Jan 23, 2022 Hot Take

The Climate Movement Needs to Hold Itself Accountable

By Amy Westervelt

For many, many—too many—years the consensus in the climate movement was that social justice issues (systemic racism, sexism, poverty, labor issues, really anything other than emissions and energy) were a "distraction" from the real work of fending off catastrophic climate change. We'll get to that later, they (usually white, affluent men) said.

During the Standing Rock protests of 2016, the mainstream climate movement finally started paying attention to the work frontline communities had been doing all along, and some folks realized a broader more inclusive movement was the way to actually win for a change. But not everyone was into it. As recently as 2019 some climate talking heads wondered aloud if things like the Green New Deal weren't "saddling the climate movement with a laundry list of other social programs" and thus turning off much-needed allies like moderate Democrats and Republicans (aka, educated, wealthy white people who don't historically line up to challenge the systems they benefit from).

This framing of inequality as a distraction rather than the root cause of the whole damn crisis, is a lot less common in the climate movement today. But don't celebrate just yet.

It's not gone, it's merely been replaced by a more genteel and thus more insidious version, what I've been calling the "united front" approach. In his book, The New Climate War, atmospheric scientist Michael Mann makes some valid points about the long history of propaganda in the U.S. (although he's far from the first to point that out), and argues that part of what he calls "the new denialism" is the fossil fuel industry sewing divisiveness in the climate movement. It's true, they have been! But while other climate folk (most recently climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe) have pointed to things like the spread of doomerism, Mann adds his old favorite target: "identity politics."

"The climate action deflectors," he argues, "are attempting to drive a wedge into pre-existing rifts within the climate community. That includes rifts arising from the ongoing debate over the role of personal behavior versus systemic change. (It also includes rifts involving the politics of identity, and matters of gender, age, and race.) When the climate discourse devolves into a shouting match over diet and travel choices, and becomes about personal purity, behavior-shaming, and virtue-signaling, we get a divided community unable to speak with a united voice. We lose. Fossil fuel interests win."

Whew that's quite the parenthetical aside! Some of this is very true, of course. I've documented myriad ways the fossil fuel industry tries to take advantage of weaknesses like racism and exploit them. But that's not an argument for not talking about race—it's the exact reason we must address systemic racism and how it shows up in climate spaces. Mann is far from alone in this sort of thinking, which is unfortunate because the idea that the way to get to a united voice is to simply stop disagreeing, to sidestep these longstanding issues altogether, is a far greater gift to the fossil fuel industry than what they might dare dream of.

This is not to say that there are no valid criticism of identity politics, particularly the idea that simply slotting in women or people of color to positions of power will automatically deliver wins (stares in Kyrsten Sinema). But that's not what Mann and his Mannions are talking about. As one acolyte put it recently (retweeted and amplified by Mann): "One of the climate inaction deflection tactics: making it an identity issue that polarizes the debate. Result: no policy, no progress - in spite of majority support for most common sense climate action policies." Translation: Stop talking about race so we can pass climate policy already!

The climate counter-movement is able to exploit these -isms because of the movement's refusal to deal with them, not because we're finally talking about it after 50 years. Advocating for more civil discourse amongst allies is one thing, but when it becomes "don't criticize me because we all need to be united against the real bad guys: Big Oil," then it's just another way to shut down the climate voices that are only beginning to find space in the movement. Fossil fuel interests win when we don't talk about it, actually.

I understand that conflict makes some people uncomfortable. And obviously I don't disagree that Big Oil are the bad guys but… how are you gonna hold them accountable when you can't even hold your friends accountable? Or take responsibility for your own shit? And why does just talking about race and gender and equality automatically mean arguing or a "shouting match"? Maybe it wouldn’t be a shouting match if some people would just learn to listen. We're not behind on climate because we're talking about race, if anything we wouldn't have the climate crisis without white supremacy and racialized capitalism before it, and the longer we ignore that, the longer it will be before we make progress.

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The Only Good Thing About 2021

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

There weren’t a lot of good things about 2021. It came in hot as the second year of a pandemic with an actual storming of the Capitol, in which we nearly saw elected officials publicly lynched and lost all democratic function. Then there were the skyrocketing temperatures and raging wildfires and storms, and even the OCEAN CATCHING FIRE. Among so, so many other things. But, here’s one good thing: the media is finally paying more attention to climate change.

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All Science Matters

By Amy Westervelt

For the past decade or so, and especially in the last five years, the climate movement has come to realize that climate change is not a so-called "information deficit problem," solved by simply getting people data and information they might be missing. It is instead a question of political will. Which, you would think, would lead us straight to the question: okay, how do we build political will toward climate action? And for the answer to that, of course, the media and politicians have largely turned to…climate scientists. Um, what? Why?

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