The Sierra Club has just won a case before the EPA appeals board which will make it very hard to build new coal plants unless they actually have carbon mitigating technology in place. Looks like we're headed to clean coal or no coal (of course with the requisite caveats that this case isn't set in stone, blah blah blah). I often criticize the electoral strategy of the Sierra Club, but their legal work and anti-coal work does bring results. Kudos.
One of the claims of the coal industry - that there's some capacity to use coal without emitting carbon dioxide using fancy new technology - is about to be tested in a big way. One sign to look for is squealing; if the industry gets very upset, it means they weren't really telling the truth about the ability to use clean coal technology in the first place. If they don't squeal, then it looks like we're going to get a whole bunch of coal plants that don't emit carbon.
I've been exploring the League of Conservation Voters and how it makes endorsements. One of the consistent criticisms is that single issue endorse Republican moderates when these people take votes to put Republican extremists in leadership positions. This criticism disputes how these single issue groups create checklists as prioritizing the wrong values; for instance, Alito and Roberts are not on the LCV scorecard, and they should be since their judgments affect the environment in very significant ways.
Still, I wanted to look at something slightly different, which is whether according to their own criteria the League of Conservation voters is fair to Democrats. The LCV scorecard is the major scorecard for the environmental movement, this is their measure of how friendly to the environment a candidate is, a selection of key votes that set goals for the large and sprawling set of green groups. So one would expect them to treat all candidates the same and judge them strictly according to votes (with some wiggle room based on the type of district). If you are a Democrat and the LCV endorses a Republican, too bad, the Republican is good on the environment and LCV looks at politicians without fear, favor, or partisanship. We wanted to test whether that's actually how LCV operates.
Here's how we went about understanding the real criteria for the LCV. Adam Terando compiled LCV scores for all endorsed Republican and Democratic candidates. I excluded all but the endorsed incumbents in general elections, so that there's an apples to apples comparison. We then compared scorecards of the Democrats and the Republicans.
Basically, what the data suggests is that LCV has two sets of standards, one for Democrats, who have to meet a certain bar for support, and one for Republicans, who have to meet a lower bar for support.
Democratic Mean LCV lifetime score: 88 Republican Mean LCV lifetime score: 66
+22 advantage for Republicans
Republican Mean 2008 score: 68 Democratic Mean 2008 score: 85
+17 advantage for Republicans
Republican Mean 2007 score: 81 Democratic Mean 2007 score: 93
One of my consistent themes on OpenLeft has been the tendency of progressive advocacy groups to help Republican candidates or conservative Democratic candidates when there's an alternative in the race. There are many reasons why they do this, and today it happened again. Kate Sheppard has a piece on the League of Conservation voters endorsing Republican Susan Collins. LCV is the most important environmental group when it comes to politics; it is actually the 'political arm' of the environmental movement, set up as a collaborative venture among all major green groups to go after bad votes on the environment.
It's curious then that LCV helps Republicans. The full list of LCV endorsements is here, and includes such odious figures as Chris Shays, who has a relatively low lifetime environmental score and is running against progressive Jim Himes, and Chris Smith, the near white supremacist running against progressive Josh Zeitz in NJ-03. There are many races where the non-involvement of the DC environmental community is a signal, such as WA-08, where the Sierra Club decided not to endorse, after endorsing Darcy in 2006.
I have a small research project going to look at their endorsement procedure with a bit more rigor. One interesting nit is that the group has made most of its endorsements over the past few months, but only released its scorecard for 2008 today (as opposed to a rolling scorecard). Another nit is the vote choices in the scorecard (the 2005 version leaves out the Alito and Roberts cloture votes), but I'm not really going to go there.
If you have an hour or so and want to help out with a bit of relatively easy research, drop me an email at stoller at gmail.com or leave a note in the comments.
... Thanks Adam Terando for grabbing the ball and running with it. If you want to help out, email me.
One of the most predictably irritating parts of the last week was hearing that environmental groups - including the Sierra Club - were lobbying for the bailout bill because it had tax credits for solar and wind power. Of course, as Greenpeace notes, the bill also contained "subsidies for oil shale, liquid coal, and unproven schemes to store carbon dioxide from coal and oil." The push for renewal energy tax credits is laudable, but the tradeoffs - increased liquid coal and a $700 billion bailout - are incredibly high. Penny-wise, pound-foolish, seems to be the motto of the Sierra Club.
I just got off the phone with a Congressional staffer, who couldn't quite focus on the issue we were supposed to discuss because she is working overtime on the floods in the Midwest. So I turned on cable news, and found out that the floods are plastered all over, much as the wildfires in California were in October of 2007. And just like 2007, the major environmental groups are AWOL on the most covered climate event of the year so far.
Here's an answer to a vexing question for lots of liberals. If you want to know why there is no action on global warming, do the following simple exercise. Turn on cable news right now, or do a Google News search for floods. Here are some news headlines you might find.
I just got this email from Environmental Defense about their massive clusterfuck coal subsidy bill to 'deal' with global warming. They combine a nice defensive whine from Barbara Boxer and ED's Fred Krupp, as well as a pitch for Senators to buy blogads. I like how the criticism from Friends of the Earth is forcing the other side to actually start organizing. That's kind of neat.
I've been meaning to blog more about climate change politics, but there's so much there, so I wound up getting into this 'I'm going to write one mega-blog post' and then never got around to it. So I'll just give a general framework and then blog shorter posts in the future.
The essential problem is greenwashing, which is environmental groups granting credibility to figures that don't deserve it, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Newt Gingrich, in order to seem more credible. Gingrich, with his new 'Contract with the Earth' book, is now considered a 'moderate' with regards to climate change, simply because he admits it's happening and despite his long record fighting against dealing with climate change and slashing spending on the technology he now says is the answer.
And yet Gingrich is being embraced. All DC-based green groups are guilty of allowing this to happen to some extent, though NRDC is probably the most insidious, while Environmental Defense is the most corrupt. Senator Barbara Boxer is a particularly bad actor here, pushing a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to business known as the Warner-Lieberman legislative package, which is partially authored by NRDC and the business community.
Meanwhile, the IPCC came out with a grim projection of climate change scenarios, and the first Presidential forum on energy and climate change was held last week. There's a huge amount of momentum and energy in the global warming arena, but the combination of cowardice by DC-based groups and their unwillingness to hold bad actors accountable means that people like Arnold Schwarzenegger are being lauded as leaders on transforming society towards a more sustainable path while cutting mass transit funding.
The science is getting much worse, though there are new groups emerging that could take over from the corroded Beltway model of failure. It's very similar to lauding John Ashcroft as a leader in civil rights litigation for standing up to Bush on wiretapping. The desire to greenwash and call a person a leader when they cheaply say 'global warming is happening' is the essential institutional problem.
I realize this is all very vague, and it's mostly just my impression from reading and talking to a variety of stakeholders in the green community over the past few months. I'm going to try to go into more specifics going forward.
UPDATE: If leaders Carl Pope, Fred Krupp, Frances Beinecke, or Brent Blackwelder have comments on this, I'll happily update my post.
When there's a major environmental disaster, it's interesting to see how the major environmental groups think through their response. And one small tell is what they put on their websites. So let's take a tour.
It's Getting Hot in Here has as its top blog post titled 'Megafires in California Force Evacuation of 1 Million'. Step It Up has a blog post hidden down the page on the fires.
Websites do not tell the whole story. The Sierra Club after all has a press release out on the Wildfires, and that's good, except that the press release is defending the Sierra Club from right-wing attacks. And one of two of NRDC's press release yesterday was 'Environmental Victory in New York Harbor Dredging Court Battle'. Now it's possible these groups don't update their websites with their priorities, but I doubt it. And given the interesting social media coverage of the fires, that seems like a poor choice, if indeed it is a choice.
When California is burning down due to extreme drought and unusual winds, and there's drought across the Southeast and new and much more pessimistic scenarios on carbon emissions, perhaps this is something environmental groups might want to jump on.
When an emergency like this happens, it's possible to make a large discontinuous leap in the political system. It's possible to say 'throw out last years projections, we have to stop emitting carbon now and use the money to build new global warming proof infrastructure.' Put a sense of the Senate resolution in there that carbon emissions are extremely dangerous, if you don't have a plan ready. 9/11 changed everything because the right was ready. We weren't ready when Katrina happened. Thankfully, though, we'll have more extreme weather to contend with so it's not hard to plan for it.
A few years ago, liberal provocateurs Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote a provocative essay called 'The Death of Environmentalism' (PDF), arguing essentially that the 'environmental movement' operated as a narrow set of interest groups. Focusing on the need to protect the environment, instead of framing arguments around values, translated directly into a stunning loss of political power over 30 years. They put forward the notion that investment choices are the key drivers of a new movement, and the essay in general had remarkable parallels to Crashing the Gates in terms of describing an ossified advocacy structure. This argument has basically taken fundamental root throughout the group that was once known as the environmental community, and it seems to be working.
And now, in Kansas, thanks to Governor Sebelious and the recent Supreme Court case declaring carbon a pollutant, Kansas Department of Health and Education Secretary Rod Bremby rejected a permit by Sunflower Electric Power Corp to build two new coal-fired power plants. It's the first case which takes into account that carbon will soon be regulated by the EPA.
The AP has a wonderful timeline here. It was a mix of organizational competence from the Sierra Club and EarthJustice, Attorney Generals from around the country, hundreds of people showing up at multiple local hearings, and a Governor willing to listen to reasonable arguments.
Innovative approaches like Step It Up and Architecture2030 are emerging to drive the movement orientation of carbon reduction, as well as creating the capacity for the economy to move to a carbon neutral frame. Businessweek is running 'Sustainability Rankings' for business schools (Stanford is tops), and sustainability specialist employment fields are stretched ridiculously thin. On the social front, norms are emerging faster than anyone could possibly track them, from facebook applications like 'Greenbook' to the carbon offset business.
The move in Kansas to cut off coal investment will have ripple effects throughout the country and the world. It's not clear where the new energy supplies will come from, though the wind lobby in Kansas made a difference, and when I met with Tim Walz he spoke of rural sustainable energy as a new growth driver.
I'm impressed. A switch flipped on the new carbon neutral economy a few years ago, and we'll see how far and how fast we can take it.
Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner tomorrow will introduce comprehensive, bipartisan climate change legislation that would cap and cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions while protecting the economy and American consumers.
Global warming legislation expected to be introduced tomorrow could provide giveaways worth hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to polluting industries, according to an analysis of a draft of the legislation conducted by Friends of the Earth.
This is, in a sense, the same old strategy question that comes up all the time. Do you, like FOE, act as an outside agitator, draw lines in the sand, and try to pressure the political process? Or do you, like ED, worm your way inside the process, schmooze the big players, and strive to insure that the final bill is as good as it possibly can be under the circumstances?
If you say "we need both," gold star for you.
I love David's writing, but I don't agree with this as a matter of politics. Insider-outsider strategies are critical to move policy, but what Roberts is describing is not an insider-outsider strategy. He is describing a parasite. Environmental Defense is justifying a large corporate give-away under the rubric of environmentalism, and the rest of the green community is letting ED get away with it.
In terms of the policy, Environmental Defense is alone here. The green groups are remarkably polite to each, as most of them started in the 1970s convinced that protecting the environment was a value system. At the time, it might have been. Today, the question is how to manage a commons, and these groups just don't agree with each other. There is no movement around the environment anymore, there are progressives, corporatists, and deniers, all fighting over a large multi-trillion dollar and rapidly shrinking commons. The lack of robust internal debate among green groups means that ED's Fred Krupp can nonetheless speak for 'the environmental movement', scoop up his corporate money, and throw everyone else to the curb.
A letter on carbon allowances implicitly protesting the bill came out in September from Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Audubon Society, the National Environmental Trust, the National Tribal Environmental Council, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and the Wilderness Society all agree, to a greater or lesser extent with Friends of the Earth. They don't like the bill, or the giveaway, but judging by tomorrow's coverage, you wouldn't know it.
ED is using its brand as an environmental group to push against progressive solutions to global warming. In prisoner's dilemma parlance, it is 'defecting' from the rest of the community to get what it wants, which is insider influence and corporate money. The argument from ED will be that corporations are part of the solution, which is of course true, though not in the way they mean.
We're long overdue for a real green fight. And if these groups won't do it, ED is going to win until there's an internal revolt from the progressive dissidents within and outside of the environmental community.
This is a video interview of Congresswoman Hilda Solis, a progressive leader in the House. I'll have a few more clips over the next week or so.
Believe it or not, we do have some progressive leaders in Congress. Not enough, of course, but they're there. One of them is Hilda Solis, Congresswoman from the 32nd district in California and a dedicated progressive. Though elected in 2000, Solis is quite powerful, serving on the Energy and Commerce Committee (including Environment and Hazardous Materials, Health, and Telecom Subcommittees). She's also on the new select committee on global warming, which puts her squarely in the Ed Markey camp, politically speaking.
The reason I'm interested in Solis is that she's working on a structural problem facing the environmental movement: race. With the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, she successfully pushed a green jobs initiative which made its way into the energy bill. On August 16th, she's hosting a community forum on global warming, an issue that is not really on the radar for most people in her predominantly Latino district, though generically, pollution is a huge problem and global warming offers interesting political opportunities.
By turning global warming into a jobs issue, Solis is working to reframe the often depressing and disempowering rhetoric of the environmental movement into language that different groups can get behind. There are interesting and unexpected allies here. A few weeks ago, I accompanied a Sierra Club lobbyist to a visit with freshman Tim Walz, and he's using the same strategy in his rural Minnesota district - sustainable energy means jobs. Conservative rural residents are now proud of wind turbines, because it means economic growth. The political combination of rural and urban constituency groups is quite potent.
What Solis is doing on August 16 is a very different model of environmental organizing - she's actually working to put together a coalition, which is rare in a Congressional leader. A new economy is coming, and the fruits of that economy are how we can build the political consensus necessary to deal with the scope of the problem.
So the clip above is the first part of my interview with her. I'll have more from Solis over the course of the week, including her discussion of ethnic media and blogs, and her defense of the progressive caucus.
Thoughts and comments are welcome, especially from videographers who want to rip my amateurish skills apart. I'm just learning how to do video editing, so be nice.
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