Global Warming After Gore

Al Gore's Nobel Prize was a momentous event we should all applaud. Now it is time to move on and get smart about the climate movement's next steps. First, we should deal with some of our own inconvenient truths: global warming continues to rank extremely low among voter priorities, and Congress is going nowhere fast. The question we should ask ourselves is, how can the climate movement retool its politics for the post-Gore era?

It is high time for global warming activists to leave behind their focus on the "planetary crisis" and the regulatory-centered agenda, and embrace an energetic and inspiring vision that captures people's minds, hearts and votes.

Despite last year's "tipping point" in public attitudes toward climate change, Pew polls find that it still ranks dead last among voter concerns. It is of little surprise, then, that the Washington Post ran a front-page article recently titled "Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats." Nor is it surprising that the best provisions of today's congressional energy bill would still allow U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to grow 22 percent by 2030, effectively making the recommendations of the world's leading scientists unattainable.

One of the most hopeful signs is young activists, who are already making the breakthroughs necessary to build an expansive climate movement. The Campus Climate Challenge has rapidly grown to include over 500 colleges and achieved hundreds of innovative clean energy policies across the country. Power Shift 2007, the first-ever national youth summit on global warming, drew 6,000 students to Washington, D.C., last weekend and featured guests ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Van Jones. Indeed, the youth movement is quickly becoming the largest and most influential student movement in nearly a half century.

How can young activists best capture the moment? Thomas Friedman offered some ideas in his recent op-ed, "Generation Q." He said that today's young adults are "too quiet, too online, for [their] own good, and for the country's own good." We've got to wake up, he said, and reform our tactics: "Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way -- by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall."

But Friedman is mistaken. It is easy to get nostalgic for the '60s, but the direction of today's youth movement must be profoundly different from that of the baby-boomer era. Vietnam was about stopping a war. Civil rights were about equalizing freedoms. The energy and climate movement, in contrast, is about creating an entirely new clean energy economy -- a fundamentally different undertaking that requires us to transcend the models of the past.

The "old-fashioned" tactics of protest, demand and complaint just aren't enough. Global warming is one of the most complex challenges the world has ever faced, vastly different from those of the 1960s. It calls upon us to innovate, politically and economically, at an unprecedented scale. Our politics must be retooled, not only to achieve immediate policy changes but to create new and lasting political majorities. And instead of constraining our economy, we need to unleash it, driving our engineers, scientists and manufacturers to hone their skills and knowledge, and put these forces to work toward building the next energy economy.

A powerful climate movement -- one capable of capturing the public imagination, defining new political identities and fully unleashing our economy -- should put forth an even stronger vision of American greatness than the neoconservatives once offered. It must tap the optimism and can-do spirit embedded in our nation's history that has driven us to overcome the daunting crises of the past. "A new story of American Power begins by acknowledging what our country is great at: imagining, experimenting and inventing the future," argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of Break Through. "First we dream -- and then we invent."