After a staggering defeat in 2010, environmentalists needed a plan they could sell. Thus began a decade-long climb propelled by mass protests, heavy campaign spending and intense lobbying. Then came a final assist from Mother Nature herself.
There's been a “sea change” in public attitudes toward climate change, spurred by an equally dramatic change in strategy from the environmental movement itself. | Astrid Riecken/Getty ImagesOn a Tuesday night in February, Tom Perriello sat with his 80-year-old mother before the television set inside her Charlottesville, Va., home and wept.
The seeds of success in 2022 began in June 2010, when Democrats last attempted to pass a sweeping climate-change bill. Back then, the party had far greater numbers in the House and Senate, but lacked the courage of their convictions. Former Rep. Tom Perriello sacrificed his legislative career in part over his efforts to pass a climate change bill. | Molly Riley/AP Photomet with Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters. “We passed what you wanted,” she said. “Now are you going to have our backs?”
Last November, when Democrats defied history and averted the sweeping midterm defeats that the president’s party usually endures, it offered further proof, for many activists and policymakers, that acting on climate was essential not just for the planet’s survival but, politically speaking, their own.
Twelve years after his grim conversation with Pelosi had clarified LCV’s shortcomings, Karpinski and other activists spoke with Dunn on a Zoom shortly after the IRA’s passage. Climate action, she told them, finally got done because of the campaign they ran. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies had spent more than $500 million during the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency lobbying against any energy legislation, according to an OpenSecrets analysis. Green groups like the League of Conservation Voters spent virtually nothing by comparison — less than $20 million combined in 2010.
It was clear from environmental groups’ postmortems that climate policy and messaging needed a makeover, that the doomsday warnings and punitive aspects of taxing carbon were choking off public support for action. But more than anything, they needed money. Then, in 2011, New York’s billionaire mayor, Mike Bloomberg, committed $50 million through his Bloomberg Philanthropies to the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, enabling a massive scaling up of the group’s initiative to phase out the nation’s coal plants. Meanwhile, activists across the country channeled their frustration into civil disobedience in protests over the Keystone XL and Dakota access pipelines.
California updated its clean car emissions standards, already the most stringent in the nation and followed by more than a dozen states, in 2012. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images In 2015, Obama unveiled the Clean Power Plan, a federal push for a transition away from coal that gave climate activists a positive cause to rally around. Of course, rallying against fossil-fuel infrastructure continued to galvanize activists, who took satisfaction that same year when Obama, nearing the end of his term, decided to block the Keystone XL pipeline.
Trump’s rollback of Obama’s entire climate agenda proved to be a galvanizing event, as elected officials, organizations, donors and activists recognized the importance of finding new ways to affect change not in concert with an administration but in spite of one. As attention shifted to the 2018 midterms, the side-by-side reality of extreme weather getting worse and a federal administration intent on setting climate progress back animated a new generation of activists. The Sunrise Movement was founded in 2018, organizing rallies, marches and more activism online that made the passion young people had for climate more visible to elected officials and the public.
“You have to be authentic about your background,” he said. “For me, with two young kids, thinking about their future and the habitability of our planet, it led to running. And the previous administration had policies that were totally contrary to what I believed was necessary.” LCV spent $80 million in the 2018 cycle, the organization’s largest-ever campaign effort, backing candidates in competitive races who were clear about their willingness to fight for action on climate. After she won, Smith in 2019 introduced legislation for a clean-electricity standard that aimed to reduce emissions from the sector by almost 80 percent by 2035.
Just days after the election, Ocasio-Cortez joined 150 youth activists from The Sunrise Movement at a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office where they demanded that the newly elected Democratic majority introduce legislation on climate. Soon after the new Congress got to work, Pelosi followed through on her promise to create the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis to be chaired by Rep.
But Podesta was also thinking in terms of politics. After the 2018 election, a clear rebuke of Trump and the GOP, the long awaited opportunity for Democrats to finally act on climate seemed to be drawing near. During his presidential campaign, Biden's team quickly recognized the need to run on climate. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
The 2018 midterms were “the first time it became clear that running on climate was good politics and good policy,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the head of LCV’s legislative affairs operation. “And that led to the race to the top in 2020 among the Democratic presidential candidates.” As the broader public’s attitudes on climate started to shift in response to the new intensity and frequency of hurricanes, wildfires and drought, Democrats became almost entirely convinced of the need for action. A Pew survey from February 2020 showed that 94 percent of Democratic primary voters viewed climate change as at least a moderately big problem for the country.
When informed about the gap in hourly wages for workers in the solar and wind industries and other parts of the energy sector, President Joe Biden suggested including a prevailing wage requirement into any potential renewable energy tax credit. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images “Fenceline communities like the one I grew up in?” he responded. He proceeded to describe the oil sheen mixed with winter freeze on the windshield of his mother’s car as a means of relating his experience in a low-income, industrial community plagued by poor air quality. Biden seemed to get it. But Lodes and other activists continued their work to convince him and campaign brass to articulate the climate plans being discussed on Zoom to the public.
By the end of the campaign, the group had swelled to nearly 100 donors and brought in $17 million, while also delivering resources to LCV, Climate Power and other groups running TV ads and get out the vote operations in several states. “We’d been pushing Biden to see that this is an opportunity, saying basically ‘If Trump’s not going to lead, you can,’” she said. The following week, when Trump begrudgingly announced plans to travel to California to tour burn zones with Gov. Gavin Newsom, Biden was ready to go.
“It will start getting cooler,” Trump predicted. “Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually.” “Our audience at that moment, and from there on, was one person: Joe Biden,” Lodes said. A week after his swearing in, Biden signed severalon climate, directing his government to make emissions reduction a priority in every area — a solid start, as far as activists were concerned, but no reason to let up on their push for sweeping legislative action.
While Manchin and a bipartisan group of negotiators succeeded in reaching agreement on infrastructure, authoring a $1.2 trillion bill capable of getting the 60 votes needed to pass it through regular order, Democrats knew that a climate package would have to be part of a second, more partisan spending bill chock full of more partisan priorities: a child tax credit, paid family leave, subsidies for elder care and childcare, lower prescription drug costs and more.
In his primary, Markey had challenged Kennedy to a debate on climate change the day the former congressman announced his Senate bid. A decade after the legislation bearing his name failed to receive a Senate vote, his swift dispatching of the young challenger — one with the name Kennedy, no less — showed how the politics of the issue had shifted. “I won 18-34 year-olds 71-29,” Markey recalled. “My campaign showed that this was no longer an electoral liability but an electoral necessity.
As activists encouraged Biden and other top Democrats not to let the fossil-fuel industry define the terms of the debate with calls for expanding oil and gas production, they were also summoning Fortune 500 executives, former Pentagon brass and other prominent activists to lean on the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress.
After news that the White House could nix more climate provisions from the spending bill to appease Sen. Joe Manchin, Sen. Martin Heinrich responded with a “No climate, no deal” message. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images . Podesta, after months of back and forths with Manchin, let it rip in the article, wondering why the lawmaker “would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.” Leah Stokes, a climate adviser to House Democrats, lamented how the bill’s failure would prevent the U.S. from achieving its climate goals and, similarly, didn’t hold back in putting a looming global environmental catastrophe on Manchin’s back.
While the secret basement meetings were occurring, the same activists who’d flamed Manchin in the press were organizing a final pressure campaign aimed at reviving the legislation.
“It wasn’t just the political environment, because this was not a political choice of [Manchin’s],” Schumer recalled in an interview. “It was the weight of the issue, the substantive environment, that our globe is really at stake. The whole world as we know it is at stake. The urgency, the passion, the anxiety that accompanied this issue, both politically and substantively, was greater than any other issue.
Climate Power, LCV and The Sierra Club finally had legislation to celebrate — and proof of what can happen by electing climate champions. For the first time, they had an affirmative, tangible case to compel voters to turn out. And the steady investments by activist groups in polling and field staff gave them a political operation capable of capitalizing on their long-sought legislative success.
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