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Polling Results in Our Climate Action Context

Let me put our polling discussion in context by recapping and summarizing a bunch of stuff. Here goes.

My dominant metaphor for The Climate Movement is the Olympics. We all have our particular Olympian Fields of Action where we can shine. But, given the speed and scale of transformation required to overcome climate change, we also have two large Fields of Action where all of us must be active: (1) growing and improving The Climate Movement, and; (2) our two forms of politics, electoral-politics and policy-politics.

Our first characteristic/imperative/goal of The Climate Movement is to be big and broad and active enough.

• Big enough means 5% of a population by 2030. In the US that’s 16 million folks.

• Broad enough means we look like America with Climate Movement Artist-Athletes from across the spectrum.

• Active enough means we are achieving message saturation and values engagement — i.e., political leaders and the average person are reminded regularly of the necessity of bold climate action now and that everyone has a role to play, so much so that this is at the forefront of their hearts and minds and engages their values and connects to what they hold most dear.

Our two forms of political engagement are essential to achieve speed and scale of transformation. Only The Climate Movement, our First Catalytic Source of Transformation, can drive the needed change, can push everyone else to join in.

But without our Second Catalytic Source of Transformation, Climate Action Supporters, we won’t have the popular support needed to have our electoral-political and policy-political efforts be successful.

I believe popular support for bold action, i.e., both The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters combined, must be around 80%.

Finally, polls can tell us different things when it comes to our two forms of political engagement. In general, there will be more and broader support for policies than there will be for how much climate action will determine voting and electoral-political activity. Creating policy coalitions can involve even folks who aren’t explicitly in support of “climate stuff,” or are even against anything with a climate label — but are for the co-benefits, the other good stuff, of climate action.

Questions to Ask of Polls

Given our context sketched above, when we’re looking at polling we should be asking ourselves some questions. (Polling and intensity of commitment will be discussed in a forthcoming post.)

» Growing the Climate Movement

1. Where are we with our 5% Climate Movement goal?

2. What is the CM Potential?

3. Polls can group respondents into categories, e.g., conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, etc. Using a poll’s categories, where are potential recruits?

4. Is there potential to make us broad enough, to make us look like America?

Polls won’t give us a direct answer to the first question because they aren’t yet asking how many have made a commitment to collective action over time (my definition of a Climate Movement Artist-Athlete). But are there proxies, and what are those results?

» Growing Climate Action Supporters

1. Where are we with our 80% goal for both Climate Action Supporters and The Climate Movement?

2. Using a poll’s categories, where are potential recruits?

In contrast to the Climate Movement, with Climate Action Supporters polls can give us direct answers to question #1.

» Electoral-Political

1. How many of each category say climate action is their top voting priority or in their top three?

2. How many say they will vote for a candidate who supports climate action and clean energy?

3. How many say they will vote for a candidate who wants to reduce climate pollution or reduce fossil fuels? How many will help such candidates with money and time, etc.?

4. How does climate action/clean energy relate to other salient voting concerns, e.g., affordability? How do these relate to election-coalition allies?

» Policy-Political Coalitions

1. How many are in favor of clean energy and other related questions?

2. How many are in favor of specific pieces of legislation?

3. How many are in favor of regulating climate pollution?

4. How many are willing to devote time and money to climate action policy campaigns?

Polls may not answer these specific questions. But they can provide proxies.

Hope From Polls

Answering all of our questions would make this post much too long. So I’ll be sharing some highlights.

» Growing The Climate Movement

Various poll questions can give us a sense of how much potential there is for Climate Movement recruitment, or the CM Potential. Remembering that our goal for The Climate Movement is 5%, my analysis of an answer from a recent Pew poll asking how much of a concern is climate change showed a CM Potential of 28%.

As you can see below in a graph I’ve modified, the Yale/GM Fall 2025 poll asked how many were already participating in “a campaign to convince elected officials to take action to reduce global warming.” That yielded a CM Potential of 33% (with 2% of that already realized).

But this question also provides a better sense of the strength of the potential. We already have 2% affirming they are a part of a campaign and thus a part of The Climate Movement.1 11% say they “definitely” are “willing to join” (circled in red, below).

So, to achieve 5%, we already have 2%. All we need to do is recruit 3% from the 11% who say they are definitely willing to join.

So our job is to turn 3% of the 11% into Climate Movement Artist-Athletes. The trick, of course, is finding that 3%.

Ok, if we want The Climate Movement to be not just 5%, but also be a broad representation of America, what does this 11% look like? The circled numbers in the graph above give us a political sense. (We want lots of different kinds of diversity, not just political diversity. But it’s a start.)

As for Conservative Republicans, we already have 1% in The Climate Movement! And 2% are definitely willing. Definitely willing Moderate Rs are at 4%, Moderate Democrats are at 16%, and Liberal Ds are at 21%.

We need to pick up some more Rs if we can, but this is a good beginning.

» Climate Action Supporters

An April 2025 poll by the group “More In Common” gives us a sense of where we are with Climate Action Supporters in the US. Answers about clean energy can be a proxy, but because people can be in favor of clean energy but have different feelings about climate change, it is only a rough approximation.

As you can see below in the first graph, 67% agree “we need to speed up action on climate change.” (The total for “Strongly agree” is 30%, in keeping with our CM Potential numbers, above.) Of course we want to “speed up action.” That characterization, stronger than other similar questions, gives added heft to this 67%, makes it a solid number.

There’s a larger number on whether “the US should be a world leader in developing clean energy”: 83%. But this provides a softer sense of what we want to access.

So if we just looked at the first graph, at 67% we are 13 points off of our 80% goal. But if we split the difference on these two questions our rough sense of Climate Action Supporters would be about 75%.

Bottom Line: With Climate Action Supporters in the US we’ve got some work to do, but we have a solid foundation.

» Electoral-Political

The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters must push political candidates to have the government push markets to achieve speed and scale. The best way to do this is by only voting for those in favor of strong climate action.

The Yale/GM graph below (modified by me) will serve as a proxy on climate action and voting behavior. It provides data on two questions: increasing renewables and decreasing fossil fuels.

Importantly, it gives percentages of those who will only vote for candidates who will increase renewables and decrease the fossils. This is the strength of commitment we must have.

Also important is that they asked about decreasing fossil use — because, substantively, we must do both. This question also provides a stronger sense of commitment.

As you can see in the graph below, overall, 28% and 26% will only vote for those increase renewables and decrease fossils, respectively. This roughly tracks with our CM Potential numbers, above.

These numbers below can mean the difference between winning and losing primary races and close general races. That‘s even true for the lower Republican numbers:

• 15% of Republicans will only vote for a candidate who increase renewables.

• 13% of Republicans will only vote for those who decrease the fossils.

Our job is to shore these folks up come election time, and continue to grow these types of numbers.

But we also need to be joining forces with other messages that resonate and with allies we can work with. A recent poll (June 5) sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) found that a candidate:

who talks about building more affordable, American-made wind and solar energy in conjunction with stopping Trump’s agenda and making life affordable again has a greater electoral advantage than one who leaves clean energy out. This is just as true in Likely-and-Lean R districts as it is in Lean D ones, proving that clean energy messaging has real value regardless of a district’s political bent.

The most compelling pro-Democratic message we tested is the idea that expensive energy is driving up the cost of everything else and that investing in more cheap, clean energy can bring gas and utility costs down. A solid secondary message — that cheap clean energy can give people back control over their unpredictable electricity bills — shows Democrats as being aligned with consumers and against big corporations.

» Policy-Political Coalitions

As I’ve said, electoral-political and policy-political coalitions can look quite different. Electoral foes, both voters and politicians, can become policy allies. For example, there’s no reason we can’t have MAGA as part of some of our policy coalitions.

I’ll be using two Yale/GM graphs to illustrate policy-political potential. Their category of Liberal Democrats helps provide the foundation upon which many policy coalitions will be based. But on their own they will never succeed. The more we pull from the rest of the categories, the better our chances for success.

So to give us a sense of the potential, I’ll focus on the Conservative Republicans.

The first Yale/GM graph below gives an excellent sense of the potential for voters to be in coalitions. Importantly, this potential is based on being asked to participate. If we ask, they will come.

Who will come?

Well, Conservative Rs will come! (I’m betting some will even come out of Iowa cornfields if asked.) And they will be a crucial part of coalitions.

• 9% will meet with their elected officials;

• 8% will volunteer for a climate action organization;

• 5% will support those doing non-violent civil disobedience;

• 4% will participate in non-violent civil disobedience themselves.

The second graph below gives us a sense of support for particular policies.

Big majorities of all political categories are in favor of helping farmers with climate-friendly practices.

Renewable R&D gets the next amount of love, including from 47% of Conservative Rs.

Incredibly, 45% of Conservative Rs say they are in favor of regulating CO2! Combined with Moderate Rs at 76%, that’s a clear Republican majority.

Even 26% of Conservative Rs support a transition to 100% clean energy by 2050. Added to the 57% of Moderate Rs, that’s another strong Republican contribution.

One important thing to keep in mind is a key connection between the electoral-political and the policy-political. If Republicans are in charge of one or both chambers of Congress, policy progress becomes much harder for everything, impossible for many things. That’s even the case if a majority of Republican members want something but the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader don’t want to bring it up for a vote.

And, of course, if the President isn’t in favor, chances also become much harder, unless helpful policies are part of must-pass legislative packages or legislation the President wants.

Why

Our loyalty is not to any political party. We are not here for political victories for the sake of winning. We are here for our vision, our purpose, our Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

It is our values that inspire and guide us, and thus they are valuable to us: love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success. As we engage in electoral- and policy-politics we do so guided by and inspired by our values, with love as our supreme value.

Polls can help us see our strengths — but also our weaknesses. They help show us strengths to build on as we work to turn our weaknesses into even more strengths.

Our strength comes from our three forms of power, our P³: moral power, people power, staying power. We grow our movement not for it to be big, not for us to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world — which is our destiny. We become our destiny because it’s the right thing to do. We do it for those we love.

So as we work to grow our movement, as we strive in the often muddy field of politics to defeat our political foes and turn around and work with them to pass and implement policies that help us create our vision, we do it not because we’re right — even though we are right because our vision is right.

We do it because of love.

So join us. For love’s sake.

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Growing to Achieve Success

To be successful in achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — requires speed and scale of transformation the likes of which the world has never seen.

Speed and scale drives and shapes everything we do concerning climate action.

We can’t achieve the needed speed and scale by simply letting the market do its thing, or by individuals reducing their emissions, or by waiting for technology to miraculously save our butts.

NO, NO, and NO. That’s a triple NO. I mean it.

To achieve speed and scale requires our three forms of power, our P³: moral power, people power, and staying power. Here we are concentrating on our people power.

Most of the needed change will take place in the market. But for speed and scale to happen in the market requires governments to shape and push markets to do so. This is why our Fourth Catalytic Source of Transformation is Governments-and-Markets, with Governments listed first and the hyphens emphasizing the symbiosis that must occur. Governments and markets working together, with governments shaping and pushing markets.

» People Power

But governments won’t do this without themselves being pushed. That’s where the people power comes in.

Our people power comes not just from the First Catalytic Source of Transformation, The Climate Movement (although it is the key driver of the needed change).

It also comes from our Second Catalytic Source of Transformation, Climate Action Supporters. These are folks who support climate action but don’t yet consider themselves a part of The Climate Movement and most aren’t quite as active as Climate Movement Artist-Athletes.

But there’s a third source of people power we must pull from, a third pool of potential recruits. These are folks who are indifferent or even hostile to anything with a “climate change” label who also want the co-benefits of policies that address climate change, such as the myriad economic benefits of clean energy, or the reduction in air pollution, etc. They aren’t motivated by climate. But they are motivated by the other good stuff.

I’ve provided a rough visualization below.

The Climate Movement will be a small — but powerful! — percentage of the total population. It will grow primarily from the much larger pool of Climate Action Supporters. But we can also find a few recruits in our Policy Coalition Allies.

Climate Action Supporters will be the biggest group by far. These are folks who can be rallied to support favorable policies when the time is right. Growth of Climate Action Supporters will come from those who are currently disengaged for some reason or reasons: lack of understanding or knowledge; unmotivated; disinterested; indifferent; hostile.

For many there is a progression of commitment, going, say, from indifferent to a Supporter to a Climate Movement Artist-Athlete. Others may jump from hostile all the way to Artist-Athlete, a Damascus road conversion if you will.

» Politics

Having our people power push governments requires us to be involved in politics. As I explained in a previous post, for us there are two kinds of politics: (1) electoral-politics and (2) policy-politics. The former is focused on elections, while the latter is focused on enacting and implementing policies.

While in electoral-politics we need to defeat all supporters of Trump’s anti-climate agenda and all fossil- and fair-weather-Democrats, in policy-politics these folks and their voters are potential allies. Work with MAGA? If they’ll support policies that move the ball forward, you bet.

So people we work to defeat in elections can be people we work with to pass and implement policies. As I said, such allies can be indifferent or even hostile to anything labeled “climate action,” but for different reasons can be in favor of things like clean energy.

In our engagement with policy-politics, the point is to win policy victories that help achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, not for potential allies to pass some climate purity test. Here we must bring our values of pragmatism, wisdom, and success to the fore.

For policy-politics, we need both people-power and coalitions that push for speed and scale and support those legislative and executive branch leaders who help achieve both.

So in policy-politics we draw from all three of the populations pictured above: The Climate Movement (dark green core); Climate Action Supporters (light green), and; Policy Coalition Allies (light blue outer ring).

This is also theoretically true in electoral-politics, but the chances of pulling in Policy Coalition Allies are much slimmer. The co-benefits would have to outweigh all the other reasons they vote for politicians indifferent or hostile to climate action.

People Power: What We Need

» The Climate Movement in the US

The first characteristic/imperative/goal of The Climate Movement is that we must be big and broad and active enough to help give us our people power. Social science tells us it takes only 3.5% of a population for a movement to be successful. Given the speed and scale of change needed, I think we must become 5% by 2030, or 400 million worldwide and 16 million in the US.

Crazy? Far-fetched? The polling data we will explore in this post and Part Two of this Series says not at all.

» Climate Action Supporters

For Climate Action Supporters we need about 80% of the total population, including The Climate Movement, to be for climate action. As I’ve discussed before, polls from around the world have consistently shown that many countries are at or near or even beyond this goal, including the US.

Polling

I’m going to be digging into some recent polls to tease out how much potential there is to grow The Climate Movement and to engage those who could be Policy Coalition Allies. To finish out this post or Part One of this Series I’ll discuss the first poll by Pew, and in Part Two I’ll cover the other polls. This Pew poll discussion below is focused on the potential it suggests for The Climate Movement, i.e., the CM Potential.

» Pew Poll (Conducted Nov 2025; Report published June 2026)

Pew is the gold standard of political polling due to excellent analysis and their large sample sizes — 10,357 for this poll. Like many pollsters, they look at the results and the demographics of respondents and create typologies, i.e., groupings with what they see as similar characteristics. Their seven typologies for this poll and their descriptions are pictured below. (Their report has much more detailed description of each type.)

In their diagram below I’ve circled how much each typology or grouping represents in the total population.

In their polling since at least 2016 they have asked: “How much of a problem do you think climate change is?”

For the latest polling results (Nov 2025) here are the relevant numbers for each type that chose either “A very big problem” or “A moderately big problem,” and the sum of both.

• Leftward Progressives: 84% (“very big”) + 15% (“moderately big”) = 99%.

• Loyal Liberals: 78% + 20% = 98%.

• Order and Opportunity Left: 43% + 40% = 83%.

• Left-Out Left: 53% + 37% = 9%

• Tuned-Out Middle: 28% + 41% = 69%.

• Pragmatic and Polite Right: 31% + 38% = 69%.

• Unconventional Right: 9% + 30% = 39%.

• Faith First Conservatives: 5% + 14% = 19%

• No Apologies Right: 1% + 4% = 5%.

» Climate Movement Potential From Pew Poll

So our numerical goal for The Climate Movement in the US is 5% of the population by 2030. Excluding the Tuned-Out Middle (which I am tuning out), I consider those who answered the Pew climate question by saying it is a “very big” problem to approximate our potential pool of those who are already or should become Climate Movement Artist-Athletes.

For those of each Pew type who answered “very big,” here are the numbers for what they represent of the total population. I consider this to be the Climate Movement potential or the CM Potential.

CM Potential:

• Leftward Progressives = 6%

• Loyal Liberals = 9%

• Order and Opportunity Left = 8%

• Left-Out Left = 0.6%

• Pragmatic and Polite Right = 3%

• Unconventional Right = 1%

• Faith First Conservatives = 0.6%

• No Apologies Right = 0.009%

• Total CM Potential = 28%

So, given our numerical goal of 5%, a CM Potential of 28% is huge!

Now a few of you might be thinking, “Progressives at 6% — that’s enough to exceed our goal. We’re done!”

Not so fast! We don’t just have a numerical goal.

We also want The Climate Movement to be big and broad and active enough, our first characteristic/imperative/goal. We want The Climate Movement to look like America and not to be pigeonholed as a far left phenomenon. That is important for both the growth and strength of Climate Action Supporters, and for politicians who are concerned about swing voters in general elections.

Thus, we want to pull from all the types, not just Progressives. Looked at from that perspective, the 4.6% total of the four types on the right side of the ledger is quite anemic.

Nevertheless, 28%, the overall total of those who answered that climate is “a very big” problem (minus the excluded Tuned-Out) is a terrific starting point!

Olympian Fields of Action

So, looking at the CM Potential of these Pew types some logical questions would be, “How do we think about this strategically? Where should we invest our time and resources?” And a reasonable response might be: “Let’s focus 90% of our efforts on the first three listed: Progressives, Loyal Liberals, and Order and Opportunity Liberals. Let’s focus the remaining 10% on the Pragmatic & Polite Right and the Unconventional Right.”

Sounds logical and reasonable if you were the general or dictator of The Climate Movement.

But, of course, we have no general. We have no dictator. We are a movement, not the military. From the perspective of the military, we’re a mess, a clusterf***. Heck, we’re not even a non-profit.

Yikes. Yup.

What we are is our fifth movement characteristic/imperative/goal: we are both organic and strategic.

Organic?

Here’s a reminder of what we’re talking about from an earlier post:

Organic change in our Movement comes from the Climate Action Artist-Athletes who make us up. Organic change is endemic because of who we are as individuals, our personalities, our gifts, our passions, our values. Organic change doesn’t stifle or suppress these qualities, forcing us into a standardized mold; it sets us free. …

Just as every place in nature at every moment in time is a unique combination, so too does place and time and the individuals who inhabit them create relationships and opportunities that will never happen again, as the new continuously replaces the old…

As such, organic change is rooted in people, place, and time — the combination of which must be activated by freedom and fulfilled through creativity, two of our Movement Values.

For those who can reach out to Faith First Conservatives and feel called to do so, even though their CM Potential is only 0.6%, that’s what you should do. That is a Field of Action for you.

So when you or your CAT or your organization, etc, look at these types it’s up to you to figure out how to combine organic and strategic change in growing The Climate Movement, which is our top priority. Everyone is welcome, even the 0.009% of the No Apologies Right.

People Power — More Than Numbers

People power is not just numbers. We can’t just grow in numbers. What’s currently lacking in The Climate Movement is intensity, something I will cover in an upcoming post. We need both growth in numbers and growth in intensity.

We need you and your energy! Join us!

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It’s Time to Make Our Stand

For those of us in the United States, as we celebrate the 250th Anniversary of our country today in the midst of grave threats to our democracy from within, it is well past time for us to recognize that climate change is a great cause of freedom. It is time for us to get political and join forces with allies to defeat our political opponents who are working hard to deny us our freedom. It is time to create broad-based coalitions to enact and implement policies that achieve speed and scale of transformation and free us from climate consequences. It is well past time for us to understand our own power and utilize our power to the fullest.

It is time to make our stand. It is time to be climate patriots together.

Climate Action — A Great Cause of Freedom

Overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything is a great cause of freedom — in my opinion the greatest cause of freedom in this Century. For every person on this planet climate action is a true act of patriotism.

Climate action helps free us from:

• climate impacts harming billions and killing millions;

• climate consequences creating national security “threat multipliers” around the world, helping lead to conflicts and even wars;

• displacement of millions of climate refugees, forced to flee their homes, with many pushed into other countries;

• air pollution and its 6.7 million deaths a year;

• dependence from fossil dictators and despots;

• corruption of politics by the fossils.

Climate action creates:

• freedom from the fossils via abundant, cheap, locally-grown clean energy to power our lives;

• freedom to grow our own electricity and dump our dependence on state-sanctioned centralized monopolies;

• good-paying local jobs, creating economic freedom for families and individuals;

• economic freedom for your communities by keeping local dollars in local economies;

• freedom from poverty via prosperous sustainability;

• freedom from the injustice of climate impacts;

• freedom via the national security and domestic tranquility created by (1) lessening and eliminating climate impacts and (2) the positive outcomes of climate solutions.

All of this together creates climate freedom.

For citizens of every nation, creating climate freedom is to love one’s country and overcome a grave threat to the world. As such, patriotism and climate action are not complements. They’re the same thing. Climate action is patriotism. And climate patriotism spreads freedom all over the world.

Trump 2.0 Stealing Energy From Climate Action

Unfortunately, around the world authoritarianism and wars and economic challenges have sapped the energy and talent of those who could be on their Olympian Fields of Climate Action creating climate freedom.

In the US we have been rocked back on our heels by inflation, i.e., “Trumpflation.” “Affordability” has become a political flashpoint. Nearly 75% of Americans say their income can’t keep up with price increases on food, health care, and other essentials.

Trump 2.0 and all of their egregious corruption, crimes, cruelty, and proto-authoritarianism have sucked the air out of the room, as was their intent.

All of this has stolen energy from The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters.

Guess what? Trump et al have power to do this because Trump was elected. MAGA Republicans control Congress because they were elected.

Gee wiz. Elected politicians have power because they are elected. Who knew?

So it’s time to get serious about power. It’s time to get political. Some like the Sunrise Movement have already been there. Time for the rest of us in The Climate Movement to find our way towards political engagement via our three forms of power, or P³: moral power, people power, and staying power.

Time to apply our P³ to the political arena.

Two Kinds of Political For Us

For Climate Movement Artist-Athletes, we can think of “political” stuff in two basic categories: electoral-political and policy-political.

As the name implies, electoral-political has to do with elections.

Policy-political is what politicians (and their political appointees) do once they are elected: pass new laws or amend old ones; fund the government with taxpayer money, including how much programs and agencies receive; enforce the law; promulgate new regulations or modify old ones, and; enforce such regulations.

Many folks don’t differentiate these two. For them, it’s all politics.

For us in The Climate Movement, we’re about both.

Some of you might disagree — we’re not about electoral politics.

You may not like it, but we have to be. Speed and scale demand it. The strategic significance of The Climate Movement is to push the other three Catalytic Sources of Transformation, the other three of The Catalytic-4, to play their roles; and the fourth Catalytic Source is Governments-and-Markets. We must push governments, and governments must push markets. Pushing governments involves electoral politics.

As I’ve said many times, no one’s in charge of The Climate Movement. No one can make you be electoral-political if you don’t want to be. But if many of us don’t sully our hands in electoral politics we won’t overcome climate change.

» Electoral-Political

Right now Trump has made things pretty simple for us in this year’s mid-terms: defeat all politicians who have aided and abetted Trump 2.0. In other words, defeat all Republicans in Congress.

But we have to do more than that. We must push the Democrats, or elect Independents or leaders from other political parties who are climate champions. Our allegiance is not to any political party. Our allegiance is to our vision and those we love, to our great cause of freedom.

The only way we’re going to get change at the pace and size we need is by electing champions and defeating foes and fair weather friends. Climate change ain’t fair weather. So fair weather friends are out.

We must not only work to defeat all Republicans. We must also defeat all fossil-Democrats and fair-weather Democrats and elect champions in their stead, Democrats or otherwise.

These fair-weather folks may say to us when their election rolls around that they’ve changed their tune, they’ve seen the light. But how can we trust them to stay strong when they’ve already shown they will cave, or won’t do what’s needed?

We can’t. They’re out.

To achieve these political objectives using our moral power, people power, and staying power, we must form electoral alliances.

Electoral-political engagement means we must join forces with those who are:

Trump doesn’t care about affordability or that everybody has a fair chance. He’s against real democracy, against real equality and human dignity.

Instead, he’s a breeder of corruption. He’s on the side of corporate oligarchs and greedy billionaires. He’s working hard to rig our politics and our economy. He traffics in racism. And, of course, he’s the worst political leader on climate change the world has ever seen.

In short, Trump — and those who do his bidding and support his efforts — are for what we and our allies are against and against what we’re for. He’s the antithesis of true freedom, including climate freedom.

Thus, it is not that we are aligning with those For and Against what’s listed above as some sort of political marriage of convenience, as if opposition to Trump et al is the only thing we have in common. No.

We are aligned because of our Ten Movement Values compel us to be: love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success.

And you know what? Trump wants to corrupt and poison these too. We mustn’t let him. Not because we’re against him — let’s not make this all about him! Geez.

Rather, we mustn’t let him corrupt and steal our values because we’re for us, all of us, all of humanity and every living creature. It’s because of who we are. We can’t let Trump steal who we are.

You see, we are for overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — including our opponents. That’s climate freedom. That’s climate patriotism.

One thing we must be on constant alert for is the tendency to turn political opponents into enemies. As I’ve discussed before, we don’t have enemies. Our supreme value of love prevents this. We must work hard to defeat our political opponents. But they are not our enemies. We must free ourselves from all efforts to create enemies, for doing so makes us less than who we are, makes us less free.

» Policy-Political

Our second form of political is policy-political. Some folks in policy-circles, including non-partisan policy advocates, may object and say they aren’t doing politics. What they mean is they aren’t doing electoral-politics. For them, policy engagement, including lobbying, isn’t “political.” Well, as I said, for most folks it is.

For us to be policy-political means getting climate action policies enacted and enforced. The former involves engaging both the Legislative and Executive Branches. The latter involves primarily the Executive Branch. This is a Field of Action where our values of pragmatism and wisdom and creativity and freedom come to the fore, even as they are balanced by our values of love and justice.

Here we must form alliances as well, just as we do in electoral-politics. But such alliances can look quite different. Indeed, they can include MAGA voters and elected Republicans and fossil and fair-weather Democrats — our electoral-political opposition! Our opponents aren’t enemies, they are potential allies.

In a future post I will explore polling that shows the potential we have to form alliances with even the most conservative Republicans. And not just alliances. These folks can and should become a part of us, part of The Climate Movement.

Remember: no one’s in charge of The Climate Movement. No one has the authority to say who’s in and who’s out.

I’ve suggested a definition, but it’s just a suggestion: Climate Movement Artist-Athletes are those who have made a commitment to collective action over time to overcome climate change. That’s it. My hope is that many will take my Climate Movement Promise. But folks don’t have to to be a part of The Climate Movement.

Another one of my hopes is that many of our electoral-political opponents will become a part of The Climate Movement and help us achieve policy-political victories!

Furthermore, I also hope that those who don’t consider themselves a part of our Movement but want the co-benefits or good stuff of climate action — cheap, clean, locally-grown energy, good paying jobs, clean air, revitalizing rural America, etc, etc — will create alliances with us to achieve the policy objectives we share.

We Must Maintain Our Identity & Voice

Will these other challenges capturing attention right now drown out our call for climate action? Will they even have Climate Movement Artist-Athletes suspending or lessening their climate efforts?

What we must learn to do is maintain our climate focus and climate action even as we join forces with those concerned with these other challenges. We must keep our climate identity and our climate voice front and center as we come alongside those striving to create a better world by addressing other pressing challenges.

If we don’t, then who will?

What we want is Climate-Action-Plus, not Minus-Climate-Action. Plus, not minus. Both/And, not Either/Or.

For Freedom’s Sake, a Future Filled With Freedom

For those of us in The Climate Movement, freedom is one of our Ten Movement Values. It is valuable in and of itself. It is self-justifying. If someone asks you, “Why are you doing this climate stuff?” or “Why are you doing this political stuff?”, your answer could simply be: “I’m doing it for freedom.”

‘Nuff said.

We are choosing to use our moral power, people power, and staying power through electoral-politics and policy-politics to set others free.

With our P³ we set others free.

And what is freedom?

Freedom isn’t doing whatever the hell we want. That’s a childish understanding of freedom.

Nor is freedom simply the absence of coercion. The fullness of freedom isn’t an absence. It’s a presence.

Freedom is choosing rightly to create a better world, a world where everyone can become what they were created to be, the fullness of freedom. As I said in my post on freedom as a Climate Movement value:

Each one of us was created to be free, and we aren’t all free until all of us are free, because the fullness of freedom can only occur in a just and beautiful world. Injustice makes all of us less free. Ugliness makes all of us less free. Hatred and prejudice and racism make all of us less free. Poverty makes all of us less free. The extinction of species makes all of us less free. Climate consequences — which are connected to all these others — make all of us less free.

The Climate Movement is a freedom movement. When we keep on choosing to overcome climate change we are striving into the fullness of freedom where every step is filled with love, every step creates justice, every step creates beauty, every step heals the world.

Climate patriotism creates freedom. With climate patriotism, love of country and wanting the best for the entire world are the same thing. For freedom’s sake we are creating a future filled with freedom.

So on this 250th year of the birth of the United States of America, as those of us in the USA look back on the struggle for freedom in our nation’s history, it must push our imaginations forward in time.

What will our children and generations yet to come say about us? What will they think of us 250 years from now? Did we use our power for good? Did we make our stand in this great cause of climate freedom?

If we become our destiny, if we step forward into the future we were born to create, if we join this great cause of freedom, then rather than shame there will be pride. Rather than anger there will be joy and gratitude. Rather than sorrow there will be celebration.

That’s our future. Time to get busy. Join us!

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17. Climate Action & The Arts

Something that can help us with all three senses of being together enough — unity around shared goals, a constant supply of action events, and meeting together regularly — are the Arts. And when we are together in these ways, the Arts can evoke passion and tap into the deep places and inspire creativity as it helps unite us in our commitment to the actions in which we are engaged. They help make real our Movement Value of beauty, help us see the beauty all around us and within us.

The Arts can inspire us to keep putting one foot in front of the other like few things can, helping us be together long enough to make our contribution.

Stories, Narratives

Stories and narratives are found in all the Arts, but most explicitly in storytelling forms like novels, short stories, graphic novels (e.g., here and here), poems, parables, fables, lyrics, plays, operas, musicals, songs, films, and photography.

Stories and narratives are chief ways individuals can be knit together into small groups, communities, ethnicities, faith traditions, nations, and humanity in toto.

As such, we must tap into their power to bring and keep us together moving forward. Our vision, purpose, and Major Goal as I have articulated them is in fact our story of how the future can be; as we achieve them we make hope happen; in this way our hope is part of this story, our story, which becomes a new reality for the Earth and every living thing upon it.

Music

Music, its melodies, harmony, and rhythm, separately or in combination — can move us to our very depths and communicate in ways that are wonderous, mysterious, and beyond words. When we are physically together its pulsating rhythms can literally keep us moving forward.

Movements have long benefited from music, especially music with accompanying lyrics we can sing together, such as protest songs and movement songs, anthems, hymns, and adapted popular songs.

Visual Arts

The Visual Arts can be powerful expressions of the passion, depth, and creativity of their creators, and can stir strong cognitive and emotional experiences that can unite and empower us along our climate action journey’s.

o Films, or visual stories, can address problems and solutions directly, such as documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth. But they can also do so indirectly through plot and character development and cinematography.

o Icons, old and new; visual symbols; memes; posters; and other graphic designs — these can unite and inspire us like few other things can, especially those that are connected to stories and are multivalent.

o Videos designed for certain Social Media channels can combine the powerful qualities of films and icons to inspire and inform.

o Paintings, sculptures, mobiles, and other art forms found in museums, galleries, businesses, and homes can do for us all that visual arts are capable of.

o Photographs, especially ones we take, like selfies, can be powerful testaments to our climate actions, to our being together. They can rekindle such experiences again and again. Like all of the other Arts, they evoke and tell stories; but these are our stories, stories we are in, stories we can share through Social Media channels and presentations and informally when we are together.

Dance

When we come together we should be quite intentional about incorporating dance into our being together as a way of experiencing and strengthening the bonds we have with each other and having fun together and enjoying one another.

18. Joy, a Hallmark of The Climate Movement

When we come together — united by our goals, during our continual stream of action events, and by meeting regularly — our passion, our depth, our creativity, our love, can bring about something that must be a hallmark of the Climate Movement: joy.

There is joy in answering the call, knowing that for a time such as this you were faithful, we were faithful together.

When we are together enough, there is joy. And when we have such joy, it is impossible not to have hope.

19. Climate Action & Staying Power: Together Long Enough

For those of you who are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes and have made The Climate Movement Promise, you have made a sustained commitment to collective action over time to overcome climate change by achieving a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

We must be together enough for as long as it takes. 2050 and thereafter, throughout this Century and beyond — that’s our timeframe. We cannot be like vernal pools that spring up and briefly burst with life and activity and then disappear. Many movements are like this, but we cannot be.

More than anything else, it is our love that must keep us moving forward long enough. It is the dynamic nexus of finitude, kairos, and love that continues to lift us to our feet to make our stand, to strive towards our vision. Every precious second of your life is an opportunity to choose love.

And that’s how we will have staying power, our third source of power, to join together with our moral power and our people power to change the world.

20. The Climate Movement’s Purpose, Goals, & Strategic Significance

I will simply reiterate the Climate Movement’s strategic significance:

So that’s our job: to push, push, push Climate Action Supporters, strategic ARTC (the accelerating rate of tech change), and Governments-and-Markets. Our job is to make our future come faster. We are justice-achievers, hope-makers, and beauty-creators.

Conclusion

Everyone who has decided to be a part of The Climate Movement, and hopefully has made The Climate Movement Promise, is a Climate Movement Artist-Athlete striving for team Gold on our Olympian Fields of Action. Our talents and abilities make us fit for our particular roles, the types of Artist-Athletes we will be, creating beauty as we strive to achieve our best and make our contribution, helping our team to victory after victory. And the wonderful thing is we are not competing against other teams and other countries, because we’re all a part of one big Olympian team striving for Gold. Our victories are theirs, and theirs are ours as together we overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

All of us around the world are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our world more just as we make our future come faster. We have our shared Vision, embodied through our actions. And together that gives us our two forms of hope: Vision-Hope & Action-Hope.

We are the hope we’ve been waiting for. Join us!

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In our Smog-Climate Subseries, we have been exploring the history of the LA/So. Cal smog challenge for insights to enlighten our way forward on climate action. I have identified 10 take-aways in this regard, which I am fleshing out in three posts.

Part One discussed the first three take-aways.

1. The three historic anti-pollution groups — activists, scientists, businesspeople — need each other.

2. The Denier’s Playbook will be run against anyone.

3. Courageous scientists prevailed.

   Part Two only covered one of the take-aways, #4. But it’s a big one:

4. Why enviro activists were late to the climate challenge.

This post is Part Three of our comparing the smog and climate challenges. Here we will cover the final five take-aways.

#5: The Climate Effort Lacked a Clearly Discernible Problem and a Corresponding Movement to Address It

Why did it take much less time for the smog problem to be understood and acted upon in comparison to climate change? A key reason is grassroots and public support demanding action. With LA smog, the three main historic types of actors – activists, business leaders, and scientists/engineers – were not just supported, they were pushed by the grassroots and the public – who, in turn, were pushed by their continual experience of the problem itself. They could see it, smell it, cough and gasp and become teary-eyed from it.

But without a problem that simply can’t be ignored like smog, The Denier’s Playbook and other opposition tactics find fertile ground, as they did with the climate challenge. Then they can do the first and most fundamental part of the Playbook: deny that the problem exists.

Grassroots and public support for climate action only began to move toward what is required once impacts became a part of people’s lived experience. But they must make the connection. And that has taken decades of education in the face of The Denier’s Playbook.

# 6: Partisanship Has Risen, Impacting Environmentalism and Fueling Denial

Another take-away from comparing the smog and climate challenges is recognizing how much partisanship and ideological polarization have increased, which has played a vital role in bolstering denial. Unfortunately, as partisanship has risen, so has an anti-environmentalism within the Republican Party. Mix the two together on our issue and the results have not been good: climate change has been at the tip of the partisan spear for the last two decades. Again, this will take some unpacking.

One barometer of partisanship is the House of Representatives. A study published in April 2015 found that “partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing.” While such partisanship began to increase in the 1950s, it exploded after the Gingrich Revolution when Republicans took over the House after 40 years of Democratic control.[1]

Since 2015 things have only gotten worse, as a Pew study found in 2022: “Democrats and Republicans are farther apart ideologically today than at any time in the past 50 years.” Democrats have moved slightly left, while Republicans have lurched to the right. As a result, in 2022 there were only “about two dozen moderate Democrats and Republicans left on Capitol Hill, versus more than 160 in 1971-72.”

Polls of the public reflect the same increase in partisanship. The Pew Research Center’s polling has shown that unfavorable views of the other party were already high in 1994, with 74% of Republicans and 59% of Democrats having an unfavorable view of the other. That increased to 91% and 86%, respectively in 2016 – nearly everyone in one party had an unfavorable view of those in the other party.

But — disturbingly — as can be seen below, what has changed since 2016 is the intensity of unfavorable views driven in good measure by the perception that members of the other party are immoral, dishonest, lazy, and closed-minded, whereas member’s of one’s own party are the opposite: moral, honest, hardworking, and open-minded.

In other words, the other side isn’t simply misguided politically. They have deep character flaws while we have strong character. In short: they’re bad; we’re good.

And furthermore, Pew polling from last Fall shows that 85% of Americans believe political violence has increased and that extremism is a big concern. It’s just that it’s the other side’s extremism that’s the real problem:

• 77% of Republicans say left-wing extremism is a major problem in the country. Far fewer (27%) say this about right-wing extremism.

• Democrats’ views are nearly the reverse: 76% say right-wing extremism is a major problem, while 32% say left-wing extremism is a major problem.

So, the other side is immoral, dishonest, and close-minded, with extreme views fueling political violence.

This is a far cry from when Republican businessman Arnold Beckman was a leader on smog in the 1950s.

The rise of anti-environmentalism is another sad tale. In 1989, the year George H. W. Bush assumed office after campaigning to be the “environmental President,” 76% of Americans considered themselves to be environmentalists. The President followed through with his pledge with one of the nation’s best environmental laws, the 1990 Clean Air Act.

But during the 1992 campaign President Bush gave a tremendous boost to the partisan polarization on the environment. He criticized the Clinton-Gore ticket for its environmental positions, calling then-Senator Al Gore “Ozone Man,” saying “This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls, and out of work for every American. This guy’s crazy. He’s way out. Far out, man.”[2]

In 1994 Republicans won the House with the Gingrich Revolution and its Contract With America. Speaker Gingrich and his allies proposed laws to fundamentally weaken environmental protections against pollution. Gingrich’s rhetoric defending these changes sounds eerily similar to that of the Oil Industry in the smog fight. He claimed that environmental protections:

“have been absurdly expensive, created far more resistance than was necessary and misallocated resources on emotional and public relations grounds without regard to either scientific, engineering or economic rationality.”[3]

By 2016 the number of Americans who considered themselves environmentalists was 42 percent, and has basically stayed there. So from 1989 until the present the percentage of environmentalists went down 34 points, one-third of the country. Worse, the vast majority of that was in one political party. This partisanship/anti-environmentalism symbiosis has wreaked havoc on climate action.

Living in and living out our Climate Movement Values means The Climate Movement must be a vital part of defanging deadly partisanship. Our value of pragmatism and our first characteristic/imperative/goal to be big and broad and active enough pushes us to find common ground with our political opponents so that some become allies and even part of The Climate Movement. (More on this in future posts!)

#7: We Were Winning The Climate Fight Ahead of Where We Should Have Been — Until Trump’s Reelection

This may strike many as counterintuitive. How could we have been ahead of where we should have been before Trump 2.0 if activists were late to the fight, and if scientists keep telling us we’re behind on the necessary emission reductions?

Here’s why.

§ Unprecedented and Invisible — The climate problem is unprecedented in human history, global in scope yet local in terms of impacts. In contrast to air and water pollution, which you can see, smell, and taste, climate pollution is invisible to the naked eye with no discernible connection between cause and effect. Its main constituent, CO2, is an invisible gas we breathe out. Only in recent years are its impacts part of one’s experience here in the U.S.

§ Guilty But Powerless — When you are told that just about everything you do makes you guilty, but at the same time your good behavior won’t make things right, such powerlessness can easily become the handmaiden of denial.

§ Tailor-made For Denial — Given that it is unprecedented but invisible and people feel guilty but powerless, message point #1 of The Denier’s Playbook – deny the problem exists – sells itself with climate change. In contrast with smog, where opponents couldn’t deny the problem and their message of denial only worked for less than a decade, being able to deny the problem’s existence has allowed The Denier’s Playbook to have varying degrees of success for more than 40 years, culminating in the Trump 2.0 abberation.

§ Lack of Trust — As described in take-away #6 above, denial has been much easier given the increase in partisanship, ideological polarization, and anti-environmentalism, with climate placed at the tip of the partisan-ideological spear by opponents. Mistrusted messengers from outside your group are not going to be very successful in convincing you that an unprecedented and invisible threat must be dealt with by the heavy hand of government limiting the use of fuels that have heretofore powered our economy and make our way of life possible.

§ Economic Allies Only Recently Joining the Fight — Opposition has been led by those who see their economic well-being threatened, such as loss of profits and loss of jobs. Only recently has economic well-being begun to work in our favor, as more and more profits and jobs are tied to solutions.

Given all of this, our success through the Biden years was quite remarkable. We were winning the climate fight, despite these (and other) significant impediments.

Sadly, Trump’s reelection has been the worst thing to befall climate action in the US. His election is an historic aberration in a plethora of unprecedented ways — including on climate action and clean energy. Some of his supporters back parts of what Trump 2.0 has actually done. But not his climate extremism and stupidity on coal and renewables. (More in this in a forthcoming post!)

Trump wasn’t elected because of his extreme opposition to climate action and clean energy. He was elected in spite of it.

#8: The Arnold Beckmans Of Our Time Must Be Part of The Future

Now more than ever, as we push forward aggressively on solutions, we need the Arnold Beckmans of our time to step to the fore: inventors, innovators, businessmen and businesswomen, conservatives, Republicans, and philanthropists.

Many of today’s climate activists will not be completely comfortable with today’s Arnold Beckmans.

Well, you know what? We’re all going to have to get over it. Speed and scale demand it.

Just as was the case with smog, and smoke abatement before that, we may not like each other, but we are going to have to find a way to work together. The stakes are much too high, and the opportunities to create a better world too great.

If Only We Could Go Back to the Bad Old Days

In comparing the smog and climate fights, we may be tempted to think, “Wow. If we only had a simple problem like smog, something people can see, smell, and taste, something that makes them gasp when they walk out their front door.”

Yes, that would make things easier for us.

But that doesn’t mean the smog challenge was easy.

When the three main anti-pollution actors began working on the smog challenge there was no EPA or comparable regulatory agency. There was no environmental consciousness, no environmental movement; there were no national environmental organizations with a focus on pollution. There were no scientific instruments to measure the pollution they were fighting, no agencies reporting on the pollution that in time would be measured by such instruments. So many things we take for granted — they didn’t have them. They helped to create them. They were scrappy. They were creative. They kept going. They made a difference.

Arie Haagen-Smit and Arnold Beckman and all of the smog activists of their time had their day. They rose to the challenge. Now it’s our turn. This is our time.

#9 MAGA Voters Are Not the Enemy. We Don’t Have Enemies. We Do Have Common Ground

We don’t have enemies. That’s what I hope all of my Climate Movement Artist-Athlete teammates can affirm.

Clearly we have opponents. But we must not turn them into enemies. Not labeling people as enemies is not some mushy, we-want-everyone-to-like-us, let’s-all-be-nice kinda deal. It protects both them and us.

Enemies are people we can harm, supposedly in the name of good. To conclude someone is an enemy is profoundly dangerous for both them and us.

It’s a short step from labeling someone an enemy to demonizing and dehumanizing such individuals and groups. Demonization of our opponents degrades them and us, corroding and weakening our Movement Values, thereby weakening one of our three forms of power: our moral power.

So I’ve said “them and us” three times. Sometimes such distinctions are needed. But we gotta be careful here. “Them” ain’t the enemy. In fact, “them” could become “us.” Indeed, we want “them” to become a part of us! Opponents can become allies and Climate Action Artist-Athletes.

As was the case with smog, when it comes to climate consequences, there’s no “them and us.” There’s just us. That’s not to say that the consequences are equal. Far from it. As I discussed in a 36-part Hope & Justice Series, how climate consequences has and will harm people is profoundly unjust. It’s not equal. But no one escapes climate consequences. And no one escapes the moral call such consequences create, nor the Better Future Covenant that we are all called to.

So just like smog, there is common ground when it comes to climate consequences. But there is also common ground when it comes to the benefits and co-benefits: clean air and water; cheap electricity via renewables; locally-grown clean energy via microgrids, community solar, and rooftop and plug-in solar, and; good paying jobs.

While we must defeat MAGA politicians (more on this soon), we must find common ground with MAGA voters and opponents more generally.

#10 Hyperpartisanship Is One More Obstacle For Us to Overcome

Sadly, over the last two decades hyperpartisanship, anti-environmentalism, and anti-climate-action have gone hand in hand, an unholy trinity.

I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming post. So here I’ll be brief.

Our response must be two-fold. Dialing down hyperpartisanship can:

• create space for climate action to rise in intensity/priority for Republicans still concerned about climate change;

• open up opportunities for cooperation, including with those who aren’t interested in climate action, but are interested in the co-benefits.

As I’ll discuss more fully in an upcoming post, we don’t have a popular support problem. We have an intensity problem, a priority problem, a perception/framing problem. We must raise our intensity level across the board, including Republicans of all stripes.

To do so we must be two of our values, wise and pragmatic, wily and crafty for good, like Arnold Beckman.

The Smog & Climate Challenges Compared: Conclusion

So what do our 10 take-aways teach us?

Here’s what we know.

• We have already overcome arduous challenges. That’s good, because climate change is offering us ones never seen before in history.

• We will never give up.

• It won’t be easy.

• We will achieve victory together.

This is our moment. Now is the time for regular folk to become heroes together. Nothing less than greatness is our calling. Join us!

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[1] Clio Andries, et al., “The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives” PLOS One (April 21, 2015): Fig. 2.

[2] Mary Matalin, James Carville, and Peter Knobler, All’s Fair in Love, War, and Running For President (Simon & Schuster, 1995): p. 449.

[3] John Cushman, Jr., “Congressional Republicans Take Aim at an Extensive List of Environmental Statutes” New York Times (Feb. 22, 1995).

[4] Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinberg, G., & Rosenthal, S. Politics & Global Warming, Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (Fall 2015): p.4.

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16.0 Climate Action Teams or CATS — Introduction

Climate Action Teams or CATS are volunteer groups or teams ideally made up of 5-10 members organized based on many factors, but usually revolving around things CAT members have in common: school, job/profession, organizational affiliation, faith community, where you live, shared interests, age.

With CATS we can be all that we need to be: big and broad and active enough, passionate enough, deep enough, dynamic enough, organic and strategic enough, together enough, and long enough. Without CATS, we won’t. It’s that simple.

To stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster, we need CATS.

CATS meet regularly to support each other in our sustained commitment to collective action over time to achieve our Major Goal.

As such, CATS do three basic things:

1. We meet.

2. We support.

3. We act.

Just like Olympic athletes have family, coaches, trainers, backers, and teammates to support them, we need encouragement and help and cooperation from others we see regularly.

We must help one another to use all that we are in service of something greater than ourselves as we live in and live out our Ten Movement Values: love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success.

We meet so we can join our gifts and abilities with the gifts of others to do more than we could alone. And in the doing and becoming we need support to see it through.

16.1 Climate Action Teams (CATS) Will Make Us Big and Broad and Active Enough

Social science research tells us that 3.5% of a population can create social change. But to create the needed speed and scale of change, by 2030 we’re going to need more:

• 5% of the world’s population, or

• 400 million worldwide.

This means we need to get big fast to match the scale and speed of the challenge and make our future come faster.

Growing and improving The Climate Movement is our top priority because we are essential to having the other three of The Catalytic-4 play their parts. Being big and broad and active enough will give us the people power needed to make things happen — and CATS are key to our growth.

Everyone on the planet can start or join a CAT. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You were born with permission! It is part of your birthright as a human being.

Climate Action Teams are one of the greatest expressions of freedom of our time. We are using our freedom to fight for freedom.

16.2 CATS Must Be Passionate & Deep Enough

CATS are places where you have permission to be passionate; even more so, where you need to be passionate, our second Climate Movement characteristic. CATS are where you can let your passion out and tap into the deep places that sustain your passion. Passion helps you to be your fullest self, to be fully alive by faithfully living in and living out your values. Climate Action Teams are where you can let your passion and those of your teammates motivate you towards consistent bold action.

Ours is the greatest moral cause of our time; our Major Goal is profoundly ambitious, even audacious; our Movement will be the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world; our cause is just — deeply so.

But all of this does not make us morally superior. In fact, to really own all of this is to become chastened in the face of the challenge, in the recognition of our complete and total inability as individuals to do anything about the climate crisis on our own; becoming a part of this great worldwide movement should humble us to our very depths.

We achieve greatness through humility. It is one of the keys to our attaining greatness together. CATS keep us passionate, grounded, and humble, preventing our moral passion from devolving into arrogant self-righteousness or, even worse, prophetic narcissism.

CATS also help us to be deep enough, our third characteristic/imperative/goal.

Only with depth of commitment will we get ourselves out of this mess. It is the L-word and our other Movement Values that will provide the depth we need. And it is in our CATS where we can say these words out loud, where we can intentionally tap into and claim their power. As CATS we are together because of who and what we love, and love is the heart from which justice springs.

16.3 Dynamic CATS

CATS are vital to helping us be dynamic enough, our fourth Movement characteristic/imperative/goal, which involves a forward-driving tension created by the relationships between the (1)tried-and-true, (2) discipline, and two of our Movement Values, (3) freedom, and (4) creativity.

Part of our freedom is the freedom to do things differently than was done in the past. We must learn from the past and benefit from the tried-and-true. But we must also let our Movement Values of wisdom, pragmatism, and creativity help us see that past lessons may not fit present realities. We must have the discipline to stay true to achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal even if that means doing things differently, even if it means transforming or even abandoning long cherished and comfortable traditions and approaches. Needed change takes discipline, a discipline driven by love.

16.4 CATS Must Be Organic & Strategic

Because we are in kairos-climate-time, to make our future come faster we need to be organic and strategic enough, our fifth characteristic/imperative/goal of The Climate Movement.

Out of all of our social forms, all the ways we can be together enough, CATS are where the combination of organic and strategic change will be — must be — the most powerful. Messy and non-linear must be combined with efficient and targeted to achieve something stronger and more effective than either alone. That’s hard. It’s also glorious.

CATS are organic precisely because each one is sui generis. In contrast to existing organizations and campaigns, there has never been a group like yours before, nor will there be one like yours ever again. You don’t have to think outside the box because you were never in the box. You make your own box — and it doesn’t have to be a box!

All choices are yours — choices your CAT makes together and choices each individual Artist-Athlete makes within the group. You can choose to exercise gifts and talents and take on roles that no other group has provided the opportunity before.

For us to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything we must have a plethora of CATS the world over who are being organic and strategic enough.

16.5 The Nine Lives of CATS

CATS can help with the long enough dimension of climate action, our seventh characteristic/imperative/goal of the Climate Movement, by helping individuals increase their length of active engagement.

However, if there is one Achilles heel of Climate Action Teams it is their longevity. To be honest, some CATS may not fulfill their potential on this score.

The Climate Movement, just like all social change movements, is and will be a bit of a mess. But it’s our mess. Organic messes are fine. Toxic dysfunctional ones are not. It can take wisdom and patience — but not too much patience — to know the difference. If you are in a toxic CAT, find another one.

Even healthy, well-functioning CATS may last just a few years, but in that time they kept their Artist-Athletes at it. And as one CAT’s season comes and goes, you are free to join another one! CATS may not last as long as organizations, but they still can increase the time individuals devote to organic and strategic climate action. They can also forge friendships that last a lifetime, friendships that can help our Movement in a future we cannot yet see.

16.6 CAT Meetings

You are free to determine how you will structure your time, rules, roles, and decision-making.

Time: Meeting regularly and consistently for an angreed upon length of time is best. Consider creating a standard agenda that can be modified.

Rules: Articulate some basic ground rules that everyone affirms, e.g., that meetings begin and end on time, that everyone is treated with respect, that everyone honors the agenda and agrees to any modifications of the agenda.

Roles: All roles (see examples) should be designated and agreed upon by the CAT.

Decision-making: Agree on how decisions will be made. Consensus? Majority? A designated member? You could use all three and more. I would suggest consensus for major decisions, and designated roles for smaller ones.

16.7 Self-Herding CATS

If all individual CATS do is their own thing, if the moral and people power of CATS are not brought to bear in strategic efforts that help create national policies in keeping with our vision, purpose, and Major Goal and bring about speed and scale, then our power and our efforts will be squandered.

That’s why CATS must look for ways to be a part of larger strategic efforts. Such efforts can be created by organizations and coalitions.

But with CATS I see something more. I see the potential for something ever greater still. I see a miracle of sorts — CATS herding themselves!

CATS don’t have to wait for someone or something to organize them into larger strategic efforts. You don’t need to ask for permission. You were born with permission!

Your CAT is free to join with other CATS! Here are some initial thoughts on how ever larger circles of CATS might be organized.

1. CATS Communities: They have something in common (geography, school, trade, profession).

2. All participating CATS in a country, or “CATS United!” Within a country there could be a CATS Council made up of representatives of CAT Communities.

3. CATS Worldwide, made up of all participating CATS around the globe. Its leadership could be made up of all of the CATS Councils from individual nations — a Council of Councils.

Whatever organized structures we end up creating, our job as individuals and as CATS is to help The Climate Movement become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world as together we overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Join us!

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In our Smog-Climate Subseries, we have been exploring the history of the LA/So. Cal smog challenge for insights to enlighten our way forward on climate action. I have identified 10 take-aways in this regard, which I am fleshing out in three posts.

Part One discussed the first three take-aways: (1) the three historic anti-pollution groups — activists, scientists, businesspeople — need each other; (2) The Denier’s Playbook will be run against anyone, and; (3) courageous scientists prevailed.

This post Part Two, only covers one of the take-aways, #4. But it’s a big one.

#4: Activists Were Late to the Climate Challenge

In comparing the efforts to combat smog and climate change I came to realize something that took me a bit by surprise: activists were late to the climate challenge. This is going to take a bit of unpacking.

We think of activists as those who raise the alarm in society on new problems, or problems being ignored. They are ahead of the curve, including being ahead of scientific consensus. This was the case with smog. Not so, climate change.

It was scientists like James Hansen in his congressional testimony in 1988 who began raising the alarm, not the activists. And, as I will sketch below, Hansen’s testimony was a decade after committees of the National Academy of Sciences had issued three reports.

Even the public seems to have been ahead of the activists. A 1980 poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation in the US showed that fairly early on, of the 38% who were aware of climate change, 65% of them were concerned: 37% considered global warming “very serious,” while 28% considered it “somewhat serious.” These folks listened to the scientists.[1]

What If …

What if activists had begun to push in 1965 for a faster pace of scientific research? We certainly could have used it. The pace and scale of scientific inquiry on climate change was too slow given the enormity of the problem.

What if activists would have pushed for greenhouse gases (GHGs) to be included in some way in federal clean air laws passed in 1967, or 1970, or 1977, or 1990? What if by the 1990 Clean Air Act GHGs were formally recognized as a pollutant?

Even by the slow pace of scientific inquiry that did occur, and corresponding events in politics and policy, such outcomes were quite plausible.[2]

After all, Svante Arrhenius propounded the greenhouse theory in 1896, which for decades was treated to the scientific community’s inherent skepticism.

Then Roger Revelle and Charles David Keeling and others began demonstrating in the late 1950s and early 1960s how it could be a serious problem. Beginning in 1956 and for several years thereafter Revelle testified before Congress about the importance of funding climate research, saying in 1959 it should not be allowed to fail:

“We know that the average weather conditions we call climate can change over a few decades, and we suspect that changes in the storage of gases and heat in the oceans will profoundly influence the process.”[3]

By 1965 President Johnson issued a warning to Congress:

“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”[4]

A scientific report for President Johnson, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, with a chapter on climate change, was released later that year.

The Oil Industry was also on the problem early, funding research in the late 1950s and having the Stanford Research Institute or SRI do a comprehensive private report in 1968.[5]

To their credit, the SRI scientists concluded:

“ there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe … CO2 and submicroscopic particles may be the cause of serious world-wide environmental changes.”[6]

This was a far superior response scientifically by SRI in comparison to their deplorable work on smog as part of the Oil Industry’s running of The Denier’s Playbook.

Less than a decade after SRI’s private report to the Oil Industry, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) began issuing three reports on climate change from small research committees, in 1975, 1977, and 1979. The 1977 report by their Energy and Climate Committee, which was widely reported in the media,[7] forthrightly stated that a major shift away from fossil fuels could be required:

“Worldwide industrial civilization may face a major decision over the next few decades—whether to continue reliance on fossil fuels as principal sources of energy or to invest the research and engineering effort, and the capital, that will make it possible to substitute other energy sources for fossil fuels within the next 50 years.”[8]

It warned that what made the climate problem so different from other environmental problems – its lack of a personal experience of cause and effect – is also what helped to make it so dangerous:

“If the decision [to act] is postponed until the impact of man-made climate changes has been felt, then, for all practical purposes, the die will already have been cast” (emphasis added).[9]

Thus, it called upon government leaders to act with wisdom:

“The possibility of modification of the world’s climate by carbon dioxide released in the production of energy from fossil fuels should be given serious prompt consideration by concerned national and international organizations and agencies.”[10]

The 1979 report from a study group on climate had a statement that is as strong as anything ever written by a nationally or internationally recognized scientific body:

“We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change.”[11]

So Hansen’s 1988 testimony, which many think of as a break-through moment in society for the climate challenge, came over 10 years after the first two NAS committee reports, and 20 years after the Oil Industry was alerted by SRI.

Summing up: activists were late to climate action; they did not help push the scientific inquiry along in the early stages;[12] nor were GHGs included in clean air legislation.

Why Late? Smog Clears Things Up

The smog challenge helps us understand why. Historically activists have raised their ruckuses over pollution problems that had local consequences people could see and smell and taste.

Not so with climate change (until recently, that is). It is caused primarily by CO₂, an invisible, orderless, tasteless gas we breathe out. But when it becomes too much of something in the wrong place causing harm it becomes pollution, and therefore is an environmental problem. It’s just that the place where this heat-trapping gas is causing a problem, in this case global warming, is way up in the atmosphere where no one can experience it. And the problem is not just that it is getting hotter down on earth. The problem is that it is changing the climate, the average weather of an area — and a stable, predictable climate has been the foundation upon which human civilization has been built.

Thus, it is much more than an environmental problem. It is its own category, something the world has never seen before, global in scope, with local consequences that have no easily grasped connection to its causes.

With smog all you had to do was walk out your door and gasp to understand what pollution was doing. Activists geared towards making their local situations better simply had no frame of reference for a problem like climate change; no one did.

Furthermore, before 1970 pollution activists organized themselves into local groups that came and went. In 1965 when President Johnson mentioned climate change, environmentalism focused on pollution was a nascent movement at best. The major national environmental organizations that dealt with pollution as a first order of business didn’t exist.[13] Who was there to champion an increase in the pace and scale of climate research?

Scientists & Political Champions Acted Before the Activists

But were there other signs to alert activists of this growing problem, especially in the 1970s when environmental organizations were in existence, like the Environmental Defense Fund (1967), Friends of the Earth (1969), the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969), the League of Conservation Voters (1970), and the Natural Resources Defense Council (1970)?

In contrast to the activists, beginning in 1965 with the Johnson Administration scientists and politicians and government officials were taking notice and acting.

In 1969 Nixon policy advisor (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo to Nixon’s top domestic advisor John Ehrlichman warning of “the carbon dioxide problem.” He attached the 1965 report from the Johnson Administration.

In 1972 a little known governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, was underlying articles dealing with climate change in the journal Nature.

In 1974 the NAS established a Committee on Climate Variation, which recommended a climate research program. That same year the Domestic Council of the Nixon/Ford Administration drafted a National Climate Program Act.

The various NAS committee reports in the ‘70s (highlighted above) were partly due to the leadership of Congressman George Brown (D-CA), who also introduced the National Climate Program Act in 1976, which was signed by President Carter and enacted on September 17, 1978.[14] The Act begins in Sec. 2 (1) with a finding that succinctly captures why it is in the national interest to both understand and address the problem:

“Weather and climate change affect food production, energy use, water resources and other factors vital to national security and human welfare.”

The purpose of the Act is succinctly articulated in Sec. 3:

“to establish a national climate program that will assist the Nation and the world to understand and respond to natural and man-induced climate processes and their implications.”

So, even though climate change was unlike any other environmental problem, including smog, in that our own senses and experiences were not telling us something was wrong, there were other signs – the NAS reports and media coverage of them, hearings and legislation – alerting environmental organizations and activists that climate change could be a major problem.

Indeed, by 1979 the basis for national action had been established with:

1) the nation’s leading scientists on the issue telling us the problem and our role in it were “incontrovertible,” and that delaying action until impacts were felt would be too late, and;

2) the finding by Congress in the National Climate Program Act that climate change could have serious consequences for “national security and human welfare,” meaning it is in our national interest to address it.

The Fossils Laid in Wait with The Denier’s Playbook

While activists/environmentalists were late, and scientists were doing their normal, painstakingly slow process, the fossil fuel industry laid in wait, monitoring what was occurring in scientific and policy circles, and doing their best to slow things down at meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that hardly anyone was paying attention to. The well-worn Denier’s Playbook stood ready for a public campaign once policymakers and broader society began seriously to consider action.

Activists and environmental organizations were late to the climate challenge. But it’s not too late to become a Climate Movement Artist-Athlete and take your place on your Olympian Fields of Action. Join us!

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[1] Spencer Weart, “Global Warming: How Skepticism Became Denial,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 67 no. 1 (2011): p. 45.

[2] For the history of climate change, see Spencer Weart, Discovery of Global Warming; Weart also maintains an excellent website with up-to-date revisions and additions. See also Joshua P. Howe, “Making Global Warming Green: Climate Change and American Environmentalism, 1957-1992,” Ph.D. Diss (Stanford University, July 2010.)

[3] Roger Revelle, “Statement of Dr. Roger Revelle Concerning the Oceanography Investigation,” Testimony Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives, Report on the International Geophysical Year (Feb. 1959): p. 78.

[4] President Johnson’s quote is found in an article by Marianne Lavelle. “Fifty years ago this month President Johnson voiced concern over invisible fossil fuel emissions in a special message to Congress. It was the first time a U.S. president warned the nation about our carbon habit,” The Daily Climate (Feb. 2, 2015). A scientific report for President Johnson with a chapter on climate change was released later that year. See Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, The White House (November 1965).

[5] Charles Jones’ peer-reviewed 1958 report states that API had funded research to provide an “Analysis of the gaseous carbon compounds in the atmosphere to determine the source of atmospheric carbon.” See Jones, “A Review of the Air Pollution Research Program of the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the American Petroleum Institute, p. 271.

[6] See E. Robinson and R. C. Robbins, Sources , Abundance, and Fate of Gaseous Atmospheric Pollutants, SRI Report prepared for the American Petroleum Institute, February 1968, p. 110.

[7] Weart, Discovery of Global Warming, p. 99.

[8] National Academy of Sciences, Geophysical Research Board, Geophysics Study Committee, Panel on Energy and Climate, Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics (1977): p. 1

[9] NAS, Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics, p. 3.

[10] NAS, Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics, p. 5.

[11] See National Academy of Sciences, Report of an Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, (1979): p. vii.

[12] Funding was nearly non-existent in the early years. Keeling recounts how the famous Mauna Loa observatory was shut down briefly, and almost permanently, in 1964, due to lack of funds. See Charles D. Keeling, “The Influence of Mauna Loa Observatory on the Development of Atmospheric CO2 Research,” in Mauna Loa Observatory. A 20th Anniversary Report, ed. John Miller (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Special Report, September 1978): p. 52.

[13] I am drawing a distinction here between preservation/conservation organizations, of which there were a good number before 1965, and environmental organizations that also dealt with pollution. One might suggest that the Sierra Club was an environmental organization in this sense. However, in the 1960s they were focused on preservation fights – even to the point of advocating for coal-burning power plants in place of electricity from proposed dams. The preservation/conservation organizations did address some pollution issues before 1965, but these were associated with keeping their protected areas pristine.

[14] Howe, “Making Global Warming Green: Climate Change and American Environmentalism, 1957-1992,” pp. 210-211.

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The five posts summarized below all have an economic connection.

14.7 The We Mean Business Coalition

In our exploration of coalitions the We Mean Business Coalition raises the question: can an effort focused mostly or even exclusively on reducing climate pollution be considered a part of the Climate Movement?

For some that may be a confusing, even absurd, question. Isn’t reducing climate pollution to avoid the really bad stuff what we’re all about?

For me, and many others, no. Remember our vision, purpose, and Major Goal as I have articulated them: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

They describe themselves as:

a global nonprofit coalition working with the world’s most influential businesses to take action on climate change. Together, we catalyze business and policy action to halve global emissions by 2030 in line with a 1.5C pathway.

They do briefly discuss a just transition for impacted workers. But that is only one part of a just and prosperous sustainability.

Does this mean we shouldn’t consider the We Mean Business Coalition as part of the Climate Movement, until, say, they have more of a track record on our fuller vision?

Absolutely not.

We all have our roles to play on our particular Fields of Action. The We Mean Business Coalition is part of the Climate Movement as long as they are supportive of our efforts for our fuller vision.

14.8 The Green Economy Coalition & the WEALL Coalition

While the We Mean Business Coalition that I just covered is focused almost exclusively on 1.5 and pollution reduction, the first part of our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, these two are focused on the second part, i.e., creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

When you see who’s involved in The Green Economy Coalition — e.g. UNEP, Oxfam — you see they are reformers, not revolutionaries.

But the reforms they champion would represent a true transformation of our economic systems. They state:

A green economy is one where wellbeing, justice, sufficiency, good governance and planetary boundaries are at the heart of decision-making, for governments, businesses and citizens.

Sound familiar? It is very much in keeping with my articulation of our vision, purpose, and Major Goal. However, the need for urgency, although occasionally recognized briefly, is not one of their primary messages.

This points to the fact that overcoming climate change and creating a green economy are not the same thing, even as they share a good deal. It is why our vision, purpose, and Major Goal joins these two imperatives together.

A coalition quite similar to the Green Economy Coalition, including, again, a vision very similar to ours, is the Wellbeing Economy Alliance or WEALL, which is chock full of NGOs trying to transform our economic systems.

WEALL’s mission is “To change the debate and build momentum for economic transformation so that economies around the world deliver shared wellbeing for people and planet by 2040 (emphasis added).”

Such an economic transformation will be made possible when “our definition of societal success shifts beyond GDP growth to delivering shared wellbeing.”

It is vital that our thinking about the economy and the economic structures of our societies be transformed to be climate-friendly, sustainable, and creators of justice, enhancing wellbeing for everyone and everything. These coalitions are hopeful signs that such thinking and efforts already exist.

What the broader Climate Movement needs to bring alongside their efforts is urgency and our three forms of power — moral power, people power, & staying power — to transform ideas into reality.

14.9 Race to Zero & Race to Resilience; But Justice Demands More

Post 14.9 concludes my 9-part Subseries on coalitions and how they help us to be together enough, our sixth Climate Movement characteristic/imperative/goal. My final examples of coalitions are Race to Zero and Race to Resilience. Race to Zero claims to be “the world’s largest coalition of non-state actors,” while Race to Resilience seeks to help 4 billion vulnerable communities become resilient by 2030.

Both of these coalitions are instigated by a governing entity, the United Nations. Can such a government-related effort be considered to be a part of the Climate Movement? Hmmm …

Race to Zero and Race to Resilience view things from the top down, as is clear from their collective label for who/what is being engaged: “non-state actors.” There are nation-states, and then there are institutions, businesses, and local governments.

And individual volunteers in a mass movement viewing things from the bottom up? Not on their map.

Race to Zero has two meta goals in keeping with 1.5C:

1) achieve net-zero by 2050;

2) halve emissions by 2030.

It’s their second goal that puts the race in Race to Zero and makes sure it’s not actually a scam. Without the second goal, the first can be a con job.

Whereas Race to Zero has very clear and measurable targets, the Race to Resilience’s criteria are much vaguer. This reflects not only the differing subject matters, but, more importantly, the fact that reducing the causes of climate change has received much more attention than dealing with the consequences. Race to Resilience is doing good things and providing leadership where it has been sorely lacking.

But when measured against the three actions of justice — to stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better — it is clear we must do much more. Resilience, even if you added in “loss and damage,” isn’t all that justice requires. We must work for prosperous sustainability — the good stuff — for everyone as well.

15.1 The Climate Movement and Businesses: Foes

This is the first in a two-part Subseries on climate change and businesses and how some can help us be together enough.

Here are two things to look for when thinking about whether we should consider a particular business a friend or foe of the Climate Movement:

§ profit-motive;

§ ideology, or more broadly, behavior-shaping ideas.

The profit-motive is usually going to be the deciding factor. But ideology cannot be overlooked.

We must be ever mindful that the profit-motive for Big Producers of Polluting Products provides a powerful incentive for Grifter hope-stealing greenwashing, where businesses want to appear climate-friendly for PR purposes to enhance sales and burnish their image.

But, when it comes to businesses we cannot say “a pox on all your houses.” We need those in the business sector who are our friends, because most of the implementation of climate mitigation will take place in the market. Thus, thinking clearly about both business friends and foes is essential.

15.2 The Climate Movement and Businesses That Are Friends

Markets are already playing a vital role because profits and price now favor clean energy.

1. The green/climate economy has surpassed $5 trillion annually and will exceed $7 trillion by 2030.

2. To achieve 1.5C by 2050 — our temperature reduction goal — about 75% of needed mitigation efforts are cost competitive today (55%) or nearly so (20%).

3. Two charts (below) from the World Resources Institute (WRI) utilizing data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) clearly shows clean energy investments and jobs are going up, up, up, while the fossils are going down, down, down.

How did profits and price become so favorable? It happened because the four Catalytic Sources of Transformation worked for decades to make it so.

The fourth of The Catalytic-4 is Governments-&-Markets. The hyphens I’ve placed to connect them are there to emphasize that they must work together to play their part. “Governments” is put first because they must find ways to make markets achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal. This could result from a wide variety of government policies: incentives, taxes, regulations, mandates, codes, standards, public-private partnerships.

But to achieve the needed speed and scale of change, The Climate Movement (#1), bolstered by Climate Action Supporters (#2), must push governments to make the accelerating rate of tech change or ARTC (#3) strategic, and structure markets to achieve our purpose.

One of the things we can do in our businesses is create Climate Action Teams (CATS) to support each other— one social form nesting in another.

We’ve all got a job to do because we are the hope we’ve been waiting for. We are at work making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!

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Introduction

Looking back at the LA/Southern Cal smog story one could ask, “Was the effort a success? Is the smog gone?”

Success? Yes. Smog gone? No.

But how can we say it’s a success if the smog isn’t gone? Because smog pollutants have been significantly reduced even as population, vehicles, and vehicle miles traveled have exploded.

For example, one study found that “Despite a 38% increase in regional motor vehicle activity, vigorous economic growth, and a 30% population increase, total estimated emissions of NO_x … decreased by 54% …” between 1993 and 2011. (NO_x or nitrogen oxides, is the chief smog-producing pollutant.)

More broadly, California, with the fifth largest economy in the world and the second largest per capita, has continued to lead the nation and the world in reducing all forms of air pollutants, including climate pollution. It’s climate efforts received a major boost from the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since then, just like smog pollution, climate pollution has gone down while economic growth has gone up as the graph below demonstrates.

All of this had its beginnings in the LA/Southern Cal smog challenge. California has blazed a path that the rest of the US and the world has followed.

What Can We Learn? 10 Take-Aways

Thus far in this Smog-Climate Subseries we have discussed the following:

#2.1 Smog Lifts, Climate Warms, and the Creation of The Denier’s Playbook

#2.2 Smog Fight Helps Create Environmentalism

#2.3 The Denier’s Playbook: Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Defends the Oil Industry

#2.4 Arie Haagen-Smit: The Scientist Who Decoded LA Smog and Was Attacked For Doing So, Part One

#2.5 Arie Haagen-Smit: The Scientist Who Decoded LA Smog and Was Attacked For Doing So, Part Two

#2.6 Arnold Beckman: Scientist, Inventor, CEO, Republican Power-player, Smog-fighter — Part One

#2.7 Arnold Beckman: Scientist, Inventor, CEO, Republican Power-player, Smog-fighter, Part Two

For Climate action types, what can we learn from comparing the smog and climate challenges?

I have identified 10 take-aways, which I will discuss in three posts. This is Part One. Parts Two and Three will arrive on the next two Saturdays. These three will conclude our Smog-Climate Subseries.

#1: The Three Anti-Pollution Types Need Each Other

As I covered earlier, in the second half of the 19th Century and the first part of the 20th, as the Industrial Revolution came to full flower in the United States with its attendant pollution, groups across the country worked to address what was then called “smoke abatement.” There were three main anti-smoke types:

1. reformers/activists,

2. engineers/scientists, and

3. civic/business leaders.

As I’m sure many of us trying to reduce pollution would recognize, we still fit in these three basic categories. The one that might raise some eyebrows would be business leaders.

We tend to be a bit surprised today when business leaders support caring for the environment by addressing pollution. But that has always been the case in this country.

For example, in 1898 Andrew Carnegie told the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce that industrial smoke had to go. Based on his urging, the Chamber sprung into action, guided by its Committee on Smoke Prevention. The Committee stated:

“there will always be found individuals who will insist that unless they are at liberty to make smoke at their pleasure, they will be ruined. Such protestations will have to be ignored.”[1]

As folks who’ve been working on environmental and climate challenges know, this tired old “It will ruin the economy” “Jobs vs. Environment” line is still trotted out. But at the turn of the 20th Century Andrew Carnegie and the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce already exposed that canard.

Thus, the LA Chamber of Commerce’s concern with smog was not an aberration; rather, it was consistent with past stances. As they said in the Smog Elimination Action Program: air pollution “poses serious threats to living values, business values and property values in the Los Angeles Basin.”

Dr. Beckman’s response to smog was also in keeping with history, in his case doubly so. He fits two of these three types, businessman and scientist/engineer.

The smog fight also illustrates another pattern: these three types don’t always agree or get along, but they nevertheless need one another – even if they may not like each other.

Dr. Beckman makes it very clear that it was the activities of the third group, the citizen activists, those “emotionally charged people” who “go off half-cocked” and create “unnecessary chaos,” that pushed him into the smog fight.

This was true not only for Dr. Beckman, but for the Chamber as well. Two years before they asked Beckman to become involved the Chamber sprung into action in 1944 when a local grassroots group proclaimed: “If the authorities don’t do something about this, the people will.”[2] The Chamber did not believe “that citizens demanding hurried action … can bring about a satisfactory solution of the problem.”[3] More than this, both the smoke abatement efforts and the LA smog fight show that business leaders who want to reduce pollution would rather have polluters cooperate voluntarily than be required to by the government.

It is the activists who must push for the government to have pollution reduction power and use that power to do a its most basic job: defend its citizens against a dangerous threat.

The activist ruckus-raisers and the business and scientist/engineer rationalists are never going to be completely in sync, never going to be completely comfortable with each other. But without the ruckus-raisers, the rationalists may never get off the dime. Without being an irritant, without making them uncomfortable, progress my come too slow or not at all.[4]

This is not just true on the business side of things. It’s a also true for the scientific findings needed to properly address the problem. In many situations, if it were not for activists raising concerns, the conservative nature of scientific inquiry would have the process take much longer than the problem requires. Lack of funds can also be an impediment, and activists can help secure what’s needed to increase the pace and scale of scientific progress.

But without the facts, and with a chronic problem like smog wreaking havoc, activists can rush to judgment, hurting their cause. Even more basic, we want to solve the actual problem, and to do so we need to understand what’s causing it. While in the case of smog we could argue, retroactively, that the efforts to reduce SO2 helped improve air quality in other ways, it didn’t help with the smog problem. That hurt credibility and gave an opening to the deniers.[5]

So, activists need Haagen-Smit and Beckman the scientists/engineers. But we also need Beckman the inventor and businessman, not only to help push for public policies, but to create and implement the solutions throughout the economy; that is where the problem will be solved.

#2: If They Run The Denier’s Playbook Against Smog, Well …

Few today would not want to do something about smog, and the struggle continues in LA and across the nation.[6] Yet when the need for action was greatest, the Oil Industry and their hired scientists ran The Denier’s Playbook to thwart or slow down needed action.

And they haven’t stopped doing it! Incredibly, the Oil Industry still has been opposing efforts to combat smog.

For example, in Fall 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed some overdue guidelines for methane or natural gas leaks in the industry’s infrastructure. (Natural gas contains smog precursors.) Here’s what the American Petroleum Institute had to say:

“Moving forward with these guidelines without robust data could impose unachievable emission reduction requirements on the industry, while adding potentially significant costs to the American economy, jobs, consumers and the environment.”[7]

Sound familiar?

Let me add a bit of snarky commentary:

• “… robust data …” – Yea, somehow there never seems to be enough data, always just a bridge too far; to riff on an old saying, data, data, everywhere, but not a byte to eat.

• “… unachievable emission reduction requirements …” – Except for all those other requirements they’ve met once they had to.

• “ … significant costs …” – They’re serious this time, this one will really wreck the economy.

• “… and the environment.” – Oh what the heck, throw the environment in there, that will be wrecked, too, if we reduce this pollution.

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us 2,942.06 times, shame on us!

BTW, the Biden Administration subsequently issued new methane regulations, only to have the Trump EPA gut them in November 2025, with the American Petroleum Institute cheering them on:

“Smart regulations are essential to sustaining our industry’s progress in reducing methane emissions. We commend E.P.A. for its thoughtful and timely work to finalize a rule that supports innovation while balancing environmental progress and meeting the world’s growing energy needs.”

In their Orwellian doublespeak, “balancing” somehow means backtracking.

#3: Courageous Scientists Prevailed

If the Fossils and their allies would attack Arie Haagen-Smit, an apolitical member of the Chamber of Commerce and researcher for agribusiness, then they will attack anyone.

Scientific statesmen like Haggen-Smit are needed to stand up for what the facts demand. It is not enough to simply find the facts; we must have scientists who will stand up for the truth and its requirements in the face of withering attacks. And the rest of us must support them.

We continue to need scientists who are truth-tellers on climate change like Haagen-Smit was on smog. As unpleasant as it was for Haagen-Smit, his experience pales in comparison to that of many climate scientists.

At this point the debate within the scientific community is long over. That’s largely due to such courageous scientists like James Hansen, Ben Santer, Sir John Houghton, Michael Mann, and Katharine Hayhoe, who have withstood attacks to stand up for the truth and for what’s right.[8] I, for one, will be forever grateful for what they’ve done.

Conclusion to Part One

The dynamic smog duo of Arie Haagen-Smit and Arnold Beckman, scientists who followed the truth wherever it led, then fought for the truth even as The Denier’s Playbook was run against them, and then did what needed to be done to address the problem — their examples help to light our way.

It’s good to know they weren’t perfect. That means the rest of us have a shot at standing for truth and what’s right for such a time as this.

And, of course, we have many climate scientists who have faced adversity for the sake of the truth, heroes for our great cause.

They had their Olympian Fields of Action, and we have ours. The scientists on their own can’t do it. They need the activists. They need us. Each of us are called to our own Fields of Action to play our part, something no one else on Earth can do.

Ours is a time for regular folk to become heroes together. Nothing less than greatness is our calling. Join us!

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[1] As quoted in Robert Dale Grinder, “From Insurgency to Efficiency: The Smoke Abatement Campaign in Pittsburgh Before World War I,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 61, no. 3 (July 1978): pp. 190-191.

[2] As quoted in Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy, p. 59.

[3] Minutes from a Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce meeting on Sept. 14, 1944, as quoted in Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy, p. 63.

[4] Historian Frank Uekoetter makes a similar point. When cooperation between regulators and industry succeeded in reducing pollution, it was usually because a less attractive alternative helped push them to do so: “Throughout history, cooperative modes of regulation were usually at their best when they competed with a different, more confrontational approach; conversely, they were in danger of sclerosis when no alternative was in sight. … if cooperation worked, it did so not because industrialists were nice people, but rather because they wanted to prevent a shift to less attractive policies.” See The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States trans. Thomas Dunlap (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2009): p. 17.

[5] For example, the API’s Vance Jenkins called it “The Sulfur-Dioxide Fable.” See Jenkins, “The Policeman is Coming!” p. 295.

[6] The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District (APCD) eventually became the South Coast Air Pollution Control District. As two news articles show, LA has continued working to reduce smog through the APCD. From the LA Times: “The first five months of 2026 in Southern California have been the smoggiest — with the highest number of unhealtful air days — in more than a decade, according to statewide air monitoring.” That piece adds a new wrinkle: warmer days create more bad smog episodes. The NYT article highlights that many of the arguments for and against are quite similar to those during the time of Haagen-Smit and Beckman. See Tony Briscoe, “L.A. Region Begins the Year with the Smoggiest First 5 Months in a Decade,” Los Angeles Times (June 6, 2026), and; Mike McPhate, “California Today: Tackling Los Angeles’s Deadly Smog,” New York Times (Feb. 6, 2017).

[7] Reid Porter, “Implementing EPA’s Control Techniques Guidelines Without Proper Scientific Input Is Bad Public Policy,” American Petroleum Institute (Oct. 20, 2016).

[8] As the historian of climate science, Spencer Weart, reminds us, besides standing up to the attacks, other forms of courage were needed for “the struggles of thousands of men and women over the course of a century. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy wastes or on the high seas. The rest needed more subtle forms of courage. They gambled decades of arduous effort on the chance of a useful discovery and staked their reputations on what they claimed to have found.” See Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, revised ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008): p. vii.

[9] Spencer Weart, “Global Warming: How Skepticism Became Denial,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 67 no. 1 (2011): p. 45.

[10] For the history of climate change, see Spencer Weart, Discovery of Global Warming; Weart also maintains an excellent website with up-to-date revisions and additions. See also Joshua P. Howe, “Making Global Warming Green: Climate Change and American Environmentalism, 1957-1992,” Ph.D. Diss (Stanford University, July 2010.)

[11] Roger Revelle, “Statement of Dr. Roger Revelle Concerning the Oceanography Investigation,” Testimony Before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives, Report on the International Geophysical Year (Feb. 1959): p. 78.

[12] President Johnson’s quote found in an article by Marianne Lavelle, “Fifty years ago this month President Johnson voiced concern over invisible fossil fuel emissions in a special message to Congress. It was the first time a U.S. president warned the nation about our carbon habit,” The Daily Climate (Feb. 2, 2015). A scientific report for President Johnson with a chapter on climate change was released later that year. See Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, The White House (November 1965).

[13] Charles Jones’ peer-reviewed 1958 report states that API had funded research to provide an “Analysis of the gaseous carbon compounds in the atmosphere to determine the source of atmospheric carbon.” See Jones, “A Review of the Air Pollution Research Program of the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the American Petroleum Institute, p. 271.

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13.1 Campaigns, Initiatives, & the Climate Movement

Campaigns and Initiatives are more ways we can be together enough, our sixth characteristic/imperative/goal.

Whether to create positive change or stop bad stuff, campaigns are about

1. collective action to achieve

2. agreed-upon goals

3. by a set time.

The term “Initiative” is used for efforts that also share the three characteristics of campaigns. In many cases “initiative” is a safer word to use than campaign — especially if one wants to avoid the taint of politics or edgy advocacy. As such, campaigns and initiatives can have stylistic differences even as they share core characteristics.

Some hard-core movement folks may think we don’t have time to be nice and play it safe. But to become big and broad enough we can’t confine ourselves to those normally drawn to movements. A softer approach may attract more people faster, or a specific targeted group more quickly and successfully. Simply put: we need both campaigns and initiatives, and campaign-types shouldn’t look down their noses at initiatives and those that gravitate toward them.

Campaigns are nearly always organized by “the professionals.” However, most campaigns will only be successful if they recruit enough of what campaign organizers consider to be “the grassroots.” Professional campaign organizers activate. The volunteer grassroots passively wait to be activated and told what to do.

But as Climate Action Artist-Athletes we cannot adopt a stance of passivity if we are to play our part in achieving our Major Goal. We cannot be trapped in this passive grassroots mentality.

We are Artist-Athletes on our Olympian Fields of Action, not viewers watching on TV or sitting in the stands. We are all leaders of ourselves; we must activate ourselves, not wait for someone to turn us on or tell us what to do.

We are forward leaning, constantly in search for the next strategic thing for us to accomplish together to achieve victory.

As Climate Action Artist-Athletes not only can we join together in Climate Action Teams (CATS), we can create campaigns and initiatives; we don’t need anyone’s permission. The kairos-climate moment we find ourselves in, and the vision, purpose, and Major Goal we need to achieve, are all the permission we need.

13.2 Campaigns and Movements

Is a campaign and a movement the same thing? Are these terms interchangeable?

No. Campaigns are organized by a person or a collective entity like an organization. Someone or some group is in charge and determines the goals, etc.

No person or collective entity is in charge of a movement, including The Climate Movement. Our Movement Value of freedom is at the core of who we are. Such freedom makes movements creative and organic. It can also make them messy and unfocused!

Campaigns and initiatives are more structured, disciplined, and linear, even as they adapt to changing circumstances. Most give individuals the gift of being strategic, of achieving a victory we could not win by ourselves, of becoming a part of something greater than what we could be on our own.

But campaigns/initiatives being strategic is also a gift for The Climate Movement, since we must be both organic and strategic to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

14.1 Coalitions, Alliances and Networks — Introduction

Continuing our conversation about how we can be together enough, our sixth Movement characteristic/imperative/goal, this post introduces a 9-part Subseries on coalitions, alliances, and networks. Coalitions and alliances are usually made up of collective entities — groups, organizations, associations, teams, businesses, schools, faith communities. Networks can be individuals and groups, but here I am focused on those that have collective entities.

14.2 Coalitions, Alliances, and Networks — Brief Descriptions

This post provides an illustrative sampling of the breadth of these collective entities who help us with the three ways to be together enough: shared goals, action events, and meeting together regularly.

Catching a glimpse of the various coalitions that currently exist helps us see that the Climate Movement is growing bigger and broader, and we can find inspiration and hope from those who are working hard through such coalitions to overcome climate change while creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

14.3 The Global Alliance of Territorial Communities

This post begins a more in-depth look at select coalitions, with some chosen in part to raise questions and spark discussion about the boundaries of The Climate Movement.

The Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) is one of the most remarkable coalitions in the climate space. Many of these folks literally put their lives on the line for climate and sustainability.

GATC is made up of five large regional coalitions, that are themselves made up of smaller coalitions. Thus, like nesting dolls, we have a global coalition made of regional coalitions made of smaller coalitions. At every level these inspiring coalitions are worthy of recognition in their own right.

The GATC has as its mission:

To be a single voice to fight for the collective rights of our peoples and communities, for the legal recognition of our territories, for protecting Mother Earth and all human beings, and to combat the causes of climate change.

Their courage inspires all of us to dig deep and match their courage and commitment with our own.

14.4 The Climate Justice Alliance and The Climate Leadership Council

The first characteristic/imperative/goal of the Climate Movement is to be big and broad and active enough.

But can these two coalitions both be a part of the Climate Movement? How broad is too broad?

As the Climate Justice Alliance states:

We are locally, tribally, and regionally-based racial and economic justice organizations of Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing.

The Climate Leadership Council began as “a coalition of major companies, top environmental organizations, and opinion leaders from both the right and the left.” Part of its coalition are major fossil corporations like ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies.

Who’s in and who’s out. Who decides?

14.5 Climate Movement and Foundation-led Coalitions

Here I highlight two foundation-led coalitions that have us asking once again, how broad is too broad for The Climate Movement?

The first is the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP, or, in their shorthand, “The Energy Alliance”) is a self-described “radical collaboration” spearheaded by three powerful Foundations: The Bezos Earth Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and The IKEA Foundation. It is also made up of agencies like the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and investment banks like the World Bank. (“Radical”? Hmmm…)

I contrast GEAPP with The CLIMA Fund , a “collaboration” comprised of the Global Greengrants Fund, Grassroots International, Thousand Currents, Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, and Youth Climate Justice Fund. They believe that climate change can’t be adequately tackled without addressing underlying causes, as pictured below.

14.6 The #StopEACOP Coalition

#StopEACOP is a coalition of organizations that have come together to protect people, nature, and the climate from the construction of the biggest heated oil pipeline in the world, which is about 81% finished as of June. #StopEACOP is an example of Climate Movement Activists and Supporters from the rich countries working together with Activists on the ground in the Majority World. Both are needed to achieve their two-part plan:

1. support frontline activists, making sure their voices are heard, and;

2. stop the needed investment of money and insurance.

#StopEACOP is another example of activists literally putting their lives on the line.

Conclusion

I hope that some if not all of the coalitions highlighted here inspire you. They are making hope happen as we become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. Join us! And stay tuned for the third installment in this 5-part Climate Movement Cliff Notes Series arriving next Wednesday at 5pm.

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Rising electricity bills and pain at the pump are the key concern of “The Energy Bill Voter” — a voting bloc identified by The League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund (LCVVF). They now have a campaign to reach these voters that could be the difference between a House of Representatives controlled by MAGA Republicans and one where Democrats are in charge.

Trump, the MAGA Congress, Big Oil, and Big Tech — voters are starting to make the connections, and this campaign will strengthen and grow that awareness.

In a memo obtained by Axios, LCVVF lays out the case for their campaign. Here are some highlights.

• 51% of undecided voters in battleground states identify utility bill costs as their #1 voting priority.

• Minus-41. That’s where new polling has Trump when asked by voters if he was “making things better for consumers when it comes to energy prices.” When he took office he was at +15. That’s a 56-point swing.

• For areas with new Data Centers, the wholesale cost of electricity has risen 267%, driving up electric bills for consumers, according to Bloomberg.

• Big Oil has earned $30 million every hour of unearned windfall profits off the first month of the Iran War, according to The Guardian.

Back on July 1, 2025, after the vote on the grotesque, Orwellian “Big Beautiful Bill,” I called for the defeat of all Republicans until the Republican Party has been completely reformed and strongly supportive of bold climate action at the speed and scale necessary.

So I’m quite pleased to see this campaign to target “Energy Bill Voters” by the League of Conservation Victory Fund.

But The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters must not think simply defeating our political opponents will result in climate action at speed and scale. We must be ready to push Democrats to lead on clean energy that lowers energy bills and overcomes climate change simultaneously. Clean energy prices show we can do both! Join us!

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As we already have seen in this Smog-Climate Suberies, Arnold Beckman was essential to: (1) Arie Haagen-Smit discovering what made up LA smog and then (2) having Haagen-Smit’s conclusions be accepted by the scientific, policy, and political communities.

But his contributions didn’t end there.

In 1954 the LA Chamber of Commerce made him Chair of its Air Pollution Committee; at his urging the Chamber defended the regulatory agency, the Air Pollution Control District, from efforts to cripple it, and instead advocated that it be given more resources.[1]

Then in 1956, a decade after becoming involved in the smog issue for the Chamber, Beckman became its President, which at that time had a staff of 120. He made smog their top priority. In his inaugural speech he stated:

“Air pollution is generally conceded to be the major menace to our community … As a scientist I have been personally associated with various aspects of the efforts to eliminate smog since the earliest days of the Air Pollution Control Act [1947], and I have a deep personal interest, for many reasons, in doing everything possible to accelerate the elimination of air pollution. … It is an objective of the Chamber to encourage cooperation between the pertinent governmental and private agencies … and to consider and recommend new forms of attack on the smog problem. … The tempo of the fight must be speeded up. We must cut out nonsense and time-consuming bickering and get on with the job. In its fight on smog the Chamber is battling for the community as a whole, and it will carry on its fight without bias, prejudice, or fear.”[2]

Not only did Beckman think they were fighting for the entire community, one scholarly analysis concludes that elected officials saw it the same way. To them, speaking to Beckman and the Chamber was speaking with the community.[3]

Through Beckman’s leadership the Chamber put forward an impressive “Smog Elimination Action Program,” as can be seen in the document pictured below. While acknowledging that important work had already been done, the Chamber recognized that there was an “urgency for greatly accelerated action.” Their Program was designed to “stimulate that action.”

The entire foundation for the Chamber’s Action Plan is stated matter-of-factly right at the beginning: their approach is based upon an understanding of the problem provided by “scientific authorities who have studied the problem.”

This seems so simple, so obvious, that for some your response might be:

“Well, duh.”

Exactly.

Simply put: this is how it should be. It should be as normal and uncontroversial as this document makes it to be. But for those of us involved with addressing climate change, this simple, foundational, affirmation by the Chamber of Commerce is, sadly, amazing.

The document’s first premise is that air pollution “as a result of man’s activities” is not only a problem for LA, but for other big cities around the world. It recognizes that LA’s unique geography and topography might make their smog problem worse, but the real problem is pollution from human activities – something that is a worldwide problem.

Just like opponents to climate action would do in the future, the opponents of smog action — the Oil Industry, SRI, and the automakers after them — would seek to blame a natural cause, LA’s geography and topography, as the real culprit of LA’s unique smog problem.[4]

The Chamber of Commerce was having none of it. While natural factors make it worse, LA’s smog is due to human activities.

Based on the best science available — Haagen-Smit’s work and that sponsored by the Air Pollution Foundation — the Chamber recognized that the top two sources were, (1) vehicles, and (2) industry. Both implicated the Chamber’s members; they were owning up to their own responsibility.

The basic answer is to “reduce substantially the air pollution from these major sources.” To do so, the Chamber called for:

• the auto industry to “vastly improve fuel combustion”;

• ride-sharing programs and more mass transit;

• early completion by industry of air pollution control technology;

• a ban on polluting industries for which there are no controls, and;

• continued research and development.

So let’s review:

1. Our response to a pollution problem is to be based on the best science available.

2. The Chamber rejected the scapegoating of natural causes, forthrightly stating that the problem was pollution from human activities.

3. The problem is a global one.

4. It requires urgency.

5. The Chamber put forward concrete objectives: proper pollution controls, better fuel efficiency/combustion, mass transit, more R&D.

6. Solving the problem requires cooperation. They extended their hand to any person or organization ready to work together to “rid this area of smog.”

What you have here are the basic ingredients for overcoming climate change.

Beckman’s smog work with the Chamber of Commerce didn’t end in the 1950s. In 1967 he brought this concern into his leadership of the California Chamber of Commerce.[5]

His public service continued also with his appointment by President Nixon to the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Advisory Board, on which he served a 4-year term from 1970-74 (see picture, below). This marked nearly 30 years of addressing air pollution as a civic leader.[6]

Tackle Smog With Beckman Instruments

Beckman’s response to smog was not just through public service. When Beckman encountered a problem, his creative mind couldn’t help but go to work on it, especially on what the needs were and how technology could help address them. If no technology yet existed, he would invent it; if one did, he would modify or transform it through innovation – just like he did during his high school years playing piano and organ to provide music for silent movies.

This is exactly what he and his company did when it came to smog: invent and innovate.

In February 1946, the year he became seriously engaged on the issue for the Chamber, he applied for a patent on an instrument that recorded “gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”[7] Keep in mind that this was before California’s law was passed in January 1947, and before Haagen-Smit had his breakthrough in understanding the chemistry of smog in 1948. Yet Beckman already sees the technology that will be needed.

Based on this patent, granted in 1952, Beckman Instruments created an “oxidant recorder” that continuously measured the levels of ozone and nitrogen oxides – smog’s key constituents. From this invention came a host of innovations and products. As Beckman’s biography summarizes:

“There were new specialized instruments for measuring automobile exhaust, both large-scale devices suited for the production lines of automobile manufacturers and smaller instruments suited for testing at local garages and inspection stations. Beckman Instruments also offered highly specialized research instrumentation for use by automotive scientists in their efforts to develop cleaner technologies. The firm eventually even produced ‘air quality monitoring vans,’ customized trucks backed with an array of air pollution-monitoring devices for use by local governments and large industrial enterprises.”[8]

Two final areas of activity round out our story of Dr. Beckman, his politics and his philanthropy.

Political Activities

Arnold Beckman was a lifelong Republican who championed free market principles and believed the poor should not be helped by the government but through charity. “In that little town of Cullom, we had poor. We took care of the poor. We didn’t have hungry people there.”[9] In 1962 he campaigned for Richard Nixon in his losing effort to become Governor. A major lesson Beckman drew from this experience was that fundraising could be greatly improved: “When I saw how money was raised and controlled, I said, ‘This is a horrible way. We as businessmen ought to be able to do a better job of spending our money effectively.’”[10]

As a result, Beckman organized the Lincoln Club of Orange County to help candidates at all levels. “When we found a good candidate, we put money behind his campaign.”[11] This included supporting Ronald Reagan’s successful 1966 gubernatorial bid and Nixon’s election in 1968 to his first term as President. Without the votes he received in Orange County and surrounding areas, Nixon would not have won.[12]

Philanthropy: The Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation

Once Dr. Beckman retired from his company he and his wife Mabel effectively began new careers as philanthropists through the Beckman Foundation. Their initial vision was to give nearly all of their wealth away during their lifetimes. But the Beckman’s found that this wasn’t such an easy task. As he remarked, “It is more difficult to give money away than it was to make it.”[13] By the time of Mabel’s death on June 1, 1989, they had donated almost $200 million, which went primarily to the creation of five Beckman institutes/centers for scientific research. But due to the company’s stock doing so well, Dr. Beckman still had about that same amount. After he turned 90, Beckman decided that the foundation “should be recast as a foundation in perpetuity, spending only its income.”[14] The Foundation’s mission was to:

“support leading-edge research in the fields of chemistry and life sciences, broadly interpreted, and particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and material that open up new avenues of research and application in these disciplines and related sciences.”[15]

By the end of his long life, through both direct gifts and the establishment of his foundation, Beckman gave away the vast majority of his wealth, over $400 million.

In recognition of his accomplishments, Dr. Beckman received numerous awards during his lifetime, including the National Medal of Technology (1988), the National Medal of Science (1989), and the Presidential Citizens Medal (1989).

The Beckman Foundation has helped many young scientists who have gone on to receive some of the highest awards in science, including three Nobel Prizes (see below).

A Candidate for Environmental Sainthood? Nyet

Today, some proponents of climate action may be ready to elevate Arnold Beckman to environmental sainthood. But if you are on the center-left of the political/ideological spectrum, your laurels would rest uneasily upon him. You already know some things that would make you uncomfortable, such as his efforts to elect Republicans and his comments on welfare.

Climate Skepticism?

You would be even more uncomfortable with the fact that Dr. Beckman signed the infamous climate skeptic document, the Oregon Petition, which states in part:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.[16]

It is important to keep in mind that if he signed when the document was first released in 1997 he would have been 97 years old. We don’t know why Dr. Beckman lent his name; indeed, I have found nothing that explains what he thought about climate change (as opposed to Haagen-Smit, who warned about it in 1970).[17] There are numerous reasons he could have signed that have little or nothing to do with climate skepticism; for example, he may not have liked the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was the reason for the Oregon Petition.

Or he may have thought it was actually from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Many older members like Dr. Beckman were confused about this, given that it was formatted to look like an NAS document and came from a former president of the NAS, whom Beckman probably knew.[18]

I have no doubt that the Dr. Beckman who tackled smog in the 1940s-1950s, and then later became a member of NAS, would have accepted the conclusions of the Academy’s 2001 report confirming the climate threat and humanity’s role.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that he signed one of the most infamous of all climate skeptic documents.

Sounding Like an Oil Exec, But Acting Like a Champion

Aside from this, you also wouldn’t be so comfortable with parts of his smog story.

If you lined up some of the things Dr. Beckman said and compare them to spokesmen from the Oil Industry or SRI they would actually sound very similar. As a businessman and a conservative Republican, he is very much a part of their world.[19]

For example, in an extensive oral history interview for Caltech in 1978, Dr. Beckman reflected on the smog fight.

“Oh, you have no idea how emotionally charged people were. Everybody knew it was sulfur. We had preachers out here mentioning the sulfurous fumes in Hades and referring to the Bible … It was unbelievable … So I said, ‘Let’s analyze the air.’”[20]

And:

“We’ve wasted hundreds of millions of dollars needlessly [to reduce sulfur dioxide]. But that’s what you get when emotionally charged people don’t take the time to find out the facts. So that’s how I got interested in air pollution.”[21]

And:

“I was involved on the legal business side, because I wanted to make sure that we didn’t go off half-cocked and get a lot of well-meaning but uninformed people just creating chaos unnecessarily.”[22]

Now lets compare them to quotes from senior executives of the Oil Industry.

In his peer-reviewed recounting of their research to date, Vance Jenkins, the head of the API’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, had a section labeled “Panicky People,” where he stated:

“The worst thing that can happen, in many instances, is the hasty passage of a law or laws for the control of a given air pollution situation. For in many such cases their passage results from a panicky feeling …”[23]

Concerning pollution, he went on to say:

“unless the matter is viewed calmly and logically and appropriate measures devised to alleviate these situations, a great deal more economic loss and inconvenience is liable ...”[24]

And finally:

“accurate knowledge on a subject must be available before accurate decisions can be made. … accurate information instead of theories and hypotheses … the passage of unnecessary legislation may be prevented thereby, at a great saving of time and expense, both to legislative and enforcement agencies and to industry. … a law designed to improve air pollution might have a reverse effect if not properly and wisely drawn.”[25]

Based on the rush to judgement by those who blamed sulfur dioxide for LA’s smog, and the efforts subsequently required of industry to reduce SO2, Mr. Jenkins’ words ring true.

One might consider Mr. Jenkins’ stance to be a reasonable one until we remember that behind the scenes, as I recounted earlier, he tried to get a young scientist, Harold Johnston, to knee-cap Dr. Haagen-Smit’s reputation. Furthermore, the SO2 mistake by advocates of action allows Jenkins the opportunity to use this against Haagen-Smit’s explanation and put Haagen-Smit and his allies into the same rush-to-judgement camp.

As Jenkins puts it about the policy ramifications of Haagen-Smit’s findings:

“much more money may be spent unnecessarily by the petroleum industry if certain proposed rules and regulations for the control of the emission to the air of certain substances which may play no part in smog formation are put into effect.”[26]

So whether it fits or doesn’t fit, the same rhetorical playbook is deployed.

In 1958, at least three years after the scientific debate on smog was over, Jenkins’ successor, Charles Jones, was still pounding away on this same argument:

“should legislation be regarded as necessary in some instances, fundamental knowledge based on reliable research rather than on theory or hypothesis should be available to government organizations to avert restrictive and uneconomic rulings of the type that had proved unnecessary in the past.”[27]

As we have seen, Dr. Beckman, too, was highly critical of the rush to judgement on SO2. He certainly agreed that not every problem should be solved with legislation. When it is required it should be based on sound science, meaning the facts and an interpretation informed by those facts. Not doing so can lead to solutions that may not solve the problem. So in all of this Dr. Beckman’s words and the overall approach they represent are quite similar to the rhetoric and arguments of the Oil Industry representatives.

Let’s recap the language used:

Beckman: “wasted hundreds of millions of dollars” … “emotionally charged people” … “go off half-cocked” … “creating chaos” … “find out the facts.”

Oil Execs: “Panicky People” … [the problem must be ] “viewed calmly and logically” … “accurate knowledge … accurate decisions” … “fundamental knowledge based on reliable research”… “unnecessary legislation.” …

Given all of this, how is it that a conservative Republican businessman like Dr. Beckman became a champion of action on smog?

The crucial difference is that Dr. Beckman genuinely wanted to find what was causing the problem and then do something about it.

As I quoted Part One, for Dr. Beckman one must have intellectual integrity and base your actions on the truth, not on what you wish the truth to be.[28] As he proudly said about his companies: “We’ve never had anybody point the finger at us and say, ‘Hey, you were dishonest, you didn’t tell us the whole story.’”[29]

The Oil Executives, aided and abetted by their scientific allies at SRI, used science to slow things to a crawl, to deny and delay – a favorite tactic of polluting interests before and since.[30]

Dr. Beckman used science to get things right, to find the facts and act upon them, to have intellectual integrity.

But what about those on the other side? Many of their statements sound like what scientists of their time would say. Such statements reflect the inherent conservatism of scientific skepticism, which pushes for strong validation of any scientific or factual claims.

These Oil Industry representatives cloak themselves in the language of rationality and science, but underneath we find men who will do what it takes to defend the financial well-being of their industry. They see themselves as good people, who want to be “good neighbors,” as this quote from Vance Jenkins demonstrates:

“the petroleum industry is managed by men who want to be good neighbors, by men who will go more than half way in cooperating with enforcement agencies in order to be good neighbors, even when the laws under which they operate are not believed to be wisely drawn.”[31]

And yet their implementation of The Denier’s Playbook against Dr. Haagen-Smit, as Vance Jenkins did, shows this attempt to see themselves as a “good neighbor” was a form of self-delusion that actually allowed them to continue harming people in defense of their industry, their tribe.

When it came to smog, Beckman the scientist never let Beckman the businessman manipulate the facts or forestall the actions those facts required. He was crafty for good, whereas the Oil execs and SRI were crafty for bad.

He led the Chamber of Commerce to fight for smog action, telling them in his presidential address that “the Chamber is battling for the community as a whole, and it will carry on its fight without bias, prejudice, or fear.”

If today a large local Chamber of Commerce were to have a climate program like Beckman’s smog program it would blow our frikkin’ minds.

In our next post, we’ll compare the smog and climate fights. Stay tuned!

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[1]Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 226.

[2] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 227.

[3] Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy, p. 52.

[4] Krier and Ursin in Pollution and Policy point out that as late as 1960 the auto industry kept touting the idea that LA’s geography/topography made its pollution problem unique, even though many studies had already shown otherwise. In testimony before a congressional subcommittee, a representative of the Automobile Manufacturers Association stated: “‘The popular term ‘Los Angeles smog’ … has sound origin, because photochemical smog is … not likely to occur anywhere else on earth with the frequency and intensity found in this area’” (p. 89) Krier and Ursin found this statement “surprising,” given the evidence of smog being a problem elsewhere. But there is a rhetorical sleight of hand going on here. While I’m guessing that the statement is technically true, it leads to a false impression. LA probably did have the worst problem in the world given its “frequency and intensity.” But that doesn’t mean that other places wouldn’t benefit from the improvements needed to address the LA situation. See pp. 90-92 for documentation of smog’s growing problem across the nation before 1960.

[5] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 228.

[6] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 228, 281.

[7] Go here to see the patent documentation, and Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 224. See also p. 369, for a list of Beckman’s 14 patents.

[8] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 224.

[9] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, p. 292.

[10] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, p. 293

[11] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, p. 294.

[12] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, pp. 294-295; “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 48-49.

[13] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, p. 313.

[14] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 355.

[15] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, p. 355.

[16] Here is the full text of the Oregon Petition:

“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

[17] Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, “Man and His Home,” the B. Y. Morrison Memorial Lecture presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Williamsburg, Virginia, April 28, 1970: “This century has taught us that our space ship is not at all so big and that we have finally succeeded in changing, on a global scale, the composition of our atmosphere and the water of the oceans. The rapid burning of fossil fuel in the last fifty years has raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air substantially, and this, together with particulate matter from our industrial operations, will affect the heat balance of the earth.”

[18] Another reason Dr. Beckman could have signed is that he may have been swayed by an endorsement letter by Frederick Seitz, former President of the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University. It is highly likely that they knew one another. Both have connections to the University of Illinois-Urbana, and Beckman served on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences while Seitz was president. In addition, an accompanying briefing document was formatted to look like a NAS journal article; so much confusion arose, especially with their older members, that the NAS had to issue a statement saying they had nothing to do with the Oregon Petition.

[19] This affinity of scientists with business and industry was very much the norm during Dr. Beckman’s formative years. According to historian Scott Hamilton Dewey, “most of the scientific expertise in the prewar days was controlled or influenced by private, corporate industrial interests …” Don’t Breathe the Air, p. 9. This is also reflected in SRI’s mission statement, referenced earlier.

[20] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 60.

[21]“Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 63.

[22]“Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 61-62. These quotes lend credence to the description of his biographers that Beckman was a “conservative rationalist” or a “techno-scientific-conservative” See Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 292.

[23] Jenkins, “The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research,” p. 145.

[24] Jenkins, “The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research,” p. 145.

[25] Jenkins, “The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research,” p. 148.

[26] Jenkins, “The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research,” p. 147.

[27] Charles A. Jones “A Review of the Air Pollution Research Program of the Smoke and Fumes Committee of the American Petroleum Institute,” Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association, Vol. 8.3 (1958): p. 268.

[28] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 64.

[29]“Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 41.

[30] As Dewey states: “studies finding only the need for further study became a standard part of the history of air pollution control in America at the local, state, and federal levels. After some point, there is no doubt that many such thorough, detailed studies were used deliberately to prevent or delay control efforts until public agitation died down, while allowing major polluters to show apparent good citizenship.” See Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air, p. 30. Stradling provides an excellent example in Chicago. In 1909 when a campaign to have locomotives use electricity instead of coal to reduce local pollution was at its height, the Chicago Association of Commerce conducted a major study, which recommended electrification immediately. Crucially, however, they only shared their findings privately with railroad officials. “With significant railroad influence, the association chose to ignore its own study and initiate a new, thorough analysis, to be funded by railroad money.” In March 1911 they organized a new committee with significant railroad membership. It took four years to complete the new study. During this time, women’s groups lobbied the mayor, but he put them off saying he would wait until the committee “‘finished its scientific investigation of the smoke question.’” The committee concluded that “electrification to reduce smoke was neither advisable nor practicable.” (Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, pp. 125-129.) As I have demonstrated, the Oil Industry’s research on smog, including that done by SRI, fits this delay tactic exactly. Historian Samuel Hays adds an important qualifier. Many scientists naturally strive for more and more certainty. This tendency can be exploited by polluting interests who seek delay: “Industry leaders … sought to reinforce those scientists who in their own professional and personal commitments insisted on high levels of proof of harm. They brought to legislative and administrative hearings and court testimony scientists who argued that more proof was needed. They attacked the margins of safety as requiring an inordinate degree of protection … There was a constant tendency for scientists to think of themselves as reliable only if they refrained from drawing conclusions short of firm proof. Hence they were susceptible to these challenges from industry.” See Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): p. 360.

[31] Jenkins, “The Petroleum Industry Sponsors Air Pollution Research,” p. 149. The example of Bill Stewart, referenced in an earlier post, reminds us not to slip into a Manichaean dualism of black hats and white hats when it comes to the individuals within the Oil Industry and those fighting to reduce pollution; there are well-meaning people within the Oil Industry, just as there are all types of motives in the hearts of those seeking to reduce pollution. (To quote Stewart again: “If we tackle this air-pollution problem as it should be tackled; if we accept our moral responsibilities … I am satisfied we shall gain the everlasting respect and gratitude of the people. … To me, it is also smart to be leaders, to be good neighbors, to play fair, to practice the golden rule; but, above all, to be the sort of Americans we should like America to be made up of.” See W. L. Stewart, Jr., “Laws, Morals, and Manners,” Addresses Delivered at Sixteenth Mid-Year Meeting, Division of Refining, Tulsa, Okla., April 30 to May 3, 1951, American Petroleum Institute: New York: p. 13.) A realistic understanding of human nature can keep us grounded. It also reminds us that well-meaning individuals can find themselves swimming against the tide of their group/organization/industry. Reinhold Niebuhr sees this as “one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.” See Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribners: 1932): p. 9.

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1. The Climate Movement and Our Olympian Fields of Action: Introduction

The Climate Movement can be thought of as analogous to the Olympic Games, and its offshoots, the Paralympics, the Special Olympics, and the Senior Olympics. Where we are active are our “Fields of Action.”

Just as in the Olympics, where there are larger categories such as athletics (or track and field), aquatics, gymnastics, wrestling, skiing, and ice skating, so too with the Climate Movement. What is your Field of Action?

Our Fields of Action are fields of hope. Coming together creates hope. Taking action together creates more hope. We are making hope happen. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for.

2. Kairos-Climate-Time: Now is the Time

Kairotic time are the moments when life presents you with a decision, such as accepting one’s deliverance. Expressions like “when the time is right,” or “strike while the iron is hot,” or “the time is now,” or “timing is everything,” or “seize the day” capture this sense of time. Kairos is when life opens up windows of opportunity or danger that may appear for seconds or hours or days or years, but will not stay open forever. For The Climate Movement, we are in kairos-climate-time.

3. The Climate Movement Itself

There are 4 Catalytic Sources of Transformation — The Catalytic-4 — that are making it possible for us to overcome climate change, and are thus profound sources of hope. The first and the most indispensable is The Climate Movement — we ourselves. We push the other three to achieve their potential.

We are hope in action. We are hope incarnate.

Join us!

4. The Climate Movement’s 7 Characteristics, Imperatives, & Movement-building Goals

This post begins a major 36-part Series on The Climate Movement’s 7 characteristics/imperatives/goals.

Since the climate challenge calls for speed, scale, and longevity, we need a moral movement:

1. big and broad and active enough

2. passionate enough

3. deep enough

4. dynamic enough

5. organic and strategic enough

6. together enough, and

7. long enough.

These seven characteristics are simultaneously seven Movement-building goals: to become what we need to be, we must become these seven to be set free from climate tyranny.

These seven characteristics are also seven imperatives. We must become them together to become what we are being called to do.

We must become them to fulfill our climate calling to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster.

5. Big and Broad and Active Enough: The First Characteristic of the Climate Movement

To overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything, I believe we must recruit:

• 5% of the world’s population or roughly 400 million by 2030, and

• 10% by 2040.

This means:

1. We simply can’t grow fast enough.

2. We cannot be ignored.

3. We will transform the world.

We must become big and broad and active enough so that we achieve message saturation and values engagement within our cultures and societies. This means that leaders and the average person are reminded regularly of the necessity of bold climate action now and that everyone has a role to play — so much so that this is at the forefront of their hearts and minds and engages their values and connects to what they hold most dear.

We make hope happen with every person who joins us — so join us!

6. The Climate Movement Must Be Passionate Enough

Without passion climate action won’t become what it needs to be: a defining cause of our lives, something we fight for even at personal cost and risk. Passion must drive us to give ourselves to something greater, something worthy of the sacrifices we make. Passion must awaken within us and bring forth who we really are. It fires our creativity and propels us into lives that are meaningful.

Passion pushes us to changes our ways, to do what it takes, to join the struggle, to fight for what’s right, to find our Olympian Fields of Action and make our unique contribution to victory.

When passion becomes action we make hope happen.

7. Deep Enough — Our Third Characteristic

To keep ourselves on our Olympian Fields of Action for the long haul, to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our future come faster, and our world more just, we must understand and embrace how climate action is connected to what we cherish, to our deeply held values and relationships. We must tap into deep reservoirs of support and motivation.

The deepest source of both passion and perseverance, and what binds them together, is the L-word — easily spoken by some, hardly ever uttered by others.

Love contains hope; love sustains multitudes; love carries us forward; love lives in the hard places; love is the wellspring of justice; love is a promise to the future that we will create a better world. Love is the ultimate source of power that creates and sustains us as a moral movement.

8. Dynamic Enough — Our Fourth Characteristic

To be dynamic enough is to combine and balance four things: (1) the tried-and-true and (2) discipline with two of our Movement Values — (3) freedom, and (4) creativity. As we bring about this dynamic 4-part combination we must employ another of our movement values: pragmatism. It is the dynamic tension between these, brought together with our passion and what makes us deep enough, that will propel us forward. We must lean into the future, guided judiciously by the past even as we are ever open to a better way to make our future come faster and our world more just.

9.1 Organic & Strategic Change, Part One

Plants don’t grow in straight lines as they seek the light. In the same way, movements are messy and non-linear. Why? Because they’re made up of people! Geez.

When a group of individuals come together at a specific time and place to focus together on our vision, purpose, and Major Goal (i.e. on being strategic), it is something that has never happened before. What flows out of such experiences cannot be planned for; rather, it must be given the opportunity to come forth. Organic change is endemic because of who we are as individuals, our personalities, our gifts, our passions, our values. Organic change doesn’t stifle or suppress these qualities, forcing us into a standardized mold; it sets us free.

It is the dynamic constructive dialogue between organic and strategic change that will help fuel our journey, making hope happen and our future come faster.

9.2. Organic & Strategic Change, Part Two

By strategic I mean developing and implementing a plan where we deploy our resources at targeted times and places to maximize our gains towards achieving our purpose and goals. Our resources include ourselves, our time, our energy, our influence, our relationships, our moral standing, our values, our money, our numbers.

We are not posers or prophetic narcissists; this is not a vanity exercise. We are not just about checking boxes to make ourselves feel better. Busy-work that gets us nowhere is no friend of hope or victory. All of our Movement Values propel us to our final value, success. Achieving success requires us to be strategic enough.

9.3. Organic & Strategic Change, Part Three

Curvy and messy, organic change arises not from a strategic plan, but from the creativity and courage of the group’s members responding in real time to changing circumstances — like the Civil Rights movement did in the 1960s, especially the Birmingham campaign.

Without the new tactic of including children and youth in non-violent civil disobedience this campaign could have easily become a failure.

Simply put: No Children’s Crusade — no 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But these children didn’t spontaneously walk out of school and head downtown to face Bull Connor and attack dogs and fire hoses. Weeks of training preceded their participation. Their actions were a part of a strategy the Civil Rights Movement had been implementing for years, and they practiced Gandhian tactics that had been around for decades. Birmingham was both organic and strategic.

10. Together Enough — Introduction

Being together enough is our sixth characteristic/imperative/goal. By its nature it will require the largest collection of posts by far, 27 in all.

When I say we must come together, or we must join together, or we must work together, etc., I mean three things simultaneously that are mutually reinforcing.

1. We are unified as a Movement by working to achieve the same or similar goals on all of our Fields of Action, as well as our particular, tailored objectives designed to meet these shared goals.

2. We engage with others in strategic actions.

3. We meet with other Climate Action Artist-Athletes on a regular basis.

To sum it up: shared goals, action events, meeting together regularly.

Being together enough gives us hope as we draw strength and encouragement from each other, from the simple, experiential, lived reality of not being alone in overcoming this monumental challenge.

11. Environmental, Conservation, & Climate Organizations

Environmental, conservation, and climate organizations have vital roles to play in the Climate Movement in ensuring we are strategic enough, dynamic enough, and have the expertise we need. They are indispensable in helping to keep us going long enough.

But they are not enough for what we are called to become: the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

We must complement their strengths with those of other nonprofit non-governmental organizations or NGOs and Climate Action Teams (CATS).

12.1 Civil Society Organizations & Professional Associations

Another vital part of the Climate Movement is and will be the participation of civil society organizations, professional associations, and faith communities (covered in 12.2), whose primary focus is not on environmental, conservation, or climate issues. Rather, these NGOs have come to recognize that climate change intersects with their broader missions.

12.2 Faith Communities

For Climate Movement Artist-Athletes who also are a part of a faith community, they help us to be all seven of our characteristics:

Faith communities are where people can learn, experience, and practice our Ten Movement Values: Love, Justice, Beauty, Freedom, Creativity, Wisdom, Pragmatism, Non-violence, Sustainability, and Success.

I believe the world’s faith traditions, when properly understood and put into practice, will help us run the race with perseverance, will support our efforts as Climate Artist-Athletes on all of our Olympian Fields of Action.

Stay tuned for more in this Climate Movement Cliff Notes Series!

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He Changed the World by Revolutionizing Scientific Instruments

As we saw in our previous post (#2.4) in this Smog-Climate Subseries, Dr. Arnold Beckman was a key figure in the LA smog fight.

While grateful for his leadership on smog, his most significant contribution to society was his ability to make scientific instruments and the creation of companies to sell such instruments.

As James Watson, of Watson-and-Crick double-helix fame, said in the Foreword to Beckman’s biography:

“Our pursuit of the chemical underpinnings of biology has depended as much on the invention of new instrumentation and experimental procedures as on the generation of new experimental results and new ideas. Arnold Beckman’s contribution to science and to society came, in part, from his rare talent for creating these new instruments …”[1]

Such instruments could be the difference between genius realized and genius squandered. As Nobel Prize winning economic historian Joel Mokyr has observed, Leonardo Da Vinci had thousands of pages of ideas that could not be realized because:

“the gap between the visionary who saw what might be done and the craftsmen whose material and tools limited what could be done was too wide to be bridged.”[2]

Beckman’s inventions would bridge such gaps.

That’s exactly what he did in the smog fight — bridge gaps.

A Blacksmith’s Son and Budding Chemist

The son of a blacksmith who grew up making his own toys in the farm village of Cullum, Illinois, there never was a time when he did not understand that the proper tools helped one create things that mattered – and also made a profit.[3]

His love of chemistry began when he was just nine years old. Rummaging through the family’s attic one wintry day looking for something to do or read, he came across an introductory chemistry book that once belonged to an aunt. It had instructions for doing some basic experiments, “and that intrigued me, and in this little town I tried to carry out these experiments.”[4] For his 10th birthday his father built him a small shed to use as a laboratory. A few years later when he was 12 he had his first job as a chemist. Using sulfuric acid and a hand-cranked centrifuge, Beckman measured the cream content of dairy products brought in by local farmers.[5]

By the time he was in high school the family had moved to Bloomington, IL. When a freshman, Beckman convinced the principal to let him take advanced chemistry courses at the local college instead of Latin; he eventually graduated with over two years of college chemistry credits.[6]

To keep his interest kindled, his college professor while he was in high school encouraged him to start his own consultancy, and even found him his first client, Union Gas and Electric. Beckman had a closet in the family’s Bloomington home, his “lab,” where he did his chemistry work. He had business cards printed up for “Bloomington Research Laboratories” with his title being “Chief Scientist.”

He almost burned the house down several times – literally throwing an experiment on fire out the window on one occasion – but otherwise things went well.[7]

His consultancy involved a problem familiar to our story: sulfur. The coal Union Gas and Electric used had high concentrations, and they devised a procedure to get rid of the smell. Beckman’s work was part of that process.

As we have seen, years later he would put his finely honed chemist’s sense of smell to good use, declaring to Lewis McCabe, the head of the LA Air Pollution Control District, that sulfur dioxide wasn’t the real culprit in LA’s smog. It was this conviction, combined with his businessman’s desire to forestall any more costly regulations that wouldn’t solve the problem, which kept him on the case, and led to McCabe approving the hiring of Haagen-Smit to do the necessary research that quickly ruled out SO2.

“Hoot” Beckman Improvises

During his high school years, 1914-17, Beckman, or “Hoot” as he was known, not only had his chemistry business. He also was a pianist and organist for the local movie theater, where every night he accompanied silent films. As he watched the film he had to improvise music on the spot to help create the proper mood. In addition, Hoot had his own group, “The Beckman Orchestra,” complete with business cards and publicity photos, that played at parties, dances, and events.[8]

His talent for improvisation – which involved both invention and innovation – demonstrated a quality he would display his entire life: the ability to quickly size up a situation, see the possibilities, and marshal his gifts and resources to create a high-quality, successful product. He would do the same with smog.

By the time he was 18 and had graduated as valedictorian, Beckman was a successful scientist, entrepreneur, musician, and businessman. As his biography remarks, “he already exemplified Louis Pasteur’s maxim, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’”[9]

A Marine and His Sweetheart

Upon graduation from high school Beckman joined the Marines to fight in World War I. After boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina, and a few days before the war’s end, Beckman was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard awaiting transport to a theater of operations. He missed by one spot leaving on a ship bound for Russia and two years of fighting the Red Army. As Beckman himself said, if not for this one place in line, “my life would have been completely different.” With the armistice signed on Nov. 11, Beckman was in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving when he met a 17 year old Red Cross volunteer serving food to the soldiers, Mabel Meinzer. Six years later they would be married.[10]

Theirs was a long-distance romance, as Beckman returned to his home state to earn in four years both a Bachelors and Masters degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois.

After one year of Ph.D. work at Cal Tech, Beckman missed Mabel too much, and left California on the cheapest transport he could find, an old steamer that sailed down to the Panama Canal and up the East Coast.

Bell Labs Sets the Stage

He felt he couldn’t ask Mabel to marry him without a good paying job, yet he had no prospects lined up before he left Cal Tech. He arrived in New York hoping he could find something quickly. In just one day he had two offers, one at Bell Labs made possible by a Cal Tech friend, which he accepted. He spent two years there before being enticed by Cal Tech to return to finish his Ph.D.[11]

Although he didn’t know it at the time – after all, he came to New York for love, not to further his career – these two years at Bell Labs would prove crucial to the great successes of his life as an inventor, entrepreneur, and CEO.

First, he was introduced to the electronics revolution, and much of his career would be about combining electronics and chemistry. As he later recounted, “If I’d never gone to Bell Labs, I might not have developed any interest in electronics.”[12]

Second, he learned first hand about the need for quality control in the production process to ensure real life reliability and customer satisfaction. Phones were complex pieces of new technology that had to be simple to use and rugged enough for everyday wear and tear – exactly the qualities that Beckman infused in his inventions and products.

Third, he learned that a company based on cutting edge technologies must do the necessary research and development to remain competitive.

Finally, his boss, Walter Shewhart, showed Beckman that dealing with the facts in front of you was good business. As Beckman would later recount:

“I’ve often said that one important thing, whether in science or business, is to have intellectual integrity. Don’t allow yourself to have wishful thinking. And that was what Shewhart did” (emphasis added). [Thackray & Myers, One Hundred Years, p64]

This, of course, is exactly how Beckman dealt with the problem of smog – in sharp contrast, as we have seen, to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the Oil Industry.

An Inventor of Scientific Instruments Comes Into His Own

By the time Dr. Beckman became involved in the smog fight in 1946 he had already been a professor of chemistry at Cal Tech, an inventor and innovator of scientific instruments, the founder and CEO of several technology companies, and a prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce.

Beckman came into his own as an inventor and innovator in 1935 with his pH meter. As was typical of so many of his innovations, it began with a friend and colleague asking him for help with a problem. A chemist from his Illinois days, Glen Joseph, was working for the California Fruit Growers Exchange. Knowing a fruit’s acidity was essential to determining what it could be used for, whether it deserved the Exchange’s Sunkist label, or conversely whether it would be processed into various by-products, such as pectin or citric acid.

The problem: there wasn’t a reliable instrument to determine this. His time at Bell Labs introduced him to various electronic instruments, and out of this experience he was able to see how to solve the problem.

He created “the first chemical instrument with electronic technology at its very heart.”[13] Before this time, individual chemists had adapted electrical equipment for their own uses. But there were not “electric instruments a chemist could buy in the marketplace – complete, assembled, and ready to answer chemical questions by analyzing the electrical properties of matter.”[14] Beckman’s pH meter helped to change this.

“Now a scientist could purchase a precision instrument and start making quick, simple, and reliable measurements. The frustrations of assembly, then measurement, then mathematical calculation all vanished … the instrument itself required of its users no special expertise in either electron-chemistry or electronics: the expertise was in the box” (emphasis added).[15]

Beckman’s pH meter was the first commercial scientific instrument in the “instrumentation revolution” of the 20th Century, a revolution that has contributed significantly to the explosive growth of scientific knowledge.

Beckman’s subsequent creations and products would bear the qualities of his pH meter: reliability, precision, simplicity, elegance of design, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, all of which he learned at Bell Labs.

These same attributes Beckman displayed in the smog fight and his other civic and political activities. The man and his creations and activities were one and the same.

Beckman’s first real company had $11,700 in sales in 1935. By 1948 when he recruited Haagen-Smit to work on smog it was $3.6 million. Sales climbed to $21.4 million by 1955, the year before he became President of the LA Chamber of Commerce. A decade later it was over $100 million.[16]

Beckman’s success in business was in finding “those sweet spots where academic knowledge, technological possibility, and commercial opportunity meet …”[17] The same qualities he demonstrated in high school while improvising music for silent films in the hometown movie house came into play in his business career.

Over and over again, this led Beckman and his team to see how an innovation of their inventions could lead to a new product for a completely different use and market, be it top secret components for radar during World War II,[18] or for the Mars Viking lander, or for centrifuges that made it possible to understand DNA reproduction, or a protein sequencer that quickly separated, identified, and recorded amino acids, or the synthesis of highly specialized chemicals that cost $10 million an ounce, or medical instruments to measure blood sugar and cholesterol.[19]

With Haagen-Smit and Smog, Beckman Gets Crafty

Beckman’s businesses were able to grow for another reason. He would find the right person for the job and then get out of their way. He did the same thing with Haagen-Smit and smog. But when Haagen-Smit wanted to return to his regular research, Beckman once again improvised, showing his craftier, shrewder side.

As mentioned in Part Two of the Haagen-Smit smog story, the turning point in Haagen-Smit’s career as a smog researcher and leader came when SRI’s Abe Zarem gave a lecture at their home institution criticizing Haagen-Smit’s smog work.

What I didn’t mention was that it was Beckman who arranged for Zarem to speak. Then he sat beside Haagen-Smit and waited to see what would happen.[20]

As Beckman recounted years later:

“Well, this got his dander up. He didn’t want to work in this [smog] before, because he was working on isolating the flavor constituents in pineapple, working on root-growth hormones, auxins, things like that. He didn’t want to get involved in this stinky political mess. But Abe’s remarks got under his skin enough that Haagie agreed to work on it.”[21]

Beckman was in a position to recruit Haagen-Smit because of an interlocking web of powerful relationships. As a businessman and longstanding member of the Chamber of Commerce, he became their point person on smog in 1946. As an acquaintance of Lewis McCabe, the head of the newly created regulatory agency, from their days at the University of Illinois, he became a consultant to the agency and in that capacity recruited Haagen-Smit.

Beckman was trusted by Haagen-Smit, trusted by the Chamber, trusted by McCabe, and trusted by the political community, as evidenced by his appointment by Gov. Goodwin Knight (R) to Chair his Special Committee on Air Pollution in 1953.[22] The Committee’s report became known as “the Beckman Bible,” whose recommendations guided the government’s response for years to come.[23]

From his Chairmanship Dr. Beckman was able to affirm Haagen-Smit’s scientific explanation of smog, which sealed the fate of SRI’s “we don’t know” message.

But there would have been no explanation of smog from Haagen-Smit if Dr. Beckman hadn’t created a situation calibrated to keep him on the case. With Haagen-Smit, Beckman had been wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.

Well, maybe not quite innocent. All the same, if Hoot were ever to have told Haagy, I bet they would have had a good laugh together.

Crafty for good. Sometimes that’s what we have to be in The Climate Movement.

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[1]Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers, Jr., Arnold O. Beckman: One Hundred Years of Excellence, (Chemical Heritage Foundation: 2000) Forward, p. x. Go here for an excellent one hour documentary The Instrumental Chemist, on Dr. Arnold Beckman, available on the Scientific History Institute’s website. Here’s their description:

This one-hour documentary highlights six of Beckman’s groundbreaking scientific instruments and features interviews with experts from such diverse fields as art conservation and oyster farming speaking about how their work benefitted from Beckman’s inventions and philanthropy.

[2] Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: New York, 1990): p. 72.

[3] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 3, 9. Years later, reflecting upon his creation of scientific instruments, Beckman said: “I’ve always liked to work with my hands. My father was a blacksmith; I guess that’s where I inherited that. At home I was always making things, always had my own little shop.” “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 31.

[4] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 2.

[5] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 9-10, 13.

[6] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 20; “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 4.

[7] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 21-22.

[8] “Arnold O. Beckman (1900-2004),” interviewed by Mary Terrall, Archives, California Institute of Technology (Pasadena: October 16-December 4, 1978): pp. 4-5; Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 24.

[9]Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p.27.

[10] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 7; Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 32-34. Here is Beckman’s fuller reflection upon this turn of events: “I’ve often thought about how little matters often determine the course of a person’s life. In this case, I got the last bunk on the second deck. If I’d been one bunk later, and gone to the third deck, my life would have been completely different, because the people who were assigned to the third deck were shipped over to Vladivostok not long after that. As it was, I stayed there in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I was there on Thanksgiving Day in 1918. Well, we had our Thanksgiving dinner in the barracks, and then we were ordered to eat another dinner. It turned out that a Red Cross chapter located in the Brooklyn YMCA was having a dinner for wounded marines coming over from Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood [in France], and there weren’t enough marines to fill the places. So we were ordered to go there and eat another dinner right on top of our own dinner! Well, fortunately, I was only eighteen years old, and I had the appetite of a teenager, so I could do that. Well, the important thing about the dinner is that one of the girls helping out at the tables is now Mrs. Beckman. If it hadn’t been for this unusual double-dinner experience, I wouldn’t have met her.” “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 7-8.

[11] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 59-61; “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 12-24.

[12] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 26.

[13] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 129.

[14] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 28-29.

[15] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 130.

[16] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence,, pp. 192-193, 208, 227, 267.

[17] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 266-267.

[18] Concerning radar, Beckman tells the story of how he was asked whether he could modify one of his products for the rigors of military use: “‘They’ll have to meet military specs. Can you do that?’ I said, ‘Yes, we’ll develop one that will.’ Well, when I came back, I found that ours was absolutely worthless from a military standpoint, because if you hit the Helipot sharply, the sliding contact would spring off of the coiled resistance winding, causing a momentary open circuit, which they couldn’t permit. So it meant that we had to start from scratch. … That’s when our research people just refused to work on the problem. They were working on a complicated Rube Goldberg device that I’d like to forget. So this was one of the times in my life when I did lose a little sleep. I began getting telephone calls from the military, particularly from the navy: ‘Where are the Helipots? We have ships ready to go, but the radar gear is incomplete because we have this potentiometer.’ One sleepless night I finally figured out how to do the job. Next morning I went down to our shop and talked to a mechanic, Ralph Stalder. I knew that if I put the design through our regular design department, it would be months before it came out, because they would keep it on the back burner. So I went to Ralph and with a penciled sketch said, ‘Ralph, make this part. When you get it done, bring it up to my office and we’ll take the next step.’ In two days, we had a working model of this Model A Helipot potentiometer, of which we’ve made tens of millions. As a matter of fact, from a business standpoint, in our first twelve months of operation after we produced it, that little Helipot made 40 percent of our total profit, more than our spectrophotometers.” “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, , p. 40.

[19] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, pp. 39-40, 52-53; Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, pp. 173-175, 262-263, 268.

[20] Thackray and Myers, Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 223; “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 61.

[21] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 61.

[22] “Arnold O. Beckman,” interview by Terrall, p. 63; Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 225.

[23] Thackray and Myers, One Hundred Years of Excellence, p. 225.

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Affordability for Rural Americans? Yes. We’re talking affordability. But much more.

Freedom.

Self-reliance.

Patriotism.

Neighbors helping neighbors.

Jobs.

Economic Growth.

Clean air and water. A healthy, climate-friendly environment.

A brighter future for your children and communities.

All of this is yours for the taking, if you but believe in yourselves.

It’s Time to Claim and Grow Your Power: P³ in 250.

Rural Americans — in this 250th Anniversary year of our nation’s birth, time to declare your independence by claiming and growing your P-cubed power or P³:

1. political power,

2. electric power, and

3. economic power.

You grow good things for our nation. It’s time to grow your P³ for you. But not just you. Your neighbors. Your country.

How?

First, you must stop listening to those who want to keep you down, keep you from organizing to create political power, keep you from growing your own electric power and through that your economic power.

As Daniel Bell, a Kentucky farmer, put it about growing electric power: “For me, it’s just been about freedom. Freedom to lower bills, freedom to control my own assets.”

If you want affordability that lasts, then tap into your P³. That’s because we’re up against powerful and devious foes.

Fossil companies and those with connections to them have been spreading lies about solar and wind, spending $$ millions to do so. And those lying are pushing bans, telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their land. Unfortunately, they’ve succeeded in having some local officials institute bans.

“I just don’t think it’s right for the county commissioners to tell other property owners that they can’t do what they want with their land,” said Emily Adams, fighting to end a local ban in Richland County, Ohio.

So lies and bans thwarting freedom and self-reliance and affordability.

Emboldened by the truth, it’s time to have the political power necessary to defeat such bans, but also harmful backroom sweetheart deals for AI data centers that have folks paying for it with higher electricity prices, rolling blackouts, and water shortages. If you have already organized to thwart AI data centers (let Erin Brockovich help you, BTW) don’t stop there! These are the same basic fights — big utilities, big tech vs. regular folk.

“I think they count on us being dumb country people and us not pushing back,” said Kassi Solmberg, a homesteading mom in Montana.

Rural Americans must grow your political power to not only defeat local bans and AI data centers, but to defend and enhance longstanding bipartisan federal policies that bolster Rural America’s contribution to energy independence — for both farmers and our nation.

Begun during the George W. Bush years, the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) has funded $1.8 billion in grants and “backed tens of thousands of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects across the country in that time.”

Unfortunately, in its stupid war on renewables the Trump Administration has halted these grants. Will Congress fix this in the next Farm Bill? At this point it’s anyone’s guess while the bill continues to be bottled up in the Senate.

The fossils and their friends and don’t want farmers to grow clean energy for themselves and the country. Self-reliance, affordability, and patriotism are all wrapped up together in the gift of renewable energy — just what our country needs for its 250th birthday.

As William Becker says:

With oil and gas prices controlled by global markets, and coal and nuclear power producing dangerous wastes, renewable resources are the true path to America’s energy independence. They are the “America First” options.

To reap the full harvest of wind and sunshine Rural Americans must have P³ in 250.

As we have seen, for Rural Americans to maximize your electric power potential, you must grow and flex your political power to overcome the fossils and their liars and powerful friends, and do so emboldened by the truth.

But to do so we must remember that for most residents in Rural America, there are two main types of utilities, and they will require different approaches from us:

1. state-sanctioned investor-owned monopolies, and;

2. Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs).

As the name implies, the first are owned by investors, while the second, as a coop, are owned by the customers.

1. Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs)

State-sanctioned investor-owned monopolistic utilities provide electricity to around three out of every four customers nationwide, but that drops significantly in Rural America.

Their acronym is “IOU” — but it should really be YOM — You Owe Me.

Remember: these “YOMs” are in business to make money for their investors, not the customers, not you. They are not looking out for you, your community, or your country.

But that doesn’t mean our interests can’t converge.

For farmers, one way for you, your community, and your country to benefit is by leasing a portion of your land to utilities (and other energy providers) for renewable energy projects.

“Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.”

For example, the IOU MidAmerican in Iowa:

• has invested approximately $15.8 billion in wind and solar energy projects;

• paid approximately $45.7 million in 2025 to over 4,000 landowners for wind projects and $60 million in property taxes;

• generated through their wind projects enough electricity to power over 2.4 million households.

These long-term leases provide financial stability, helping to avoid the need to sell the farm to land developers, permanently taking the land out of agricultural production.

Indeed, as the “agrivoltaics” movement proves, harvesting the sun and wind in Rural America when done right can complement and enhance rather than compete with more traditional cash crops, as research from the National Renewable Energy Labratory (NREL) shows. Renewables are simply another cash crop.

For hard working farmers there are other benefits. William Becker puts it well:

Renewable energy is a dream crop for farmers. It generates income without heavy equipment, labor, expensive inputs, fuel costs, 5 a.m. milkings, or worries about trade tariffs and commodity prices.

The benefits don’t stop there. As mentioned above, contributions to local taxes improve schools, fund police and fire fighters, build and maintain roads, and help keep other taxes low. In Texas, for example, wind energy provided $288.3 million in state and local taxes in 2021.

But what if your interests don’t converge, especially if you are generating your own renewable electricity? In that case you have become a competitor to investor-owned utilities.

As state-sanctioned monopolies, they don’t like red-blooded American competition, and they are doing everything in their power to snuff you out, or at least make you pay. Their political allies have established high mandatory fixed fees in 27 states so far. It doesn’t matter if you use any of their electricity, you still end up with a big monthly bill.

One example is Doug Goyings and his family, who farm about 5,000 acres of barley, soybeans and corn in Paulding county, Indiana.

“I don’t have to pay an electric bill at all, on the generation side. But the transmission and distribution [charges], it’s outrageous …” Speaking of his utility, American Electric Power (AEP): “They got these fees that they put on there.” He used no electricity from them in March. But AEP charged him $918 in fees.

So IOUs will work with you if it benefits them, and work against you when it doesn’t. It’s all about them.

2. Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs)

It is the exact opposite with Rural Electric Cooperatives or RECs. What benefits you benefits them and vice versa. That’s because you are them.

As with any coop, RECs are owned by their customers. Today RECs “serve 42 million people” and “power over 22 million businesses, homes, schools, and farms in 48 states” covering “56% of the American landscape.”

They began in the 1930s because investor-owned utilities couldn’t make enough profit off of rural residents in sparsely populated areas. So RECs were created so folks in most of Rural America could have electricity.

Their main goals were and continue to be reliability and affordability. The latter is crucial, because 1 in 4 households served have annual income below $35,000 and they provide electricity to “92% of persistent poverty counties.” RECs have been about affordability long before it became a political buzz-word.

In contrast to the deep financial pockets of the state-sanctioned investor-owned for-profit monopolies, Rural Electric Cooperatives are not-for-profit organizations that each year “return more than $1 billion to their consumer-members.” They don’t hoard capital. They give it back to their customer-members.

But to keep achieving reliability and affordability, especially today and into the future as demand is rising, requires new capital investments. And homegrown renewables are now the best cost choice for new electricity production. So where can RECs get the capital for such investments since they don’t have deep pockets?

Traditionally, a key source has been US Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs. But other creative options are out there as well.

One way for RECs to achieve reliability, affordability, and a cleaner environment is locally harvested electricity by individuals, groups and local businesses. Given the high expense of maintaining aging long transmission lines over the vast rural landscape, and the increasing vulnerability of such systems to extreme weather and growing demand, RECs are tailor-made for the local clean electricity production by individuals and families, by Community Solar, and by renewable-powered micro-grids. All of them generate power where it is used, avoiding the waste and cost of long transmission, and increase reliability when power outages occur on the “macro grid”.

Such local clean electricity production is anathema to investor-owned monopolies because they are competition. But they totally fit the bill for RECs because they are neighbors helping neighbors, and local businesses, schools, and civic groups generating power for themselves and their communities, all while achieving reliability, affordability, and a cleaner environment.

So why isn’t this happening more quickly? Answer: finance. What is needed is public investment to make this a reality.

With the proper support one study showed that Rural Electric Cooperatives could rapidly deploy renewable energy, reduce their wholesale electricity costs by 10-20%, and retire all coal plants — all the while maintaining reliability.

Affordable, reliable, clean and climate-friendly. We can have it all. But only if we marshal our P³ to push for these investments that are good for Rural Americans and in our national interest.

Our political power and our electric power must join forces to help us create economic power — something Rural America desperately needs.

Studies show there are twice as many rural counties in economic distress as there are prosperous ones. “On average, rural places lag behind non-rural places on nearly every measure of economic well-being from poverty rates to labor force participation,” according to the Economic Innovation Group.

To sum up, Rural Americans can do well by doing good with:

• renewable leases,

• renewable ownership creating electricity self-reliance,

• neighbors helping neighbors with community solar,

• local micro-grids, and

• agrivoltaics.

All of this can help family farms stay in family hands and keep money in the local economy via the local multiplier effect, generating $2-4 for every $1 spent — another way neighbors can help neighbors and their communities while also creating self-reliance from economic empowerment.

Affordability, yes. But so much more. Time to claim and grow your power, literally — and not just electricity, but political power and economic power.

Finally, The Climate Movement can make those who become involved in a P³ movement in Rural America stronger if we join forces. (And if you want to become a part of The Climate Movement as well, then join us!)

So let’s create P³ in 250 to celebrate real freedom and energy independence in America. Joining together we will have moral power, people power, and staying power to make the changes needed to create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — and overcome climate change to boot.

What are we waiting for? Let’s roll.

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In our last post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, Arie Haagen-Smit had just discovered the answer to the questions “What is LA smog and how is it created?”

Having the answer is one thing. Convincing others is quite another. It took him over five years for his photochemical theory of smog to gain acceptance.

Haagen-Smit faced opposition not only from the Oil Industry and its hired guns or “experts,” the Stanford Research Institute or SRI. Like nearly all new scientific findings he faced skepticism within the scientific community as well, including some colleagues at Cal Tech who felt the controversy might be harmful to the university.1 Initial efforts to get his findings published in a peer-reviewed journal were rejected.2 Haagen-Smit’s explanation first appeared in Cal Tech’s university magazine in December 1950.3

Of course this wasn’t some sleepy scientific affair argued only in journals. As we have seen, smog was a major political issue created by public outcry and bad press. Haagen-Smit had been hired by the Air Pollution Control District, and they had been making his findings public. The LA Times caught wind of his breakthrough, and on Nov. 20, 1950 published a major article with the headline: “Puzzle of Smog Solved by Caltech Scientist.” On Nov. 27 he presented the chemistry of smog at a public hearing of the California Assembly’s Air and Water Pollution Committee.4

Vance Jenkins, the head of the Oil Industry’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, which had hired SRI, reports that by late 1950:

“the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District accepted as proven fact a theory on the origin and nature of smog proposed by one of its consultants [Haagen-Smit]. This caused a change in the nature of the Stanford Research Institute program which, since that time, has been concerned largely with investigations designed to determine the degree, if any, to which this theory coincides with facts.”5

Because they believed Haagen-Smit’s understanding of smog was now accepted by the regulatory agency, the Oil Industry and SRI drew and even bigger bullseye on his back. While they could continue to sow doubt about the lack of knowledge with the general public, with the regulators they could no longer get away with saying nobody knows; they must now say that Haagen-Smit was wrong.

But even as his views were gaining notice despite opposition and skepticism – including by some of the public who thought his findings were “a plot by ‘the interests’ to put the blame on the little man’s automobile,”6 – Haagen-Smit was the one who had to stand up to the skeptics and deniers and convince the public and the policymakers.

To get his own message out, Haagen-Smit would give lectures where he would whip up flasks of smog and release it into the room, making his audience cough, teary-eyed. He became known in Southern California as “Dr. Haagen-Smog.” In a PR stunt of his own, a student helped him build a “smog chamber” made up of materials found in a junk yard. They set it up in the Air Pollution Control District’s parking lot, where employees “voluntarily exposed their eyes to smog from the chamber while workers with stopwatches timed how long it took for tears to stream down the volunteers’ faces.” After breathing extremely high levels, Smith Griswold, who later became the head of the agency, developed bronchitis.7

Haagen-Smit later recalled SRI’s role in particular: ‘I didn’t have any public relations agent, but they had. And it was very unpleasant.’”8 As a result, SRI was a constant in press stories, and whiz-bang puff pieces appeared like the one in Popular Mechanics entitled “Smog Sleuths,” touting SRI’s methods and expertise. There was even a documentary film made promoting SRI’s views with a Noir-esque title, “The City that Disappears.”9 (It’s a mystery.)

In one attempt to discredit him — point #2 in operationalizing the message as part of The Denier’s Playbook — SRI claimed to have run his experiments without being able to produce the same results; indeed, his formula created something that “was no more irritating than fresh outside air.” Haagen-Smit fought back by showing that SRI “had not replicated his experimental method at all – it had ignored several important procedures crucial to his laboratory findings.”10

In an attempt to marginalize him, he was not even invited to speak at the first ever major scientific conference on air pollution organized by SRI in Nov. 1949.11

After early rejections, Haagen-Smit’s work and that of his colleagues was starting to appear in peer-reviewed journals, including one on the injury to plants submitted in July 1951 and published in January 1952.12 Haagen-Smit brought it all together for the educated layperson in an excellent article in Cal Tech’s magazine in May 1952.13 By this time the Air Pollution Control District had recognized the soundness of his findings and began to suggest it was time to consider how to deal with emissions from vehicles.14

But SRI kept running The Denier’s Playbook by opposing Haagen-Smit in public with their message of denial, as well as implementing Step #3 in operationalizing the message — we don’t know enough; more research is needed; the science isn’t settled.

In late 1953 an SRI representative told the local press that the smog problem was still way too complicated to say anything definitive. Pollution from “thousands” of sources “somehow meet in the air and undergo some mystic sort of chemical reaction to produce smog” (emphasis added).15

Mystic? When you have scientists appealing to spiritual mystery to justify their denial, a whiff of desperation, and maybe something else, is in the air.

But that was their story, and they were sticking to it. As such, “from so many potential sources, no single class of violators could be condemned.”16

And there you have it, a message straight out of The Denier’s Playbook. If you can’t deny the problem exists (Talking Point #1), then deny we know enough (Talking Point #2) and deny culpability (Talking Point #3).

It’s a mystery! So our guys shouldn’t have to do anything.

In a major report in Jan. 1954 for the Oil Industry’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, which was “distributed in the public interest,” SRI proclaimed this same basic message:

“It will be apparent to all who read this report that there is yet much to be learned before a complete understanding of the smog problem in Los Angeles is attained. Few problems have been more oversimplified than this one. … It appears that many factors enter into causing smog – some of them unknown or not yet fully understood.”17

Apparently, what should be obvious is that when it comes to smog nothing is apparent. In other word, SRI was still on message: we don’t know.

But with a plausible theory from Haagen-Smit, SRI couldn’t just keep on saying we don’t know. Even as they tried to discredit both Haagen-Smit and his approach, they did end up throwing out alternative theories during this time, which, of course, denied the culpability of the Oil Industry.

For example, Zarem theorized that stratospheric ozone seeping down through the inversion layer was the cause. Haagen-Smit explained how such a scenario was wrong by noting simply that smog was much worse during daylight hours, consistent with his photochemical theory.18

Another message pitched to the public from SRI’s major report for the Oil Industry found its way into Time magazine: “The real villain [of smog] is Southern California’s much-touted sunshine, reports the Stanford Research Institute after a seven-year study.”19 It’s nature’s fault, in other words, not ours.

Through 1954 many scientists, regulators, and elected officials continued to believe we didn’t know enough to take costly regulatory action. As one scientist put it in June 1954, “‘ the more we investigate, the less we seem to know.’”20

Thankfully, Haagen-Smit’s findings were already accepted by the Air Pollution Control District and by his friend, Arnold Beckman, who in the Fall of 1953 was appointed by Governor Knight to chair a special committee on smog. At the Governor’s Air Pollution Control Conference on Dec. 5, 1953, Beckman’s committee made its findings public, affirming Haagen-Smit’s chemistry of smog.

In an effort to deal with smog based on facts, and to reach a consensus on what they were, on Nov. 2, 1953 local businessmen, industries, and government officials came together to create the Air Pollution Foundation.21 Their sponsored research over the next several years – even by several SRI scientists – confirmed Haagen-Smit’s chemistry of smog. Not only that, research by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, also affirmed his work. These confirmations were presented at what Haagen-Smit called an “historic meeting” of the American Chemical Society in September 1955, and another one organized by the Foundation in February 1956. As Haagen-Smit would later narrate:

“This signified the end of the controversy. The photochemical origin of Los Angeles smog through the action of sunlight on a mixture of oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons was no longer in dispute.”22

The Fights Over Smog Science and Climate Science: A Comparison

From the perspective of the fight over climate science, the collapse of the “we don’t know” position of SRI and others is remarkable. The fight over the science of smog lasted about five years. In contrast, the climate science fight is at least 40 years old and is perceived as still continuing by a significant sector of the population.

When the SRI “smog sleuths” were basically the only players on the field with scientific authority, the message they put forward – we’re on the job, it’s a complex problem you wouldn’t understand, more research is needed – could carry the day, even though for some of those paying attention it was wearing thin. As a spokesperson from the LA Farm Bureau and the hard hit agricultural community remarked in Nov. 1953, SRI “‘spent $1,250,000 given by the oil industry and still professes to know nothing about’ smog.”23

Even with such criticism, the opposition was able to continue their “we don’t know” stance until it became clear that it was scientifically indefensible. Once the opposition had to prove or disprove Haagen-Smit’s theory and his scientifically demonstrated results, once they had to employ the scientific method and be transparent with their own results, the game was up. Sadly, the game still isn’t up on climate science.

Arnold Beckman Was Key

But Haagen-Smit’s success would not have happened without Arnold Beckman. He brought Haagen-Smit into the fight and recommended him for the consultantship at the Air Pollution Control District, thus assuring that his findings would be heard by those in a position to act on them. As the Oil Industry’s Vance Jenkins reports, when the regulators took Haagen-Smit’s conclusions seriously, that’s when SRI on behalf of the Oil Industry had to “determine the degree, if any, to which this theory coincides with facts.”

And when Beckman’s Commission for the Governor affirmed Haagen-Smit’s work, that was the beginning of the end for “we don’t know.”

The Oil Industry/SRI Vs. Haagen-Smit: In a Nutshell

Finally, I want to lift up a story recounted by Dr. Harold Johnston, who became one of the world’s leading atmospheric chemists and a National Medal of Science recipient.24 This story reveals both the depth and tenor of the opposition to Haagen-Smit and the compromised nature of the SRI-Oil Industry relationship.

Johnston was teaching chemistry at Stanford and had recently received his Ph.D. from Cal Tech. He attended a seminar at Stanford where someone presented Haagen-Smit’s findings. Johnston recounts that he stood up and “politely pointed out” a small problem with Haagen-Smit’s smog formula.

Sitting in the room, not saying a thing, was Vance Jenkins. Thinking that Johnston was an ally, Jenkins told his SRI colleagues to hire him as a consultant to poke holes in Haagen-Smit’s approach. So SRI hired Johnston, suggested the possibility of presenting his findings to SRI’s Board, and that future funding could come his way. According to Johnston, they also said “terrible things” about Haagen-Smit and attacked him “vociferously,” especially the Oil Industry representatives.

“I was given the job of disproving the theory of this quirky, perhaps dishonest, scientist. I was given the job of overthrowing his theory entirely” (emphasis added).25

And what did Johnston find?

“I rapidly concluded that Haagen-Smit was a genius! Everything he said was based on experiments he had carried out, and his techniques seemed to be sound. I told them it seemed to me that he was right, across the board” (emphasis added).26

Johnston made a slight correction to Haagen-Smit’s formula and presented his findings to his manager at SRI.

And what was the response?

“The [SRI] manager said, ‘Oh, this is important, this is very important, but we must be careful. We have to do more research before we can bring this out.’ They postponed my appointment with the board of directors. They made no more reading assignments, and my consultantship lapsed.27

Afraid of the Truth? Attack First With The Denier’s Playbook

When it comes to uncovering the “mystery” of smog, was Haagen-Smit simply brilliant while his opposition were merely pedestrian? Maybe. But they attacked him after he put forward his theory; they didn’t want to find the truth; they didn’t want to see the truth. Shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.

Why? Because they thought they were guilty.

If they would have stopped running The Denier’s Playbook for a second they would have seen that there was important overlap in their positions that could have served the interests of the Oil Industry, as suggested back in 1977 by UCLA law professors Krier and Ursin. “A point of implicit agreement in the great scientific controversy between Haagen-Smit and SRI was that the automobile was a significant contributor …”.28

While the public and the press continued to blame the oil refineries for the problem, Haagen-Smit implicated vehicles as the primary culprit. As noted earlier, in doing so he was criticized by some in the public for being in cahoots with corporate interests in trying to scapegoat “the little man’s automobile.”

So it wasn’t the oil company’s refineries that were the main problem. It was the burning of their product by their customers. Given that the solutions everyone reached for at the time were point-source end-of-pipe technological ones, they wouldn’t be the main targets.

Why didn’t they see the common ground they had with Haagen-Smit? He was a very reasonable guy and a member of the Chamber of Commerce who palled around with the retired chemical director from Uniroyal. He had done research for various agricultural interests. In later years he would have good relations with his research counterparts in the automobile industry, even as he fought with them to make changes in his capacity as member and then Chair of the state’s Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board.29

The Oil Industry and SRI could have used Haagen-Smit’s findings to bolster their own position. But they reached for The Denier’s Playbook instead. It seems that the only thing they needed to know about him was he appeared to be in their way. And yet he really wasn’t.

The industry was right in its concern that initially there was a rush to judgment that cost them money, and could cost them more. When there is a serious problem like smog, people want answers quickly, they want to find solutions and solve the problem. This was not only the general public, or the media. It was Dr. McCabe, the first head of the LA Air Pollution Control District, and other experts of east coast and midwest smog.

But Dr. Haagen-Smit wasn’t a part of that. He was simply doing science, following the facts, and reaching conclusions based on those facts. They attacked him anyway.

And that’s exactly what the corporate fossils and many of their hired scientists have done to legitimate climate scientists simply for telling the truth. Shoot first and keep shooting. Don’t ask questions later.

Climate Movement: Time to Employ Our Power In Service of the Truth

When the corporate fossils feel they must pick between truth and profit, they’ll pick profit every time. For them they are simply following the logic of the system they are in. They’re in the business to make money. Everything else is secondary. As Milton Friedman famously argued, the only ethical obligation for corporate leadership is to increase stockholder value. Thus, we must change the “logic” of this system.

That’s a key reason why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most important thing we can be doing right now. We must be able to exercise our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — to push our societies to not simply reign in the corporate fossils, Big Producers of Polluting Products.

No, we must replace them. And not just them. We must replace the government-run and government-owned Big Producers of Polluting Products as well with a clean energy transformation at the speed and scale necessary to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Join us!

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So here’s the deal of the year. You get to do the right thing — and save 20-45% on your electric bill right now! Do right by the family budget and the Earth’s climate pollution budget. Reduce them both and be a hero in the process.

What’s the catch? To get this particular deal you have to live in New Jersey in the United States where you can sign up for what’s called “Community Solar.” Other states like Virginia are also rapidly expanding Community Solar.

What Is Community Solar?

As pictured and explained above by the Coalition for Community Solar Access:

“Community solar refers to local solar facilities shared by multiple community subscribers who receive credit on their electricity bills for their share of the power produced.”

As the Coalition states elsewhere:

“Community solar installations are larger than [individual] rooftop systems but smaller than utility-scale projects, interconnecting at the local distribution level. Their placement on schools, brownfields, parking lots, fallowed agricultural land, and farmland reduces grid congestion, improves reliability, offsets utility investments [that would be paid for by customers], and brings [clean energy] to communities.”

Aren’t able to have your own solar panels? No problem. With Community Solar everyone can have pollution-free electricity, a clear conscience, and in many situations like in New Jersey save money to boot.

What’s Happening in New Jersey

450,000 homes in New Jersey will be able to participate in Community Solar over the next three years and start saving 20-45% on their electricity bills.

An incredible volunteer group in South Orange New Jersey, Electrify SOMA, has done a terrific job of explaining Community Solar to potential participants in their area (where PSE&G is their utility). Their info below gives a basic sense of how a program is run:

Virginia and Other States

It’s not just New Jersey. Gov. Spanberger in Virginia (VA-D) just signed a slew of bills to make electricity clean and affordable, including expanding the availability of Community Solar by 625 megawatts. This more than doubles what was previously allowed and is enough, conservatively, to power around 160,000 homes.

Right now, before these new policies take effect, Virginia has gotten nearly 10% of its electricity from solar, enough to power 850,000 homes.

This amount of solar was hard fought, given the laws and red tape that made it difficult to install new solar and made it much more expensive. In most situations nationwide red tape costs for residential solar are nearly 80% of the total cost of a system.

This package of bills will change that in Virginia, saving up to $6,000 for the installation of a household system and more than doubling the capacity of Community Solar.

Other states — Colorado, New Mexico, Maryland, Minnesota — have also passed legislation related to Community Solar.

Obviously, much more needs to be done!

The Monopolistic Old Guard Ain’t Happy. Don’t Fall For the “Cost-Shifting” BS From Utilities

Community Solar is great! But the state-sanctioned monopolies, i.e., investor-owned utilities, don’t think so. That’s because Community Solar is cutting into their profits; they don’t get $$ for their investors and themselves from energy they don’t generate.

As the Coalition For Community Solar Access puts it in an excellent primer:

“Utilities often oppose customer-driven, third-party owned energy projects like community solar because they threaten shareholder profits. They use ‘cost-shift’ … as a false flag.”

As one seasoned utility observer, Karl Rábago, noted, they are crying crocodile tears for consumers over misleading claims about “cost-shifting,” a situation where certain groups can pay less while others pay more for benefits everyone in the group receives.

But, as Rábago explains, the monopolistic utility system is built on cost-shifting, including shifts from the poor to the rich:

High fixed charges increase overall costs for low-usage customers and allow higher-usage customers to benefit from lower per-unit costs. Connecting very large homes to the grid costs much more than connecting apartments. And customers located near generation resources pay the same transmission rates as everyone else, despite imposing lower costs on the system. Customers at the end of long lines pay the same as customers in the heart of the system, despite often requiring more infrastructure and maintenance to achieve reliable service.

Furthermore, those trying to confuse people about cost-shifting conveniently leave out all the ways Community Solar benefits the group, i.e., all ratepayers.

Rábago:

Utilities claim that when some ratepayers benefit from community solar, others unfairly bear the cost. Studies from multiple states have proven this blanket claim to be false — the benefits of distributed energy resources outweigh their costs.

In other words, when you include all the benefits and costs, Community Solar comes out ahead. For example, in Maine, Community Solar and similar projects deliver $1.23 in savings for every $1 invested.

Climate Action, Affordability, Health, & Wellbeing Go Together

As The Climate Movement here’s what we’re about: overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

This includes making our energy/electricity not just affordable — but cheap, clean, plentiful, and available to all.

Heck, let’s just go ahead and make it FREE — at least some of the hours.

A pipe dream? It’s already happening in Australia where millions of users will get three free hours of electricity midday. Why? Because of all the solar energy they are producing.

In the US we’re behind on this free energy revolution. But with The Climate Movement on the team we can make this happen, and Community Solar can play an important role at the needed speed and scale once we push governments to let them.

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As I discussed in my earlier post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, when the people of Los Angeles and its business and political leaders finally began to get serious about smog they had two basic problems: (1) no government had proper jurisdiction, and; (2) no one knew what made up smog or how it was created.

On June 10, 1947, California passed a law giving counties the authority to create Air Pollution Control Districts with enforcement powers. This was a major turning point. By October 1947 the LA Air Pollution Control District or APCD was up and running. With a budget of $178,000 and a staff of 47, it quickly became the best funded and staffed air pollution agency in the country.1

What Is LA Smog? Beckman & Haagen-Smit to the Rescue

But the second problem still hung over the effort. What exactly was LA smog? What made it up? How was it created? Who was responsible?

Incredibly, no one really knew – even though they thought they did. Just about everyone assumed it was the same smog that occurred in heavily industrialized areas of the East and Midwest. Experts from Pittsburgh and St. Louis were brought in to explain what smog was; sulphur dioxide was the culprit, they said, because that was true for those areas.

With the public clamoring for action, the first head of the new LA Air Pollution Control District, Louis McCabe, Ph.D., a former Army officer and an engineer by training, began negotiating with industry to reduce SO2. One of his key connections to the larger business community was Dr. Arnold Beckman, a longstanding member of the LA Chamber of Commerce and its designated smog point person since 1946.

The smog problem was not new to the LA Chamber. They had been working with local officials since 1944 out of a concern that a patchwork of local policies would unfairly target some areas and not others, leading to business costs that wouldn’t solve the problem and a frustrated public egged on by a “hysterical movement” (i.e., the activists) demanding even more be done. The Chamber sponsored research, encouraged its members to reduce pollution voluntarily, especially by increasing efficiency of equipment, and worked closely with elected officials to keep any needed policies as business-friendly as possible. This included providing draft ordinances put forward by local officials.2

In contrast to the Oil Industry, the Chamber was not running what I call The Denier’s Playbook. They had the entire economy and its diverse business interests to consider, and pollution was becoming a real problem for certain sectors. And so the Chamber found itself in the middle of the smog fight in more ways than one.

A group particularly hard hit were farmers, who had deluged the Chamber with concerns about unusual crop damage, which began showing up as early as 1944. They were losing about $250,000 a week when smog was bad, and eventually 10 types of vegetables would be eradicated from the area due to smog.3 In 1946 as the public became more and more aroused, and farmers and their own members were looking for answers, the Chamber turned to the Chair of its scientific committee, Arnold Beckman, for leadership.4

Inventor of scientific instruments and creator of his own company that sold such instruments, and former chemistry professor at Cal Tech, Beckman was perfectly situated to be the Chamber’s point person on smog.5 In this capacity he served as liaison to policymakers and civil servants like McCabe. An added bonus – Beckman and McCabe already knew each other, both having received degrees from the University of Illinois.6 Beckman so impressed McCabe and the Air Pollution Control District’s leadership that he was hired on as a scientific consultant (1948-52).7

As a chemist Beckman knew sulfur dioxide (SO2) when he smelled it, which has a distinctive odor even in small amounts. He was convinced the problem was not SO2, and that McCabe’s program would cost business plenty and not solve the problem. So he told McCabe flat out:

“Lou, for the love of Pete, you don’t have sulfur dioxide in the air. … Before you spend millions of dollars putting in recovery or replacement plants, you’d better find out what’s in the air.”8

“There’s no time for research,” McCabe replied hastily.9 But he eventually agreed to let Beckman pursue the matter, even as he moved forward on regulating SO2.

A seasoned microchemist was required, and Beckman knew where to find one: his former Cal Tech colleague, Arie Haagen-Smit.

And so it was the Chamber’s point man, recently appointed as the regulatory agency’s scientific consultant, who launched Haagen-Smit’s career fighting smog.

It turns out that Haagen-Smit, his own scientific curiosity piqued one especially smoggy day in 1946, had already done a little poking around himself with his own equipment and techniques. He had begun to suspect that a major culprit was ozone.

One of the strange things happening in LA at the time provided a clue: tire manufacturers were reporting that rubber was cracking much faster than elsewhere. To begin to solve this mystery, Haagen-Smit and a friend, Dr. Charles Bradley, a retired chemical director from Uniroyal,10 began some very simple experiments exposing rubber tubing to various mixtures of polluted air. The more ozone there was, the quicker the rubber tubing cracked.11

And so due to his own curiosity Haagen-Smit had begun to unravel the mystery of LA’s version of smog even before he was approached by Beckman.12

Curiosity is the driving force behind scientific discovery, and Dr. Haagen-Smit was first and foremost a scientist. Like Beckman, he was also a member of the LA Chamber of Commerce. In contrast to the activist types, he remained dubious of the respiratory health impacts of smog and died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. His pathbreaking scientific articles on smog listed “crop damage, eye irritation, haze, smell” as the problems arising from it.13 Even years later he still had a blind spot when it came to the health effects. “Smog is an aesthetic and economic nuisance.” People shouldn’t “believe stories that death in the form of smog stalks the streets of Los Angeles.”14

With Beckman’s request Haagen-Smit was asked, basically, to do scientific pro-bono work. So between classes and his other projects, and utilizing his pineapple study equipment and techniques, in fairly short order Haagen-Smit discovered the basic ingredients of LA’s version of smog – and SO2 was not one of them.

While he didn’t have a complete understanding of how these basic ingredients became smog, he felt the results of his initial experiments were sufficient to begin to address the problem by reducing the pollutants that came together to produce it. He reported his results to Beckman in the latter’s capacity as scientific advisor to the Air Pollution Control District, which released the findings to the public.15. Haagen-Smit told Beckman he would be getting back to his real research.

Smog? Check. Done. Now back to the pineapples.

Ah, not quite.

Unfortunately for Dr. Haagen-Smit, his early volunteer work on smog would end up in the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, at least in these early years. The Oil Industry and SRI didn’t like his results. Up until Haagen-Smit came on the scene, SRI was the only real voice speaking with the appearance of scientific authority. He couldn’t go unchallenged.

And so in what would turn out to be a major turning point in our nation’s history of addressing pollution, Abe Zarem, the head of SRI’s LA office, gave a talk at Cal Tech where he attempted to discredit Haagen-Smit. Zarem, a brash 31 year old with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cal Tech, was a rising star who the next year would be recognized nationally by the Chamber of Commerce as one of “America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men.” He would go on to a distinguished career and be elected to the National Academy of Engineering.16

But on this day, nurtured as he was by SRI’s symbiotic relationship with their Oil Industry compatriots, he was suffused with misguided purpose as he participated in operationalizing The Denier’s Playbook against Haagen-Smit.

Beckman had invited Haagen-Smit to join him in hearing Zarem, and they sat together. As Beckman described it, Zarem asserted that Haggen-Smit’s theory was not consistent with what SRI had found. He thought it sad that Haagen-Smit would make such a serious mistake.17

In other words, at his home institution, in front of his colleagues and students, SRI’s man said Haagen-Smit didn’t know what he was talking about in an area utilizing Haagen-Smit’s expertise.

Thus, when it came to operationalizing The Denier’s Playbook, Zarem fulfilled Steps One and Two:

• Hire scientific consultants (i.e. SRI) to do research, propose theories friendly to the Industry’s interests, and help proclaim the message of denial.

• Attack and discredit legitimate scientists.

Haagen-Smit was furious. This former boxer, horse-piss tester, and pineapple flavor expert was the wrong guy to pick a fight with.

“‘I’ll show them who’s right and who’s wrong,’ he muttered as we left the room’” Beckman recounted.18

Thus began a feud between the Oil companies, SRI and Haagen-Smit that would last for years and linger for decades, even after Haagen-Smit’s death.19

Instead of returning to his pineapples, Haagen-Smit took a leave of absence from Cal Tech and devoted over a year to the study of smog. Steps were taken in March 1949 by the Air Pollution Control District to hire him as a consultant and they set him up in a lab a few months later.

Haagen-Smit Cracks the Smog Case

Beginning in the fall of 1949 Haagen-Smit teamed up with scientists from the University of California-Riverside who had been studying the damage crops were experiencing. It was during this time that Haagen-Smit’s personal breakthrough occurred in understanding the basic chemistry of smog formation.

Earlier when he had condensed down LA’s smoggy air he found oily organic substances, partially oxidized hydrocarbons from petroleum. He guessed that these hydrocarbons were being oxidized by ozone. When he exposed smog-sensitive plants to such a mixture they showed the same damage as those exposed to LA’s smoggy air. But where was the ozone coming from?

“Now Haagen-Smit remembered reading that organic material could be oxidized by air if initiation by light and nitrogen dioxide were provided. He tried such a system and found it to be successful in producing smog symptoms.”20

And so it all fell into place. As Beckman puts it:

“He painstakingly delineated the photochemical process by which organic materials in the air—mostly hydrocarbons—are oxidized through the combined actions of oxides of nitrogen and sunlight to become smog.”21

Understanding it is one thing. Convincing others is another. As we will see in our next post in this Subseries, it would take five years and a bruising battle with the Oil Industry and SRI before Haagen-Smit’s answers to the questions “What is LA smog and how is it created?” would carry the day.

Haagen-Smit’s courage and tenacity in standing up to the fossils and their flacks are the kind we need to have the staying power necessary to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Like Haagen-Smit, we have the truth, and the truth still matters. We must be steadfast on all of our Olympian Fields of Action until victory is ours. Join us!

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I thought it might be helpful to summarize how I see what we are trying to do through the Climate Movement by utilizing an approach that some of us are familiar with — the categories and forms of strategic planning.

Articulating vision, purpose, goals, and objectives has been a mainstay of strategic planning that some of us have gone through. You may love it; you may hate it. You may think it’s a big waste of time because the plan is never implemented, or changes so much that you wonder why we bothered.

Many negative feelings about strategic planning have to do with a failure of leadership to implement what everyone worked hard to agree to. Fair enough.

Another turn-off: some folks can become strategic planning fundamentalists, especially about the ideational categories. “Oh, that’s not a goal because …”

Oy vey.

Finally, if implementation of a strategic plan is so rigid and joyless that you end up hating it, well, something has gone terribly wrong.

For us, the thinking of strategic planning and the concepts it utilizes should serve the Climate Movement, not the other way round.

So why am I bothering with this?

For three reasons.

First, as I’ve said, its forms and style are familiar to some of us. Such familiarity can aid in communication leading to understanding, and hopefully to common ground and acceptance.

Second, at a meta level, movements and strategic planning share a need to articulate what our efforts are trying to do. But whereas with a strategic plan the group can affirm it, not so with an entire movement. No one is in charge of a movement, including ours. No governing body, no single leader, is in a position to approve a strategic plan. Nor can everyone in a movement, including our Movement, participate in the creation of a strategic plan.

But the more people in a movement who can agree on the vision, purpose, and major goals of that movement the better. As I have written in the Together Enough Subseries of posts, movements include collective entities or social forms like organizations and campaigns that can affirm vision, purpose, and goals. Just like with individuals, the more social forms that affirm the same or similar vision, purpose, and goals the better.

Throughout this Climate Hope Together Substack, I have articulated what I consider to be our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, and I have done so all wrapped up in a single 18-word package:

In much of my writing I simply call this text our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, as if it was universally recognized to be so. I do this for convenience and shorthand, but also in the hope that many of you will accept them!

The third reason I am employing strategic planning concepts here is the emphasis on articulating measurability and timeframes. Measurability shouldn’t become a dictator, trying to run everything, trying to fit everything we do into some measurable form. But it has important benefits, especially in helping to clarify what we are trying to do within a certain timeframe. As you will see, I have tried to put forth ambitious but achievable goals to help us imagine both the challenge and the opportunity the Climate Movement presents.

Of course, there’s a huge difference between what I will put forth here and an actual strategic plan. My presentations using the style and forms of strategic planning are another way to communicate and sum up what we are trying to do and achieve as the Climate Movement.

But an actual strategic plan is the result of a process by a group of people who, at the end, affirm the plan. It is both process and product — and the process, resulting in buy-in, is just as important as the product. Obviously, the process hasn’t happened here.

So while the content I will present in this post is in the form of a strategic plan, it isn’t a real strategic plan because a group hasn’t worked on it together and approved the final product.

Besides articulating what I think we should be trying to accomplish, this is also a bit of a thought experiment. If the Climate Movement were able to create a strategic plan, what would it look like?

Of course, any of you could take what I have written as a starting point, either for yourself, or for any of the social forms you may belong to. I certainly hope you will!

However we end up doing it, it will be good for as many of us as possible to affirm a basic agreement on what we are all trying to achieve.

Before we launch in, a note on a term I’m using: Climate Movement Artist-Athletes. This is not a special role. It refers to every member of the Climate Movement. We’re all special! We all bring our gifts and creativity to our participation. Your creativity might be in how to facilitate a meeting that makes everyone feel welcome and their contribution worthwhile. Or it might be how to plan an event, or lead singing, etc. We all can be creative in our own way. That’s why all of us are Climate Movement Artists.

We also are all Climate Movement Athletes. I use the Olympic Games as our main metaphor for understanding who we are. We are striving for victory on all of our Olympian Fields of Action.

So we are both Artists and Athletes. We are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes.

Without further ado, here we go.

Vision, Purpose, and Major Goal of the Climate Movement

Movement-Building Goals

To achieve the vision, purpose, and Major Goal of our Climate Movement, we must become these seven characteristics/imperatives/goals.

1) Big and Broad and Active Enough

a) The Climate Movement will be 5% of the total human population or 400 million by 2030.

b) We will be 10% by 2040.

c) By 2030 we will have enough Climate Action Artist-Athletes to achieve victory on every Olympian Field of Action needed, including but not limited to:

• constituents at every political level around the world;

• students;

• retirees;

• scientists and engineers of all kinds;

• farmers and foresters;

• those connected to every business that can help or impede our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — consumers, owners, employers, employees, consultants;

• Climate Solutions Workers — those connected to creating, improving, and implementing clean energy, natural climate solutions, and other solutions-related fields;

• every profession and trade — e.g., nurses, plumbers, law enforcement officers, electricians, fire fighters, welders, doctors, carpenters, teachers, auto manufacturing workers, computer programmers;

• finance and banking sector professionals;

• every faith tradition;

• every civil society group;

• those who create art — musicians, songwriters, composers, YouTube and TikTok videomakers, photographers, actors, all those involved in filmmaking, writers of all kinds, painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, quilt makers;

• all the needed groups I haven’t thought of.

d) We will have the strength in numbers and the diversity of all of the types of social forms necessary to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal.

e) We will be active enough by having public events:

• at least weekly in large countries like the US with population sizes in the hundreds of millions or more, as well as medium-size countries with over 200 million;

• at least bi-weekly in medium-size countries with less than 200 million;

• at least monthly in small countries under a million.

2) Passionate Enough

a) 75% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will rank climate change as their top concern starting in 2027, increasing to 85% by 2030.

b) 100% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes by 2027 will take actions at least monthly to help achieve our Major Goal; such actions will be both personal and strategic, and in addition to policy advocacy.

c) From day one all Climate Movement Artists-Athletes are willing to make sacrifices to advance our cause.

d) 20% of Climate Artist-Athletes will be willing to engage in strategic civil disobedience by 2030, and we will maintain this level as long as necessary.

e) 100% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will make a lifelong commitment when they join to make our future come faster, thereby ensuring that we overcome climate change at the speed and scale necessary.

3) Deep Enough

a) By 2027, at least 70% of Climate Action Artist-Athletes, and 80% by 2030, will have asked these or similar questions:

• What do I think makes life meaningful?

• What do I think life is all about?

• What are my strongly held values?

• Why do I think climate action is the right thing to do?

• How does remaining faithful to climate action help me to live out my values, to have a life of integrity and worth, to make a difference?

Climate Action Teams or CATS will help achieve these goals by asking these or similar questions of all CAT members.

b) By 2027 all Climate Movement Artist-Athletes recognize and name people we care about who we are fighting for.

c) By 2027 at least 80% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be able to clearly articulate why climate action fulfills their most cherished values and protects who and what they love.

d) By 2027, 70% or more of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will have affirmed: (1) our Ten Movement Values, including that we are fighting for justice — to stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, and; (2) the Better Future Covenant, to create a better future for children and subsequent generations, which is their due.

e) 80% will be in meaningful weekly communication with other Climate Movement Artist-Athletes by 2027.

f) Whenever we come together, at meetings, marches, etc., we will sing movement songs (e.g. Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready; Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come), or popular songs adapted for our Movement (e.g., Seal’s Crazy; REM’s Stand; Taylor Swift’s Only The Young; Tab Benoit’s Night Train; Little River Band’s Cool Change).

4) Dynamic Enough

a) Have regular discussions about balancing: 1) the tried-and-true, 2) discipline, 3) freedom, and 4) creativity.

b) Implement tactics and strategies from the past that best fit current circumstances.

c) Maintain discipline by remaining true to our Movement Values and all of our goals and objectives.

d) Regularly encourage one another to have the discipline to stay the course and achieve our seven Movement-building goals and our vision, purpose, and Major Goal as we make hope happen, our world more just, and our future come faster.

e) Regularly remind everyone that freedom — i.e., choices that create a better world, the fullness of freedom — is at the heart of our Movement.

f) At every meeting have as an agenda item to ask whether there are any new ideas to discuss, including tweaks to current approaches.

g) Regularly encourage a variety of: 1) tactics, such as marches, boycotts, etc., and 2) targets, such as fossil bank credit card holders.

h) Recognizing the need for speed and scale, combine passion with the tried-and- true, discipline, and creativity to produce continuous actions within each country so that there are one or more organized actions happening at least weekly. Once they have occurred, post these organized actions on a map all Climate Action Artist-Athletes can see.

i) Establish prizes/medals for the most creative ideas in a variety of categories, e.g. targeting, tactics, communications.

j) Educate Artist-Athletes about the creative process and ways we all can enhance ours.

5) Organic and Strategic Enough

a) Achieve our goals on all of the Fields of Action we create, which are designed to help us attain our vision, purpose & Major Goal.

b) At every meeting encourage Climate Action Artist-Athletes to bring forward new ideas and for others to add to these ideas ones that make them even better. Be open to the spontaneous when it arises from the interactions between group Artist-Athletes, utilizing wisdom to discern the value of implementation.

c) Regularly raise the issue of balancing organic change with the need for efficiency, effectiveness, targets, timelines, and the strategic employment of resources at key moments and places to achieve our goals so that the organic and the strategic make each other better.

6) Together Enough

a) By 2028, 70% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be a participant in one or more social forms.

b) By 2030 this will increase to 80% and will be maintained or increased thereafter.

c) From their beginnings, all of our social forms will fulfill the three aspects of being together enough: shared goals; action events; meeting together regularly.

d) By 2028 half of all businesses will earn climate-friendly profits and actively encourage employees to work together to come up with better processes and products.

e) By 2035 such businesses will increase to 70% and continue to grow thereafter.

f) By 2027, 30% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be part of a Climate Action Team or CAT.

g) By 2030 this will increase to 50%, which will be maintained or increased thereafter.

h) All Climate Action Teams or CATS will meet in synchronous or real time at least once a month — but ideally once a week — to support one another and plan actions together, including at least one joint major action each month.

i) CATS will help individual members discover and/or affirm their gifts and abilities and how they can be utilized in the roles they play on the CAT and in the Climate Movement.

j) All CATS and other social forms will meaningfully incorporate the Arts into meeting together, and also find ways to have fun and enjoy one another.

7) Long Enough

a) 70% of individual Climate Action Artist-Athletes maintain their commitment to the Climate Movement throughout their lives.

b) 50% of climate organizations will still be active in 2050.

c) 50% of environmental organizations currently engaged will still be working on climate change in 2050.

d) Climate organizations and environmental organizations and other organizations with a focus on climate action will make employee retention and job satisfaction a top priority.

e) Coalitions/alliances/networks/associations, faith community efforts, campaigns, and initiatives will create supportive conditions for all participants so that the goals and related timelines are achieved, and, if possible, lay a foundation for new goals/timelines to be adopted.

f) Members of Climate Action Teams or CATS will make up a third of the Climate Movement starting in 2030 and grow to half by 2040.

g) CATS will help all of their Climate Action Artist-Athletes to recognize and claim their roles and support them in fulfilling their roles.

h) CATS will appoint “keepers” for each of the values affirmed by the CAT. Each one will report regularly their observations and suggestions. The CAT will also designate a “joy-spotter,” who highlights joys within the team and throughout the Climate Movement.

i) All Climate Action Artist-Athletes will experience the hope and the joy that come from joining together to be a part of bringing forth a better world by overcoming climate change while creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

Strategic Significance of the Climate Movement

Victory Is Up To Us

Friends, we are the hope we’ve been waiting for! But we are not the only source of hope. The other three Catalytic Sources of Transformation — Climate Action Supporters, ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change, Governments-&-Markets —also give us hope. And yet without us they will not achieve their full hope-potential. That’s why we are indispensable. We must continually drive everything forward to victory. Victory is up to us, but we have help.

And because victory is up to us, we won’t be complete without you. We need your help. We need you for victory. Join us!

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