Why Did the Climate Bill Die? Because We Still Don’t Have a Real Climate Movement

By Kelsey Wirth, Larry Shapiro, Philip Radford
Grist Magazine, Aug 5, 2010
Straight to the Source

We now know the U.S. Senate will not pass climate-changelegislation this year. Postmortems havepointed to a number of challenges: the lack of leadership from the White House,unified GOP opposition to the Senate cap-and-trade bill, the structure andrules of the Senate, and the complicated nature of cap-and-trade legislation.

There has been one major omission in much ofthis analysis: the absence of pressurefrom Americans across the country demanding that serious action be taken toaddress climate change. Few Americans arecurrently engaged in this great societal challenge in a way that would generatethe necessary political will to act. Itis the absence of this public pressure, above all else, that has resulted in thecurrent state of political inaction.

Take the most broadly transformational politicalacts in the history of the U.S. -- the signing of the Emancipation Proclamationand the approval of the 14th Amendment in the 1860s, women's suffrage in 1920,the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s, the establishmentof the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act in the early 1970s, toname a few. They all required some formof political leadership, but that leadership was exercised in response to theabolitionist, women's suffrage, civil rights, and environmental movements of the time, social movementsthat forced the issues into our national conscience and made inaction politicallyuntenable. These social movements consistedof large numbers of people, united by a strong sense of shared values and moralpurpose, who stood up to the deeply held assumptions and powerful vestedinterests of their times.

Environmental organizations and foundations spentwell over $200 million in the attempt to enact climate change legislation. Several of these organizations builtalliances with some of the largest corporations in America in an effort topromote a watered-down bill. And eventhis effort failed. Why?

The top answer is that we failed to build a socialmovement equal to the task. In theabsence of a real climate movement, we are likely to continue to see eveninadequate half-measures fail again and again. Only a broad-based social movement aroundclimate change can get the job done, fueled by the same passion and underpinnedwith the same moral conviction that characterized the historical movements thatended slavery, promoted suffrage, secured civil rights, and mandated a cleanerand healthier environment.

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