Why the Climate Movement is Actually Close to Winning

 

Why the Climate Movement is Actually Close to Winning

Despite widespread discouragement among climate activists, a tested blueprint for successful movements shows immense progress being made.

In January, U.S. climate activists prepared for one of the largest direct action protests against fossil fuels in years. The plan was for people to descend on the Department of Energy headquarters for three days of sit-ins protesting a series of massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals up for approval on the Gulf Coast. If built, the projects would dramatically increase the amount of fossil natural gas being burned around the world. Hundreds of activists readied themselves to risk arrest.

The sit-in never happened, but not because activists lost their nerve. Rather, just a couple of weeks before it was to begin, the Biden administration announced it would delay its review of the LNG projects to look at their climate impacts. The eventual fate of the terminals remains uncertain, in light of court challenges and Biden’s shaky re-election prospects. However, the fact that activists moved the administration without one actual arrest represents a remarkable win.

Successful social movements — especially big, complex ones like the climate movement — are messy affairs. Victories are hard-won, and sometimes the end goal seems unreachable. However, there are patterns movements follow as they expand from the political fringes to start shaping national decisions. One framework for identifying these is the eight-stage “Movement Action Plan,” or MAP, articulated by activist and scholar Bill Moyer in 1987.

Trying to fit the whole climate movement, with its many sub-movements, projects, and campaigns, neatly into the MAP isn’t simple. After all, it is arguably really a composite of movements for fossil fuel divestment, community-centered clean energy, and just solutions, as well as against coal, oil, and gas development.

Still, preventing the worst effects of climate change is a definable goal, requiring a set of policy wins that no single one of the smaller movements above can accomplish fully on its own. For this reason, there’s value in taking a big-picture look at the larger climate movement through the lens of the MAP. Doing so helps show how we got to a point where activists dealt a major blow to one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in history with relatively little effort. It also suggests possible paths forward for the movement.

Today, many climate activists seem discouraged, unable to appreciate how successful their own efforts have been. Putting their work in the context of the MAP’s eight stages suggests there is more reason for hope than some realize.

Stage One: Normal Times

According to Moyer, during Stage One of the MAP unjust conditions “are maintained by the policies of public and private powerholders, and a majority of public opinion.” This applies to the state of affairs for climate issues in the U.S. through the early 2000s, before there was a national, grassroots climate movement. Frontline communities resisted the fossil fuel industry and some explicitly connected their struggles to climate, but without the support of a national uprising. Large environmental organizations supported curbing carbon emissions, but the issue had yet to become a top priority even for them.

The science of climate change has been well established since the 1970s, but its implications were largely ignored by policymakers, the media, and the public. Occasionally, events like Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress elevated the issue in the news, but without much lasting impact. Public confusion about climate science was partly by design, as fossil fuel companies deliberately sowed misinformation.

Stage One is a demoralizing time for movements, when success may seem unimaginable. During this period for the climate movement the scattering of frontline communities, scientists, and a few writers seeking to call attention to the crisis seemed to be shouting into a void.

Stage Two: Prove the Failure of Institutions

During the MAP’s Stage One, the status quo is reinforced by the public’s misconception that if something were seriously amiss, officially sanctioned forms of advocacy like lobbying should be sufficient to rectify the problem. Stage Two is about shattering this illusion.

Traditional advocacy organizations, which Moyer called “professional opposition organizations,” or POOs, play a key role during this stage. By trying to fix a major societal problem through official channels, POOs end up demonstrating the inefficacy of this approach. Thus, in the ‘90s and 2000s, environmental nonprofits with paid staff and substantial — but largely passive — memberships lobbied, petitioned, and pleaded with policymakers to act against climate change. These efforts were not entirely without results; for example, investments in clean energy were included in the Obama administration’s 2009 economic stimulus. Yet, there were limits to what they could achieve.

In late 2009, activists hoped the world would adopt a legally binding climate treaty at U.N. talks in Copenhagen. Instead, the talks collapsed, with the Obama administration expending minimal capital to change the outcome. Efforts to pass domestic climate legislation unraveled around the same time. By mid-2010, it was clear lobbying and petitioning would not, on their own, turn the tide on climate.

Becoming disillusioned with institutions is painful, and during this stage activists may lash out not just at government decision-makers, but POOs whose efforts failed to achieve the needed change. This anger is useful when it motivates people to try new approaches to activism. However, POOs serve a necessary function during Stage Two by demonstrating the limitations of official advocacy channels. And, to the extent that they achieve some partial wins, their work may lay a foundation for broader change.

Stage Three: Ripening Conditions

The next stage of the MAP involves conditions aligning to create a political environment where the birth of a broad-based movement becomes possible. This may involve national or global events over which activists have little control. For the climate movement, these included:

• Awareness-raising events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which demonstrated the potential for extreme weather to cause havoc; the 2006 release of Al Gore’s massively popular film “An Inconvenient Truth;” and the publication of a key Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007.
• A new and seemingly more hopeful political environment following Barack Obama’s election in 2008, which inspired POOs and grassroots groups to “field test” diverse approaches to activism. Some of these, like fossil fuel divestment and the direct action campaign against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, won important victories that eroded the fossil fuel industry’s power.
• The advent of a new age of mass protests following Trump’s election in 2016, which saw historic demonstrations in support of women’s rights, racial justice, immigrants, and gun control. All of these demonstrated a readiness on the part of progressives to take action in huge numbers.

According to Moyer, in response to external events during Stage Three, “growing numbers of discontented local people across the country quietly start new autonomous local groups, which as a whole form a ‘new wave’ of grassroots opposition [to status quo policies], which is independent from the established POOs.” This takes thousands of volunteers pitching in to hold meetings, build supporter lists, and train others in organizing.

In the 2000s and 2010s, a diversity of decentralized, mostly volunteer-run climate organizations took root in the U.S. These included climate justice groups tied to specific communities, such as the Black Mesa Water Coalition in the Navajo Nation, and national projects like 350.org, Rising Tide, Zero Hour, and Sunrise Movement. Some eventually developed large paid staffs and now straddle the line between POO and outside agitator group. Others have remained volunteer-run.

Stage Four: Social Movement Take-Off

All successful movements experience a moment when they enter the public consciousness and become a potent political force, usually after a trigger event that grabs people’s attention. History is full of such moments, from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott to mass protests against the 1999 World Trade Organization in Seattle. Large movements may involve multiple trigger events that reinforce one message. For example, the civil rights movement was propelled into the spotlight by not just the Montgomery bus boycott, but the 1960 Greensboro sit-in and 1961 Freedom Rides.

Identifying a take-off for the climate movement is complicated because many of its branches can be said to have had their own take-off moments. For instance, the campaign against Keystone XL exploded during a series of mobilizations that began in 2011 and included mass direct action at the White House. Still, it’s possible to point to a period from late 2018 through early 2020 when the broader climate crisis became a national political issue in a way it never had before.

In late 2018, young activists from Sunrise Movement called for a Green New Deal during sit-ins at the offices of Congressional Democrats, who had just won a House majority. Images of young people being led out in handcuffs spread across the internet, forcing Democratic leaders to respond to the activists’ demands. The following year, Sunrise joined forces with the climate school strike movement that spread from Europe, generating an unprecedented display of public support for climate action. That September, over seven million people around the world joined climate protests.

In Stage Four, mass media begin paying serious attention to activists, and casual observers may get the impression this is when the movement began. However, it’s important to understand that while movements seem to spring from nowhere at this stage, this happens thanks to years of work creating conditions where such a take-off became possible.

Stage Five: Identity Crisis of Powerlessness

The MAP’s greatest paradox is that the moment a movement achieves unprecedented recognition, it is followed by discouragement and even despair for activists, who come to believe over a period of months or years that their best efforts are failing. Yet, according to Moyer, the problem “is not that the movement has failed to achieve its goals, but that expectations that its goal could possibly be achieved at this stage were unrealistic.”

In Stage Five, many who only recently joined movements may burn out or become jaded. Grassroots groups start to fracture and turn on each other. “Where is the movement we were building?” people ask. The identity crisis also coincides with a sharp backlash from elites whose power the movement threatens. In the 1960s civil rights movement, this took the form of escalating racist violence in the South. More recently, the Trump administration embraced an agenda that promoted fossil fuel interests as a means of undermining climate action.

From early 2020 to mid-2021, the climate movement appeared to have lost momentum, with mass protests largely on hold due to the pandemic and young people avoiding in-person gatherings. Some may have felt their activism had come to naught. At the same time, fossil fuel companies are hoping to build LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast that could lock in demand for their product for decades. New challenges such as the increasing frequency of climate change-fueled wildfires and heatwaves also weigh heavily on activists’ minds.

Stage Six: Winning the Majority

In the MAP’s Stage Six, a movement that appeared to be fading manages to rally broad-based public support. More and more people start embracing the movement’s aims, even if they are not personally involved in activism. In recent years, there have been many signs this is happening with climate.

In 2021, public opinion research found overwhelming support for a bold federal program to cut emissions and create jobs in clean energy. Polling has also found the Green New Deal is broadly popular with voters of both parties. In Stage Six, movements also push elites in society to adopt many of their demands. This can sometimes make it hard to determine whether those in power are co-opting a movement or simply responding to growing public pressure.

The Biden administration’s early record on climate has mixed reviews. On the one hand, it has continued to approve fossil fuel infrastructure, but it also won major investments in clean energy. While the scale of climate change can make it hard to appreciate incremental victories, this is a case where activists can rightfully claim partial success. After all, if they had not protested, it’s unlikely any president would have made climate a top-tier issue.

Stage Seven: Achieving Alternatives

Stage Seven is when the movement’s gains are consolidated and become the new status quo. This requires both implementing positive alternatives and defeating efforts by elites to roll back change. For example, the civil rights movement eventually achieved federal legislation that enshrined many of its gains into law. The MAP makes clear Stage Seven is often the longest period in a movement, with some victories followed by setbacks.

Even without full implementation of a Green New Deal, activists have won major victories — from local fights to stop fossil fuel infrastructure to building community-owned solar projects. Federal funds allocated to clean energy and climate justice in the Inflation Reduction Act also represent a major win, although there will be fierce competition over how this money is spent.

A major test for the climate movement in this stage will be stopping the Gulf Coast LNG build-out. If grassroots organizing combined with court challenges and regulatory hurdles succeed in blocking it, this could deal a serious blow to the fossil fuel industry.

Stage Eight: Continuing the Struggle

The final stage in Moyer’s MAP is one of continued engagement. The struggle is never fully over, and any gains made must be defended from attempts to roll them back. Movements need to remain vigilant, always ready to mobilize in defense of the new status quo. One challenge for the climate movement will be responding to ongoing environmental changes and increasing climate impacts even as it fights to implement solutions.

Ultimately, the climate movement’s journey through Moyer’s eight stages shows significant progress. From the early days of isolation and institutional failures to today’s broad-based support and policy wins, the movement has laid a foundation for continued success. Climate activists may find hope in this perspective, recognizing their role in a larger historical process and understanding that despite setbacks, they are closer to winning than it may seem.