The Big-Name Game

Inside the Beltway, the climate movement is comatose. During the Clinton-Gore years, while the U.S. dragged its feet in international climate negotiations, the major national environmental groups allowed themselves to be used by the administration. Seduced by the former vice president's rhetoric, the groups watched their issue disappear from the political arena when Al Gore sacrificed his convictions to his ambitions and made global warming the subject of a personal vow of silence during his presidential campaign.

The inability of the nation's large, mainstream environmental groups to mobilize the public around the immense threat of climate change -- and their failure to forge alliances with public-health, development, corporate-accountability, and labor activists -- paved the way for the do-nothing climate agenda of President Bush.

In the wake of that failure, the responsibility for mobilizing the public has fallen on the shoulders of local climate activists. And the magnitude of their challenge -- in both the political and natural arenas -- is truly daunting.

Taking his cues from ExxonMobil and the coal industry, Bush reneged on his promise to cap power plant emissions. Next, he withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol. He then released his energy plan -- a fast track to climate disaster. Finally, he dismissed predictions by the U.S. EPA and other agencies of serious pending climate impacts in the U.S.

The public response to the Bush agenda might have been different had the national groups put their energies into relentlessly trumpeting the truth about the climate crisis. Because the truth speaks for itself: Around the world, the deep oceans are heating, the tundra is thawing, ice shelves are breaking up, sea levels are rising, fish, insects, birds and ecosystems are migrating, violent weather is increasing, and the timing of the seasons has changed -- all from a 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature increase. The scientific consensus is that temperatures will rise an additional 2 to 10 degrees by the end of this century. The world's property insurers saw their losses increase six-fold between the 1980s and the 1990s. Two years ago, the biggest insurer in Great Britain, CGNU, said that unchecked climate change could bankrupt the global economy by 2065.

Nature's message is remarkably simple: Cut carbon emissions quickly, globally, and dramatically, or prepare for a future of environmental and economic disintegration.

Don't Follow These Leaders

Only strong leadership could stave off these catastrophic consequences at this late date. Unfortunately, that leadership has not come from the big, D.C.-based environmental groups. Too often, these organizations are at the mercy of funders whose agendas range from protecting wetlands to keeping disposable diapers out of landfills. "These groups are running around trying to put out all these fires," environmental journalist Dianne Dumanoski has written, "but nobody's going after the pyromaniac." Even those groups that do focus on climate change seem trapped in a Beltway mentality that measures progress in "politically realistic" nibbles. For example, before Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto negotiations, representatives of several major environmental groups -- World Wildlife Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Natural Resources Defense Council -- spent considerable energy and talent bird-dogging excruciatingly minute and arcane provisions of the climate treaty, rather than mobilizing their supporters and focusing public outrage on the obstructionism of U.S. negotiators.

To wit: When the E.U. decided it would meet at least half its emissions reductions obligations domestically -- and limit the amount of cheap offsets it would buy in developing countries -- the U.S. held out for achieving its entire obligation through such offsets. The troika of U.S. environmental groups worked futilely to get the U.S. to agree to some small percentage of domestic cuts, when they should have held a series of press conferences exposing U.S. recalcitrance. By trying so hard to be inside players, these environmentalists effectively marginalized themselves.