Shellenberger Deathenvironmentalism 2009

THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
Author(s): MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER and TED NORDHAUS

Source: Geopolitics, History, and International Relations , Vol. 1, No. 1 (2009), pp. 121-
163
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THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
•
GLOBAL WARMING POLITICS IN
A POST-ENVIRONMENTAL WORLD
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
Executive Director, Breakthrough Institute
[email protected]
TED NORDHAUS
Vice President of Evans/McDonough
[email protected]
ABSTRACT. “The Death of Environmentalism”, originally self-

published by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in 2004,
argues that environmentalism is unable to deal with climate change
and should “die” so that a new paradigm can emerge that can. The
essay draws on history, political philosophy, and interviews with
over two dozen leaders of large and small environmental organi-
zations and foundations, including the Sierra Club, the Hewlett
Foundation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Shellen-
berger and Nordhaus suggest that the 20 year failure to reduce
emissions is due in part to the unwillingness of environmental
leaders to expand their conception of ‘the environment’ to include
humans and economic development. Since this essay was published
Shellenberger and Nordhaus authored Break Through: From the
Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton
Mifflin, 2007), and a series of articles arguing for large scale public
investment in technology innovation to make clean energy cheap,
and a new green cultural pragmatism.
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Introduction
To not think of dying, is to not think of living.

Jann Arden
Over the last 15 years environmental foundations

and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dol-
lars into combating global warming. We have strikingly little
to show for it. From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for
cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions
through international treaties, environmental groups repeat-
edly have tried and failed to win national legislation that
would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, en-
vironmental groups today find themselves politically less
powerful than we were one and a half decades ago.
Yet in lengthy conversations, the vast majority of
leaders from the largest environmental organizations and
foundations in the country insisted to us that we are on the
right track.
Nearly all of the more than two-dozen environ-
mentalists we interviewed underscored that climate change
demands that we remake the global economy in ways that will
transform the lives of six billion people. All recognize that
it’s an undertaking of monumental size and complexity. And
all acknowledged that we must reduce emissions by up to 70
percent as soon as possible.
But in their public campaigns, not one of Ame-
rica’s environmental leaders is articulating a vision of the
future commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis. Instead
they are promoting technical policy fixes like pollution
controls and higher vehicle mileage standards — proposals
that provide neither the popular inspiration nor the political
power the community needs to deal with the problem.
By failing to question their most basic assumptions
about the problem and the solution, environmental leaders are
like generals fighting the last war – in particular the war they
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fought and won for basic environmental protections more
than 30 years ago. It was then that the community’s political
strategy became defined around using science to define the
problem as “environmental” and crafting technical policy pro-
posals as solutions.
The greatest achievements to reduce global warming
are today happening in Europe. In Europe, Britain has agreed
to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent over 50 years, Holland
by 80 percent in 40 years, and Germany by 50 percent in 50
years. Russia may soon ratify Kyoto. And even China –
which is seen fearfully for the amount of dirty coal it intends
to burn – recently established fuel economy standards for its
cars and trucks that are much tougher than ours in the US.
Environmentalists are learning all the wrong lessons
from Europe. We closely scrutinize the policies without
giving much thought to the politics that made the policies
possible. As a consequence, environmentalists continue to
craft legislation only for what it will do for the “the en-
vironment” — not also for what it will do for industry and
labor interests.
Our thesis is this: the environmental community’s
narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy
literalism that undermines its power. If you consider the
drought of real policy achievements since the 1970s, and the
long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush, the environmental movement’s
approach to problems and policies hasn’t worked particularly
well for nearly 30 years. And yet there is nothing about the
behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our inter-
views with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a
community are ready to think differently about our work.
What the environmental movement needs more than
anything else right now is to take a collective step back to
rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things
around as long as we understand our failures as essentially
tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical.
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In Part II we make the case for what could happen if
progressives created new institutions and proposals around a
big vision and a core set of values. Much of this section is
aimed at showing how a more powerful movement depends
on letting go of old identities, categories and assumptions, so
that we can be truly open to embracing a better model.
We resisted the exhortations from early reviewers of
this report to say more about what we think must now be done
because we believe that the most important next steps will
emerge from teams, not individuals. Over the coming months
we will be meeting with existing and emerging teams of
practitioners and funders to develop a common vision and
strategy for moving forward.
One tool we have to offer to that process is the
research we are doing as part of our Strategic Values Project,
which is adapting corporate marketing research for use by the
progressive community. This project draws on a 600 question,
2,500-person survey done in the U.S. and Canada every four
years since 1992. In contrast to conventional opinion research,
this research identifies the core values and beliefs that inform
how individuals develop a range of opinions on everything
from the economy to abortion to what’s the best SUV on the
market. This research both shows a clear conservative shift in
America’s values since 1992 and illuminates many positive
openings for progressives and environmentalists.
We believe that this new values science will prove to
be invaluable in creating a road map to guide the development
of a set of proposals that simultaneously energizes our base,
wins over new allies, divides our opponents, wins policy
victories and makes America’s values environment more pro-
gressive. Readers of this report who are interested in learning
more about the Strategic Values Project — and want to en-
gage in a dialogue about the future of environmentalism and
progressive politics — should feel welcome to contact us.
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1. Environmentalism as a Special Interest
Death is not the greatest loss in life.

The greatest loss is what
dies inside us while we live.
— Norman Cousins
Those of us who were children during the birth of

the modern environmental movement have no idea what it
feels like to really win big. Our parents and elders exper-
ienced something during the 1960s and 70s that today seems
like a dream: the passage of a series of powerful environ-
mental laws too numerous to list, from the Endangered
Species Act to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts to the
National Environmental Policy Act.
Experiencing such epic victories had a searing im-
pact on the minds of the movement’s founders. It established
a way of thinking about the environment and politics that has
lasted until today. It was also then, at the height of the
movement’s success, that the seeds of failure were planted.
The environmental community’s success created a strong
confidence – and in some cases bald arrogance – that the
environmental protection frame was enough to succeed at a
policy level. The environmentalists’ belief that their power
derives from defining themselves as defenders of “the envir-
onment” has prevented them from winning major legislation
on global warming at the national level.
We believe that the environmental movement’s
foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative pro-
posals, and its very institutions are exhausted. Today environ-
mentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this
can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning.
What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are
about what gets counted and what doesn’t as “environmen-
tal.” Most of the movement’s leading thinkers, funders and
advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about
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who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should
be doing.
Environmentalism is today more about protecting a
supposed “thing” – “the environment” – than advancing the
worldview articulated by Sierra Club founder John Muir, who
nearly a century ago observed, “When we try to pick out
anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the
Universe.”
Thinking of the environment as a “thing” has had
enormous implications for how environmentalists conduct
their politics. The three-part strategic framework for environ-
mental policy-making hasn’t changed in 40 years: 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 through a variety of tactics,
such as lobbying, third-party allies, research reports, adver-
tising, and public relations.
When we asked environmental leaders how we can
accelerate our efforts against global warming, most pointed to
this or that tactic – more analysis, more grassroots organizing,
more PR.
Few things epitomize the environmental commun-
ity’s tactical orientation to politics more than its search for
better words and imagery to “reframe” global warming. La-
tely the advice has included: a) don’t call it “climate change”
because Americans like change; b) don’t call it “global
warming” because the word “warming” sounds nice; c) refer
to global warming as a “heat trapping blanket” so people can
understand it; d) focus attention on technological solutions —
like fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars.
What each of these recommendations has in com-
mon is the shared assumption that a) the problem should be
framed as “environmental” and b) our legislative proposals
should be technical.1
Even the question of alliances, which goes to the
core of political strategy, is treated within environmental
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circles as a tactical question — an opportunity to get this or
that constituency — religious leaders! business leaders!
celebrities! youth! Latinos! — to take up the fight against
global warming. The implication is that if only X group were
involved in the global warming fight then things would really
start to happen.
The arrogance here is that environmentalists ask not
what we can do for non-environmental constituencies but
what non-environmental constituencies can do for environ-
mentalists. As a result, while public support for action on
global warming is wide it is also frighteningly shallow.
The environmental movement’s incuriosity about the
interests of potential allies depends on it never challenging
the most basic assumptions about does and doesn’t get
counted as “environmental.” Because we define environmen-
tal problems so narrowly, environmental leaders come up
with equally narrow solutions. In the face of perhaps the
greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders
are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent
light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be
sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to over-
come the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry
interests in Washington, D.C.
The entire landscape in which politics plays out has
changed radically in the last 40 years, yet the environmental
movement acts as though proposals based on “sound science”
will be sufficient to overcome ideological and industry op-
position. Environmentalists are in a culture war whether we
like it or not. It’s a war over our core values as Americans and
over our vision for the future, and it won’t be won by ap-
pealing to the rational consideration of our collective self-
interest.
Those of us who are children of the environmental
movement should never forget that we are standing on the
shoulders of all those who came before us. The clean water
we drink, the clean air we breathe, and the protected wilder-
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ness we treasure are all, in no small part, thanks to them. The
two of us have worked for most of the country’s leading
environmental organizations as staff or consultants. We hold
a sincere and abiding respect for our parents and elders in the
environmental community. They have worked hard and ac-
complished a great deal. For that we are deeply grateful.
At the same time, we believe that the best way to
honor their achievements is to acknowledge that modern envi-
ronmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world’s
most serious ecological crisis. We have become convinced
that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined as-
sumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must
die so that something new can live. Those of us who pay so
much attention to nature’s cycles know better than to fear
death, which is inseparable from life. In the words of the Tao
Ti Ching, “If you aren’t afraid of dying there is nothing you
can’t achieve.”
Environmental Group Think
If we wish our civilization to survive we must break

with the habit of deference to great men.
Karl Popper
One of the reasons environmental leaders can whis-

tle past the graveyard of global warming politics is that the
membership rolls and the income of the big environmental
organizations have grown enormously over the past 30 years
— especially since the election of George W. Bush in 2000.
The institutions that define what environmentalism
means boast large professional staffs and receive tens of
millions of dollars every year from foundations and individ-
uals. Given these rewards, it’s no surprise that most environ-
mental leaders neither craft nor support proposals that could
be branded “non-environmental.” Doing otherwise would do
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more than threaten their status; it would undermine their
identity.
Environmentalists are particularly upbeat about the
direction of public opinion thanks in large part to the polling
we conduct that shows wide support for their proposals. Yet
America is a vastly more right-wing country than it was three
decades ago. The domination of American politics by the far-
right is a central obstacle to achieving action on global warm-
ing. Yet almost none of the environmentalists we interviewed
thought to mention it.
Part of what’s behind America’s political turn to the
right is the skill with which conservative think tanks, in-
tellectuals and political leaders have crafted proposals that
build their power through setting the terms of the debate.
Their work has paid off. According to a survey of 1,500
Americans by the market research firm Environics, the num-
ber 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 percent in 1996 to
26 percent in 2000. The number of Americans who agreed
that, “Most of the people actively involved in environmental
groups are extremists, not reasonable people,” leapt from 32
percent in 1996 to 41 percent in 2000.
The truth is that for the vast majority of Americans,
the environment never makes it into their top ten list of things
to worry about. Protecting the environment is indeed sup-
ported by a large majority — it’s just not supported very
strongly. Once you understand this, it’s much easier to under-
stand why it’s been so easy for anti-environmental interests to
gut 30 years of environmental protections.
The most troubling aspect of today’s environmen-
talism is the absence of a serious public debate about how to
deal with global warming. Few environmental leaders ask
whether their legislative proposals will provide them with the
muscle we need to win in a political environment that is
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dominated by apocalyptically fundamentalist right-wingers at
the beck and call of polluting industries.
The conventional criticism of the environmental move-
ment articulated by outsiders and many funders is that it is too
divided to get the job done. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Ross Gelbspan argues in his new book Boiling Point, “Des-
pite occasional spasms of cooperation, the major environ-
mental groups have been unwilling to join together around a
unified climate agenda, pool resources, and mobilize a united
campaign on the climate.”
Yet what was striking to us in our research was the
high degree of consensus among environmental leaders about
what the problems and solutions are. We came away from our
interviews less concerned about internal divisions than the
lack of feedback mechanisms. Engineers use a technical term
to describe systems without feedback mechanisms: “stupid.”
As individuals, environmental leaders are anything but
stupid. Many hold multiple advanced degrees in science, en-
gineering, and law from the best schools in the country. But
as a community, environmentalists suffer from a bad case of
group think, starting with shared assumptions about what we
mean by “the environment” – a category that reinforces the
notions that a) the environment is a separate “thing” and b)
human beings are separate from and superior to the “natural
world.”
The concepts of “nature” and “environment” have
been thoroughly deconstructed. Yet they retain their mythic
and debilitating power within the environmental movement
and the public at large. If one understands the notion of the
“environment” to include humans, then the way the environ-
mental community designates certain problems as environ-
mental and others as not is completely arbitrary.
Why, for instance, is a human-made phenomenon like
global warming — which may kill hundreds of millions of
human beings over the next century — considered “environ-
mental”? Why are poverty and war not considered environ-
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mental problems while global warming is? What are the im-
plications of framing global warming as an environmental
problem – and handing off the responsibility for dealing with
it to “environmentalists”?
Some believe that this framing is a political, and not
just conceptual, problem. "When we use the term ‘envi-
ronment’ it makes it seem as if the problem is ‘out there’ and
we need to ‘fix it,’” said Susan Clark, Executive Director of
the Columbia Foundation, who believes the Environmental
Grantmakers Association should change its name. “The pro-
blem is not external to us; it’s us. It’s a human problem
having to do with how we organize our society. This old way
of thinking isn’t anyone’s fault, but it is all of our respon-
sibility to change."
Not everyone agrees. “We need to remember that
we’re the environmental movement and that our job is to pro-
tect the environment,” said the Sierra Club’s Global Warming
Director, Dan Becker. “If we stray from that, we risk losing
our focus, and there’s no one else to protect the environment
if we don’t do it. We’re not a union or the Labor Department.
Our job is to protect the environment, not to create an in-
dustrial policy for the United States. That doesn’t mean we
don’t care about protecting workers.”
Most environmentalists don’t think of “the environ-
ment” as a mental category at all — they think of it as a real
“thing” to be protected and defended. They think of them-
selves, literally, as representatives and defenders of this thing.
Environmentalists do their work as though these are literal
rather than figurative truths. They tend to see language in
general as representative rather than constitutive of reality.
This is typical of liberals who are, at their core, children of
the enlightenment who believe that they arrived at their
identity and politics through a rational and considered process.
They expect others in politics should do the same and are
constantly surprised and disappointed when they don’t.
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The effect of this orientation is a certain literal-
sclerosis2 — the belief that social change happens only when
people speak a literal “truth to power.” Literal-sclerosis can
be seen in the assumption that to win action on global
warming one must talk about global warming instead of, say,
the economy, industrial policy, or health care. “If you want
people to act on global warming” stressed Becker, “you need
to convince them that action is needed on global warming and
not on some ulterior goal.”
What We Worry about when

We Worry about Global Warming
Calculative thinking computes… it races from one prospect to the

next. It never stops, never collects itself. It is not meditative thinking,
not thinking which contemplates the meaning that reigns in
everything there is… Meditative thinking demands of us that we
engage ourselves with what, at first sight, does not go together.
Martin Heidegger, Memorial Address
What do we worry about when we worry about

global warming? Is it the refugee crisis that will be caused
when Caribbean nations are flooded? If so, shouldn’t our
focus be on building bigger sea walls and disaster prepared-
ness? Is it the food shortages that will result from reduced
agricultural production? If so, shouldn’t our focus be on in-
creasing food production? Is it the potential collapse of the
Gulf Stream, which could freeze upper North America and
northern Europe and trigger, as a recent Pentagon scenario
suggests, world war?
Most environmental leaders would scoff at such
framings of the problem and retort, “Disaster preparedness is
not an environmental problem.” It is a hallmark of environ-
mental rationality to believe that we environmentalists search
for “root causes” not “symptoms.” What, then, is the cause of
global warming?
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For most within the environmental community, the
answer is easy: too much carbon in the atmosphere. Framed
this way, the solution is logical: we need to pass legislation
that reduces carbon emissions. But what are the obstacles to
removing carbon from the atmosphere?
Consider what would happen if we identified the
obstacles as:
• The radical right’s control of all three branches of the US

government.
• Trade policies that undermine environmental protections.
• Our failure to articulate an inspiring and positive vision.
• Overpopulation.
• The influence of money in American politics.
• Our inability to craft legislative proposals that shape the
debate around core American values.
• Poverty.
• Old assumptions about what the problem is and what it isn’t.
The point here is not just that global warming has

many causes but also that the solutions we dream up depend
on how we structure the problem. The environmental move-
ment’s failure to craft inspiring and powerful proposals to
deal with global warming is directly related to the move-
ment’s reductive logic about the supposedly root causes (e.g.,
“too much carbon in the atmosphere”) of any given environ-
mental problem. The problem is that once you identify some-
thing as the root cause, you have little reason to look for even
deeper causes or connections with other root causes.
NRDC attorney David Hawkins, who has worked on
environmental policy for three decades, defines global warm-
ing as essentially a “pollution” problem like acid rain, which
was addressed by the 1990 Clean Air Act amendment. The
acid rain bill set a national cap on the total amount of acid
rain pollution allowed by law and allowed companies to buy
pollution credits from other companies that had successfully
reduced their emissions beyond the cap. This “cap-and-trade”
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policy worked well for acid rain, Hawkins reasons, so it
should work for global warming, too. The McCain-Lieberman
“Climate Stewardship Act” is based on a similar mechanism
to cap carbon emissions and allow companies to trade pol-
lution rights.
Not everyone agrees that the acid rain victory offers
the right mental model. “This is not a problem that will be
solved like acid rain,” said Phil Clapp, who founded National
Environmental Trust working a decade ago, with foundations
that recognized the need for more effective public campaigns
by environmentalists.
“Acid rain dealt with a specific number of facilities
in one industry that was already regulated,” Clapp argued. “It
took just 8 years, from 1982 to 1990, to pass. Global warming
is not an issue that will be resolved by the passage of one
statute. This is nothing short of the beginning of an effort to
transform the world energy economy, vastly improving effi-
ciency and diversifying it away from its virtually exclusive
reliance on fossil fuels. The campaign to get carbon emissions
capped and then reduced is literally a 50-year non-stop cam-
paign. This is not one that everybody will be able to declare
victory, shut up shop, and go home.”
That lesson was driven home to Clapp, Hawkins, and
other leaders during the 1990s when the big environmental
groups and funders put all of their global warming eggs in the
Kyoto basket. The problem was that they had no well-de-
signed political strategy to get the U.S. Senate to ratify the
treaty, which would have reduced greenhouse gas reductions
to under 1990 levels. The environmental community not only
failed to get the Senate to ratify Kyoto, industry strategists –
in a deft act of legislative judo – crafted an anti-Kyoto Senate
resolution that passed 95 – 0.
The size of this defeat can’t be overstated. In exiting
the Clinton years with no law to reduce carbon emissions –
even by a miniscule amount – the environmental community
has no more power or influence than it had when Kyoto was
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negotiated. We asked environmental leaders: what went
wrong? “Our advocacy in the 1990s was inadequate in the
sense that the scale of our objectives in defining victory was
not calibrated to the global warming need,” answered Hawk-
ins. “Instead it was defined by whatever was possible. We
criticized Clinton’s proposal for a voluntary program to im-
plement the Rio convention agreement [that preceded Kyoto]
but we didn’t keep up a public campaign. We redirected our
attention to the international arena and spent all of our efforts
trying to upgrade President Bush Sr.’s Rio convention com-
mitments rather than trying to turn the existing commitments
into law. We should have done both.”
Responding to the complaint that, in going 10 years
without any action on global warming the environmental
movement is in a worse place than if it had negotiated an
initial agreement under Clinton, Clapp said, “In retrospect, for
political positioning we probably would have been better off
if, under the Kyoto protocol, we had accepted 1990 levels by
2012 since that was what Bush, Sr. agreed to in Rio. I don’t
exempt myself from that mistake.”
After the Kyoto Senate defeat, Clapp and others
focused his wrath on Vice President Al Gore, who was one of
the country’s strongest and most eloquent environmentalists.
But Gore had witnessed Kyoto’s 95 – 0 assassination in the
Senate and feared that the tag “Ozone Man” – pinned on him
for his successful advocacy of the Montreal Protocol’s ban on
ozone-destroying CFCs – would hurt his 2000 presidential
campaign.
The environmental hit on Al Gore culminated in an
April 26, 1999 Time magazine article titled, “Is Al Gore a
Hero or a Traitor?” In it the Time reporter describes a meeting
where environmental leaders insisted that Gore do more to
phase out dirty old coal power plants. Gore shot back, “Lo-
sing on impractical proposals that are completely out of tune
with what is achievable does not necessarily advance your
cause at all."
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The public campaign against Gore generated headlines
but inspired neither greater risk-taking by politicians nor
emboldened the Vice President. Instead, the author of Earth
in the Balance spent much of the 2000 race downplaying his
green credentials in the false hope that in doing so he would
win over undecided voters.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the
end, the environmental community had still not come up with
an inspiring legislative proposal that a majority of Americans
could get excited about.
Everybody Loses on Fuel Efficiency
Great doubt: great awakening.

Little doubt: little awakening.
No doubt: no awakening.
Zen koan
By the end of the 1990s, the environmental com-

munity hadn’t just failed to win a legislative agreement on
carbon, it had also let a deal on higher vehicle fuel efficiency
standards slip through their fingers.
Since the 1970s environmentalists have defined the
problem of oil dependency as a consequence of inadequate
fuel efficiency standards. Their strategy has rested on trying
to overpower industry and labor unions on environmental and
national security grounds. The result has been massive failure:
over the last 20 years, as automobile technologies have im-
proved exponentially, overall mileage rates have gone down,
not up.
Few beat around the bush when discussing this fact.
“If the question is whether we’ve done anything to address
the problem since 1985, the answer is no,” said Bob Nordhaus,
the Washington, D.C. attorney who helped draft the Corpor-
ate Average Fuel Economy or “CAFE” (pronounced “café”)
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legislation and the Clean Air Act. (Nordhaus is the father of
one of the authors of this report.)
The first CAFE amendment in 1975 grabbed the
low-hanging fruit of efficiency to set into place standards that
experts say were much easier for industry to meet than the
standards environmentalists are demanding now. The UAW
and automakers agreed to the 1975 CAFE amendment out of
a clearly defined self-interest: to slow the advance of Japan-
ese imports. “CAFE [in 1975] was backed by the UAW and
[Michigan Democrat Rep. John] Dingell,” said Shelly Fiddler,
who was chief of staff for former Rep. Phil Sharp who
authored the CAFE amendment before becoming Chief of
Staff for the Clinton White House’s Council on Environ-
mental Quality. “It got done by Ford and a bunch of renegade
staffers in Congress, not by environmentalists. The environ-
mental community didn’t originate CAFE and they had ser-
ious reservations about it.”
Thanks to action by US automakers and inaction by
US environmental groups, CAFE’s efficiency gains stalled in
the mid-1980s. It’s not clear who did more damage to CAFE,
the auto industry, the UAW or the environmental movement.
Having gathered 59 votes – once short of a filibuster
– Senator Richard Bryan nearly passed legislation to raise
fuel economy standards in 1990. But one year later, when
Bryan had a very good shot at getting the 60 votes he needed,
the environmental movement cut a deal with the automakers.
In exchange for the auto industry’s opposition to drilling in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, environmentalists agreed
to drop its support for the Bryan bill. “[I]t was scuppered by
the environmentalists, of all people,” New York Times auto
industry reporter Keith Bradsher notes bitterly.3
Tragically, had Bryan and environmentalists succeed
in 1991, we would have dramatically slowed the rise of SUVs
in the coming decade and reduced the pressure on the Refuge
— a patch of wilderness that the Republicans again use to
smack around environmentalists under President George W.
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Bush. The environmental community’s failure in 1991 was
compounded by the fact that the Bryan bill “helped scare
Japanese automakers into producing larger models,” a shift
that ultimately diminished the power of both the UAW and
environmentalists. “Where was the environmental move-
ment?” asks Bradsher in his marvelous history of the SUV,
High and Mighty. “[A]s a slow and steady transformation
began taking place on the American road, the environmental
movement stayed silent on SUVs all the way into the mid-
1990s, and did not campaign in earnest for changes to SUV
regulations until 1999.”
Finally, in 2002, Senator John Kerry and Senator
John McCain popped up with another attempt to raise CAFE
standards. Once again environmentalists failed to negotiate a
deal with UAW. As a result, the bill lost by an even larger
margin than it had in 1990. The Senate voted 58 – 42 against
it. From the perspective of even the youngest and greenest
Hill staffer, the political power of environmental groups ap-
peared at an all-time low.
Environmental spokespersons tried to position their
2002 loss as a victory, arguing that it provided them with
momentum going forward. But privately almost every envi-
ronmental leader we interviewed told us that CAFE — in its
2002 incarnation — is dead.
Given CAFE’s initial 10 years of success, from the
mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it made sense that environ-
mentalists saw CAFE as a good technical tool for reducing
our dependence on oil and cutting carbon emissions. Un-
fortunately, the best technical solutions don’t always make for
the best politics. Senators don’t vote according to the tech-
nical specifications of a proposal. They make decisions based
on a variety of factors, especially how the proposal and its
opposition are framed. And no amount of public relations can
help a badly framed law.
Bradsher argues pointedly that “Environmentalists
and their Congressional allies have wasted their time since the
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days of the [1989] Bryan bill by repeatedly bringing overly
ambitious legislation to the floors of the House and Senate
without first striking compromises with the UAW. The sad
truth is that by tilting the playing field in favor of SUVs for a
quarter of a century, government regulations have left the
economy of the Upper Midwest addicted to the production of
dangerous substitutes for cars. Any fuel-economy policy must
recognize this huge social and economic problem.”
In light of this string of legislative disasters one
might expect environmental leaders to reevaluate their as-
sumptions and craft a new proposal.4 Instead, over the last
two years, the environmental movement has made only the
tactical judgment to bring in new allies, everyone from reli-
gious leaders to Hollywood celebrities, to reinforce the notion
that CAFE is the only way to free America from foreign oil.
The conventional wisdom today is that the auto in-
dustry and the UAW “won” the CAFE fight. This logic im-
plies that industry executives represent what’s best for share-
holders, that union executives represent what’s best for work-
ers, and that environmentalists represent what’s best for the
environment. All of these assumptions merit questioning.
Today the American auto industry is in a state of gradual
collapse. Japanese automakers are eating away at American
market share with cleaner, more efficient, and outright better
vehicles. And American companies are drawing up plans to
move their factories overseas. None of the so-called special
interests are representing their members’ interests especially
well.
There is no better example of how environmental
categories sabotage environmental politics than CAFE. When
it was crafted in 1975, it was done so as a way to save the
American auto industry, not to save the environment. That
was the right framing then and has been the right framing
ever since. Yet the environmental movement, in all of its
literal-sclerosis, not only felt the need to brand CAFE as an
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“environmental” proposal, it failed to find a solution that
worked not just for them but also for industry and labor.
By thinking only of their own narrowly defined in-
terests, environmental groups don’t concern themselves with
the needs of either unions or the industry. As a consequence,
we miss major opportunities for alliance building. Consider
the fact that the biggest threat to the American auto industry
appears to have nothing to do with “the environment.” The
high cost of health care for its retired employees is a big part
of what hurts the competitiveness of American companies.
“G.M. covers the health care costs of 1.1 million Americans,
or close to half a percent of the total population,” wrote the
New York Times’ Danny Hakim recently.5 “For G.M., which
earned $1.2 billion [in profits] last year, annual health spend-
ing has risen to $4.8 billion from $3 billion since 1996…
Today, with global competition and the United States health
care system putting the burden largely on employers, retiree
medical costs are one reason Toyota's $10.2 billion profit in
its most recent fiscal year was more than double the combined
profit of the Big Three.”
Because Japan has national health care, its auto com-
panies aren’t stuck with the bill for its retirees. And yet if you
were to propose that environmental groups should have a
strategy for lowering the costs of health care for the auto
industry, perhaps in exchange for higher mileage standards,
you’d likely be laughed out of the room, or scolded by your
colleagues because, “Health care is not an environmental
issue.”
The health care cost disadvantage for US producers
is a threat that won’t be overcome with tax incentives for
capital investments into new factories, or consumer rebates
for hybrids. The problem isn’t just that tax credits and rebates
won’t achieve what we need them to achieve, which is save
the American auto industry by helping it build better, more
efficient cars. The problem is also that these policies, which
the environmental community only agreed to after more than
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two decades of failure, have been thrown into the old CAFE
proposal like so many trimmings for a turkey.
Environmentalists — including presidential candid-
ate John Kerry, whose platform includes the new turkey
trimmings — as well as industry and labor leaders, have yet
to rethink their assumptions about the future of the American
auto industry in ways that might reframe their proposal. Some
environmental “realists” argue that the death of the American
auto industry – and the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-
paying union jobs — isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the
environment if it means more market share for more efficient
Japanese vehicles. Others say saving the American auto in-
dustry is central to maintaining the Midwest’s middle class. “I
don’t like to bribe everyone into good behavior, but it’s not
bad to help the unions,” said Hal Harvey. “We need jobs in
this country. Union members are swing voters in a lot of
states. And a livable wage is ethically important.”
Like Harvey, most environmental leaders are pro-
gressives who support the union movement on principle. And
though many have met with labor leaders about how to re-
solve the CAFE quagmire, the environmental movement is
not articulating how building a stronger American auto in-
dustry and union movement is central to winning action on
global warming. Rather, like everything else that’s not seen as
explicitly “environmental,” the future of the union movement
is treated as a tactical, not a strategic, consideration.
California’s recent decision to require major in-
creases in fuel efficiency over the next 11 years was widely
reported as a victory for environmental efforts against global
warming. In fact, coming after over two decades of failure to
reverse the gradual decline of fuel efficiency, the decision is a
sign of the community’s weakness, not strength. Automakers
are rightly confident that will be able to defeat the California
law in court. If they can’t, there is a real danger that the
industry will persuade Congress to repeal California’s special
right to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. If that
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happens, California will lose its power to limit vehicle polu-
ution altogether.
Today’s fleet-wide fuel efficiency average is the
same as it was in 1980, according to the Union of Con-
cerned Scientists. This quarter century of failure is not due to
one or two tactical errors (though there were plenty of those,
as we describe above). Rather, the roots of the environmental
community’s failure can be found in the way it designates
certain problems as environmental and others as not. Auto-
makers and the UAW are, of course, just as responsible as
environmentalists for failing to form a strategic alliance. The
lose-lose-lose that is the current situation on automobiles is
the logical result of defining labor, environmental and indus-
try self-interests so narrowly.
Before his death, David Brower tried to think more
creatively about win-win solutions. He spoke often about the
need for the environmental community to invest more energy
in changing the tax code, a point reporter Keith Bradsher
emphasized in High and Mighty. “Environmentalists have a
history of not taking notice of tax legislation, and paid no
attention whatsoever to the depreciation and luxury tax pro-
visions for large light trucks. More egregiously, environ-
mental groups ignored SUVs in the 1990 battle over the
Bryan bill, and even disregarded the air-pollution loopholes
for light trucks in the 1990 clean air legislation.”6
Some in the environmental community are trying to
learn from the failures of the last 25 years and think dif-
ferently about the problem. Jason Mark of the Union of
Concerned Scientists told us that he has begun the search for
more carrots to the Pavley stick. “We need to negotiate from a
position of strength. Now is the time for us to propose in-
centive policies that make sense. We’ve been working on tax
credits for hybrids. Now we need to come up with tax credits
for R&D into reduced emissions, and something to ease the
industry’s pension and health burdens. No one has yet put a
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big pension deal on the table for them. None of this has yet
been explored.”
In the end, all sides are responsible for failing to
craft a deal that trades greater efficiency for targeted federal
tax credits into R&D. One consequence of Japan’s public
policies that reward R&D with tax credits, suggests Mark, is
that Japanese automakers are run by innovation-driven en-
gineers whereas American automakers are run by not nar-
rowly focused accountants. For Pavley to inspire a win-win-
win deal by industry, environmentalists and the UAW, all
three interests will need to start thinking outside of their
conceptual boxes.
Winning while Losing vs. Losing while Losing
Failure is an opportunity.
Tao Ti Ching
In politics, a legislative defeat can either be a win or

a loss. A legislative loss can be considered a win if it has
increased a movement’s power, energy, and influence over
the long-term. Witness the religious right’s successful effort
to ban partial-birth abortions. The proposal succeeded only
after several failed attempts. Because it was anchored to core
values, not technical policy specs, the initial defeats of the
ban on partial-birth abortions paved the way for eventual
victory.
The serial losses on Rio, Kyoto, CAFE, and
McCain-Lieberman were not framed in ways that increase the
environmental community’s power through each successive
defeat. That’s because, when those proposals were crafted,
environmentalists weren’t thinking about what we get out of
each successive defeat. We were only thinking about what we
get out of them if they succeed. It’s this mentality that must
be overthrown if we are to craft proposals that generate the
power we need to succeed at a legislative level.
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The thing everyone from the Pew Charitable Trusts
to Rainforest Action Network agrees on is the size of the
problem. “What we are trying to achieve is a fundamental
shift in the way this country (and the world) produces and
consumes energy,” said Pew’s Environment Director Josh
Reichert. “I am confident that we will get there, primarily
because I believe that we have no choice. But how long it
will take, and how much will be sacrificed because of the
delay, remains to be seen.”
Greg Wetstone of the NRDC concurred. “There’s an
awareness in the scientific community and the public that this
is the most important and difficult environmental challenge
we’ve ever faced. We’re not, unfortunately, seeing progress
yet in Congress or the Bush Administration.”
After the Senate voted against McCain-Lieberman
55 to 43 in October 2003, Kevin Curtis of the National
Environmental Trust spoke for the community when he told
Grist Magazine that “It’s a start. This may seem to be a defeat
now, but in the end it’s a victory. A bill that gets at least 40
votes has a fair chance of passing if it’s reintroduced.”
Not everyone agrees that McCain-Lieberman is help-
ing the environmental community. Shelley Fiddler, who
worked on global warming for President Clinton and, more
recently, the Ted Turner-funded Energy Futures Coalition,
said, “It is completely spurious for anyone to call this loss a
victory.”
Even though Senators McCain and Lieberman have
watered down the carbon caps to win more votes, it’s not
clear that environmentalists can muster the strength to pass
the Climate Stewardship Act through the Congress. Reichert
predicts that McCain Lieberman will pass the Senate by the
end of 2005, but acknowledges that the House will be much
harder.
The political calculation environmentalists are ma-
king now is how subsidies for cleaner coal and carbon
sequestration could win over the coal and electric industries,
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as well as the United Mine-workers. While we believe that
the situation in China and other developing countries makes
investments into cleaner coal technologies and sequestration
an urgent priority, it is a disturbing sign that, once again,
environmentalists are putting the technical policy cart before
the vision-and-values horse. Investments in cleaner coal
should be pitched as part of an overall vision for creating jobs
in the energy industries of the future, not simply as a technical
fix.
In some ways McCain-Lieberman offers the worst of
all worlds. Not only does it fail to inspire a compelling vision
that could change the debate and grow the political power of
environmentalists, it also disappoints at the policy level.
“Even if McCain-Lieberman were enacted it wouldn’t do a
hell of a lot of good,” said one well-known environmental
attorney. “It’s a minor decrease in carbon. If you look at
what’s necessary, which is stabilizing emissions, McCain-
Lieberman isn’t going to make a dent. We need 50 – 70 per-
cent reductions. Part of the job is to stay the course and keep
pushing. But another part of the job is to come up with a more
thought-through program.”
Passing McCain-Lieberman will require more than
buying off or out-flanking industry opponents. It will also
require beating savvy neocon strategists who have success-
fully turned the regulation of carbon emissions into the bête
noire of the conservative movement.
If the political prospects for action on global warm-
ing appear daunting in the U.S., don’t look to China for uplift:
the 1.2 billion person country, growing at 20 percent a year,
intends to quadruple the size of its economy in 30 years and
bring 300 gigawatts — nearly half of what we use each year
in the US — of dirty coal energy on-line.
The challenge for American environmentalists is not
just to get the US to dramatically overhaul its energy strategy
but also to help developing countries like China, India, Russia
and South Africa do so as well. That means environmental
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groups will need to advocate policies like technology transfer,
ethical trade agreements, and win-win joint ventures. The
carbon threat from China and other developing countries
drives home the point that a whole series of major policies not
traditionally defined as “environmental,” from industrial po-
licy to trade policy, will be needed to deal with global warm-
ing.
The question that must be put to proposals like
McCain-Lieberman is this: will its continuing defeat — or its
eventual passage — provide us with the momentum we need
to introduce and pass a whole series of proposals to reshape
the global energy economy? If not, then what will?
Environmentalism as though
Politics Didn’t Matter
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can
succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper
than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
Abraham Lincoln
Ross Gelbspan captured the pragmatic sentiment

held by most environmentalists when he told us, “I view
McCain-Lieberman like Kyoto: ineffectual but hugely im-
portant and indispensable for setting up a mechanism to re-
gulate carbon.” When we told him that Eric Heitz, executive
director of the Energy Foundation, predicted to us that the US
will have a “serious federal carbon regime in five years,”
Gelbspan replied, “It can’t wait even a couple of years. The
climate is changing too quickly. We have to start faster.”
In Boiling Point Gelbspan accuses environmental
leaders of “being too timid to raise alarms about so night-
marish a climate threat” and for settling for too little. “Take
the critical issue of climate stabilization – the level at which
the world agrees to cap the buildup of carbon concentrations
in the atmosphere,” Gelbspan writes. “The major national
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environmental groups focusing on climate – groups like the
Natural Resources Defense Council, the Union of Concerned
Scientists, and the World Wildlife Federation – have agreed
to accept what they see as a politically feasible target for 450
parts per million of carbon dioxide… [That] may be poli-
tically realistic, it would likely be environmentally catas-
trophic.”
In our interview, Gelbspan told us that environ-
mentalists’ failure to achieve more is “because they operate in
Washington and they accept incremental progress” – a cu-
rious criticism given his endorsement of McCain-Lieberman a
few minutes earlier as an important, if small, step. Gelbspan
continued, “If they can get two more miles on a CAFE
standard that would be a huge accomplishment for them. But
compared to the need to cut emissions 70 or 80 percent it’s
nothing. They’re scared they’ll be marginalized by calling for
big cuts. They are taking the expedient route even as we see
the scientists sounding the alarms and saying it’s too late to
avoid the significant disruptions.”
The alternative Gelbspan advocates is the unfor-
tunately titled “WEMP” proposal – the World Energy Mod-
ernization Plan — to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent
worldwide in three ways: 1) shifting subsidies from polluting
industries to clean industries; 2) creating a fund to transfer
clean tech to the developing world; and 3) ratcheting up a
“Fossil Fuel Efficiency Standard” by five percent per year.
It’s a program Gelbspan says is strong enough to deal with
the global warming crisis while creating millions of good jobs
around the world. It might even, he writes, help “create con-
ditions supportive of a real peace process in Israel” (though
he acknowledges that the latter is a “highly improbable fan-
tasy”).
Intrigued by this big vision, we asked him about the
political strategy for passing WEMP. “It’s not a hard one,” he
answered. “You have to get money out of politics. If you did
that you would have no issue. I don’t see an answer short of
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real campaign finance reform. I know that sounds implausible,
but the alternative is massive climate change.” We asked,
“Are you saying we have to get campaign finance reform
before we can get action on global warming?” At this Gelb-
span backed down. “I don’t know what the answer to that is. I
really don’t.”
What is so appealing about Boiling Point is Gelb-
span’s straight-talk when it comes to the size of the crisis: we
must cut carbon emissions by 70 percent as soon as possible
or it’s the end of the world as we know it. In his book
Gelbspan positions himself as something of a Paul Revere
attempting to wake the legions of sleeping environmentalists.
Yet none of the environmental leaders we interviewed ex-
pressed any denial about what we’re facing. On the contrary,
they all believe the situation is urgent and that big steps must
be taken – at least eventually. Their point is that you have to
crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run.
What’s frustrating about Boiling Point and so many
other visionary environmental books — from Natural Capit-
alism by Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins to
Plan B by Lester Brown to The End of Oil by Paul Roberts —
is the way the authors advocate technical policy solutions as
though politics didn’t matter. Who cares if a carbon tax or a
sky trust or a cap-and-trade system is the most simple and
elegant policy mechanism to increase demand for clean
energy sources if it’s a political loser?
The environmental movement’s technical policy
orientation has created a kind of myopia: everyone is looking
for short-term policy pay-off. We could find nobody who is
crafting political proposals that, through the alternative vision
and values they introduce, create the context for electoral and
legislative victories down the road.
Almost every environmental leader we interviewed
is focused on short-term policy work, not long-term strategies.
Political proposals that provide a long-term punch by their
very nature set up political conflicts and controversy on terms
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that advance the environmental movement’s transformative
vision and values.
But many within the environmental movement are
uncomfortable thinking about their proposals in a transform-
ative political context. When we asked Hal Harvey how he
would craft his energy proposals so that the resulting political
controversy would build the power of environmentalists to
pass legislation, Harvey replied, “I don’t know if I want a lot
of controversy in these packages. I want astonishment.”
2. Going beyond Special Interests

and Single Issues
To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to

enter fully into the shifting, poignant, beautiful
and tragic contingencies of the world.
Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center
The marriage between vision, values, and policy has

proved elusive for environmentalists. Most environmental
leaders, even the most vision-oriented, are struggling to arti-
culate proposals that have coherence. This is a crisis because
environmentalism will never be able to muster the strength it
needs to deal with the global warming problem as long as it is
seen as a “special interest.” And it will continue to be seen as
a special interest as long as it narrowly identifies the problem
as “environmental” and the solutions as technical.
In early 2003 we joined with the Carol/Trevelyan
Strategy Group, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the Com-
mon Assets Defense Fund, and the Institute for America’s
Future to create a proposal for a “New Apollo Project” aimed
at freeing the US from oil and creating millions of good new
jobs over 10 years. Our strategy was to create something
inspiring. Something that would remind people of the Amer-
ican dream: that we are a can-do people capable of achieving
great things when we put our minds to it.
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Apollo’s focus on big investments into clean energy,
transportation and efficiency is part of a hopeful and patriotic
story that we are all in this economy together. It allows
politicians to inject big ideas into contested political spaces,
dominate the debate, attract allies, and legislate. And it uses
big solutions to frame the problem — not the other way
around.
Until now the Apollo Alliance has focused not on
crafting legislative solutions but rather on building a coalition
of environmental, labor, business, and community allies who
share a common vision for the future and a common set of
values. The Apollo vision was endorsed by 17 of the coun-
try’s leading labor unions and environmental groups ranging
from NRDC to Rainforest Action Network.
Whether or not you believe that the New Apollo
Project is on the mark, it is at the very least a sincere attempt
to undermine the assumptions beneath special interest en-
vironmentalism. Just two years old, Apollo offers a vision
that can set the context for a myriad of national and local
Apollo proposals, all of which will aim to treat labor unions,
civil rights groups, and businesses not simply as means to an
end but as true allies whose interest in economic development
are, at least in the long-term, mostly aligned with strong
action on global warming.
Van Jones, the up-and-coming civil rights leader and
co-founder of the California Apollo Project, likens these four
groups to the four wheels on the car needed to make “an
ecological U-turn.” Van has extended the metaphor elegantly:
“We need all four wheels to be turning at the same time and
at the same speed. Otherwise the car won’t go anywhere.”
Our point is not that Apollo is the answer to the
environmental movement’s losing streak on global warming.
Rather we are arguing that all proposals aimed at dealing with
global warming — Kyoto, McCain-Lieberman, CAFE, car-
bon taxes, WEMP, and Apollo – must be evaluated not only
for whether they will get us the environmental protections we
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need but also whether they will control the debate, divide our
opponents and build our political power over time.
It is our contention that the strength of any given
political proposal turns more on its vision for the future and
the values it carries within it than on its technical policy
specifications. What’s so powerful about Apollo is not its 10-
point plan or its detailed set of policies but rather its inclusive
and hopeful vision for America’s future. “There was a brief
period of time when my colleagues thought I was crazy to
grab onto Apollo,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl
Pope, a co-chair of the Apollo Alliance. “They kept looking at
Apollo as a policy outcome and I viewed it as a way of re-
framing the issue. They kept asking, “How do you know
[Teamsters President] Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. is going to get the
issue?’ I answered, ‘Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. isn’t! I’m not doing
policy mark-up here, I’m trying to get the people that work
for Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. to do something different.’”
Getting labor to do something different is no easier
than getting environmentalists to. But its problems are similar
to those of the environmental movement: lack of a vision, a
coherent set of values, and policy proposals that build its
power. There’s no guarantee that the environmental move-
ment can fix labor’s woes or vice versa. But if we would
focus on how our interests are aligned we might craft
something more creative together than apart. By signifying a
unified concern for people and the environment, Apollo aims
to deconstruct the assumptions underneath the categories
“labor” and “the environment.”
Apollo was created differently from proposals like
McCain-Lieberman. We started by getting clear about our
vision and values and then created a coalition of environ-
mentalists, unions, and civil rights groups before reaching out
to Reagan Democrats and other blue-collar constituents who
have been financially wrecked by the last 20 years of econ-
omic and trade policies. These working families were a key
part of the New Deal coalition that governed America through
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the middle of the last century. Though ostensibly liberal on
economic issues, Reagan Democrats have become increas-
ingly suspicious of American government and conservative
on social issues, including environmentalism, due in no small
part to the success of conservatives in consistently targeting
this group with strategic initiatives (more than 80 percent of
Reagan Democrats, our polling discovered, support Apollo –
higher rates even than college-educated Democrats).
Irrespective of its short-term impact on US energy
policy, Apollo will be successful if it elevates the key pro-
gressive values noted above among this critical constituency
of opportunity. Viewed as part of a larger effort to build a true,
values-based progressive majority in the United States,
Apollo should be conceived of as one among several initiat-
ives designed to create bridge values for this constituency to
move, over time, toward holding consistent and coherent
views that look more and more like those of America’s pro-
gressive and environmental base.
Apollo defends high standards but doesn’t focus on
regulation, which irked many environmental leaders who
believe that if we don’t talk about regulation we won’t get
regulation. Nowhere does policy literalism rear its head more
than in arguments against Apollo’s focus on investment.
That’s because instead of emphasizing the need for com-
mand-and-control regulations, Apollo stresses the need for
greater public-private investments to establish American
leadership in the clean energy revolution – investments like
those America in the railroads, the highways, the electronics
industry and the Internet. “We’ve been positive publicly
about Apollo,” Hawkins said, “but not positive policy-wise
because it doesn’t have binding limits, either on CAFE or
carbon.”
Van Jones believes Apollo represents a third wave of
environmentalism. “The first wave of environmentalism was
framed around conservation and the second around regul-
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ation,” Jones said. “We believe the third wave will be framed
around investment.”
We can no longer afford to address the world’s pro-
blems separately. Most people wake up in the morning trying
to reduce what they have to worry about. Environmentalists
wake up trying to increase it. We want the public to care
about and focus not only on global warming and rainforests
but also species extinction, non-native plant invasives, agri-
business, overfishing, mercury, and toxic dumps.
Talking at the public about this laundry lists of con-
cerns is what environmentalists refer to as “public education.”
The assumption here is that the American electorate consists
of 100 million policy wonks eager to digest the bleak news
we have to deliver.
Whereas neocons make proposals using their core
values as a strategy for building a political majority, liberals,
especially environmentalists, try to win on one issue at a time.
We come together only around elections when their can-
didates run on their issue lists and technical policy solutions.
The problem, of course, isn’t just that environmentalism has
become a special interest. The problem is that all liberal
politics have become special interests. And whether or not
you agree that Apollo is a step in the right direction, it has, we
believed, challenged old ways of thinking about environ-
mental politics.
Getting Back on the Offense
Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even

though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the
gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
Industry and conservative lobbyists prevent action

on global warming proposals by framing their attacks around
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an issue of far greater salience for the American people: jobs.
The industry opposition claims that action on global warming
will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. They repeat
this claim, ad nauseum, through bogus studies, advertise-
ments, lobbying, public relations, and alliance building
among businesses and labor unions.
The environmental leaders we interviewed tended to
reinforce the industry position by responding to it, in typical
literal fashion, rather than attack industry for opposing pro-
posals that will create millions of good new jobs.
In a written statement, Pew’s Josh Reichert said,
“Ultimately, the labor movement in this country needs to be-
come positively engaged in efforts to address climate change.
They need to recognize that, if done properly, reducing
greenhouse gases will not be detrimental to labor. On the
contrary, it will spawn industries and create jobs that we don’t
have now.”
The unspoken assumptions here are a) the problem,
or “root cause,” is “greenhouse gases”, b) labor must accept
the environmental movement’s framing of the problem as
greenhouse gases, and c) it’s the responsibility of labor to get
with the program on global warming.
The problem is that environmental leaders have per-
suaded themselves that it’s their job to worry about “environ-
mental” problems and that it’s the labor movement’s job to
worry about “labor” problems. If there’s overlap, they say,
great. But we should never ever forget who we really are.
“Global warming is an apt example of why environmentalists
must break out of their ghetto,” said Lance Lindblom, Pre-
sident and CEO of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “Our
opponents use our inability to form effective alliances to drive
a wedge through our potential coalition. Some of this is a
cultural problem. Environmentalists think, ‘You’re talking to
me about your job — I’m talking about saving the world!’
Developing new energy industries will clearly help working
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families and increase national security, but there’s still no
intuition that all of these are consistent concerns.”
The tendency to put the environment into an airtight
container away from the concerns of others is at the heart of
the environmental movement’s defensiveness on economic
issues. Our defensiveness on the economy elevates the frame
that action on global warming will kill jobs and raise elec-
tricity bills. The notion that environmentalists should answer
industry charges instead of attacking those very industries for
blocking back investment into the good new jobs of the future
is yet another symptom of literal-scleroris.
Answering charges with the literal “truth” is a bit
like responding to the Republican “Swift Boats for Truth” ad
campaign with the facts about John Kerry’s war record. The
way to win is not to defend — it’s to attack.
Given the movement’s adherence to fixed and arbit-
rary categories it’s not surprising that even its best political
allies fall into the same traps. At a Pew Center on Global
Climate Change conference last June, Senator John McCain
awkwardly and unsuccessfully tried to flip the economic
argument on his opponents: “I think the economic impact [of
climate change] would be devastating. Our way of life is in
danger. This is a serious problem. Relief is not on the way.”
Senator Lieberman did an even worse job, as one
might expect from someone who makes conservative argum-
ents for liberal initiatives: “Confronting global warming need
not be wrenching to our economy if we take simple sensible
steps now.”
There is no shortage of examples of environmen-
talists struggling to explain the supposed costs of taking
action on global warming. A June poll conducted for environ-
mental backers of McCain-Lieberman found that 70 percent
of Americans support the goals of the Climate Stewardship
Act “despite the likelihood it may raise energy costs by more
than $15 a month per household.” In the online magazine
Grist, Thad Miller approvingly cites a study done by MIT’s
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Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
that “predicts household energy expenditures under the bill
would increase by a modest $89.”
More good news from the environmental community:
not only won’t we kill as many jobs as you think, we only
want to raise your energy bill a little bit!
For nearly every environmental leader we spoke to,
the job creation benefits of retrofitting every home and
building in America were, at best, afterthoughts. A few,
however, like Eric Heitz of the Energy Foundation, believe
that the economic development argument should be front and
center. “I think the Apollo angle is the best angle,” he said.
“There are real economic benefits here. The environmental
community is focused too much on the problem. It’s a shift
we’ve only started to make, so it’s not unexpected that it’s
happening slowly. The pressure becomes overwhelming as
Canada and Japan begin to move on us.”
When asked what excites him the most about the
movement against global warming, Hal Harvey, too, pointed
to economic development. “Let’s go for the massive expan-
sion of wind in the Midwest — make it part of the farm bill
and not the energy bill. Let’s highlight the jobs and farmers
behind it,” he said.
Talking about the millions of jobs that will be
created by accelerating our transition to a clean energy econ-
omy offers more than a good defense against industry attacks:
it’s a frame that moves the environmental movement away
from apocalyptic global warming scenarios that tend to create
feelings of helplessness and isolation among would-be sup-
porters.
Once environmentalists can offer a compelling vis-
ion for the future we will be in a much better position to stop
being Pollyanna about the state of their politics. And once we
have an inspiring vision we will have the confidence we need
to “take a cold, hard look at the facts,” in the words of Good
to Great author Jim Collins.
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Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” is
famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision
that carried a critique of the current moment within it.
Imagine how history would have turned out had King given
an “I have a nightmare” speech instead.
In the absence of a bold vision and a reconsideration
of the problem, environmental leaders are effectively giving
the “I have a nightmare” speech, not just in their press
interviews but also in the way that we make our proposals.
The world’s most effective leaders are not issue-identified but
rather vision and value-identified. These leaders distinguish
themselves by inspiring hope against fear, love against in-
justice, and power against powerlessness.
A positive, transformative vision doesn’t just inspire,
it also creates the cognitive space for assumptions to be
challenged and new ideas to surface. And it helps everyone to
get out of their “issue” boxes. “Global warming is an apt
example of why environmentalists must break out of their
ghetto,” said Lance Lindblom, President and CEO of the
Nathan Cummings Foundation. “Our opponents use our in-
ability to form effective alliances to drive a wedge through
our potential coalition. Some of this is a cultural problem.
Environmentalists think, ‘You’re talking to me about your job
— I’m talking about saving the world!’ Developing new
energy industries will clearly help working families and in-
crease national security, but there’s still no intuition that all of
these are consistent concerns.”
Toward the end of his life, King began reaching out
to labor unions and thinking about economic development.
He didn’t say, “That’s not my issue,” as today’s liberal
leaders do. He didn’t see his work as limited to ending Jim
Crow. Environmentalists have a great deal to learn from con-
servatives. Today, when right-wing strategist Grover Norquist
proposes a big agenda like sweeping tax cuts, his allies
understand that his unspoken agenda is to cripple the federal
government’s ability to redistribute wealth and pay for ser-
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vices like health care, public education, and the enforcement
of labor and environmental laws. Special interests seeking
cuts to worker safety programs are, for example, more likely
to join alliances around Norquist’s vision of less taxes than an
alliance built around “somebody else’s issue,” like cutting
investments into clean energy.
Because today’s conservatives understand the stra-
tegic importance of tax cuts for killing social programs, never
do they say, “That’s not my issue.”
A Path for the Crossing
Our company has, indeed, stumbled onto

some of its new products. But never forget that
you can only stumble if you’re moving.
Richard Carlton, former CEO, 3M Corporation
While it's obvious that conservatives control all three

branches of government and the terms of most political
debates, it's not obvious why. This is because environmen-
talists and other liberals have convinced themselves that, in
politics, “the issues” matter and that the public is with us on
categories such as “the environment” and “jobs” and “heath
care.” What explains how we can simultaneously be "winning
on the issues" and losing so badly politically?
One explanation is that environmentalists simply
can't build coalitions well because of turf battles. Another
says that environmentalists just don’t have enough money to
effectively do battle with polluting industries. Another says
that we environmentalists are just too nice. These statements
all may be true. What's not clear is whether they are truly
causes or rather symptoms of something far deeper.
Issues only matter to the extent that they are pos-
itioned in ways linking them to proposals carrying within
them a set of core beliefs, principles, or values. The role of
issues and proposals is to activate and sometimes change
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those deeply held values. And the job of global warming
strategists should be to determine which values we need to
activate to bring various constituencies into a political major-
ity.
For social scientists, values are those core beliefs
and principles that motivate behavior – from who you vote for
to which movie to see. These values determine political
positions and political identities (e.g., environmentalist or not,
Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive).
Conservative foundations and think tanks have spent
40 years getting clear about what they want (their vision) and
what they stand for (their values). The values of smaller
government, fewer taxes, a large military, traditional families,
and more power for big business are only today, after 40
years of being stitched together by conservative intellectuals
and strategists, coherent enough to be listed in a “contract
with America.” After they got clearer about their vision and
values, conservatives started crafting proposals that would
activate conservative values among their base and swing
voters.
Once in power, conservatives govern on all of their
issues – no matter whether or not their solutions have ma-
jority support. Liberals tend to approach politics with an eye
toward winning one issue campaign at a time – a Sisyphean
task that has contributed to today’s neoconservative hegem-
ony.
The scientists who study values understand that
some values are traditional, like so-called “family values,”
others are modern, like “liberal” enlightenment values, and
others (like consumer values) fit into neither category. These
values inform how individuals develop a range of opinions,
on everything from global warming to the war in Iraq to what
kind of SUV to buy.
Environmental groups have spent the last 40 years
defining themselves against conservative values like cost-
benefit accounting, smaller government, fewer regulations,
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181.43.208.82 on Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:22:19 +00:00
and free trade, without ever articulating a coherent morality
we can call our own. Most of the intellectuals who staff
environmental groups are so repelled by the right’s values
that we have assiduously avoided examining our own in a
serious way. Environmentalists and other liberals tend to see
values as a distraction from “the real issues” – environmental
problems like global warming.
If environmentalists hope to become more than a
special interest we must start framing our proposals around
core American values. We must start seeing our own values
as central to what motivates and guides our politics. Doing so
is crucial if we are to build the political momentum – a
sustaining movement – to pass and implement the legislation
that will achieve action on global warming and other issues.
“Most foundations accept these categorical assumptions just
as our grantees do,” said Peter Teague, the Environment
Director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “We separate
out the category of ‘the environment.’ We assign narrowly
focused issue experts to make grants. We set them up to
compete rather than cooperate. And we evaluate our progress
according to our ability to promote technical policy fixes. The
bottom line is that if we want different results we have to
think and organize ourselves in a dramatically different way.”
Environmental funders can take a page from the
world of venture capitalists who routinely make and write-off
failed investments, all while promoting an environment of
vigorous debate over what worked and what didn’t. Just as
the craziest ideas in a brainstorming session often come just
before a breakthrough, some of the business world’s most
spectacular failures (e.g. Apple’s Newton handheld) come
just before it’s most stunning successes (e.g., the Palm Pilot).
It is this mentality that inspired one prominent business
strategist to suggest that the motto for CEOs should be, “Re-
ward success and failure equally. Punish only inaction.”7
Pew’s Josh Reichert deserves credit for learning
from the venture capitalist model. Pew commissions serious
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research, pays for top legal, public relations and advertising
talent, and funds campaigns that achieve results. To no small
extent, Reichert shares the credit for the public vigor of
grantee Phil Clapp and the National Environmental Trust.
The obvious difference between business and envir-
onmental strategy is that in business your effectiveness is
easily measured by the bottom line. But in global warming
politics, what kind of results can be reasonably expected?
Without a financial bottom line, it’s critically im-
portant that environmental foundations ask for and listen to
critical feedback from within and outside the environmental
movement.
The responsibility doesn’t lie solely with environ-
mental foundations or organizations. If newspapers can write
critical reviews of everything from politicians to restaurants
and art exhibits then they can certainly dedicate some space to
a critical review of the strategies responsible for dealing with
the most serious crisis facing the human species.
Kevin Phillips recently argued in Harper’s Magazine
that the decline of liberalism began because “liberal intel-
lectuals and policy makers had become too sure of themselves,
so lazy and complacent that they failed to pay attention to
people who didn’t share their opinions.”
Environmentalists find themselves in the same place
today. We are so certain about what the problem is, and so
committed to their legislative solutions, that we behave as
though all we need is to tell the literal truth in order to pass
their policies. Environmentalists need to tap into the creative
worlds of myth-making, even religion, not to better sell nar-
row and technical policy proposals but rather 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
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181.43.208.82 on Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:22:19 +00:00
new institutions founded around a more expansive vision and
set of values?
If, for example, environmentalists don’t consider the
high cost of health care, R&D tax credits, and the overall
competitiveness of the American auto industry to be “en-
vironmental issues,” then who will think creatively about a
proposal that works for industry, workers, communities and
the environment? If framing proposals around narrow tech-
nical solutions is an ingrained habit of the environmental
movement, then who will craft proposals framed around vis-
ion and values?
One thing is certain: if we hope to achieve our ob-
jectives around global warming and a myriad of intimately
related problems then we need to take an urgent step back-
wards before we can take two steps forward.
Anyone who has spent time near wide and wild rivers
know that crossing one on stepping stones requires first con-
templating the best route. More often than not you must
change your route halfway across. But, at the very least, by
planning and pursuing a route you become conscious of the
choices that you are making, how far you’ve really come, and
where you still must go.
We in the environmental community today find our-
selves head-down and knee-deep in the global warming river.
It’s time we got back to shore and envisioned a new path for
the crossing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This report would not have been possible had many of the country’s
leading environmental and progressive leaders not been courageous
enough to open up their thinking up for public scrutiny: Dan Becker,
Phil Clapp, Tim Carmichael, Ralph Cavanaugh, Susan Clark, Berna-
dette Del Chiaro, Shelly Fiddler, Ross Gelbspan, Hal Harvey, David
Hawkins, Bracken Hendricks, Roland Hwang, Eric Heitz, Wendy
James, Van Jones, Fred Keeley, Lance Lindblom, Elisa Lynch, Jason
Mark, Bob Nordhaus, Carl Pope, Josh Reichert, Jeremy Rifkin,
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181.43.208.82 on Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:22:19 +00:00
Adam Werbach, Greg Wetstone, V. John White, and Carl Zichella.
We are grateful to George Lakoff for teaching us how to identify
category mistakes and to Peter Teague for continually challenging
our most basic assumptions.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. The term “framing” – once associated with activities

like “framing the constitution” or “framing legislation” – is today
being used by environmentalists and other progressives as a more
sophisticated-sounding term for “spinning.” The work of linguist
George Lakoff on how conservatives more effectively frame public
debates than liberals is being badly misinterpreted. Lakoff argues
that progressives need to reframe their thinking about the problem
and the solutions. What most within the community are saying is that
we simply need to use different words to describe the same old
problems and solutions. The key to applying Lakoff’s analysis is to
see vision, values, policy and politics all as extensions of language.
2. This apt term was coined by a Packard program officer.
3. Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty, Perseus: New York,
2002. Bradsher also cites historian Jack Doyle’s Taken for a Ride:
Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: 2001).
4. Bradsher, as well as many other observers, have faulted
the environmental community for doing next to nothing to tap into a
concern about SUVs that is far more salient among the public than
efficiency: safety. Environmentalists never ran a serious anti-SUV
campaign based on the thousands of dead Americans who would
have been alive today had the industry produced cars instead of
SUVs. Apparently, in the minds of the community’s leaders, safety
is “not an environmental issue.”
5. September 16, 2004.
6. Page 77.
7. Quoted in Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
© Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus
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THE DEATH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Author(s): MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER and TED NORDHAUS

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26804018

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ABSTRACT. “The Death of Environmentalism”, originally self-

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To not think of dying, is to not think of living.

Over the last 15 years environmental foundations

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Death is not the greatest loss in life.

Those of us who were children during the birth of

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Environmental Group Think

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break

One of the reasons environmental leaders can whis-

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What We Worry about when

Calculative thinking computes… it races from one prospect to the

What do we worry about when we worry about

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• The radical right’s control of all three branches of the US

The point here is not just that global warming has

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Everybody Loses on Fuel Efficiency

Great doubt: great awakening.

By the end of the 1990s, the environmental com-

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Winning while Losing vs. Losing while Losing

In politics, a legislative defeat can either be a win or

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Ross Gelbspan captured the pragmatic sentiment

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2. Going beyond Special Interests

To be empty of a fixed identity allows one to

The marriage between vision, values, and policy has

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Getting Back on the Offense