Environmental groups whistling past the graveyard?

“Do the math”

350.org — which describes itself on its website as “using online tools to facilitate strategic offline action” — is also working on activating its base in new ways. It is embarking on a new strategy in the form of its “Do the Math” tour. Previously, the group had encouraged its supporters to demand climate protections from their policymakers. But with the failure of federal climate legislation, as well as any binding international agreement, the group has now trained its sights directly on energy companies.

“We’re really transitioning to going straight at the fossil fuel industry,” Kessler explained. With its spokesperson, the journalist and activist Bill McKibben, the group’s tour will visit 20 major cities to rally students and the public to pressure university endowments, pension funds, and churches to divest from fossil fuel companies.

Kessler explained that the Do the Math tour will highlight how much of worldwide carbon reserves is controlled by each of the large energy companies. “Exxon Mobil controls about 7 percent of all the burnable carbon we have left in the world,” Kessler said, adding that the public should hold the corporation accountable for what happens with that carbon. Through this campaign, 350.org wants to, as Kessler put it, take away the “moral license” of these companies to operate in our society irresponsibly.

The organization isn’t sure the tour will create major change, but Kessler said it’s worth trying something new. “We think that this could potentially be a winning strategy if we could get campuses to really stand up,” he said. There could be positive byproducts from the tour as well, he said. “One, we’ll [recruit] a whole new generation of climate activists which would be great. Two, we’ll be working with endowments to actually take money out of fossil fuel companies, out of their pockets,” Kessler explained. “And three, university boards are made up of very influential people and if we can talk to them and try to talk some sense into them about the path that we’re going down, that could hopefully be beneficial.”

A broader coalition effort

Earlier this year, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) formed a partnership with the Civil Society Institute (CSI) to put together a wider-reaching grassroots coalition. They held a conference in Cambridge, Mass., where a network of 36 grassroots organizations active in 22 states decided to work in concert.

Pam Solo, head of CSI, argued that this is the best way to take on the all-of-the-above approach. “I think what’s different about this effort” — the new coalition — “is bringing together people from every part of the energy fuel cycle of each of the dirty and dangerous energy sources so that they can’t be played off against one another.”

One problem of locally based organizations acting in isolation from each other is that groups opposing the environmental and health impacts of one form of extraction — mountaintop coal removal, for example — might not be tuned into problems that may arise when energy companies shift to other problematic means of extraction, like fracking.

The EWG-CSI coalition is critical both of federal lawmakers and of the large established environmental groups. Solo said organizations such as the Sierra Club and NRDC should be far more demanding. “The national environmental groups end up playing more of a Washington game,” she said. It’s one that “underutilizes what the American public is ready for in terms of real policy change.”

The coalition’s approach, Solo said, comes from rejecting political limits many other groups accept. “We need people to step away from the beltway mentality and the beltway politics and say ‘This is what’s needed to solve the problem. This is what’s possible technologically.’ And not say, ‘Well, we can’t go there because politics won’t accept it,’” she said. “The problem is that everybody starts with, ‘Well, what would be acceptable in Washington?’ and that kind of incrementalist thinking has kept us tinkering at the margins of the problem.”

Instead, Solo thinks that there should be “a national congress of the entire environmental movement [where we] hammer out our platform and say, ‘This is what we stand for and we’ll fight for it and we’ll play hardball,’” she said.