The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics

March 02, 2022

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by Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker) ... “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.

During the retreat, the activists recycled, but they didn’t compost. When they ordered takeout, they didn’t always check the “go green” box to decline plastic forks and straws. At home, some of them aspired to bike everywhere, or to eat vegan; others flew all the time and found vegans annoying. This could seem like apathy, or hypocrisy. To Sunrise’s way of thinking, trying to prevent climate change by giving up disposable straws is like trying to ward off a tidal wave with a cocktail umbrella. Besides, if you want to build a mass movement it’s best to avoid life-style shaming.

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“The proto-environmentalists’ instinct was to convince and convert those in power,” Douglas Brinkley, a historian of the movement, told me. “Not to finger-point or protest outside their homes.”

As the climate crisis has accelerated, though, it has become clear that reversing it will require building a new clean-energy infrastructure, which is, politically speaking, a heavier lift. In 2006, Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary that accurately described the scope of the crisis before offering such solutions as “Plant trees” and “Buy energy efficient appliances + lightbulbs.” William Lawrence, one of Sunrise’s co-founders, told me, “Even if you change all the light bulbs in the country, you don’t come close to preventing catastrophe. What kind of plan is that, where even if you win you still lose?” Sunrise approached the problem the other way around, first determining what would mitigate the crisis—leaving most of the remaining gas, coal, and oil reserves in the ground—and then trying to build the political will to make that happen. The only way forward, as the group saw it, was to act less like a special-interest lobby and more like a confrontational social movement. If the Big Greens were like medical researchers at the beginning of the aids epidemic, politely asking for more government funding, then Sunrise would be like ACT UP, scattering ashes on the White House lawn.

Internally, Sunrise patterns itself on the civil-rights movement, which was very unpopular in its time.

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They sought the guidance of an organizer-training institute called Momentum. Founded by millennials who had met in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, Momentum aimed to build on the strengths of such spontaneous movements (their ability to galvanize public attention) while correcting for their weaknesses (once they command attention, they don’t always know what to do with it). When organizers want to start something new, Momentum’s trainers lead them through a painstaking, year-long process called front-loading, during which they arrive at a detailed consensus about what they want to achieve and how they plan to get there. Beginning in the summer of 2016, Prakash, Blazevic, Lawrence, Girgenti, and about eight others gathered at rented farms and movement houses, giving their project the placeholder name Divestment 2.0. As students, they had demanded a say in how their universities’ money was being invested. Now they realized that, as American citizens, they also had a stake in a much bigger pot of money—the one appropriated by the U.S. government.

When asked which issues were most pressing, Americans consistently ranked “jobs” near the top of the list and “the environment” near the bottom. The front-loading team brainstormed ways to close this “urgency gap”—to convince the public that overhauling the energy sector would mean not just displacing old jobs but creating new ones. “We know ‘winning on climate’ in the U.S. will generally involve: shutting down the fossil fuel industry; massively transforming our energy system; and responding to existing and incoming crises,” Girgenti wrote in an internal Google Doc. This would require “epoch-defining pieces of federal legislation.” READ MORE