romm’s criticism marked a new level of in- and out-group distinction between Breakthrough and the climate movement: not only was

Breakthrough misrepresenting environmentalism in the eyes of the public and promoting an investment-centered agenda that did not seem to match the urgency of the climate crisis, it was also advocating for an unambitious price on carbon that placed it firmly in the camp of the climate deniers and outside of the climate movement.

It should be noted here that Joe Romm has been one of Breakthrough’s most visible critics and that the views of Breakthrough captured in his writing represent some of the more extreme stereotypes of Breakthrough. For instance, a blogger on IGHIH wrote that, despite Romm’s critiques, he knows “to [his] bones that [Jesse Jenkins] is dedicated to climate solutions and so is every one of the Breakthrough Generation fellows at the

Breakthrough Institute.”90 Nonetheless, Romm’s views of Breakthrough are by no means isolated; here, I use this as a case study to illustrate precisely how the construction of group identities contributed to the breakdown in communication between Breakthrough and the climate movement.

---

Both Break Through and the Breakthrough Generation program were deliberate efforts to build support in the movement for an advocacy agenda that was more focused on investment in clean energy R&D.

89 Romm, Joe. "The Dynamic Duo of Disinformation and Doubletalk Return." ThinkProgress. 22 Apr. 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2009/04/22/203995/the-breakthrough-institute- shellenberger-nordhaus-pielk/. 90 Graves, Richard. "Give Me a Break." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 14 Apr. 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. .

74 In attempting to typecast a heterogeneous movement as universally naysaying, focused on regulations, and stuck in the past, Nordhaus and Shellenberger inevitably received criticism from many others who were quick to reclaim the identity of “their” movement the way they understood it. At the same time, differentiating Breakthrough from

“traditional” environmentalism both created a lens through which the Breakthrough community came to perceive the climate movement, and created a Breakthrough “brand” of contrarianism and “techno-optimism.” We see evidence of the pervasiveness of this “brand” in the way in which others in the youth movement viewed the Breakthrough Generation fellows, and how others in the climate movement responded to Breakthrough in the cap- and-trade debates. And while Breakthrough had wanted to galvanise the youth movement around an advocacy agenda focused on investment in clean energy innovation and a spirit of critical thinking, this was but one of many political identities and cultural narratives that were developing in the youth movement at the time – narratives of grassroots power, social and economic justice, and systemic political change. These narratives have remained dominant in the youth movement, as will be explored in the next chapter.

75 5. ABANDONING ENVIRONMENTALISM

“If fossil fuel companies want to change, here’s how we’d know they were serious. One, they’d need to stop lobbying in Washington. Two, they’d need to stop exploring for new hydrocarbons. The first rule of holes is that when you are in one stop digging, ok. The third thing they’d need to do is go to work with the rest of us to figure out a plan where they turn themselves into energy companies, not fossil fuel companies, and figure out how to keep 80% of those reserves underground.” – Bill McKibben, Do The Math (2013 movie)

“Can you be an environmentalist and be pro-nuclear? In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pro-nuclear?” – Pandora’s Promise (2013 movie endorsed by Breakthrough)

For all the work that it has done to reimagine paradigms in the environmental movement, where is the Breakthrough Institute in the climate movement today? A look at

350.org’s website gives one an immediate sense of how the organisers at 350.org understand their mission: “We’re building a global climate movement – climate-focused campaigns, projects and actions led from the bottom up by people in 188 countries.”91 By contrast, an article headline on the “Energy and Climate” page of the Breakthrough Institute’s website reads, “Methane Leakage From Cows Higher Than From Natural Gas Development,”92 seeking to debunk what they see as overstated claims about the threat of methane leakage from natural gas drilling.

This final episode in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates illustrates how

Breakthrough and the youth climate movement have gravitated in different directions and how they each have goals that the other group either goes against or does not fit into. The

91 "350.org." Web. 01 May 2014. http://350.org/. 92 Trembath, Alex. "Methane Leakage from Cows Higher than from Natural Gas Development -- New Data from EPA, DOE, and EDF Confirm Declining Methane Leakage from Gas Prodution."Breakthrough Institute. 6 Mar. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and- climate/methane-leakage-from-cows-higher-than-from-natural-gas-development.

76 first section examines how individuals who identify with each group understand their mission. The second explores how the climate movement perceives Breakthrough today.

The last rounds out our story by studying how the Breakthrough community perceives the environmental and the climate movement, at the same time highlighting a few key reasons why Breakthrough tends to make generalisations about the movement. Breakthrough has consciously “abandoned” environmentalism in two senses: one, it is deliberately creating a new discourse of environmentalism that leaves behind what it perceives to be the “old” values of environmentalism; and two, its primary audience has shifted considerably and it is no longer making a conscious attempt to reform the narratives in the climate movement.

“THERE’S LESS SENSE THAT WE’RE ALL PART OF THE SAME MOVEMENT”

When we started off in 2008 there was a better sense that we were all part of the movement, and it was about arguing with friends about how to do this right and achieve our common goals. I think we still have common goals, but because of a lot of the history that has surrounded that debate over the last 10 years, there’s less sense that we’re all part of the same movement. So now it’s more about crafting alternative narratives and an alternative group of voices than it is about shifting the discussion amongst the mainstream environmental groups.93 – Jesse Jenkins, former Energy and Climate Director at Breakthrough

As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, the 2005 New York Times article on the debate sparked by The Death of Environmentalism called Breakthrough “a new organisation that advocates putting progressive values to work to solve problems.” This is aligned with

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s original approach to reimagining environmentalism in both their essay and the book. The Death of Environmentalism used figures from Nordhaus and

Shellenberger’s political opinion polls to demonstrate that mainstream environmentalism

93 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

77 was out of touch with what the average American was concerned about, arguing that the movement had to modify its frames to be aligned with the values of the majority of the

American public. Similarly, in Chapter 4, Breakthrough’s goal was to develop more culturally resonant narratives for the climate movement to catalyse the transition to a renewable energy economy.

Consider how differently the Breakthrough community conceives of its goals today.

One of the first questions in my survey for former Breakthrough fellows asked what they thought Breakthrough’s foremost goal was. Of the fourteen responses, five made explicit mention of “modernisation,” “human development” and/or “high energy” in describing the type of future that Breakthrough seeks to enable through its advocacy. Enabling energy access for developing countries and imagining a high-energy world has become a far more dominant narrative in Breakthrough’s articulation of its goals.

How does this influence the types of policies it advocates for? The epigraph to this chapter illustrates a core focus of Breakthrough’s advocacy today, investment in advanced nuclear technologies. A former fellow’s response to my survey also describes this shift:

“When Jesse Jenkins was heading up energy,” he wrote, “(Breakthrough’s goal) was toward innovation to make clean energy cheap. Now it is much more focused on nuclear advocacy and supporting shale gas.” Indeed, this shift is reflected in the “Publications” section of

Breakthrough’s website. A quick look reveals that Breakthrough’s analyses were focused on clean energy innovation and deployment up until 2012, after which the energy-related publications feature titles such as “Coal Killer: How Natural Gas Fuels the Clean Energy

Revolution” and “How To Make Nuclear Cheap.”

If the same survey had been conducted in 2008, the responses from Breakthrough fellows and from non-Breakthrough fellows working in the youth climate movement would

78 perhaps have been more similar. The survey responses from the 49 self-identified members of the environmental movement illustrate how differently members of the climate movement understand their goals. One of my survey questions asked, “What is the environmental movement’s strategy for addressing climate change? Do you agree with this strategy?” It is, of course, impossible to generalise across the entire movement as having a single strategy or goal; however, what is important here is the difference not within the movement, but between the movement and Breakthrough. The table below is a sample of the most common types of strategies cited:

Strategies (what Sample response No. of they are / what similar they need to be) responses Oppose the fossil Harnessing people power to oppose the corporations taking 11 fuel industry, advantage of our Earth. It is a valiant and appropriate strategy, physically or however we seem to be fighting an uphill battle. politically Build the strength It seems to be to be limited to focusing on policy solutions and using 11 of the movement internal backroom politics to get those policy solutions implemented. by increasing its The same set of people come up with the policy ideas with little or size, increasing its no community engagement to build a base around those ideas. diversity, or shifting Unfortunately, big oil and other corporate interests keep winning in the fight to local those backroom deals. We need to switch our strategy to involve problems greater movement building including engaging and building leadership in communities most impacted by the issues. Education about The scientists that are the baseline of the movement are often 5 climate change drowned out leaving non-scientists to discuss this very very very complex issue. I think that the scientists need to be in the center of the stage and in the center of the education system. Climate change is a fact, assuming the individual believes in science. The climate movement needs to be based in education not media. Advocate for Carbon tax or cap-and-trade 3 emissions reduction policies Promote renewable Invest heavily in renewable energy (tactics: lobby policy-makers at 3 energy the local, state, and national level; build new solar plants, etc.)

79 As can be seen, responses most often cited (1) opposition to the fossil fuel industry through tactics such as divestment campaigns and civil disobedience actions to resist the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure, and (2) broadening the movement, with a distinct focus on moving the climate fight from Washington to the grassroots, and on allying with oppressed populations involved in other justice movements.

Interviews with leaders in the environmental movement surfaced very similar priorities. A representative at a leading environmental movement organisation distinguished his organisation from Breakthrough by saying, “At first (Breakthrough’s) critiques were actually very true, that the environmental movement wasn’t being as effective as it could be.

But our way of dealing with that is building a new kind of movement, a new kind of message, testing out different kinds of campaigns, working with different organizers, doing what’s actually productive, the work of building a movement. They just kept on criticizing other people’s strategies.”94 The Better Future Project, a young non-profit affiliated with 350.org, sees its two core goals as leadership development and movement building around climate change. When asked when he felt most proud of the climate movement, Craig Altemose,

BFP’s executive director, said that he feels most proud when he “sees people standing up and taking pride,”95 citing their successes in delaying the Keystone XL pipeline and shutting down the Brayton Point coal plant in Massachusetts.

Undoubtedly, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, has provided much of the fuel for the youth movement’s focus on opposing the fossil fuel industry and building a grassroots climate movement. In the fall of 2012, he and 350.org launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign that has since been launched in U.S. colleges and institutions on a nationwide tour,

“Do the Math.” Rallying support for the divestment campaign, he said:

94 Personal interview. 13 Jan 2014. 95 Altemose, Craig. Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

80 “We think one thing the fossil fuel industry cares about is money, so that’s what we’re gonna go after. You wanna take away our planet and our future, we’re gonna try and take away your money, we’re gonna tarnish your brand. This industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license, their veneer of respectability.”

Speaking to the power that this message had for movement-building, one of my interviewees said, “When [McKibben] stood up on stage a year and a half ago and said, we’re declaring war against the fossil fuel industry, that made me excited, because in my organising experience those types of clear lines were what made me stand up, take sides, move things forward.” Echoing this focus on preventing any further investments in fossil fuels, prominent environmental activist Ken Ward said, “Jim Hansen wrote a paper saying, this is what has to happen globally. Fine, that’s what we’re for. We are for shutting down fossil fuels. Well prior to 350 nobody was saying that. Now Sierra Club and others are.”96

It is clear how Breakthrough’s advocacy agenda does not fit the climate movement’s goals today. One of my interviewees argued, “when an independent group like [the IEA] that has been cheerleading oil and gas extraction is saying the entire world needs to stop by 2017, to have people who claim to be on the right side of this thing in this country championing more gas production seems morally reprehensible […] I think it really confuses the issue to have people who claim to be champions of the environment, who claim to care about climate action, cheerleading the extraction of more fossil fuels.”97 (Implication: People who are champions of the environment should necessarily be opposed to the extraction of more fossil fuels.)

Earlier in the interview, before I had described Breakthrough’s current focus on nuclear and natural gas advocacy, the same climate organiser described Breakthrough’s

96 Ward, Ken. Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 97 Altemose, Craig. Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

81 objectives as much more focused on “idea generation,” on keeping in mind “the macro level of what we need to do as a society” rather than “supporting specific bills or policies.” This speaks to the role that Breakthrough played in the climate movement when this climate organiser first got to know Breakthrough in the early years of the Generation program.

Whereas Breakthrough was seen as making an intellectual contribution to the fight to achieve meaningful federal action on climate change in those years, today, Breakthrough’s activities are seen as working against the climate movement’s goals.

As well as having very different stated goals, Breakthrough is also no longer attempting to engage the youth climate movement to induce changes in their strategies, in contrast to their approach described in Chapter 4. Breakthrough continues to engage leaders in the environmental movement in public debates; in a current staff member’s words, “[they] still very much do consider the old school of environmentalism as a very primary audience

[…] [engaging] with both the ideology and the ideas and personalities of the environmental movement is still very much a part of [their] DNA.”98

However, the purpose of engaging with the movement is no longer to reform the movement in order to achieve some explicit shared goal in the way that Breakthrough

Generation was originally designed to do. In former Energy and Climate Director Jesse

Jenkins’ words, the failure of Waxman-Markey “removed climate change from the public debate for quite some time until just recently. [Breakthrough] stopped engaging with the debate on climate change for a time because there wasn’t a debate. […] The environmental movement went inward and then came back with the message that we needed to take the fight directly to the fossil fuel industry and the grassroots and that the fight in Washington was not succeeding. […] [Breakthrough and the environmental movement] went off in two

98 Personal interview. 22 Jan 2014.

82 different directions and stopped talking to each other as much, there isn’t as much of a public discussion around this stuff.”99 Instead, Breakthrough has shifted its strategic focus to expanding its influence in other circles, notably, more academic, media, and professional policy circles.

“PROFESSIONAL GADFLIES”

How do members of the environmental movement see Breakthrough today, particularly in relation to their organisational or collective goals? An observer in the environmental movement who indicated that she does “not really keep tabs on what

[Breakthrough does]” nonetheless said that “they are professional gadflies who have made their living fabricating paper tigers or man-bites-dog stories that garner media attention but that have never to my knowledge advanced anyone's thinking on any subject or any real world solutions to the problems we face.”100 That this is her impression of Breakthrough despite her current lack of contact with the organisation indicates the extent of the negativity that the Breakthrough name carries in the environmental movement. A colleague of hers also mentioned having received negative reviews of Breakthrough from her colleagues although she personally had not had much prior contact with Breakthrough, indicating how entrenched this stereotype of Breakthrough has become. She reported that her colleagues

“think that [Breakthrough] has created a brand for themselves but that their actual analysis lacks depth and scientific rigour.”101

99 Jenkins, Jesse. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014. 100 Email interview. 24 Feb 2014. 101 Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014.

83 This view of Breakthrough as not adding value to the environmental movement despite continuing to be critical of it was echoed by two of my other interviewees. One of them, who indicated an initial appreciation for Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s ability to challenge existing paradigms in the movement in The Death of Environmentalism, commented,

“I think they’ve since gone on to challenging them over and over again past the point of it being useful and maybe now they’re a little less bad and a little more repetitive,” referring to their original “bad boys” image.102 Another said, “The Breakthrough folks spend most of their time criticising whether it’s 350’s, or the Sierra Club’s or the NRDC’s strategy […] without actually laying out a believable theory of change […] they’ve written themselves into irrelevance.”103

Amongst the youth climate movement that made up most of my survey sample, what is far more common than having a negative impression of Breakthrough is having no impression whatsoever. Of the 49 respondents to my survey, 9 had heard about

Breakthrough, and only 2 could confidently list a few impressions that they had of the organisation, with the remainder indicating that they were not sure how they would describe them.

“ENVIRONMENTALISM REALLY DOES NEED TO DIE”

The negativity that the Breakthrough name carries in climate activist circles is mirrored in how the Breakthrough community perceives the environmental movement.

Consider the following list of adjectives that former Breakthrough fellows used to describe

102 Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014. 103 Personal interview. 13 Jan 2014.

84 the environmental movement when prompted by the survey: “Malthusian,” “nostalgic,”

“focused on behavioural changes,” “apocalyptic,” “self-righteous,” “technology-phobic.”

Within this list alone are three critiques of environmentalism: a cultural, a dispositional, and a strategic critique. Cultural critiques are those that hit at the values of the movement and the substance of what the movement is striving towards. Dispositional critiques identify behavioural or demographic characteristics of the movement. Strategic critiques are those that identify how the movement is not being as effective as it could be. The table below shows how different adjectives fall into each of these categories:

Type of critique Adjectives Cultural Malthusian, backwards, return to simple living, organic, nostalgic, focused on behavioural changes, technology-phobic Dispositional Small-minded, affluent, fragmented, apocalyptic, uncompromising, self-righteous, stale, rigid, ideological, hypocritical Strategic Successful for local but not global problems

Most of the adjectives fall within the “cultural” and “dispositional” categories.

Compare this with the original language used in The Death of Environmentalism:

“Environmentalists are putting the technical policy cart before the visions-and-values horse;”

“Environmental groups don’t concern themselves with the needs of either unions or the industry.” Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s original critique was primarily strategic in nature.

While there is no way to present the same survey to a hypothetical class of Breakthrough

Generation fellows in 2004, one might imagine that the adjectives they may have used to describe the movement then may have included words such as “technocratic” and “narrowly focused” – words that would fall within the “strategic” or “dispositional” categories rather than the “cultural” category.

85 In his interview, Nordhaus explained how this shift came about as a strategic decision:

“Particularly around climate change, we initially felt that the entire framing was just wrong, and that basically the idea was to just scare the crap out of people. But I think over the last decade or so, really just getting clear that the problem is a lot deeper, that it’s not just a messaging problem, that environmentalism, ideologically, really really, was out of touch with reality and was only actually possible for postmodern elites living in post-industrial societies who had completely lost track of all of the basic context that even allowed them to care about the environment in the way they did. […] So if you want to look at why a decade ago we would’ve been trying to convince environmentalists to use different strategies, tactics and policies, why now the relationship is more adversarial, it’s because now we increasingly go, well, environmentalism is the problem, it’s not the solution. And the environmental agenda has never been about climate change. That agenda existed before there was climate change, and it was lifted and applied to climate change as a justification to do a bunch of things that Amory Lovins and Shumacher and Barry Commoner all wanted to do in the 60s and 70s. And that was really a reaction to post-war modernization and industrialization. And maybe that made some sense in 1965 but sitting where we are today, it makes no sense at all. […] We’re saying that environmentalism really does need to die.”104

It is worth noting that at the heart of this reconstruction of the “environmentalist” identity is still a strategic critique, one similar in spirit to that which motivated Nordhaus and

Shellenberger’s original essay. Today, this critique manifests in accusations of the movement being opposed to nuclear power and natural gas, which Breakthrough sees as essential energy options in a low-carbon energy future. A former Breakthrough staff member recognised that environmental advocates now have a more sophisticated understanding of the role of private finance and public investment in clean energy research and development, but followed that with, “Where I do think there is still a hindrance and it could be very problematic ultimately for the climate movement is on nuclear power. The underlying

104 Nordhaus, Ted. Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

86 scepticism of technology, a lot of the remnants of the 1970s and 1980s makes it have a very knee-jerk reaction to the idea of using nuclear power to address our climate problems.”105

Thus, the cultural aspect of the critique is fundamentally situated in a strategic critique of what the environmental movement is not doing right. What is of interest, then, is tracing how this strategic critique, when couched in a fundamentally cultural critique, further closes off communication between Breakthrough and the movement.

Within the paragraph quote above are at least three layers of identity-related critiques that Nordhaus makes of climate activists. One, there is one version of “the environmental agenda” in American environmentalism – that developed during the 1960s and 1970s, which

Nordhaus describes in another part of the interview as “small is beautiful,” “shrinking the human footprint” and “harmonising human systems with nature.” Two, those shaping the climate change agenda in the environmental movement today necessarily derive their philosophy from this particular strand of environmentalism. And three, environmentalists are “postmodern elites living in post-industrial societies.”

Given how broad the term “environmentalism” is and how diverse a group of people would claim to be “environmentalists,” it is clear how making a generalisation about what the values of environmentalism are and who environmentalists are would already be an impossible task. It is even more difficult to extrapolate from that to state that the environmental movement leaders who are shaping campaigns on climate change today are necessarily influenced by these particular values of environmentalism. The increasing depth of Nordhaus’ (and Breakthrough’s) critique over the past decade, therefore, has created more avenues, and deeper avenues, for heated debates over the meaning of the

“environmentalist” identity to occur.

105 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

87 Breakthrough’s generalisations about the movement are in part strategic and in part authentic. A few of my interviewees indicated that Breakthrough’s organisational strategies depend upon this discursive approach. A former staff member at Breakthrough explained,

“Breakthrough has a certain theory of change, and their approach to social change is based on shifting paradigms. For the most part they believe that paradigms do not shift without conflict and debate.”106 Another former staff member built on this, saying, “It’s a difficult challenge for anybody writing on this sort of thing to paint [their interlocutors] with a charitable but sharp brush when [they’re] trying to start a public debate.” 107 Creating generalisations about the environmental movement is thus part of Breakthrough’s method of reducing the complexity of the movement and focusing on key dimensions that can then be used to launch a public criticism of the movement.

To an extent, however, Breakthrough’s generalisations do stem from a genuine perception that much of the environmental movement is homogeneous, or at least looks homogeneous from the outside. When I asked one of my interviewees if he felt that the environmental movement is indeed homogeneous in sharing values and habits such as a scepticism of technology and an excessive focus on climate denial as an obstacle to climate action, he responded, “I think that there’s actually a lot more heterogeneity in the environmental movement than might be perceived, but the challenge is it seems that the advocacy and the donor base is much more homogeneous […] It seems true to me that it seems there is an environmental orthodoxy and much of that is to rally behind one policy solution or one world view and that has been one of punishing corporations and consuming less.”108

106 Ibid. 107 Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014. 108 Personal interview. 22 Jan 2014.

88 The same interviewee explained in detail his environmentalist upbringing, citing these attributes of environmentalism as ones that he began to renounce as a result of being exposed to Breakthrough’s philosophy. He described coming around to Breakthrough’s philosophy as “identity challenging” when he began to realise that he “was looking forward to the next Hurricane Katrina […] to show all those climate deniers that they’re wrong and they should do what [environmentalists] say,” as well as when he began to look at consumption as “actually very good for the soul,” which came into conflict with how he was raised to “see consumption and very often to see technology and the American way of life as very damaging to the soul.” He went on to highlight both of these attributes as undesirable characteristics of the dominant environmental community today.

A similar “coming of age” story surfaced in another interview, in which a former staff member at Breakthrough spoke about how Breakthrough helped her to recognise a habit that she had had as an environmental activist. “It was kind of jarring for me to realise,” she said, “that I wasn’t really thinking about [solutions] in a rational way – that because I had this visceral, emotional way of looking at problems, I had a visceral, emotional way of thinking about solutions too.”109 Both of these stories demonstrate how, for some in the

Breakthrough community, their perception of environmentalism and environmentalists stems in part from their former experience with environmentalism and their conscious decision to put an aspect of their “environmentalism” behind them – thus fixing that aspect of environmentalism onto their definition of the word.

These various dynamics have thus blended to produce a Breakthrough-style representation of environmentalism, which, once entrenched, both colours how the

Breakthrough community views the environmental movement, and dramatically reduces the

109 Personal interview. 17 Jan 2014.

89 amount of authentic communication that can occur between individuals who identify with either group on at least two levels. It first reduces the credibility of Breakthrough in its audience’s eyes, as has already been seen in previous chapters. A former Breakthrough staff member explained, “If you’re an environmentalist and you read, ‘environmentalists say x or do y’ and you don’t resonate with that, you’re immediately going to stop listening to what that person is saying.”110 When it does engage an environmentalist audience, it tends to focus the discussion on the definition of environmentalism, rather than on any substantive discussion about the environmental movement’s chosen strategies.

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Where is the Breakthrough Institute in the climate movement today? When The Death of Environmentalism was first published, Breakthrough was a year-old organisation without a distinct institutional identity. Nordhaus and Shellenberger had claims to being veterans in the environmental movement and were active in the Apollo Alliance, a partnership with other movement leaders to jumpstart an innovative, visionary approach to motivating climate action. Additionally, many other leading voices in the movement agreed that the environmental movement needed to reflect on its strategies.

These three chapters have traced the decline of Breakthrough’s credibility in the climate movement since the essay’s publication on two dimensions – the extent to which it was able to propose ways of framing climate change that resonated with others in the movement, and the extent to which it was considered a part of the climate movement. By spotlighting a series of case studies and intergroup dynamics – the reactions to the original

Death of Environmentalism essay, Breakthrough’s attempts to mobilise the climate movement

(and in particular, the youth climate movement) around the message of investment in clean

110 Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

90 energy R&D, the growing divide between the Breakthrough Generation fellows and the youth movement as seen on the It’s Getting Hot In Here blog, Breakthrough’s critiques of the federal cap-and-trade bills, the divergence of Breakthrough’s and the climate movement’s goals in recent years, and the entrenched stereotypes that each has about the other today – this narrative has examined how the transformation of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s image as the “bad boys of the environmental movement” into Breakthrough’s distinctively “anti- environmentalist” reputation occurred.

Revisiting the theoretical framework established in Chapter 2 will help us make sense of the social movement and social identity dynamics underlying each episode:

Diagram 6. Social movement and social identity dynamics in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates.

The “Death of Environmentalism” debates were a series of attempts to redefine the climate movement’s framing of the global warming problem, articulated most prominently in the original essay and in the book Break Through. In the process, Nordhaus, Shellenberger, and Breakthrough inevitably had to characterise the movement a certain way in order to launch a critique of it (1). Their mischaracterisations of the movement’s values and strategies led others in the movement to perceive them as contrarian and/or dishonest (2). At the

91 same time, their articulations of a “new” environmentalism and their deliberate attempts to define themselves against the “traditional” movement created a foundation on which the

Breakthrough identity developed (3). It also opened a space in which other identities that were present in the movement, such as those focused on grassroots movement building and social justice organising, could manifest (4).

Breakthrough’s multi-layered discourse gradually developed over the years (5) into a combination of: a belief that the environmental movement had to make itself relevant to the values of the American public, a particular way of understanding those values as centred on economic concerns, technological innovation, and cheap energy, a particular mode of characterising the environmental movement, a focus on the need for government investment in clean energy technologies, and later, a focus on energy access and human development.

This discourse fed into Breakthrough’s image as, for instance, investment-centric (6). This served as the lens through which others evaluated Breakthrough (7), an evaluation that was also influenced by other discourses in the movement that were, for instance, more focused on the need to reduce carbon emissions immediately due to the urgency of the climate crisis.

Finally, following the failure of the Waxman-Markey bill, Breakthrough and the climate movement refocused their strategies and their discourses, leading to a divergence in their groups’ purposes (8). Where the Bill McKibben-led movement’s goal is to build a broad movement to oppose the politically powerful fossil fuel industry in order to preserve a liveable climate, one of Breakthrough’s goals is to provide thought leadership to advance energy policies that will deliver what they consider “clean energy” to developing country populations.

The cases highlighted in these three chapters are but a small sample of the interactions between Breakthrough and others in the climate movement. Nonetheless, they

92 serve to illustrate the processes that played out in many other debates and that eventually contributed to Breakthrough’s loss of credibility within the movement.

Why bother to understand the complex social identity dynamics in this narrative? By spotlighting the formation of group identities and discourses rather than taking the popular perception of Breakthrough as an opportunistic organisation at face value, I call attention to the question of cultural currency rather than Breakthrough’s objective credibility, enabling us to understand why Breakthrough has shifted away from being able and willing to engage more fully with the climate movement, and to posit that it still has credibility in other groups more similar in discourse. Although the latter was not the focus of this thesis, such an analysis is worth pursuing, as it would allow us to understand where Breakthrough has influence and the extent to which it has succeeded in building an alternative discourse and culture of environmentalism.

As well, the processes and consequences of discourse and identity formation are almost more intractable and insidious. Inherent in each layer of Breakthrough’s discourse is a critique of environmentalism, and implicit in every Breakthrough critique of the movement is a way of typifying environmentalists. When read by a bystander who has not had prior experience with the movement, this creates the notion that “environmentalists,” “climate activists,” “the environmental movement” and “the climate movement” can be thought of as a monolithic group defined narrowly as “anti-growth ideologues” or “techno-sceptics.” Not only does this deny the movement of the heterogeneity it sees in itself, thus inviting retaliation from those who identify with it, it also creates an at-times false dichotomy between two groups in the eyes of the ignorant bystander, thus closing off spaces for conversation right at the outset.

93 6. ACHIEVING DISAGREEMENT

Where the previous three chapters examined the reasons why conversation between

Breakthrough and those who know of it in the climate movement is so difficult today,

Chapter 6 studies the more “productive” aspect of the debate.

To do so, let’s remind ourselves what we’ve been debating for ten years. In Chapter

3, we debated whether and how the environmental movement should rethink its strategies and narratives to more effectively address global warming. In Chapter 4, we talked about whether the climate movement should deepen its emphasis on advocating for federal investment in clean energy R&D. And in Chapter 5, we asked what role natural gas and nuclear power had to play in a low-carbon energy future. At the end of the day, what we are arguing about is still the basic question raised at the beginning of my introduction and that was posed by The Death of Environmentalism in 2004. How can the climate movement best channel its resources towards mobilising action on climate change? When one of my interviewees asked me if I knew what Breakthrough was currently working on, I told him about their research on investments in nuclear and natural gas. “Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” was his response.111 How is it that two groups who purport to be working to address climate change can come to such different conclusions about what our energy future should look like?

In Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme argues that we should recognise that climate change “provides the public arena and the vocabulary, even the ‘safe’ virtual space in which people can confront each other with rival world-views, competing

111 Personal interview. 10 Feb 2014.

94 ideals of the social good, and conflicting economic commitments.”112 In this penultimate chapter, I describe the “rival world-views” that have shaped the debates over the ten years, peeling back the layers of the disagreement to present four different sets of questions that have surfaced in the debates. Answered differently, these questions lead us to very different conclusions about what the environmental movement should do about the climate problem.

“THIS COMMON DENOMINATOR OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS”

The title of my thesis and this chapter was lifted from two interviews with former and current staff at the Breakthrough Institute:

“There are legitimate problems that we have with the environmental community and the environmental community has with us and if we could air those and what we refer to here as ‘achieve disagreement,’ find out what the sources of our disagreement are rather than yelling past each other then I think it would be a lot more productive.”113

“One, we’re talking around each other and not characterising each other accurately and that leads to disagreement and debate. Two, we look at the same facts, the same picture of the world and see different readings of that. And three, we have different views even if we get through the first two issues. Which is the goal of these types of debates, it’s really getting to that third issue. We call it at BTI “achieving disagreement”, which is hard, actually getting to the point where you’re really disagreeing over things you’re both clear about why you disagree. That’s really hard, and it takes a long time and it takes some degree of goodwill and patience and willingness to sit down and talk which is hard in a public sphere. But eventually you will find real disagreements in your worldview that lead to different opinions and positions.”114

112 Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. 113 Personal interview. 22 Jan 2014. 114 Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

95 Why seek to “achieve disagreement”? An interviewee of mine who was a former staff member at Breakthrough argued that “particularly on the left, people are not willing to shake things up and offer criticisms and critique in a powerful way that can spark a serious and thoughtful dialogue […] so you end up in this common denominator of political correctness that stifles productivity.”115 Climate change offers a platform on which vastly different opinions can be raised, and around which organisations can become rigid institutional homes for these opinions. One of my survey respondents spoke to the need to

“achieve disagreement” with particular reference to the nuclear question, saying, “I think the conversation about nuclear needs to happen more openly; personally, I am repulsed by the idea, but I don’t know enough about the risks.” In like vein, another interviewee, an energy and climate program officer at a foundation, said, “We’re not always capable of getting outside and saying, wait a minute, cap and trade was a failure, what about it do we need to keep, what about it don’t we need to keep? […] The entire ecology needs to be able to step back and go back to what our first assumptions are here, what are the problems and solutions.”116

Existing literature on environmental discourses, such as that explored in Chapter 2, already describes the types of worldviews that have emerged as a result of our achieving disagreement about environmental problems and solutions, and that influence the way in which we respond to the question posed. Given the three typologies of discourses discussed in Chapter 2 – Bäckstrand and Lövbrand’s green governmentality, ecological modernisation, and civic environmentalism; Dryzek’s environmental problem-solving, limits and survival, sustainability, and green radicalism; and Clapp and Dauvergne’s market liberals,

115 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 116 Personal interview. 10 Feb 2014.

96 bioenvironmentalists, institutionalists, and social greens, where do Breakthrough and the others in this story, such as 350.org, fall?

Breakthrough does not seem to belong in Clapp and Dauvergne’s typology, besides possibly being on the periphery of the “market liberals” category. Even this is insufficient; while Breakthrough does see a future of continued economic development, the “market liberals” categorisation does not help us to understand that Breakthrough sees a clear role for strong government to play in promoting technological development.

In Bäckstrand and Lövbrand’s typology, Breakthrough would conceivably fit in a weak ecological modernisation worldview, given that it believes in the potential that technological developments offer to achieve both economic prosperity and environmental sustainability at the same time. Yet, the Bäckstrand/Lövbrand typology was developed in

2006, and the weak ecological modernisation category was used to describe the discourses of organisations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Apollo Alliance that advocated for cap-and-trade legislation, energy efficiency measures and support for renewable energy. While Breakthrough would fit into this category with the rest of these organisations according to the definition of weak ecological modernisation, today, it clearly distinguishes itself from them, advocating for investments in nuclear energy and natural gas and arguing that cap-and-trade, energy efficiency, and renewable energy are either insufficient or politically impossible. Thus, there is a need for even more nuanced subcategories within weak ecological modernisation.

Dryzek helps us understand this nuance, placing Breakthrough firmly in the

Promethean discourse, defined for the Greek myth about Prometheus stealing fire from

Zeus. “Opposing an environmentalism of limits and constraints,” he writes, “Breakthrough

97 sees a future of high-technology, clean energy abundance.”117 Prometheans place their faith in the potential for technology to overcome environmental problems and the earth’s biophysical limits. Yet, this is still insufficient for understanding Breakthrough’s approach to the question of what role the climate movement should play in addressing climate change.

While it describes Breakthrough’s view of technological possibilities, it does not help us understand their opinions on what role agents of change (such as environmental movement organisations) play, nor their views of the changeability of the political economy of the U.S.

Clearly, no one discourse is sufficient for describing the views of an organisation.

Nonetheless, existing typologies are very useful for surfacing the dimensions on which different movement actors disagree. These dimensions include the degree of confidence in status quo governance institutions (institutionalists, green governmentality, social greens), beliefs about the elasticity of the planet’s carrying capacity (limits and survival, bioenvironmentalists), and the extent to which the impacts of climate change and fossil fuel burning are seen in parallel with other economic and social justice issues (social greens, civic environmentalism). Thus, in this chapter, I attempt to develop an approach to understanding discourses that takes such dimensions as its starting point.

In his article, “Climate Science as Culture War,” University of Michigan sociologist

Andrew Hoffman identifies a few strategies to transform the ideological debate about the validity of climate science into a measured conversation based in objective science. One of the strategies he calls for is to present climate change as a series of questions, rather than as

“a binary yes or no question.” Examples of questions include: Are greenhouse gas concentrations increasing in the atmosphere? Are humans partially responsible for this

117 Dryzek, John S. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

98 increase? What will be the environmental and social impact of climate change over the next century?118

In a similar spirit, I do not address the question of how the climate movement should address climate change by simply presenting a static menu of options belonging to a fixed typology of discourses; rather, I distil it into a series of four fundamental questions.

This, I argue, is both a more enduring and flexible approach to climate discourses, enabling us to see how individuals’ and organisations’ responses to these questions shift over time, as well as a more comprehensive approach, allowing us to see how their discourses are a collection of opinions on a diverse set of questions. By taking this approach, I also hope to move beyond the habit of putting people into discrete categories, a habit whose detrimental impacts on communication we have already seen in previous chapters.

The diagram below maps out the four questions I will go on to discuss. In each sub- section, I will illustrate a number of different ways in which my respondents approached these questions. Finally, I will conclude the chapter by tracing the development of

Breakthrough’s discourse and recommendations for the climate movement over this past decade using this framework.

Diagram 7. Four fundamental questions underlying the divergences in worldviews in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates.

With these questions, I hope to make room for more heterogeneity than would otherwise be possible, spotlight the cognitive rather than the cultural dimension of the debate, and also invite my readers to engage with each of these questions for themselves.

118 Hoffman, Andrew J. "Climate Science as Culture War." Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/climate_science_as_culture_war.

99 Some of these questions will be nothing new to many of my readers, but my hope is that, by putting them all together, I present a systematic, innovative, and ultimately useful framework for thinking about this question.

“WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT”

In a televised debate about the challenges posed by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) last October between Michael Shellenberger and Kate Sinding, an attorney at the Natural

Resources Defense Council, the moderator invited each participant to define the parameters of the debate before they began – in other words, exactly what challenge fracking posed.

Shellenberger said, “What we’re dealing with is an energy transition – so the US is in a process of transitioning away from coal and towards natural gas. The crux of the debate is how to manage the negative impacts of natural gas exploration.” Kate responded, “I’d frame the fracking debate a little differently. Is this an economic boon, a chance to move off coal, or does it represent just yet another exploitation of fossil fuels, one that has significant impacts on communities where it’s extracted?”119 In the absence of a public platform such as this on which to define the problem that we are concerned about, how can we be sure that we are working to address the same problem in the first place, even if we all claim to be dealing with “climate change” or “the energy transition” or, even more ambiguously, “energy and climate issues?”

What I found striking in my research was that each of my interviewees and survey respondents had unique reasons for what brought them to the climate and energy issue, and thus, a different definition of or attitude towards the problem. In almost all of my interviews,

119 "Kate Sinding & Michael Shellenberger: The Striking Challenge of Fracking (Full)." YouTube, 07 Oct. 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxBIt1BsGOw.

100 I asked, “What do you worry about when you worry about climate and energy issues?”

Along with questions about what brought them to the Breakthrough Institute or the environmental movement in the first place, I was able to develop an understanding of the vastly different paths that brought people to the same problem, and therefore, influenced the solutions they were most invested in. My interviewees’ responses differed on a number of dimensions – on (1) the substance of the problem, (2) how narrowly they defined the problem, (3) the tone with which they spoke about the problem, and (4) the solvability of the problem. Each of these had implications for the solutions that they then went on to talk about.

With regards to what substantive problems people were worried about, the most common responses described the human impacts that climate change would cause. One interviewee said, “We’re talking about the end of the world as we know it,”120 while another described climate change as “the body of humanity bleeding to death.”121 Those who provided descriptions of the impacts mainly cited the human suffering that climate change would cause, with an emphasis on the disproportionate impact that severe weather patterns would have on vulnerable populations. These included references to “the Bangladeshis and the Maldivians and the Nigerians,” “the effects of varying rainfall patterns on a subsistence farmer in Africa,” and the “suffering, the kinds of extreme weather, and the extractive and burning process” associated with fossil fuels and climate change.

A good number of interviewees also mentioned energy access alongside climate change. One of them first described the problem of energy access and development, then said that the “two broad themes” he was concerned about were “energy poverty and environmental destruction.” The same interviewee explained that he became interested in

120 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 121 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

101 the issue because he had studied “science, technology, and international affairs” at college and “had been exploring issues of energy simultaneously with issues of development for quite a while.”122

Finally, for a few of my interviewees and survey respondents, the primary problem they were concerned about extended beyond climate change to more systemic political and social justice issues. To them, climate change was merely one manifestation of “how powerful interests were able to have their way and the interest of the public took a back seat.”123 One of my survey respondents described her concern for fundamental justice issues, criticising the movement’s strategies for not “working for the social transformation of our intersecting oppressive systems of capitalism, racism, misogyny, etc.”

Within each of these ways of defining the substance of the problem, how narrowly did respondents define the issue? Some went only as far as saying, “I worry that we’re not making enough progress to slow climate change as fast as possible.” Others took a step further to define the problem within their solution frameworks. While I did not explicitly ask Bill

McKibben to define the problems that moved him to act, the one problem that did surface in our conversation was that “the fossil fuel industry has far more reserves of fossil fuels than you can safely burn, five times as much.”124 Another interviewee defined the problem to a similar degree of specificity, saying, “There is a huge challenge of creating zero-carbon technologies that do the job better than fossil fuels, and that is the climate challenge, whatever anybody says. If we’re not admitting that, then we’re really not talking about the problem.”125 The more narrowly a respondent described the problem, the more it indicated a

122 Personal interview. 23 Jan 2014. 123 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 124 McKibben, Bill. Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014. 125 Personal interview. 22 Jan 2014.

102 degree of entrenchment within a particular way of viewing the climate problem, as well as a specific focus on achieving a given set of goals.

What emotions did respondents bring to their definition of the problem? These ranged from the very worried to the resigned to the optimistic. One of the most desperate descriptions of the climate problem that I encountered was, “if we can’t maintain stable supplies of food and water then everything from gay rights to iPods is out the window […] I don’t think that extinction is terribly likely, but I do think that the end of civilisation as we know it is absolutely in the cards if we don’t take action in a deep, profound, rapid manner.”126 Another explained that what brought him to the energy and climate issue was how exciting a challenge it was, using the word “create” three times in his response. The energy challenge, to him, was an opportunity to “transform our entire global energy infrastructure and technological platforms – it was a very creative process with a lot of creative technology possibilities, and the potential to create entirely new industries.”127 When I asked another interviewee what he worried about with regards to energy and climate, he plainly responded that he would not call it a “worry,” but rather a “big, interesting challenge,” going on to name the dual challenges of energy access and environmental degradation from climate change.

However urgent respondents agreed the climate change problem was (and everyone who talked about climate change did explicitly mention the seriousness of the problem), they differed in the extent to which they thought it could be tackled, or needed to be tackled. A few drew bright lines that they were working towards with regards to the maximum temperature rise permissible (“we need to provide a world that doesn’t exceed 2 degrees or probably more like 1 degree”) and the burning of fossil fuels (“we can’t do anything other

126 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014. 127 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

103 than shutting down fossil fuels”128). In contrast, another interviewee, while acknowledging that the climate crisis still “absolutely” invoked a sense of urgency in him, said that he was

“more wedded to the idea that we’re not going to solve climate change in the purest of sense.”129 Whether our definition of the problem involves bright lines or not thus also has significant implications for the solutions we dedicate ourselves to.

“PEOPLE WANNA CONSUME ENERGY”

Once we understand what the nature of the challenge is, how do we think about the type of future that we would like to head towards? Mike Hulme writes, “One of the reasons we disagree about climate change is because we understand development differently...several different development paradigms have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century: post-War colonial welfare and development; neo-liberalism and free trade; sustainable development

(both reformist and radical variants); and, more recently, what has been called ‘post- development’.” While I did not explicitly ask respondents what type of economic future they saw, this inevitably came up in several of my conversations.

An interviewee who was a former staff member at Breakthrough explained the

“Terawatt Challenge” to me. As an institution, Breakthrough takes as its starting point the belief that vast, and growing, populations in the developing world will need ever increasing amounts of energy, and thus, as my interviewee explained, “all of [their] framework is grounded in […] a recognition that in order to meet global energy demand and population growth we’re going to have to expand global energy capacity from 15TW to up to 30,

128 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 129 Personal interview. 28 Jan 2014.

104 potentially 60 TW by late century and do it in a low-carbon way.”130 This increasing demand for energy access is not merely something to be dealt with; it is also something to be embraced, for the economic growth that it promises “helps better lives, helps with overpopulation, helps with environmental degradation, helps with social disruption, and helps with democratisation,”131 as another Breakthrough interviewee described.

Inevitable economic development and demand for energy is one way to imagine the future; inevitable climate change is another. One interviewee articulated this, saying that she thought that economic growth was fundamentally incompatible with the scale of emissions reductions required by climate change. In the event that “climate change and capitalism are impossible or difficult to separate,” which she saw as highly likely and criticised the environmental movement for “working with the idea that we can live our lives as before and just eliminate fossil fuels from the equation,” then what is needed is an alternative that

“looks like more locally based economies that are necessarily smaller scale and […] more resilient.”132

“PEOPLE WHO CARE EXTREMELY PASSIONATELY THAT THAT LAST

LITTLE PIECE OF FOREST DOESN’T GET CUT DOWN”

Implicit in the question of how the environmental movement can best dedicate its resources to addressing climate change is the assumption that “the movement” is a definitive group of individuals and organisations whose actions can be coordinated in a collective effort to tackle climate change. Yet, Chapters 3 through 5 demonstrated how the definition

130 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 131 Personal interview. 22 Jan 2014. 132 Personal interview. 08 Feb 2014.

105 of the “environmental movement” was consistently an obstacle to effective communication.

Who is the environmental movement, and what is its role? Once again, there are several dimensions to this question, including what values hold “the environmental movement” together, who constitutes “the movement” and to what extent their actions can be coordinated, and what activities the movement should be engaged in (advocating for environmental values, proposing plausible policy solutions, etc.).

The first question to consider is one that Nordhaus and Shellenberger raised from the very beginning in The Death of Environmentalism. To what extent is climate change an environmental problem, and therefore, to what extent is the amalgamation of organisations and individuals working to address climate change part of the “environmental movement”?

An interviewee of mine who personally does not identify as a member of the environmental movement also expressed frustration at being called an environmentalist: “even though I only talk about the harms [of climate change] to humans […] I still am boxed in and seen as an environmentalist – from other environmentalists to non-environmentalists. People have these boxes and ideas and they put you into it. I see the work we’re doing as social justice work.”133 When posed the question of whether they saw themselves as climate activists, environmental activists, or social justice activists, two other interviewees also identified themselves as social justice activists. If much of the energy in the youth climate movement comes primarily from a commitment to social justice and human well being rather than environmental values, does it still make sense to talk about this group of activists as “the environmental movement”?

What are the implications of thinking about them as environmental activists? My interview with someone who came to the climate issue through environmentalism provides a

133 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

106 clue. In his words, the solution to the “existential crisis” that environmental problems, especially climate change, poses, is “living a – what’s now called “sustainable” – but used to be just called ecological or ecologically sound way – and building societies around that,” and

“at the same time not destroy the last wild places on earth and have some kind of respect for other species.”134 Identifying the movement as the “environmental” movement suggests that its narratives should be centred on the relationship between humans and the natural world, and places defending environmental values at the heart of the movement’s activism.

The same interviewee argued that, more than deciding what narratives to use to frame the climate problem, the movement had the responsibility to “embolden” and

“invigorate” its core by “unearthing the core values of environmentalism.” While he recognised that there was no “canon” of environmental values written down, he named a number of core environmental attitudes, including “making decisions based on what’s good for people who will be living a long time after us,” “making decisions with the understanding that there’s such a thing as ecosystems, even global ecosystems,” “coming to grips with the ethical question of species,” and “caring extremely passionately that that last little piece of forest doesn’t get cut down.” While these are by no means mutually exclusive with the values of social justice described above, putting the human-environment relationship at the core of the movement shapes its cultural narratives in a different way than does centring the movement on “avoiding the unjust impacts of climate change.” This issue dovetails with the various definitions of “the climate problem” highlighted in the earlier section of this chapter; any of these definitions would change the narratives, values, and goals that form the core of the movement.

134 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

107 This highlights a separate but related issue; to what extent is it possible to define “the movement,” if acting on these common issues can mean so many different things to different people? When I asked my interviewees to tell me what, in their mind, constitutes the “environmental movement,” one of the most common responses I received was, “that’s a good (read: difficult) question.” Consider these varying definitions of “environmentalist” and “member of the environmental movement”:

“I believe we need to create a sustainable economy that can foster a prosperous global economy for 9 or 10 billion people by mid-century and do that in a way that preserves the essential life support systems of the planet. In that sense I’m absolutely an environmentalist.”135

“I think the environmental movement is a mixture of folks at the grassroots that are doing the mobilising and organising, and the 501(c)(3)s and (c)(4)s that are coordinating those efforts. EDF, NRDC, WWF, WRI, Sierra Club, Environment America. Any organisations broadly working on environmental policy and climate change can be considered part of that umbrella.”136

“I don’t think that you could have a definition at all. To me, the climate movement is anyone who has recognised climate change as a serious threat and is trying to fight it and that can take a ton of different forms.”

“It's 100% bottom-up with very little coordination across organizations. Everyone's doing everything on climate – public education; lobbying and activism at the local, state, federal, international levels; corporate campaigns / corporate social responsibility improvements; personal behavior change, etc. I think we need all these efforts.”137

What, then, holds together “the environmental movement,” or, more strictly speaking, “the climate movement”? Is it a common interest in addressing climate change?

Specific activities housed within movement organisations? A certain prevailing strategy, or

135 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 136 Personal interview. 28 Jan 2014. 137 The third and fourth block quotes were taken from my survey results.

108 set of strategies? When we say, “the environmental movement should,” who exactly are we saying should lead this charge?

Whether we conceive of the environmental movement as a collection of non-profit organisations with coordinated strategies or as anyone interested in addressing climate change will influence the way in which we think about the final dimension of this question:

What activities should “the movement” prioritise?

Some of my interview and survey respondents cited grassroots movement building as their primary goal. A grassroots organiser explained the seemingly uncoordinated nature of the movement today as a result of “people looking for more locally based solutions and campaigns” due to “the failure of the national and international fights.”138 One of my interviewees described the goal of his work as “people in communities learning the organising skills themselves” in order to “create an infrastructure of local organisers across the country so that when there is a national issue it’s really strategic for us to mobilise around and come together.”139 Building its numbers and organising strength, then, is in itself a charge of the movement.

Several others felt that the movement’s most important role was to “speak the truth to what ultimately needs to get done.”140 When I asked an interviewee when she felt most proud of the climate movement, she answered, “When I am with a group of people and I feel like we are telling the truth about what’s happening and how scary it is.”141 This translates to raising awareness about the fact of climate change, and beyond that, speaking about the urgency and magnitude of the actions that need to be taken.

138 Personal interview. 08 Feb 2014. 139 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014. 140 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014. 141 Personal interview. 02 Feb 2014.

109 Several of my interviewees spoke about those actions as “shutting down fossil fuels,” with one saying that a world agreement on how to deal with climate change should be “far more draconian than anything that’s being considered now” – it should be a “Montreal

Protocol for fossil fuels that would say we’re going to phase out fossil fuels just like we did with CFCs.”142 The extremity of this proposal (relative to what the Kyoto Protocol currently calls for) raises the question: is the climate movement’s first responsibility to tell the radical truth, or to find and advocate for plausible policy solutions? The same interviewee argued that the environmental movement’s responsibility has “never been to come up with a policy solution.”

Finally, is the movement’s first responsibility to advocate for its values, or for measurable action on reducing greenhouse gas emissions? The two are not mutually exclusive, and indeed, the former can be seen as a means to the latter. However, it does change the way in which we evaluate the validity of any given strategy. In one of my interviewees’ words, “part of the reason many people think we should oppose something like the Keystone XL pipeline is that it is morally wrong to pass on the problem of carbon pollution to our future generations.”143 In contrast, an article on the Breakthrough Institute’s website titled “The Keystone Distraction” criticises the climate movement for being fixated on stopping a pipeline project that will “amount to a mere 0.2 per cent of the ‘carbon budget’ that scientists say we need to shrink in order to avoid catastrophic warming.”144 This critique becomes less valid if indeed one of the core roles of the movement is to make use of symbolic actions to advocate for what is morally right.

142 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 143 Personal interview. 27 Jan 2014. 144 Trembath, Alex, and Matthew Stepp. "The Keystone Distraction - How Environmentalists Got Lost in a Dangerously Misguided Battle." Breakthrough Institute. 10 Apr. 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/the-keystone-distraction/.

110

“THE MAGNITUDE OF THE SOLUTIONS WE NEED”

So that is sort of the political will paper145 saying that technologically this stuff is feasible and politically it’s not. But when we look at the assumptions, policy implementation is actually not politically viable, not realistic, it’s like a fairy tale fantasy land.146 - A former Breakthrough Generation fellow

I think Michael and Ted’s thing is a magical story. Here’s these magic beans, here’s a way that this can happen without any pain if we just manufacture these beans. But the bottom line is, at some point, someone has to go to Exxon, Peabody Coal, and a bunch of companies that are making more money than God, more money than anybody’s ever made, and say, you can’t do what you plan to do. And those guys don’t ever address that.147 - A veteran environmental activist

One of the most recurrent themes in my interviews was a deep sense of urgency amongst my interviewees, a steadfast belief that the solutions they were working on held the most promise in view of this urgency, and a perception that the other group’s strategies were grossly insufficient or woefully unrealistic. How could each argument be so internally coherent, but jointly discordant? In this last section of the chapter, I ask: What do we think is the biggest obstacle to action on climate change, and correspondingly, what solutions are sufficient for overcoming the given obstacle? My interviewees’ opinions on this question surfaced in their opinions on (1) what kind of energy and climate policies the climate movement should advocate for, and (2) whether the movement should embrace or be resistant to natural gas or nuclear power as energy options.

Two secondary questions are important here. What do we see as politically plausible, and why? And, are the obstacles to action on climate change primarily technological or political?

145 My interviewee was referring to a 2009 paper from Stanford University titled “A Plan for a Sustainable Future – How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030.” 146 Personal interview. 17 Jan 2014. 147 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

111 Central to Breakthrough’s critique of the climate movement’s emphasis on advocating for a price on carbon is the view that such a policy would simply be politically impossible to pass, as captured in the block quote above. To illustrate: one of my interviewees, a prominent leader in the youth climate movement, critiqued Breakthrough’s insistence on investment in clean energy, arguing that their position failed to acknowledge that there was a market failure inherent in the price of fossil fuels failing to internalise the cost of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “The most effective way to correct that,” he said, “is not to dump a bunch of money into alternatives but to just incorporate the actual cost to society of fossil fuels into the price of fossil fuels.”148 I posed this challenge to a former Breakthrough fellow. He responded that Breakthrough no doubt recognises that the cost of fossil fuels is not internalised, but that “its entire approach is premised on the recognition that it is nearly politically impossible to put a price on carbon.”149

In this view, “building political will” to pass anything that will likely make energy more expensive or slow economic growth in some way, including a carbon tax, cap-and- trade, and the Kyoto framework, is impossible because it simply runs up against the laws that dictate that societies will only consume more and more energy.

One interviewee explained the “iron law of climate change,” a framework developed by Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado,

Boulder and a senior fellow at Breakthrough. The iron law of climate change is an identity for the total amount of emissions, with four influencing variables: population, GDP per capita, energy per GDP (energy intensity), and carbon dioxide per unit of energy (carbon intensity). The term GDP per capita is the iron law of climate change – “You’re never going to be decreasing GDP per population,” my interviewee said, “You’re always going to be

148 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014. 149 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

112 increasing it.” For this interviewee, “building political will” for these policy solutions necessarily meant “keeping poor countries poor” and “sacrificing a lot of the things we take for granted for some abstract concept of climate change.”150 Because these contradict the iron law of climate change, technological solutions to alter the other two variables – energy intensity and carbon intensity – offered the most promise.

Several of my interviewees also cited empirical observations or evidence from opinion surveys to substantiate their views that society would not be willing to pay to internalise the cost of fossil fuels. One of my interviewees stated, “the public’s sense of priority around climate change is remarkably low,” citing public opinion research that showed that “it continuously ranks 17-20th of 20 priorities, and even below conventional environmental issues like air and water and pollution.”151

Given this, what would a politically successful message look like? The same interviewee who cited the public opinion research above said that he thinks that “public opinion research continues to show that (clean energy investment) is a stronger narrative,” even after the perceived failure of some portfolio investments made with green stimulus funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He cited a successful attempt that he worked on to help pass a Renewable Portfolio Standard in Oregon, mandating that utilities purchase 25% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, as evidence of the effectiveness of the narrative about building a clean energy industry. “Not once did we talk about climate change,” he said – “The people who were motivated by climate change were already with us. So the thing we talked about was the economic benefits from renewable energy deployment in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington counties.

And it worked.”

150 Personal interview. 17 Jan 2014. 151 Personal interview. 05 Feb 2014.

113 Counter to this view, another of my interviewees argued that the environmental movement’s framing of the climate issue in positive terms has not been effective. “Under

[Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s] plan, and essentially what environmentalists have been doing,” he said, “is trying to put everything in a positive terms, downplaying the problem, and trying to motivate everyone by a positive and bigger vision. The problem with that is that does not motivate people who are freaking out.”152

To others, whether something was or was not politically possible was less relevant.

In several interviews, I encountered the argument that, however difficult, building political will, either to stop burning fossil fuels or to put a price on carbon, was essential. There was no choice. One interviewee said, “I see nothing in human history that would indicate that people have ever walked away from money. The only way you can walk away from money is to beat them.”153 To this interviewee, Breakthrough’s insistence on searching for politically palatable policies was simply its attempt to find an easy way out “without actually fighting.”

Another cited an IEA report in 2012 that said, “in order to reach the 2 degree

Celsius goal the entire world needs to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure, no new extraction sites, new pipelines, new power plants, by 2017. Otherwise, we’ll exceed the 2 degree target, or we’ll have stranded assets.” Something not appearing to be politically plausible was no reason not to build a movement around it, for it is the responsibility of the movement to “not limit ourselves to what is politically achievable but speak the truth to what ultimately needs to get done, and […] to shift the broader underlying political climate so we can make such progress possible.”154

152 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 153 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014. 154 Personal interview. 24 Jan 2014.

114 What ultimately does need to get done? Do we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, impose a carbon tax, increase subsidies for the deployment of renewable energy, increase our investment in clean energy research and development, natural gas technologies, or advanced nuclear technologies, or build more resilient communities and economies? Which of these, and in what order? This brings us to the second sub-question of whether we think the obstacles in the way of action on climate change are ultimately political or technological.

“The obvious reason why action hasn’t happened,” said one of my interviewees, “is that industry – utilities, coal – are very powerful interests.” “The absolute domination of money in politics and the fact that the oil and gas industry has more money than anybody else to inject in politics”155 have been most responsible for inaction on climate change.

Speaking to the political obstacles to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, an organiser and electricity policy analyst I spoke to said, “I’ve seen examples of utilities that control electric grids creating policy that attempt to block out technologies that suppress or create an unequal playing field where it’s harder for the new technologies to compete. Even if you bring down the cost of clean energy you also need to deal with the fact that there are a lot of political power in the old technologies.”156

To counter this, “building up a popular movement” both on energy policy and on resisting fossil fuel infrastructure is the only way to compete with this amount of money and power. Even if it is “notoriously difficult to get people to care passionately about issues that don’t have an immediate impact on themselves,” it is nonetheless still imperative to build a strong movement to re-open the conversation about clean energy policies “to allow elected officials to hear directly from their constituents that it might not be money but it’s votes

155 Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014. 156 Personal interview. 08 Feb 2014.

115 being taken away from them.”157 McKibben spoke eloquently to this need for movement- building in his interview:

“Since the other side has all the money, we require passion, spirit, creativity, and numbers, and we’re going to need a lot of people in order to match the power of the fossil fuel industry. We can hold them to a draw when we focus all of our efforts, but man, it’s hard work, and we just need to get bigger and bigger.”158

While not denying that the fossil fuel industry was an obstacle to progress, most of my Breakthrough interviewees argued both that the state of clean energy technology was the bigger impediment, and that technological improvements offered greater potential for reductions in emissions. I asked one of my Breakthrough interviewees to comment on subsidies for the fossil fuels. He acknowledged that “subsidies for mature and advanced fossil fuels and fossil fuel technologies are obviously wasteful and there is a strong policy and advocacy consensus that imposing a price on carbon emissions would do good,” but followed that by arguing that a tax is “so far removed from anything resembling a coherent and comprehensive solution which at its core has to be focused on accelerating innovation in low-carbon energy technologies.” Fundamental to this view is the premise that low- carbon energy technologies are still not at a point where they are competitive on cost or performance with fossil fuels.

On the other hand, another interviewee of mine said, “Everything I’ve read has convinced me that there is enough capacity to figure out how to do this without tapping nuclear or gas,” 159 pointing to evidence that there were factors besides technological deficiencies that were preventing renewable technologies from being adopted at scale: “Right now Europe has 58 offshore wind farms, we have none. It’s not because we don’t have the

157 Ibid. 158 McKibben, Bill. Personal interview. 04 Feb 2014. 159 Personal interview. 28 Mar 2014.

116 technology to build offshore wind farms, it’s just because we haven’t gotten our butts in gear to build them.”160 This particular interviewee advocated for a combination of direct actions against fossil fuel infrastructure, support for renewable energy deployment, and ultimately, a price on carbon: “I think we are at a point where we no longer need to be researching, we need to be implementing. There are so many roofs that need solar panels on them, so many hilltops that need wind farms on them, and I don’t doubt that there can be further gains to be gotten from research, but I don’t think it’s either or.”

---

Having now mapped out various possible answers to these four questions – how we define the problems we’re concerned about, how we imagine the economic future we are headed towards, how we define the “environmental movement” or “climate movement” and what role(s) it plays, and whether we see inaction on climate change as mainly a political or technological problem and how we know that – we now have a systematic framework with which to understand the very different viewpoints that emerged in the “Death of

Environmentalism” debates.

The following diagram helps us understand how this framework maps onto the development of Breakthrough’s discourse over the past decade. Note, of course, that this depiction is simplified: the growth of each segment of Breakthrough’s discourse does not necessarily map precisely onto the years specified, and Breakthrough’s recommendations are more far-reaching than those captured here. Note also that while these opinions can in general be associated with Breakthrough, some individuals affiliate with the Breakthrough community may not agree with the full set of opinions. Nonetheless, this exercise is helpful for developing both a chronological understanding of Breakthrough’s institutional discourse,

160 Personal interview. 25 Jan 2014.

117 as well as for systematically breaking down each of Breakthrough’s core recommendations in each chapter into its responses to each question.

Diagram 8. The gradual evolution of Breakthrough’s discourses and recommendations for the climate movement based on the 4-question framework.

A similar diagram could be constructed for any of the other voices in the debates, on any other issue besides natural gas. It should be noted that this framework does not help us to understand how each actor obtains the information he/she needs to make judgments, nor does it highlight the assumptions or leaps or reasoning that he/she makes.

Regardless, it still helps us to move beyond the boundaries of the discourses identified in the literature on environmental discourses. Breakthrough may indeed be

Promethean in its discourse, and identifying it as such does help us to understand its view that technological innovation has the potential to vastly increase our ability to meet our growing population and energy needs. Bill McKibben may indeed be a social green, seeing climate change as a justice problem and a symptom of an economic model predicated on unlimited consumption. Yet, putting them in these rigid categories does not help us to understand how their answers to these questions may have shifted over time, nor does it

118 enable us to make a comprehensive, systematic comparison of the logics that led them to their respective strategies. Most of all, thinking about their discourses as answers to a series of questions brings each of us individuals into the thought process as well, enabling us to arrive at our unique sets of answers regardless of which environmental discourses we may find ourselves identifying with.

119 7. CONCLUSION

Whenever I told others what I was writing my thesis about, a common response I received was one of hope – hope that I would somehow, through my meticulous research, find a way for the participants of this debate to agree with one another so that they could forge a common path forward. Yet, the goal of spotlighting the social movement and social identity dynamics in these debates, and of uncovering the discourses feeding into each opinion, was, to quote scholar of science communication Baruch Fischhoff, “not agreement, but fewer, better disagreements.”161

In separating the story about the politicised debate from the study of environmental discourses, I have been able to examine both how the conversation between Breakthrough and others in the climate movement soured and eventually evaporated, as well as the substantive disagreements that emerge when they are brought into conversation with one another. It is my hope that doing so has helped surface the “better” disagreements from the unproductive ones.

With the four-question framework in Chapter 6, I have demonstrated how the disparate discourses in the “Death of Environmentalism” debates are a collection of different approaches to the same fundamental questions. By doing so, I hope to make two concrete contributions. One, I hope to bring the debates down from the superficial “pro- natural gas vs. anti-fossil fuel” media messaging to the level of the substantive so that we can be better at hearing what one another is saying. Two, I hope to equip those of us invested in the climate fight with the habit of asking ourselves what our answers to these fundamental questions are – answers that are often truncated to a simplified set of heuristics by the

161 Fischhoff, B. "The Sciences of Science Communication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.Supplement_3 (2013): 14033-4039. Print.

120 referent groups that we belong to (or that we find ourselves in). One of my core motivations in pursuing this thesis was that both Breakthrough and groups in the climate movement seemed ideological in their own ways, and it is through encounters with others over these fundamental questions that the mental shortcuts in our discourses – the iron law of climate change, the Terawatt Challenge, or the faith in renewable energy and energy efficiency – start to become more visible and less infallible.

Employing the theoretical lenses that I did to study the “Death of

Environmentalism” debates in Chapters 3 to 5 is powerful in a number of ways.

Prior to applying a social movement framework to my analysis and prior to understanding the history of the interaction, I had not thought about Breakthrough as an actor in the climate movement. Indeed, a close friend of mine questioned me in the early stages of my writing, asking me how I could see Breakthrough and Bill McKibben as equivalent competitors in the early years of the youth movement, when their explicit goals were so divergent. Yet, Breakthrough, particularly when Nordhaus and Shellenberger first published their 2004 essay and then their 2007 book, has attempted on multiple occasions to shape the collective action frames of the climate movement around an optimistic message of clean energy innovation.

Understanding the “Death of Environmentalism” debates as an attempt, and then a struggle, and then an abandonment of efforts to shape the agenda and messaging of the environmental and the climate movement places the spotlight on how the political identities and values in the climate movement have shifted over the years. In every interaction between

Breakthrough and the movement is not just an attempt to put forth the Breakthrough identity and message, but also an articulation of how else other members of the movement would like their movement to be defined.

121 In several ways, the directions in which the movement’s frames have shifted over the past decade mirror what Nordhaus and Shellenberger called for in their first essay, explaining their initially successful attempts to reframe global warming. (These shifts should not be read as having been caused by the essay, but that Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s original arguments were aligned with what some others – who have since gone on to build the movement – thought was necessary at the time.)

First, there is, today, a distinctive “climate” movement, where previously global warming was a cause for the “environmental” movement. Increasingly, some in this movement would like to define themselves as allied with, and not members of, the environmental movement, as social justice activists rather than environmental activists, and as concerned with the human, rather than the environmental, impacts of climate change.

Second, there is a dominant discourse of the need for grassroots movement building over legislative lobbying, echoing Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s original argument that the movement had to move from a policy-focused to a politics-focused approach.

Where the debate’s participants have most often diverged is over the question of limits. Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s book, Break Through, called for the movement to move beyond “a politics of limits” towards “a politics of possibility.” The book criticised the environmental movement for its tendency to treat global warming as a pollution problem whose solution depends on limiting consumption and limiting economic growth. Indeed,

Breakthrough’s discourse is heavily premised on the notion of political limits, behavioural limits, and limits to the extent to which individuals are willing to pay to address global warming. Yet, inherent in many observers’ critiques of Breakthrough are other types of limits – limits on the earth’s global carbon budget, and limits on the potential for technology to enable human populations to continue growing within these biophysical limits.

122 This tension is most visible in the debate over eco-modernism, a school of thought that places faith in technological innovation as the key to decoupling environmental impact from human development. Breakthrough has emerged as a thought leader in this space, and while this thesis fell short of exploring this philosophy in greater depth, the intergroup dynamics studied here have implications for where and how the debate will occur in the near future.

Through the lens of social identity theory, I have examined how Breakthrough’s split from the climate movement has been both an inevitable outcome of the clash of divergent group identities, as well as a result of Breakthrough’s conscious and strategic shift towards a different audience. The first implies that Breakthrough has very little cultural currency in the dominant environmental and climate movement today, and thus, that the conversation that it would like to have about the need for a more eco-modern environmental philosophy is not being had with most people in the movement. It raises the question of exactly where

Breakthrough has cultural currency and organisational credibility, and where and how its messages are being received. The second implies that Breakthrough is interested in using the climate movement as a foil against which they can juxtapose their arguments to a different audience, and raises the question of whether the debate will only become yet more polarised.

In thinking about the future of the “Death of Environmentalism” debates, it becomes clear how the theories I have chosen are limited in at least two ways. First, it is important to understand which audiences are receiving messages from Breakthrough, and which from the climate movement. Further research could conduct a “knowledge network” analysis to identify how these different discourses are entering the policy, media, and corporate realms.

123 Additionally, while this thesis identifies different cultural approaches to the four sets of questions in Chapter 6, it does not describe how individuals and organisations develop the empirical knowledge they need to answer these questions. For instance, on the question of the validity of natural gas as a climate solution, my interviewees often quoted different types of information in their responses, with some describing the danger of methane leakage, and others arguing that this danger has been overstated in the media. Methods from research on science communication can help us to understand this crucial aspect of the debate.

The “Death of Environmentalism” debates will continue, so long as the activities and philosophies of one group are seen to be in conflict with the goals of the other. Over the past few years, the debate has shifted into increasingly public spaces, from the coffee shop to the blogosphere to the television screen, reducing the number of authentic points of contact between each party and increasing the spaces of anonymity in which stereotypes form, differences become more distinct, and collective identities become more entrenched.

The deeper the polarisation, the more we as observers need to return to first principles, and to fundamental questions rather than rigid discourses, in order to understand the substance of the debate and to recreate the space in which disagreement may be achieved.

124 8. REFERENCES

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125 Clapp, Jennifer, and Peter Dauvergne. Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. Print. "Climate." Nathan Cummings Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. . Deephouse, David, and Mark Suchman. "Legitimacy in Organisational Institutionalism." The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. By Royston Greenwood. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008. N. pag. Print. Dryzek, John S. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. Fischhoff, B. "The Sciences of Science Communication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.Supplement_3 (2013): 14033-4039. Print. Gamson, William A., and David S. Meyer. "Framing Political Opportunity." Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Comp. Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, and Mayer Zald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 275-90. Print. Geman, Ben. "Nate Silver Is Having an Ezra Klein Moment." National Journal. N.p., 20 Mar. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014. . Graves, Richard. "Give Me a Break." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 14 Apr. 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. . Hess, Jacob, and Nathan Todd. "From Culture War to Difficult Dialogue: Exploring Distinct Frames for Citizen Exchange about Social Problems." Journal of Public Deliberation 5.1 (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 16 Dec. 2008. "History of the Alex. C Walker Foundation." History of the Alex. C Walker Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. .

126 Hoffman, A. J. "Talking Past Each Other? Cultural Framing of Skeptical and Convinced Logics in the Climate Change Debate." Organization & Environment 24.1 (2011): 3-33. Print. Hoffman, Andrew J. "Climate Science as Culture War." Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. . Hulme, Mike. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. Jenkins, Jesse. "Attention Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Time to Call A Cease- Fire!" Watthead: Energy News and Commentary. N.p., 27 Sept. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. . Jenkins, Jesse. "Bill McKibben Says It’s Time to “Organize, Organize, Organize” for a Cleaner Future." It’s Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 29 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. . Jenkins, Jesse. "Michael Shellenberger Says It’s Time for a Breakthrough on Climate Change (Part 2).” It’s Getting Hot In Here. 31 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. . Jenkins, Jesse, Mark Muro, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Letha Tawney, and Alex Trembath. Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence. Rep. Breakthrough Institute, Apr. 2012. Web. . Jenkins, Jesse. "Press Release: Over 100 Groups Urge Congress to Support Obama’s Energy Education Initiative." Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 21 July 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. .

127 "Kate Sinding & Michael Shellenberger: The Striking Challenge of Fracking (Full)." YouTube, 07 Oct. 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. . Kimbrell, Mark. "Time for the Climate Movement to Take a Look in the Mirror." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 26 Jan. 2010. Web. 01 May 2014. . Kress, Gunther R., and Bob Hodge. Language as Ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Print. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. Lazarus, Richard. "Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future." Georgetown Law Faculty Publications (2009): n. pag. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. Little, Amanda. "Green Leaders Say Rumors of Environmentalism's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated." Grist. N.p., 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. . Little, Amanda. "An Interview with Authors of the Controversial Essay "The Death of Environmentalism"" Grist. N.p., 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. . McKibben, Bill. "Bill McKibben Sends Dispatches from a Conference on Winning the Climate-change Fight." Grist. N.p., 26 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. . McKibben, Bill. "A Review of Lomborg and Shellenberger & Nordhaus." Grist. N.p., 19 Sept. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. .

128 Muro, Mark. "Boost Innovation Investments to Make Waxman-Markey Bill a Game- changer." Grist. N.p., 2 June 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. . Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print. Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World. Rep. Oakland: Breakthrough Institute, 2004. Print. Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. "The Flawed Logic of the Cap-and-Trade Debate." Yale Environment 360. N.p., 19 May 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. . Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. "Wicked Polarization - How Prosperity, Democracy, and Experts Divided America." The Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. . Nordhaus, Ted, Michael Shellenberger, and Michael Pollan. "The Death of Environmentalism." Knight School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, Berkeley. 2007. Web. . Norris, Teryn. "$5,000 Breakthrough Generation Fellowships." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 21 Feb. 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. . Norris, Teryn. "Breakthrough Generation Launches." It's Getting Hot In Here. N.p., 10 June 2008. Web. 01 May 2014. . "Our Work." Energy Action Coalition. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014. .

129 Pollan, Michael, Michael Shellenberger, and Ted Nordhaus. "The Death of Environmentalism." Knight School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, Berkeley. 2007. Web. . Pooley, Eric. The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to save the Earth. New York: Hyperion, 2010. Print. Pope, Carl. "An In-depth Response to “The Death of Environmentalism”." Grist. N.p., 14 Jan. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. . Rayner, Steve. "Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions." Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on Global Environment. Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, ANSW, Sydney. 2006. Web. . Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning." Policy Sciences 4.2 (1973): 155-69. Print. Roberts, David. "Why I've Avoided Commenting on Nisbet's 'Climate Shift' Report." Grist. N.p., 27 Apr. 2011. Web. 01 May 2014. . Romm, Joe. "The Dynamic Duo of Disinformation and Doubletalk Return." ThinkProgress. N.p., 22 Apr. 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. . Romm, Joe. "Memo to Media: Don’t Be Suckered by Bad Analyses from the Breakthrough Institute the Way Time, WSJ, NPR, and The New Republic Have Been." ThinkProgress. N.p., 22 May 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. .

130 Sheppard, Kate. "Life After the Death of Environmentalism." The American Prospect. N.p., 11 Oct. 2007. Web. 01 May 2014. . Tajfel, Henri. "Experiments in a Vacuum." The Context of Social Psychology: A Critical Assessment (1972): n. pag. Web. Trembath, Alex, and Matthew Stepp. "The Keystone Distraction - How Environmentalists Got Lost in a Dangerously Misguided Battle." Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 10 Apr. 2013. Web. 01 May 2014. . Trembath, Alex. "Methane Leakage from Cows Higher than from Natural Gas Development -- New Data from EPA, DOE, and EDF Confirm Declining Methane Leakage from Gas Prodution."Breakthrough Institute. N.p., 6 Mar. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014. . Ward, Ken. "Environmental Funders Share Blame for Movement's Weak Pulse." Grist. N.p., 18 Mar. 2005. Web. 01 May 2014. . Ward, Ken. "Why Do U.S. Environmentalists Remain Irrationally Committed to a Losing Strategy?" Grist. N.p., 10 June 2009. Web. 01 May 2014. . Werbach, Adam. "Is Environmentalism Dead?" Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, San Francisco. Dec. 2004. Web. . Wildavsky, Aaron. "Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation." The American Political Science Review 81.1 (1987): 3. Print. Zald, Mayer N. "Culture, Ideology, and Strategic Framing." Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. By Doug

131 McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 261-74. Print.

132 9. APPENDIX

A. SURVEY 1:

This survey was distributed to self-identified members of the environmental movement through listservs and contacts working in environmental movement organisations.

I am an environmental studies major at Brown University writing my senior thesis on present-day discourses about strategies for addressing climate change. If you identify as a member of the environmental movement, your honest response to this survey would be very helpful for my research. It is a four-part survey and should take no more than 20 minutes to complete, as long as you don’t think too hard about the questions (which you shouldn’t). Thanks a lot for your help!

A. Scale questions

Rate the extent to which you identify with the following statements. (scale of 1-5) 1. I am part of the environmental movement. 2. I feel proud to be a member of the environmental movement. 3. I feel a strong sense of belonging to the environmental movement. 4. Being part of the environmental movement has given me a close community of friends.

B. Open-ended questions Keep your answers brief (100 words max).

1. Name one environmental movement organization or individual whose values you identify with. What are those values? E.g. 350.org, Bill McKibben, climate justice and community-building 2. What are 3-5 adjectives or phrases you would use to describe the environmental movement today? 3. What is the foremost goal you think the environmental movement is trying to work towards? 4. How and why did you become part of the environmental movement? What activities have you taken part in as a member of the environmental movement? 5. What is the environmental movement’s strategy for addressing climate change? Do you approve of this choice of strategy?

C. Read-and-respond

The following statements are characterizations of the environmental movement. Please indicate the extent to which you think they are accurate, and explain why. Please be as precise as possible, i.e. highlight specific words or phrases that you identify with, disagree with, are proud of, or are offended by. You may skip questions if you do not have enough information to answer them.

133 1. Bill McKibben’s goal is to generate a mass consciousness in support of limiting economic growth and consumption, with the hope of shifting the United States towards localized economies, food systems, and “soft” energy sources (like wind and solar power). 2. Liberals are skeptical of technology as a source of human betterment because of its risk to human health and environmental quality. 3. Some activists reject development and modernization altogether, lauding poor indigenous communities for living a simpler, more virtuous life in a closer relationship with nature. Others almost unavoidably find themselves reinventing archaic international socialist tropes in the name of sustainability. 4. Much of the Left says little to no innovation is required because existing solar and wind technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s electricity. Note: “Innovation” refers to technical improvements in energy technologies. If we believed further innovation were required, we would view continued investments in solar and wind research & development as a crucial part of transforming our energy system.

D. Opinions on climate change strategies

Rate the extent to which you agree with the following statements. Please complete this section to the fullest extent possible, but you may skip questions if you do not have enough information to answer them.

1. The federal government should end subsidies for fossil fuels. 2. The federal government should provide subsidies or mandate state subsidies and other policies to encourage clean energy production and consumption. 3. The federal government should put a price on carbon by instituting a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade system. 4. The federal government should establish a serious, strategic commitment to investing in clean energy research and development in order to make clean energy cheaper. 5. Rank the above in order of importance. (E.g. 1 - End subsidies, 2 - Clean energy R&D, 3 - Carbon tax, 4 - Subsidies for clean energy production and consumption, 5 - Cap-and-trade) 6. Until the political clout of the fossil fuel industry is reduced, none of the above will be politically possible. Therefore, the environmental movement must work to reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry. 7. The environmental movement has been overly focused on regulations, when the focus should instead be on investing in revolutionary technological innovation, which is needed to make clean energy technologies much cheaper. 8. Climate skepticism is the major stumbling block to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 9. Investments in energy efficiency, solar power, and wind power offer the greatest promise for meeting all of our energy needs in a sustainable manner. 10. We will not be able to meet all our energy needs without greater innovation in advanced fossil fuel technologies like carbon capture and storage. 11. Natural gas is a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and must play a part in the transition to a clean energy economy. 12. Nuclear energy must play a part in the transition to a clean energy economy.

134 13. If you wish to clarify any of your above responses, write your comments here:

E. Breakthrough Institute

1. Have you heard of the Breakthrough Institute? Yes / No

If you answered yes:

2. How did you hear about Breakthrough? 3. What are some adjectives and phrases you would use to describe Breakthrough? 4. Please leave your name and email address if you are willing to be interviewed (30 minutes max.) about your experience in the environmental movement and your opinions on Breakthrough.

135 B. SURVEY 2:

This survey was distributed to alumni of the Breakthrough Generation summer fellowship program.

I am an environmental studies major at Brown University writing my senior thesis on present-day discourses about strategies for addressing climate change. My thesis recognizes the Breakthrough Institute as a leading organization shaping climate change discourse today, and your response to this survey would therefore be very helpful for my research. It should take no more than 15 minutes to complete, as long as you don’t think too hard about the questions (which you shouldn’t). Thanks a lot for your help!

A. Scale questions

Rate the extent to which you identify with the following statements. (scale of 1-5) 1. I am a member of the Breakthrough Institute (BI) community. 2. I am a member of the environmental movement. 3. I am proud to be a member of the BI community. 4. I feel a strong sense of belonging to the BI community. 5. Being part of the BI community has given me a close community of friends.

B. Open-ended questions

1. What is the foremost goal that BI is trying to work towards? 2. How and why did you join the BI community? What activities have you taken part in as a member of the BI community? 3. What is the best strategy, or what are some good strategies, for addressing climate change? 4. What are 3-5 adjectives or phrases you would use to describe the environmental movement today? 5. What is the foremost goal you think the environmental movement trying to work towards?

C. Read-and-respond

14. The federal government should end subsidies for fossil fuels. 15. The federal government should provide subsidies or mandate state subsidies and other policies to encourage clean energy production and consumption. 16. The federal government should put a price on carbon by instituting a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade system. 17. The federal government should establish a serious, strategic commitment to investing in clean energy research and development in order to make clean energy cheaper. 18. Rank the above in order of importance.

136 19. Until the political clout of the fossil fuel industry is reduced, none of the above will be politically possible. Therefore, the environmental movement must work to reduce the power of the fossil fuel industry. 20. The environmental movement has been overly focused on regulations, when the focus should instead be on investing in revolutionary technological innovation, which is needed to make clean energy technologies much cheaper. 21. Climate skepticism is the major stumbling block to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 22. Investments in energy efficiency, solar power, and wind power offer the greatest promise for meeting all of our energy needs in a sustainable manner. 23. We will not be able to meet all our energy needs without greater innovation in advanced fossil fuel technologies like carbon capture and storage. 24. Natural gas is a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and must play a part in the transition to a clean energy economy. 25. Nuclear energy must play a part in the transition to a clean energy economy. 26. If you wish to clarify any of your above responses, write your comments here:

D. Interview

If you are willing to be interviewed on similar issues (30 min max.), please leave your name and email address.

137 C. INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

This is a sample of interview questions I posed to self-identified members of the environmental movement, most of whom had prior familiarity with or impressions of the Breakthrough Institute and/or its co-founders.

• How did you first get involved in the environmental movement? • What do you worry about when you worry about energy and climate issues? • How strongly do you identify as a member of the environmental movement? • When do you feel most proud of the climate movement? • How did you react to The Death of Environmentalism when you first read it? • If I were a young climate activist who hadn’t heard about the Breakthrough Institute before, how would you introduce it to me? • What role do you see natural gas and/or nuclear power playing in the movement today? • What do you think is the climate movement’s foremost strategy for addressing climate change today? Do you think it’s an effective strategy? • What is your theory of change for why we haven’t achieved any meaningful action on climate change and what we should do about it? • Would you consider yourself a social justice activist, climate activist, or environmental activist?

This is a sample of interview questions I posed to Breakthrough staff or former fellows.

• What drew you to the Breakthrough Institute? • What do you worry about when you worry about energy and climate issues? • What experience have you had with environmental movement organisations? Do you consider yourself a member of the environmental movement? What does it mean to be a member of the environmental movement / an environmentalist? • Breakthrough never seems to say anything about fossil fuel subsidies. Do you have any thoughts? • How would you introduce Breakthrough to me if I’ve never heard of it before? • To you, who is the environmental movement and what are their core strategies for addressing climate change? • Do you think the Breakthrough Institute is succeeding in communicating with environmentalists? Why or why not? • Breakthrough often says that putting a price on carbon is politically impossible. Do you think that investing in clean energy innovation is still a more politically plausible message even after the failure of some of the portfolio investments in the 2009 stimulus bill? • How would you say the environmental movement has changed over the past decade since The Death of Environmentalism was published? • What are your opinions on (insert energy / climate policy issue / campaign strategy)? • When do you feel most proud of Breakthrough? Least proud? • What is the aim of writing articles that make generalisations about and criticise the climate movement?

138