LW - Advice for Activists from the History of Environmentalism by Jeffrey Heninger

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Advice for Activists from the History of Environmentalism, published by Jeffrey Heninger on May 16, 2024 on LessWrong. This is the fourth in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? This post has more of my personal opinions than previous posts or the report itself. Other movements should try to avoid becoming as partisan as the environmental movement. Partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular, it made legislation more difficult to pass, and it resulted in fluctuating executive action. Looking at the history of environmentalism can give insight into what to avoid in order to stay bipartisan. Partisanship was not inevitable. It occurred as the result of choices and alliances made by individual decision makers. If they had made different choices, environmentalism could have ended up being a bipartisan issue, like it was in the 1980s and is in some countries in Europe and democratic East Asia. Environmentalists were not the only people making significant decisions here. Fossil fuel companies and conservative think tanks also had agency in the debate - and their choices were more blameworthy than the choices of environmentalists. Politicians choose who they do and do not want to ally with. My focus is on the environmental movement itself, because that is similar to what other activist groups are able to control. I am more familiar with the history of the environmental movement than with most other social movements. The environmental movement is particularly interesting because it involves an important global issue that used to be broadly popular, but has since become very partisan and less effective at enacting policy in the United States. It nevertheless can be risky to over-update on a single case study. Much of the advice given here has support in the broader social movements literature, but the particulars are based on the history of one movement. With those caveats aside, let's look at what we can learn. Here is a list of advice I have gleaned from this history: 1. Make political alliances with individuals and institutions in both political parties. This is the most important advice. Allying with the Democratic Party might have seemed like a natural choice at the time. Climate scientists might have already leaned left, and so found allying with Democrats to be more natural - although the evidence for this is weak. Al Gore was committed to their cause, and was rapidly building political influence: from Representative to Senator to Vice President, and almost to President. The mistake was not simultaneously pursuing alliances with rising Republicans as well. At the time, it would not have been too difficult to find some who were interested. Building relationships with both parties involves recruiting or persuading staffers for both Democratic and Republican congressmen and analysts for both conservative and liberal think tanks. Personal relationships with individuals and institutions often matter more than the implications of a fully consistent ideology. 2. Don't give up on one side once partisanship starts to be established. I wouldn't be surprised if some environmentalists in the late 1990s or 2000s thought that the issue was already partisan, so it didn't matter that they were only working with one side. They were wrong. Partisanship could and did continue to get worse. Environmentalism is now one of the, if not the, most partisan issue in the country. In 1995, after Newt Gingrich had won control of the House of Representatives opposing the BTU tax, there was still only one conservative think tank that regularly promoted climate skepticism. Environmentalists might have been able to gain influence at other conservative think tanks to weaken the reframing efforts of fossil fuel companies. In 2006, Al Gore...