Well-Dressed Activists, Spin-Savvy Journos Equally Essential to Stop Global Warming

by Emily Gertz

Published February 19, 2009 @ 08:50PM PT

Journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben believes the national moment is right to organize a mass protest against dirty power -- even though we've got a president in office who's made combatting threat of climate change a policy touchstone.

McKibben is planning to get arrested on March 2 at the coal-fired power plant in Washington, DC, he says, because "this is just the moment to up the ante."

For one thing, it would have done no good in the past: you think Dick Cheney was going to pay attention?

More importantly, we need a powerful and active movement not to force the administration and the Democrats in Congress to do something they don’t want to, but to give them the political space they need to act on their convictions. Barack Obama was a community organizer — he understands that major change only comes when it’s demanded, when there’s some force noisy enough to drown out the eternal hum of business as usual, of vested interest, of inertia.

From McKibben's description, this action looks like it's taking a thoughtful, course away from tired, self-limiting activist tactics that (in the opinion of this former activist) needed to be retired long ago:

• People are asked to arrive in dress clothing, "not just because it’s serious business — but also in hopes of discouraging the hardcore anarchists and troublemakers attracted to such events, sort of in the way that convenience stores play classical music to keep folks from loitering outside."
• Protesters are not all showing up for one humongous rally and then all leaving in a self-satisfied glow. "...Powershift, the huge gathering of young people the same weekend in D.C., will focus on lobbying on Capitol Hill that Monday morning of the protest. Lobbying first, sitting-in second."
• Apparently next steps are already in progress: "... third, and most important of all," writes McKibben, "the suddenly swelling movement toward symbolic action next fall on a global basis. 350.org, the campaign I helped found, is looking for new ways to make a point, with a global day of action on Oct. 24 that will link people up from high in the Himalayas to underwater on the Great Barrier Reef to… Your Town Here."

McKibben couldn't be more right about the dangers of vested interests and intertia, even at this most hopeful moment ever towards US action to curb global warming. Take a look at the media splash the Western Business Roundtable has made this week, with its report stating that the economic costs of a multi-state climate action plan called the Western Climate Initiative will prolong the economic recession.

Letting global warming advance unchecked will be an economic, ecological, and social disaster -- but it's going to cost a lot of money, physical effort and political capital to get off dirty energy. As McKibben puts it,

Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.

And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

I've gone in a direction that's tangential to McKibben's -- from activism towards journalism, albeit journalism grounded in the notion that sustainability is right up there with truth and justice as an inherently positive, necessary societal value, one equally vulnerable to abuses of greed and power.

So hype from any direction rings my internal alarm. Will green jobs save the economy? My educated guess is, 'not all by themselves.' Will doing nothing cost less than doing something to fight climate change? Again, sounds far-fetched, when you tote up the disruptions to established systems like agriculture, water supplies, infrastructure, and public health, as well as our national security.

We need accurate data and trustworthy analysis comparing and contrasting the costs and benefits of the many different steps that need taking towards cleaning up our energy act, and how they will and won't affect our wellbeing. So it's too bad that WBR is largely a public relations invention that has long sought to block action on global warming.

Front groups for industries with vested interests in keeping the public quiescent, and business-as-usual unchanged, are going to take aim at both journalists and politicians as the nation moves tantalizingly closer to federal regulation and caps on carbon dioxide emissions. So we journalists are going to have to keep our eyes open, reporting on global warming fairly and accurately, rather than "fair and balanced."

Image: "For a long time, it seemed that Antarctica was immune to global warming. Most of the icy southern continent, where temperatures can plummet to minus 80 degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Fahrenheit), seemed to be holding steady or even cooling as the rest of the planet warmed. But a new analysis of satellite and weather station data has shown that Antarctica has warmed at a rate of about 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.22 degrees F) per decade since 1957, for a total average temperature rise of 0.5 degrees Celsius (1 degree F)." Source: NASA Earth Observatory