“ACHIEVING DISAGREEMENT”: Culture Wars and Competing Epistemologies of Climate Change Strategies in the “Death of Environmentalism” Debates 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 4 “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.