Climate Advocacy in the US at a Time of Federal Disinvestment
Climate Advocacy in the US at a Time of Federal Disinvestment: Session #5 of Day 1 of the Climate Trek
Panelists:
Reflection: The session on domestic climate advocacy at a time of federal disinvestment in sustainability was interesting because it brought together panelists from organizations that worked in different spheres of the nonprofit and NGO world. The panelists represented the watchdog Environmental Defense Fund, the think-tank World Resources Institute, the research institute of the Center for Global Sustainability and the citizen’s engagement group and nonprofit lobbying organization Citizens Climate Lobby.
There were three main themes that surfaced from this session: 1) the importance of having differing organizations that lead in different actions to further sustainability work; 2) the importance on translating research into digestible and salient public information; and 3) the overemphasis on bipartisanship and on “getting the communications right.”
On the first theme of having differing organizations that each fill a different role in the public sustainability space, there was ample discussion on how EDF and CCL are actively focused on defense in an era of the rollback of EPA’s endangerment finding. These organizations don’t necessarily have the bandwidth for offensive tactics, but instead are doing the work to hold up federal rollbacks in court, to defend the progress already won by the Biden administration through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, and the protect the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Center for Global Sustainability and the World Resources Institute, in contrast, are focused on further enabling the research that directly influences the actions taken by domestic and international governments on climate including: methane emissions research, political polling on environmental issues, and the impacts of climate education on sustainability habits. These organizations serve a different purpose to lay the groundwork of the necessary facts and information associated with climate change that can be used by organizations like EDF and CCL once offensive tactics are more appropriate than defense.
On the second theme of the importance of translating research into digestible public information, there was a lot of discussion on how to make evidence “politically sticky,” especially as climate change is such a scientifically difficult issue to understand and to make salient in citizens’ lives. A key learning from the Center for Global Sustainability was to pull out 2 to 3 statistics that are meaningful and to pair these statistics with short narratives that increase their relevance to the public. It is also important to cite national but also local statistics that are relevant for the audiences in question, and that highlight the disparities in climate impacts across the country.
On the final theme of the overemphasis of bipartisanship and “getting the communications right,” one very interesting discussion point that was brought up was that some organizations do not believe that bipartisanship will lead to greater climate change action. Some organizations expressed that “reaching across the aisle,” may not be feasible in the climate change context and that environmental organizations should stop spending their time on these laborious actions. Citizens Climate Lobby also pointed out that there is a mythical belief within the climate change movement that if only climate change could be described in the right way, that Americans would care about it. In fact, they argue that we need to drop climate change language totally and speak about things that people do care about like affordability, health care, mortgages, and food prices. Climate change will never be explained in a way that is salient for Americans, but the impacts of climate change are very much impacting Americans today.
Overall, it was an invigorating and enlightening session with four very different types of environmental organizations. All of whom, however, are working to ensure that a better world is left to future generations.