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Drexler Has a Vision

In 2013 Eric Drexler, dubbed by some “the godfather of nanotechnology,” wrote a short piece titled “Is Climate Change a Manufacturing Problem?” It was basically taking a distillation of his book published that year, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, and then applying it to climate change. This book, in turn, was an update and refinement of his first one in 1986, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, that helped launch the field of nanotechnology.

As his book titles suggest, Drexler doesn’t mind swinging for the fences.

What got Drexler interested as a young man in engineering more broadly were environmental problems.

“It was the early environmental movement that infused me with a sense of mission. … Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring … This kind of reading had its effect and in April 1970 I joined others (in a minor, high-school way) in boosting the first Earth Day.

Two years later I encountered a book that changed my view of the world more profoundly: Limits to Growth. …

[Trying to think about solutions led him ] to explore the potential of technologies in the nanoscale world” (Radical Abundance).

So, for Drexler, applying his mature work to climate change was coming back to home base 40 years later.

The key driving concept in Radical Abundance is Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM), and in his short piece he sketches how it can be a solution to climate change.

APM will provide the ability to make atomically precise structures that range from billion-processor tablet computers, consumer goods, and aerospace components, to high-performance thin film photovoltaics, delivered in rolls of tough material suitable for resurfacing roads and rooftops.

Global material economic development is in the end a problem of making things, a problem of manufacturing. The scope, resource frugality, and cost structure of APM can make global wealth accessible within the constraints of Earth’s limits [italics added, harkening back to Limits to Growth].

To reverse (not merely slow) the rise in atmospheric CO2 is an immense task that seems beyond the capabilities of the industrial technologies that created the problem. The productive capacity of APM, however — access to terawatts of low-cost solar power and means for efficient CO2 capture — could eventually enable draw-down of excess greenhouse gas levels on a decadal time scale. …

The path to APM-level technologies will not be short, but can be seen as a natural outgrowth of progress in atomically precise fabrication

So, via APM we’ll be able to make stuff much better, faster, and cheaper to boot — stuff that can eliminate and suck up climate pollution.

However, that last statement, that the creation of APM “will not be short,” is an important clue for how we should approach its possibilities.

Some of the reviews of the time for Radical Abundance were not kind, effectively implying Drexler was off his meds:

“Delusions Of Grandeur: Author insists ‘atomically precise manufacturing’ will transform civilization, but he’s not dealing with reality. … He just doesn’t understand that his conception of nanotechnology is a fantasy.”

Drexler is casting a vision, and visions are indeed fantasies if no one tries to make them a reality.

Should we try? My answer is Yes.

Atomically Precise Manufacturing — What Is It?

But before we continue we must describe what Atomically Precise Manufacturing is supposed to be.

At its simplest, it is creating products at the atomic level by precisely arranging atoms so that there are no gaps, missing atoms, defects, or impurities, leading to zero structural defects for resulting products.

In other words, if you want a chair, an APM chair will be a righteous chair.

It’s as if Plato said, “Make me an ideal chair.” And, poof, APM obliges. You actually get to sit on the essence of chairness. APM is the matchmaker between the ideal world and the material world, the incarnation of the essence of things.

David Forrest, a leader in the field since the mid-1990s, including award-winning stints at the Department of Energy (DOE) with a focus on APM, was recently asked in an interview what difference precision makes.

“Because that extra amount of precision changes the performance of materials by something like a factor of 50.”

Ok, atomically precise, great.

Manufacturing? How’s that going to happen?

Here again is Drexler casting the vision:

Imagine replacing an enormous automobile factory and all of its multi-million dollar equipment with a garage-sized facility that can assemble cars from inexpensive, microscopic parts, with production times measured in minutes (emphasis added). Then imagine that the technologies that can make these visions real are emerging—under many names, behind the scenes, with a long road still ahead, yet moving surprisingly fast (Radical Abundance).

This comes about via manufacturing at the atomic level, “manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices.”

“The key is to apply atomically precise nanotechnologies to build the machines we use to make things. Large scale, high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing is the heart of advanced nanotechnology, and in the coming years it has the potential to transform our world.

APM is a kind of manufacturing, but it isn’t industrial manufacturing. The differences run from bottom to top and involve replacing enormous, polluting factories with clean, compact machines that can make better products with more frugal use of energy and material resources” (Radical Abundance).

As Forrest puts it:

If you want to make cars and laptops and skyscrapers to atomic precision you need nanofactories with assembly lines that have trillions of molecular machines. That’s how life on earth works, too, by the way. Our biosphere grows and is sustained by vast numbers of molecular machines.

So nano-machines and nano-factories making righteous stuff, the essence of its stuffness in a useable product.

Doable? Hmmm …

So APM sounds good!

How? That’s the trillion dollar question.

Ok, the basic idea of atomic precision is fairly straight forward, and, as such, seems doable to a layperson like me.

It’s the nano-manufacturing part, the “molecular assemblers” part, where it gets a bit vague and incredibly complicated.

But peer-reviewed journal articles report on specific progress in certain areas, such as: “Frontiers in Atomic-level Manufacturing: Atomic-scale Electrochemical Deposition (2025); “Enabling Novel Device Designs, Scalable Manufacturing, and Rapid Prototyping with Direct Atomic Layer Processing (DALP™)” (2025); “Machine Learning-Assisted Precision Manufacturing of Atom Qubits in Silicon” (2024); Atomically Precise Manufacturing of Silicon Electronics“ (2024); and “A Molecular Assembler that Produces Polymers” (2020).

A good summing up is provided by a key federal agency, NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology): Atom-scale Devices: Engineering, Metrology and Manufacturability. And several scholars in the field have produced a fairly recent take of where they think things stand: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Future of Atomically Precise Manufacturing (2024).

All a bit head-spinning. What the rest of us need is an “APM For Dummies.”

Tim Ventura, who, admittedly is a bit of a booster, recently wrote a 40-year retrospective on Drexler’s vision, first articulated in Engines of Creation in 1986.

As Ventura summarizes at the beginning:

Nanofactories remain a long-term goal, but molecular machines, DNA origami, atomic-scale fabrication, and AI-designed proteins show how far the science has advanced.

Later Ventura compares progress to date to rungs on a ladder:

Science has learned to observe individual atoms, reposition them, pattern surfaces, program molecular self-assembly, construct artificial motors, guide sequence-specific synthesis, predict protein structures, generate new molecular designs, and automate experimental feedback. The higher rungs — continuous operation, broad chemistry, integrated control, error correction, massive parallelism, and multiscale production — remain ahead. But the lower and middle rungs are no longer imaginary. The path hasn’t been completed, yet considerably more of it is visible than it was in 1986.

As for the next 10 years, Forrest was asked what he would like to point to as a contribution from APM. His answer:

“Atomically precise membranes. Because they could be used for cleaning toxins from water, cleaning blood to eliminate kidney dialysis, mining valuable minerals from seawater, and cheaply removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.”

Always on the Horizon? The Ultimate Techno-Magic Dodge?

Ok, in 2013 Drexler says “The path … will not be short.” Just a couple of weeks ago Ventura says “Nanofactories remain a long-term goal,” and “The path hasn’t been completed …”

Will it ever? Is APM always on the horizon, a vision that never quite makes it in reality? I don’t think anyone can really say.

But there has been progress that in and of itself is worthwhile, and I believe it’s a vision that continues to be worth pursuing.

Bottom line: it should be getting more public R&D funding.

But could this be a trap? Not by Drexler, but used as one by others? A diversion, despite Drexler’s climate concern and his concern for Earthly limits more broadly?

For decades politicians and others who didn’t want to do serious action on climate change have employed what I call the markets-and-techno-magic dodge: we don’t need to do serious climate policies because just at the right time markets and techno-magic will create the solutions we need. Poof! Society just needs to continue to support basic science and the market will take it from there.

Total BS.

Is Drexler’s vision the ultimate in techno-magic? If all we did was put all our eggs in the APM basket, or even R&D more broadly, then yea, it would be.

But that’s not what we’re doing. It’s not what we’re going to do. It’s not some binary either/or situation. It’s a both/and.

APM could really help us — or not. But it’s worth supporting, even as we push to employ today’s helpful tech as big and as fast as possible. We must take some big risks to mitigate climate risks. We must take risks to overcome risks.

For some of you, APM is your specific Field of Action. Great!

But for APM and other promising tech like self-driving labs to get the public funding they need, for strategic ARTC of both kinds, broad-based and targeted, to come into its own as our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, all of us in The Climate Movement must continue to grow and improve our movement so that our three forms of power — Moral Power, People Power, and Staying Power — are enough to get the job done. Join us!

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Some Context

Let me back way up here and start wide — big picture.

As we’ve discussed before, technological progress hasn’t been some gradual progression in human history. Once we hit the Industrial Revolution it shot up like a rocket, and with it economic growth and many things that have improved human wellbeing.

The graphs above help to illustrate this because tech progress is responsible for 85-90% of economic growth, and so charting such growth also tracks the tech change behind it.

Of course, there was a big problem, a big cost. The fuels we used, fossil fuels, created deathly pollution and climate change.

So the fuel brought wealth and death and the greatest threat humanity now faces.

So how do we get ourselves out of this conundrum? We chuck the bad and keep the good. It’s just that the bad makes lots of money, has lots of power, and is intwined in our economies and cultures.

So how do we create the transformation? It’s already well underway, obviously, and as I’ve argued previously, we don’t need to wait to get going in a big way with the tech we already have. But to overcome climate change we need both to happen much faster. We need speed and scale.

Tech progress has been fueled by the fossils. But it has come about due to the production of what Nobel prize winner Joel Mokyr calls “useful knowledge.” It’s knowledge that is, well, useful.

Its production isn’t powered by the fossils. It is powered by the human brain. And useful knowledge and the tech change driving economic growth that it spawns continue to go up like a rocket because of what I call the ARTC-combo:

• specialization;

• the non-rival nature of knowledge (ideas are easily copyable and useable);

• competition.

Our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation for overcoming climate change is ARTC, the accelerating rate of tech change. For those of us who want to do something about climate change, our job is to create and support strategic ARTC, ARTC that helps us with speed and scale.

But given the nature of useful knowledge, strategic doesn’t mean narrow.

This won’t just come about with today’s “clean tech.” We must not be trapped in a clean tech silo.

Thus, there are two kinds of strategic-ARTC: (1) broad-based, and (2) targeted.

We don’t know what we don’t know. By that I mean solutions can come from many fields of scientific and technological knowledge, which form a symbiosis. That’s why we must be all in on basic science R&D. This is broad-based strategic-ARTC.

Mokyr points out that throughout history, tech progress like the steam engine can happen without scientific understanding of why the tech works (which, by the way, is happening with AI, where its creators don’t exactly know how some of it is working). Tech progress can also spur scientific advances, especially with the creation of instruments like the microscope, or, on our case, AI and robotics. So it’s not a one-way street, science-to-tech. It’s also tech-to-science.

But, eventually, tech progress runs out of steam without new scientific advances, which, again, is why we must support basic science, or broad-based strategic-ARTC and not just targeted strategic ARTC, or, more narrowly, clean tech R&D.

At the same time, there’s plenty we do know, and pushing for targeted strategic ARTC is crucial for speed and scale. When we see an area of discovery that can help, we must give it all the help it needs to become strategic for us.

Autonomous Experimentation

When we’re talking about Self-Driving Labs or Autonomous Experimentation, what do we mean?

It’s the scientific method performed without humans, made possible by AI + robotics. Their human creators, on the outside of this process, call this a “closed-loop,” as pictured with 1-4 below.

In other words, a closed-loop system doesn’t need intervention from humans from the outside. It’s beyond the “driver-permit” stage, has passed its driver’s test, and now has its driver’s license and can drive on its own. Kinda scary, but also liberating.

Self-driving labs form hypotheses, run the experiments, analyze the results, and run it over again until obtaining the desired outcome (e.g., #5 in the loop pictured above).

So how are AI and robotics doing this? Here’s a good description from some Korean friends:

Two technologies converged to make this possible. The first is physical AI — robotic systems precise enough to handle microliter volumes, computer vision that monitors reactions in real time, and LLMs capable of reading scientific literature and generating experimental protocols. The second is digital twins — virtual replicas of the lab environment that let the AI run millions of simulated experiments before touching a single reagent. Where these two meet, the experiment cycle compresses from years to weeks (emphasis added).

AI gulping down data to find a grain of sand, labs in cyberspace running millions of experiments before one is done in our reality where robotics that can be delicate and more precise than any human are aided by super-duper cameras. This ain’t the future. It’s now.

Must Go Faster: ARTC on Steroids

So to overcome climate change what do we need? Speed and scale.

We’ve got a need for speed.

In human history tech progress shot up like a rocket when we had more human brains thinking about both science and technology (examples of the specialization part of the ARTC-combo). Brains hooked on science and tech. Brains thinking like scientists and technologists and engineers. The results? The Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

Now we have artificial “brains” (AI) who can do certain things much faster than we can.

So we’ve got both human brains and artificial brains on the job, complementing one another.

One of the pioneers of self-driving labs is Ross King from Great Britain, who began thinking about autonomous experimentation in the late 1990s. His first journal article on the topic (with numerous colleagues) was in Nature in 2004, “Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist.”

King was interviewed recently where he offered this reflection:

In my mind, science is still at the pre-industrial level. A PI [Principal Investigator] with some post-docs and a few students is like a cottage industry, as opposed to a factory of science.

So when it comes into its own the self-driving autonomous experimentation juggernaut will not just be about speed, but also scale, both together pushing one another to become bigger and faster. Not just science labs, but science factories.

And when that happens, when such science factories take discoveries and then produce products for human wellbeing all under one roof — well, science fiction will be transformed into science fact. Indeed, not too long from now many of these scientific factories with far more advanced 3-D printers, or dare I say, replicators, won’t be in the cookie-cutter mass production business, they’ll be in the made-to-order customer-designed business. The volume may be big, but each will be tailor-made.

Right now there are tremendous benefits from combining the strengths of artificial brains with human brains. An artificial brain, or AI, is not just a human brain that’s an artificial one. It works differently. It’s both dumb and a genius simultaneously. As King points out:

They can’t see deep analogies or connections, but they are brilliant at other parts of science. They can literally read everything – they have read every paper in the world 1000 times. If you have a small amount of data, machine learning systems can analyze it better than humans would. In this sense, they have superhuman powers.

With such “superhuman powers” they can quickly chew through a gazillion tons of data and find connections that lead to drugs that can help cure malaria. It’s why we were able find what was needed to develop the COVID vaccine so quickly.

Now autonomous experimentation has created a “super-antigen,” which “marks a pivotal leap forward in our ability to deliver broad, lasting viral protection.” Once perfected, such vaccines will help train the human immune system to provide protection from whole families of virus’s. No more annual flu or COVID shots!

As for targeted strategic-ARTC, King comments:

Areas with low-hanging fruit include materials science, as we need better battery materials, better solar panels, and lots more. There’s something of a gold rush happening there right now … (emphasis added).

A self-driving lab called “Ada” is focused on materials science. It’s development is headed up by another of the leaders in this field, Alan Aspuru-Guzik at the University of Toronto. Here’s a taste of what Ada is doing:

Starting with perovskite solar cell candidates, Ada now autonomously navigates broad swaths of chemical space. Its throughput matches what a multi-person research team could accomplish in several weeks — compressed into a single day (emphasis added).

Aspuru-Guzik is motivated by climate change and the need for speed:

“What I personally am driven [by] is the slow pace of science and technology discovery.”

To speed things up, Aspuru-Guzik has also created a collaboration called the Acceleration Consortium, which they describe as:

a global community of government, academia, and industry that uses AI and automation to accelerate the discovery of materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future—such as life-saving medications, biodegradable plastics, and renewable energy.

Another self-driving lab is run by the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, with an explicit focus on clean tech:

Targeting battery electrolytes, catalysts, and energy storage materials, the system sequences X-ray diffraction, fluorescence spectroscopy, and electrochemical characterization under AI control — continuously. Argonne frames this explicitly as part of the DOE’s clean energy mission: autonomous labs can accelerate materials discovery for grid-scale storage and next-generation solar at a pace that conventional research cannot match (emphasis added).

King also makes a potent observation. Once we really get going on self-driving labs it’s going to make science really cheap to do.

The big picture is that the economic cost of science is dropping. A lot of the actual thinking involved in science can now be done by AI systems, and the experimental work can be done very well by lab automation. You don’t need to employ people to move things around, and people aren’t as accurate and don’t record things as well as automation does. So that’s the big picture: what can we do if we can make science much cheaper?

With cheap can come speed and scale. With cheap can come science not held back by lack of funding. With cheap we can go from science labs to science factories inventing and innovating and producing products we need to fulfill the Better Future Covenant.

Turning Potential Into The Reality We Desire

So how do we make the potential of self-driving labs become the reality we desire?

First, as an incredible example of targeted strategic-ARTC, we need significantly more public funding. Right now there are too few self-driving labs around the world. We need to create a ton more! We need to drive down the cost to democratize this self-driving lab product so that it becomes cheap enough for garage start-ups and science factories to pop up everywhere, pushing the ARTC-combo to new heights.

Second, vision and values.

How do we make autonomous experimentation work for the common good of humanity more broadly? And how, more specifically, do we ensure that it helps us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything?

Don’t be lulled into a sugar-high from confectionary tech optimism spun autonomously by a smart machine or tech-bro manifestos.

Justice won’t come from a self-driving lab, or a scientific factory. Indeed, the opposite can be the case. We must work for justice in this realm like any other.

As Bill Gates recently warned about AI more broadly: “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental.”

Thankfully, many of the scientific leaders in this space like Alan Aspuru-Guzik and others are motivated by climate action and sustainability more broadly.

But as I covered in my last post, AI is being used by the fossils. Big Tech and Big Oil have teamed up together and they are way ahead of the volunteers seeking to use AI for climate action. Right now, as I put it, “Our folks must be 4-5 times better just to break even, but many are not even out of the starting blocks while the AI-fossils are half way around the track already.” There’s absolutely no reason our opposition can’t tap into the potential for speed and scale from self-driving labs to help them torch the planet.

This is where our first two Catalytic Sources of Transformation come in, The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters. It’s our job to see that our vision and values become a reality, that the other two Catalytic Sources, ARTC and Governments-&-Markets, play their parts. The Catalytic-4 must work together for justice.

The AI race is happening so fast right now it’s running past the meager human safeguards that currently exist and pushing data centers onto communities so quickly Big Tech isn’t taking the time to do them right, creating a well-deserved backlash. Instead of the unconstrained rush job we have now, data centers should be showcases of our values: off-grid and completely powered by clean energy they produce on site, zero impact on local water supplies, full-time local good-paying jobs, excellent relations with the community.

We need speed of transformation to implement our vision and values, not to empower the Big Tech Broligarchy and Big Oil and authoritarian regimes, none of which give a damn about our freedom, one of our Ten Movement Values.

It’s our job to see that speed is for us and not against us, not at the expense of freedom but in service to it and justice.

For some of us, creating the speed we need through self-driving labs is your Field of Action. For others, it is making sure the speed creates justice and prosperous sustainability as we overcome climate change. Thankfully, folks like Alan Aspuru-Guzik are combining both.

For all of this we need our three forms of power — Moral Power, People Power, Staying Power. That’s why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most strategic thing we can all do together. Join us!

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I’ve already mentioned some of the downsides to AI, and I’ll be writing more on the potential upsides.

But in this post we are traveling deeper, from AI’s downsides to its dark side. AI’s climate dark side is significantly worse than what we’ve already covered. It has the potential to do much more damage than any good AI could do for climate. It’s way out of balance in the wrong direction.

Man, does this suck.

The answer is not to say “Pull the plug on AI!” That’s impossible. The answer is to get it right.

Climate Movement Heroes vs Big Tech’s Grim Reapers

Thankfully, there’s a group that’s working on this to help the rest of us in The Climate Movement stay abreast of this dark turn and how we can challenge it.

This campaign was founded by two Climate Movement Heroes, Holly and Will Alpine, who left Microsoft once they saw that much more needed to be done. So they created the Enabled Emissions Campaign.

As Holly put it:

I painfully quit a job I loved … I could no longer reconcile Microsoft’s strong public environmental sustainability stance with its assistance to the oil and gas industry—a partnership that was dramatically increasing global emissions. I realized that internal pressure alone wasn’t going to shift the incentives; the public and shareholders needed to know what was happening (emphasis added).

It’s not just Microsoft, as Holly Alpine explains in an interview with Emily Atkin for her Substack, Heated:

There are teams of engineers and salespeople at these tech companies that are explicitly for the fossil fuel industry ... There are engineers writing code explicitly in partnerships with oil majors to expand production (emphasis added).

Big Tech teams working with and writing code for Big Oil and the other fossils, actively selling these death products, and those in leadership cutting and approving and championing these deals — they are intensifying the last big hurrah of the fossils before clean energy finally turns out their lights. Given that air pollution kills millions and climate change that is not overcome will harm billions and kill millions, these programs are The Grim Reapers of Big Tech.

This is what the Enabled Emissions Campaign is striving to defeat. In other words, it’s Climate Movement Heroes vs. The Grim Reapers of Big Tech and their allies, Big Oil.

Enabled Emissions

Now what the heck are “enabled emissions.” Well, don’t let anybody try to fool you by telling you it’s laughter-induced flatulence. Because it’s not. At least as far as we’re concerned.

But these emissions do stink to high heaven because they are turning something we’re trying to keep on the straight and narrow, AI, into a potent tool for our opposition. In this case, AI is helping the fossils find more fossil fuels, like a demented fossil dating site whose offspring are misery and death, thanatos on steriods. They are enabling emissions that might not have occurred otherwise.

As the campaign says on its website:

Enabled emissions are the additional greenhouse gases released when advanced technologies (AI, IoT, and high-performance/cloud computing) make fossil fuel production economically viable. … Across exploration, extraction, refining, and logistics, AI applications are lowering costs and sustaining the economic viability of otherwise marginal resources.

Microsoft and other Big Tech companies and their allies are making billions of dollars helping Big Oil cook the planet. Microsoft tries to hide this even as they trumpet sustainability. The Enabled Emissions Campaign is putting a big search light on these death deals in the dark.

A Trillion Barrels of Oil

Another of Big Oil’s allies, Wood Mackenzie, a research and consultancy firm, also trumpets sustainability. But as you can see below, they aren’t trying to hide their AI abilities to help Big Oil squeeze profits from every last drop. We’re talking an additional trillion barrels they can help the fossils capture.

They state:

Wood Mackenzie’s proprietary Synoptic AI-powered analysis of oilfield performance shows existing fields are far from exhausted. … better recovery from producing fields could yield an additional 470 billion to over 1,000 billion barrels. This potential only requires the application of established best practices already deployed successfully across the industry, not unproven technologies.

Proprietary AI — They built a Frankenstein, utilizing science and technology to help bring a trillion barrels of fossilized dead matter back to life only to bring death like a plague. Their every-last-drop gluttonous glee is, frankly, pitiful.

The Really Bad News: Model Suggests AI-Fossils Trounce AI-Renewables

So to figure out how big a problem we’re dealing with, Holly and Will Alpine teamed up with a couple of researchers and used a computer model to get a handle on this question. Their results have recently been published in a peer-reviewed journal article.

Here’s the bottom line: “Renewables gains must exceed fossil gains by 4–5× to reach breakeven.”

So our AI-renewables teams must be 4 to 5 times better just to score a tie.

Below is their graph visualizing this catastrophe.

To get the net or purple color on the right you subtract the blue from the red. (Notice, too that avoided pollution from renewables helped by AI doesn’t even equal those from AI data centers, the grey bar on the left.)

AI-fossils increase climate pollution equivalent to Mexico on the low end, and Russia on the high end (who is the fourth largest polluter).

While their study conservatively estimated that the fossils and the renewable industry would take up AI at the same pace, that’s not what’s happening on the ground.

As Holly Alpine told The Guardian:

“Fossil fuel applications are already happening at scale today – real contracts, real deployment, with evidence from industry operators and financial analysts,” she said. “Renewables applications are still largely at the pilot or academic-study stage – more speculative, more dependent on deployment barriers like permitting and interconnection getting resolved.”

In other words, things are even worse than their study suggests. Our folks must be 4-5 times better just to break even, but many are not even out of the starting blocks while the AI-fossils are half way around the track already.

We’re Facing Two Goliath’s, Not Just One

When we’re talking about facing Big Oil and Big Tech together, we’re talking about the biggest and richest corporations in the world.

And what have we got?

We’ve got the P³ — Moral Power, People Power, and Staying Power. If you’re wondering where the hope is for meeting the challenge of these Goliath’s, it comes when we join together. We are the hope we’ve been waiting for.

Our moral power is a constant: our cause is just. Climate impacts are a wrong that must be made right. With AI-fossils, Big Tech is on the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of humanity’s most basic values, the wrong side of history. To change course they must do the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better. Truth is, there are many people in Big Tech who want to do the right thing, who want to be on the right side. We must find a way to tap into that.

Our people power must grow significantly — 16 million in the US and 400 million worldwide. We must become big and broad and active enough to become our destiny: the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in history. The more we grow, the better our chances become to transform this situation. Another reason why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most strategic thing we can do right now.

Our staying power is crucial. We cannot fade as has happened over the last few years. We must get strong, stay strong, and get stronger still.

The Destructive Alliance of Big Tech and Big Oil Must Be Ended Immediately

Back in 2024, the year she resigned, Holly Alpine wrote this in Fortune:

While we were at Microsoft, my colleagues and I never advocated for the company to sever its ties with the fossil fuel industry; we understood we were still operating in a world dependent on oil.

Dependent? That’s just it. We don’t have to be. We’ve got the tech now to do the transformation. And a positive use of AI can make it better and faster. Big Tech has absolutely no excuse.

I hope her view has changed since leaving Microsoft. Her own peer-reviewed study about AI’s potential shows that the only way to have AI-fossils pollution start to be reduced is for AI-renewables to stay on the field while AI-fossils are taken completely off it. As their “plain language” summary of their study puts it:

Across every adoption scenario tested, net emissions fall only when AI’s fossil fuel gains are zero.

In other words, the bottom line is this:

This is what the position of The Climate Movement should be ( and I hope this is now the stance of the Enabled Emissions Campaign).

I would encourage others to consider the following actions against Microsoft, etc, until this is accomplished:

• constant public protests at their offices and other strategic locations;

• boycotts;

• related earned media and social media efforts;

• lawsuits;

• state laws making it illegal.

We will need legal mandates in the end, because left to themselves in a market system some company or companies will always take the dirty money from the fossils.

Is AI-fossils your Field of Action? If so, we need you on it! I strongly encourage you to create CATS (or Climate Action Teams) to support one another.

Others of us must keep going on the various Keep It In The Ground efforts. And we must continue the EV and renewables transformations at break neck speed, so that in the end no one will want their death product.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get going!

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Today’s post is on Biden’s climate legacy focused primarily on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but also briefly on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The reports of the death of Biden’s climate legacy have been greatly exaggerated!”

In my previous post I reviewed how I went along with most of the inside-the-beltway climate policy intelligentsia that championed pricing carbon as the foundational solution to climate change, and how this failed the second of pragmatism's two goals: what can pass.

So how do you get major climate pollution reduction legislation passed? The IRA, still the most consequential piece of climate legislation ever signed into law by far, shows us how.

Instead of making the bad stuff cost more via pricing carbon with a tax or a cap-and-trade system — the intelligentsia’s approach — we make the good stuff cost less.

The IRA Formula That Keeps Winning

The make-good-stuff-cost-less approach, combined with a common-sense strategy to have results generate political support, was the winning combo to get the IRA to become law. You want to have what you’re trying to pass attract the needed votes, and you want those who voted for it to reap political rewards in the form of voter support in their next election. So, votes for policy create votes for reelection — that’s the formula.

Most folks see both electoral campaigns and public policy efforts as politics. From this perspective we have two kinds of politics: electoral-politics and policy-politics.

But it’s important to recognize key differences. Electoral-politics are about getting people elected. Policy-politics are about creating and modifying laws and regulations. Many who are involved in policy-politics don’t get involved in electoral-politics. They are two different skill-sets, and there are laws that differentiate between spending on “express advocacy” (electoral-politics) and “issue advocacy” (policy-politics) and how you can’t mix the two come election time.

Of course, if you don’t win elections, you don’t get to implement your policies. And if you don’t design policies to help you win elections, you may not win the next one. So there can be a delicate dance between these two forms of politics requiring participants to be crafty for good.

So the IRA, Biden’s premier climate law, was designed both to make the good stuff cheap and to generate political support for those responsible for its enactment.

The climate legislation battle between Biden/Harris/Democrats and Trump/MAGA is about as pure a political case study as there ever has been. On one side, it’s Biden’s signature achievement.

On the other side, Trump ran in 2024 vowing to destroy Biden’s “green energy scam.” Once elected, Trump & Co and his MAGA Congress unleashed the fiercest anti-climate effort in the history of humanity against the greatest climate law in US history.

(Go here for a chart of what was kept or modified from the IRA and what was repealed.)

As described below, there are clear lessons learned from what was lost and what survived the Trump/MAGA-Congress onslaught.

To help us see this, Prof. Leah Stokes, one of the key designers of the IRA approach, has done some great analysis in a piece for The Atlantic, on her Substack, and in a working paper with a colleague, Denis Lomov.

Here are my takeaways:

• Biden’s IRA climate law earned votes at the ballot box for those who voted for it, especially in cases where voters could connect it to manufacturing plants and jobs in their communities.

• This is in contrast to pricing-carbon-make-the-bad-stuff-cost-more approaches; those have resulted in political backlash and repeal.

• The stuff in the IRA that created tangible benefits people could see — jobs, manufacturing facilities — has survived the subsequent vicious, stupid attack by Trump/MAGA-Congress. Indeed, Republicans who benefitted helped to protect them.

• The funding that hadn’t yet been spent was really easy to ax because its political benefits hadn’t been realized. Benefits on paper got torched — primarily those for consumers.

• Benefits for clean energy companies were less threatened than the consumer stuff because they were on Capitol Hill fighting for them. Stokes: “The investment tax credit for solar and wind survived, albeit wounded. Battery storage made it out relatively unscathed. And so did the manufacturing tax credits.”

• The benefits for the consumer tax credits (for cars, heat pumps, etc) “were much more diffuse, going to a wide range of households across the country, making it harder to organize and ensure the credits survived.”

Lessons learned:

• Tax credits like those for manufacturing resulting in clear benefits voters could connect to a politician’s vote, i.e., benefits that happened quickly before the next election, will generate electoral support and will be protected from the fiercest opposition.

• In warfare speed kills. For policy implementation, speed saves. Stokes and Lomov: “The clear lesson for future climate policy is that tax credits move dollars and projects faster than grants, and getting dollars out the door is essential” for politicians to reap electoral rewards.

Stokes provides some numbers through an election lens (emphasis in original):

The law [IRA] helped drive $185 billion in private investment into building factories that make solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. And here’s the amazing thing most people don’t know: nine in ten of those facilities are still getting built, under a president who promised to kill them.

Those factories moved votes. We find they lifted Democratic vote share by roughly 1.5 percentage points in 2024 — a swing of 2.5 million votes, in an election where Trump won the popular vote by just 2.3 million.

So the IRA did its job politically, and in keeping with “speed saves” would have done even more if more of its funding was made tangible to voters. As it was, the IRA’s 2.5 million vote swing kept Trump under 50%, and thus from achieving a simple majority of the popular vote, a modest moral victory for our democracy.

Finally, in a quote that warms my ARTC heart, Prof. Stokes provides some wise words:

Perhaps the IRA’s deepest legacy is one Trump cannot easily reverse: it helped make clean energy cheaper. Cost declines work like a ratchet — every factory built and every panel installed pushes prices down the learning curve, and once they fall, they do not climb back up. Since the IRA passed, battery prices have dropped by a third, hitting another record low last year. A tax credit can be repealed. A price decline cannot — the learning is permanent.

What’s Missing From This IRA Analysis?

We should really take to heart all of these valuable lessons Dr. Stokes is helping us see.

But what’s missing? What aren’t we seeing?

Well, how about the elephant in the living room.

We’re missing! The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters are what’s missing.

The Climate Movement, together with Climate Action Supporters, were essential to the production of then-candidate Biden’s climate plan in 2020, and for pushing Democrats to create and pass the IRA once they were in power.

Unfortunately climate all but disappeared from the 2024 election, “climate hushing” and climate cowardice have become a thing for fair-weather Democrats, and The Climate Movement was dispirited and in disarray when Trump and the MAGA Congress launched their rollback efforts in 2025.

We are the solution and we have the potential. But we are not yet what our first characteristic/imperative/goal is calling us to be: big and broad and active enough so that our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — can help us play our part.

For example, we needed to be there with enough tangible political support to protect those benefits that were too diffuse like the consumer tax credits, or the grants that hadn’t gotten out the door and then were frozen by Trump & Co like the “Green Bank” grants for loan programs to help poorer neighborhoods with renewable energy, electric vehicles and net-zero buildings. (The latter may still survive if the “Supreme” Court doesn’t screw our country once again.)

As I’ve said before, it’s time to get our climate action Mojo back — and we can!

Biden’s Climate Legacy More Broadly: IRA + BIL

Finally, a recent Politico analysis also shows that if you look at the two major laws making up Biden’s climate legacy, the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), a huge chunk of funding — $600 billion — hasn’t been torched and is still available.

Out of nearly $1 trillion in grants, contracts and other direct federal outlays provided by Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws, POLITICO found approximately $600 billion dollars remains available for recipients to spend or for federal agencies to award. Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that total $1 trillion — about $60 billion — though many of those cuts are still wrapped up in court challenges.

So $400 billion spent, $600 billion available, and just $60 billion targeted by Trump & Co.

Politico’s graph below breaks down what has been spent and canceled and what remains available. As you can see, 37% has been canceled.

But a hefty majority — 63% — remains. In other words, the reports of the death of Biden’s climate legacy are greatly exaggerated!

The Catalytic-4 Is The Key

The IRA is an example of how each of The Catalytic-4 must work together: (1) The Climate Movement; (2) Climate Action Supporters; (3) ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change, and; (4) Governments-And-Markets. Each are indispensable. But without a Climate Movement that is big and broad and active enough the other Catalytic Sources of Transformation simply will not get the job done, a job that requires speed and scale and a quest for justice.

We must push for victories, defend them, and push for even more. Speed and scale with justice. No rest for the victorious.

But before the victories comes the building of our cause. That’s why the most strategic thing all of us can be doing right now is growing and improving The Climate Movement.

Join us!

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The Fine Art of Not Listening

Beginning in 1997, I spent over two decades in the DC climate/environment/clean energy scene. Over those years I attended many briefings at think tanks and on Capitol Hill (and organized a few myself).

There’s only one of the briefings I attended whose message stood out, that I remember to this day. That’s because it made sense, and no one else was talking abou it.

This briefing wasn’t at one of the marquee think tanks whose events drew hundreds. Nor was it a star studded briefing on Capitol Hill. It was a small little affair for an informal network of those trying to entice Republicans on climate and clean energy. As I recall, there were only about six of us in attendance.

Back in the olden days during my 20+ years in the beltway orbit, all the serious people were in agreement when it came to climate pollution. The most important policy approach was to put an economy-wide price on carbon, whether through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax. This was argued by serious economists, and, well, lots of very serious people.

Did I mention how very serious they were?

So, to be taken seriously, you went along with this group-think. And the most serious, the serious-ist of the serious, the High Priests of Serious, were the neoclassical economists. They strode forth as if they had the secrets of the universe at their beck and call, especially through the black boxes of their computer models, whose pronouncements no fool dare question.

Naturally their favorite approach was, of course, the best — a carbon tax, the most efficient and simplest of policy instruments.

But in a teeny tiny bow to political expedience we could do cap-and-trade if we really had to, another way to price carbon (though theoretically less efficient). The expedience part, a mirage, really, was that we might be able to hide that this was going to cost people money, because it didn’t literally have the odious word “tax” in it, a political poison pill if there ever was one.

We described these two pricing carbon approaches as “market-based mechanisms” to hopefully appeal to Republicans and misdirect them away from that poison pill word, tax.

And so we all confessed what the High Priests of Serious intoned: the best approach is to make bad stuff cost more. Never mind that at the time there was hardly any way the average person was going to be able to extricate themselves from the systemic ways fossil fuels made their lives possible.

The bad stuff is, well, bad. So people should feel bad about their pollution. “Are you sure you feel bad enough? Maybe you should feel more bad.” And after feeling bad they should pay for it with our you’ve-been-bad tax. Time to take your punishment for your evil behavior destroying the planet and your children’s future.

Talk about a winning message!

I confess I was swept up in it, because, well, I’m a serious person, very serious.

A price on carbon. That’s the way to go.

Well, I was wrong.

But there were a few folks who got it right back then who were part of a small, new DC think tank that wasn’t completely caught up in groupthink: ITIF, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

They were focused on the price part, but they flipped the script. Instead of making the bad stuff cost more, let’s make the good stuff cost less.

That was the pitch one of their young staffers, Matthew Stepp, made at a briefing I attended for a small number of center-right groups at the newly formed R Street Institute in 2012.

In January of that year Steep wrote:

We have to invest every public dollar wisely and use our limited public tolerance for subsidy or higher energy prices to maximum effect. The best way to do that is to invest in ways that drive down the real, unsubsidized cost of clean energy as rapidly as possible. In other words, we need to leverage each public dollar we spend to make clean energy cheap.

Two years later, in an oped in The Christian Science Monitor, Steep and Megan Nicholson continued their little drumbeat on the insufficiency of pricing carbon.

They wrote words that today sound prophetic:

The fixation on carbon pricing within the climate debate has distracted the world from adopting a more effective and comprehensive set of climate policies that make economic sense. The debate needs to change for more viable, pragmatic, and high-impact solutions to emerge (emphasis added).

The debate did need to change, but the rest of us beltway types were captured by groupthink’s fine art of not listening.

Pragmatism’s Two Goals

Steep and Nicholson had said the magic word: pragmatism.

I told Steep at the end of the briefing that, while we wouldn’t give up on pricing carbon because it had beltway momentum, we were certainly open to their approach if it gained traction. So I did listen a little bit. I listened enough to remember, but not enough to act.

Truth is, I was never inextricably wed to a carbon tax or even cap-and-trade. I’m too pragmatic for that. And when it comes to legislation, our value of pragmatism has two goals: what works, and what can pass.

Unfortunately, at the time, all of us serious beltway types didn’t listen fully to pragmatism’s wisdom. We heard the first goal, but, amazingly for serious smart beltway people, not the second: what can pass. Given all the complex neoclassical mathematical formulas run by the computerized black boxes, given the math fetish of policy types, you think we could do the simplest of equations: 50 + 1.

I mean, isn’t that our frikkin’ job, what can pass?

I even had the wisdom of regular folk outside the beltway trying to get me to listen. A few years earlier we had conducted focus groups asking evangelicals what would it take for them to purchase clean energy. Their response: make it cheaper than the polluting stuff.

At the time I was disappointed. Why wasn’t their children’s health, why wasn’t the climate threat, enough of a reason to pay more? Well, they wanted those benefits, too. But they still wanted clean energy to cost less. They wanted both. And why not?

Unfortunately, my pragmatism didn’t push me to see that pricing carbon only achieved the first goal, what works (and, as we all knew but chose to ignore, not that well).

But that goal is worse than worthless if you can’t achieve the second goal — what can pass. Why worse? Because we wasted over a decade’s worth of time, effort, and money to push the unpassable.

Just because it works doesn’t mean it will pass. Politically we built our own Potemkin Village, and only fooled ourselves.

Here’s the irony to the story. Renewables, especially solar, did get much cheaper, as seen above.

But it wasn’t the US that made renewables cheaper. It was China. And they did it not only through innovation. They did it with massive government investment in production because it was in their national interest to manufacture their way out of fossil dependence and the pollution causing societal unrest. They did it through cut-throat domestic competition between Chinese solar companies and supplying the world with the results. But that’s a story for another day.

As for those of us in The Climate Movement, we are not simply guided by what can be achieved, what can pass today. In the policy-political sausage-making process we must push for more and then take what we can get (what can pass), even as we simultaneously use our moral power to build the people power and the staying power (P³) to demand what our other values of justice and love and sustainability require of us. Our pragmatism must always be combined with our other values.

With our P³ we must work to change the art of what’s possible so it becomes bold enough to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. We must make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our just future come faster. Join us!

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In earlier posts I’ve discussed how AI can be a problem, what types of AI could help society with the speed and scale needed to overcome climate change, and how AI’s potential to help is not being matched with the needed investments and strategic direction by society through our governments.

In this post I want to give a taste of how AI is already helping to overcome climate change, but not yet at speed and scale.

The Future Is Already Here

AI is already being deployed in useful ways. We don’t have to wait to get started in a big way with AI. According to one recent study, current, proven, off-the-shelf AI can reduce climate pollution by 5-10% by 2030.

Here’s a sampling of illustrative examples of how AI can help now.

» Electricity

• Improve electrical grids, integrate renewables into smart grids, and better predict user demand.

One example is how AI via the Google company Tapestry is helping PJM, the largest grid operator in North America with 67 million customers, speed up the application and interconnection process for renewables:

By automating and improving the data verification process for things like land rights, equipment, and grid impacts, we aim to reduce the burden on energy developers and PJM planners, and significantly reduce the time it takes to process new project applications.

With the application of Tapestry’s tools and insights, the time it takes to process new project applications will significantly reduce, allowing new capacity to come online far faster. And with solar, wind, and storage project capacity making up ~ 97% of the PJM interconnection queue, we will also support the rapid and reliable integration of more carbon-free energy sources onto the grid.

Husk Power Systems offers a non-US example of how AI helps microgrids:

In Africa and India, Husk Power Systems provides “pay-as-you-go” 100% renewable power to off-grid and weak-grid communities that is 30% cheaper than the alternative: diesel generation. Husk estimates that its AI model enables it to predict user demand with 80% accuracy across its microgrids, thereby improving capacity utilization, reducing costs, delivering lower prices, and guiding capital investment in additional capacity (emphasis added).

» Transportation

• AI optimization of traffic light timing to reduce pollution from idling.

Seattle and other major cities around the world are partnering with Google’s Green Light program to use AI to optimize traffic lights, reducing climate pollution by 10% and stops by 30%.

• AI optimization of the transportation of goods via improved freight shipping.

A recent study found climate pollution from freight shipping could be cut 10-15% from the three changes pictured below:

• AI helping to reduce global warming from air flights.

Condensation trails from jets or “contrails” form when water crystallizes around soot from jet exhaust. Such contrails produce 35% of global warming from air flights. But a recent study from a partnership between American Airlines and Google AI found that having jets fly in less humid air resulted in 62% fewer contrails and 69% less global warming from these flights.

While this solution to contrails sounds simple, implementation is incredibly complex involving AI sifting huge datasets utilizing sophisticated customized algorithms.

» Business and Manufacturing

• Helping businesses map and reduce their pollution, including in their supply chains and providing better demand forecasting so retailers can optimize inventory levels and manufacturers can avoid overproduction.

One company assisting businesses is CO2 AI. According to a recent report by the Boston Consulting Group, a global health care company seeking to reduce climate pollution in its supply chain by 20% began working with CO2 AI, which identified “50 times more factors” that would help it significantly exceed its goal.

Concerning inventory and production, a recent paper highlights the benefits of AI in the retail, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors:

In the retail sector, AI-driven demand forecasting helps businesses optimize inventory levels, prevent stockouts, and reduce excess inventory costs (Sánchez-Partida et al., 2018). For example, major retailers leverage AI algorithms to predict demand fluctuations during seasonal sales, adjusting procurement and distribution strategies accordingly. Similarly, in manufacturing, AI assists in production planning by forecasting raw material requirements and reducing lead times, ultimately improving operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness (Sboui et al., 2002; Khan et al., 2024). In the healthcare industry, AI-driven forecasting has proven instrumental in managing pharmaceutical supply chains, predicting demand for critical medications, and optimizing hospital inventory (Sharifmousavi et al., 2024).

» Agriculture

• Improve agriculture production and efficiency, such as combining AI with robotics, drones, cameras, satellites, and weather data to inform yield forecasting, disease risk, quality inspections, and food waste reduction.

Mineral, an Alphabet company, has designed an AI-powered system, recently purchased by Driscoll’s, the world’s leading berry company, that includes a solar-powered “rover” equipped with sophisticated cameras and AI perception tools to help deliver info on yield predictions, plant ripeness, disease risk, and weed presence.

Another company, Taranis, offers similar capabilities. They have recently partnered with Syngenta, a global leader in agricultural innovation, to “equip agricultural retailers with AI-powered crop management solutions.” As Syngenta’s head of Digital Agriculture and Sustainable Solutions, Paul Blackman, put it:

“Instead of going out and scouting every field, you can sit behind your computer and, within 24 hours, see the report from what that drone captured.”

With ultra-high-resolution capabilities,

the platform’s generative AI agronomy agent, AgAssistant, translates imagery into prioritized recommendations, including severity scoring, economic impact, and suggested interventions.

We Must Make This Future Come Faster

The business case for these examples of AI-Climate Action can sell themselves. But on its own the market won’t take up this tech fast enough or at the level needed. Speed and scale requires The Catalytic-4 working together — The Climate Movement, Climate Action Supporters, ARTC, and Government-&-Markets.

The Climate Movement in particular must push the other three, especially governments, to create policies and incentives for adoption of promising AI-Climate Action tech at scale as fast as humanly possible.

But to have our people power be strong enough we must continue to grow our movement to 400 million worldwide and 16 million in the US. Join us!

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This is a continuation of our AI & Climate discussion, begun with our earlier post discussing various pitfalls to the AI & Climate Action relationship.

Bottom Line Up Front

To overcome climate change we need speed and scale of transformation the likes of which the world has never seen. AI, properly and safely utilized, can help. While we don’t need it and mustn’t wait for it to get going in a big way, with AI we can make our future come faster and help ensure we create speed and scale in time.

But speed and scale must also create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything, and we must ensure that AI helps bring this about as we overcome climate change.

Combining Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence to Turbocharge Strategic ARTC

As I briefly mentioned in my last post, ARTC, the accelerating rate of tech change, part of The Catalytic-4 as our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, is powered by the continual production of useful knowledge generated by the ARTC-combo: (1) specialization; (2) nonrivalry of knowledge, i.e., its endlessly copyable and useable nature, and; (3) market competition. All of this is responsible for 85-90% of economic growth, which provides the resources for more people to participate in the ARTC-combo via their particular forms of specialization.

Underlying all of this is the human brain and human intelligence. The more brains we have working and collaborating on it, and the more people communicating about it, the more chances we have to increase the production of useful knowledge leading to inventions and innovations that keep ARTC and prosperity humming along.

So now we have the possibility of supplementing human intelligence with various kinds of artificial intelligence, including machine-learning, agentic-AI, and artificial general intelligence or AGI. These can help us turbocharge strategic climate action.

What is machine learning?

Let’s let IBM explain it:

Machine learning is the subset of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on algorithms that can “learn” the patterns of training data and, subsequently, make accurate inferences about new data. This pattern recognition ability enables machine learning models to make decisions or predictions without explicit, hard-coded instructions.

Even if all we did was take advantage of this basic form of machine learning it could be a tremendous help for climate action.

What is agentic-AI?

Again, IBM:

Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.

Unlike traditional AI models, which operate within predefined constraints and require human intervention, agentic AI exhibits autonomy, goal-driven behavior and adaptability. The term “agentic” refers to these models’ agency, or, their capacity to act independently and purposefully.

So agentic-AI is a more advanced form of machine learning that is autonomous, proactive, specialized, and adaptable.

Agentic-AI can really help us speed things up even more, help us make our future come faster.

What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

Ok, so what is AGI? Once again, IBM:

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical stage in the development of machine learning (ML) in which an artificial intelligence (AI) system can match or exceed the cognitive abilities of human beings across any task.

One crucial aspect needs to be added. AGI is “unaided,” meaning it can go about its business without any help from humans.

AGI doesn’t exist yet. But it will within our climate action timeframe, which extends throughout the remainder of this Century. We must take advantage, with proper safeguards, of each step along the way to AGI and apply such advances to climate action as they become available.

Again, to be crystal clear, all of this presupposes everything is being done safely. Safety first. And, as discussed in my earlier post, AI data centers must be powered by their own clean power and cooled in ways that don’t harm local water supply.

Not Just Clean Tech

One thing we must not do is have our thinking about how AI can help captured in a clean tech silo, as if that’s the only way we can overcome climate change.

First, broadly, we must support government R&D in basic science to help ensure that new possibilities don’t run dry. We can’t predict unpredictable scientific advances. We must work to find them.

But we must not just support basic R&D spending as we’ve done in the past, we also must push for the use of AI in advancing basic science.

Second, anything that uses energy must be improved so it uses less or even creates its own.

But efficiency doesn’t necessarily equate to significant pollution reductions and less environmental impacts. That’s because any efficiency gains can be offset by what’s called the rebound effect. This can happen when people use more of something because efficiency gains have made it cheaper, given that it takes less energy and/or less stuff to achieve the same result.

What we must do is drive efficiency to a point where it completely overwhelms the rebound effect. Even more, we should strive to have the amount of energy and stuff needed to create prosperous sustainability for everyone be 10% or less than what we use today.

AI can make a major contribution by helping drive the needed invention and innovation across just about the entire spectrum of processes and products our economies produce.

AI can also help improve ways our societies function, such as improving traffic and travel patterns, and how we adapt to climate impacts and build resilience to withstand them.

Finally, AI can help us better manage our relationship with the rest of nature, including natural climate solutions and helping to create balance and harmony between human civilization and nature as prosperous sustainability requires.

What’s Happening? Nowhere To Go But Up

Let me start with this caveat: for all I know there could be many efforts going on with the human intelligence-AI-climate action nexus that aren’t being written about and shared publicly (including in China).

Be that as it may, from what I’ve learned so far there are some valiant efforts by volunteers that are absolutely needed, and the specifics will be covered in our next post.

But my overall response to what I’ve been able to discover is this: are you frikkin’ kidding me.

It’s absolutely great that we have folks volunteering. Volunteers are the only way The Climate Movement will become big and broad and active enough. And I’m so grateful folks have created this particular climate/AI Field of Action where their gifts, abilities, knowledge, and experience can be brought to bear together in overcoming climate change.

And I’m also grateful to well meaning philanthropists providing funds for small research grants.

Lots of needed learning can take place.

A standing ovation to all participating in these efforts! Thank you! You are helping lay a foundation that the rest of us must build upon.

But from the perspective of society’s response to climate change, this is woefully inadequate. These valiant volunteers and supporting philanthropists can’t create the speed and scale needed in this particular Field of Action.

Businesses also have an important role to play. They may be footing much of the bill for advances in machine learning, agentic-AI, and AGI. That’s because they see profits in their future.

But we can’t expect those in a market system where profits rule the roost to do anything other than seek those profits. If they are going to help with this particular climate action partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence they must get paid or achieve some other form of compensation or consideration or see future profits (e.g. products customers want).

Governments exist to create and/or facilitate the Common Good. Businesses may indirectly create some Common Good as they seek profits (the old Invisible Hand). Volunteers are crucial to the Common Good, as is the case with The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters. But much of our job is to push governments to do their job, including structuring markets to create the Common Good that volunteers and the Invisible Hand cannot.

Governments must lead for this partnership between human intelligence and artificial intelligence to fulfill its potential in overcoming climate change. They should be funding this work in a major way. And, again, The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters should push and support politicians to do so.

Some of us in The Climate Movement — elected and appointed officials, their staffs, relevant businesses and NGOs, etc — need to propose and enact legislation; this is one of your Fields of Action. And the rest of us need to support them. This should happen at both the state and federal levels in the US and in countries all over the world.

Finally, nations should create collaborations to further speed up and enhance these capabilities.

When it comes to the human-intelligence-artificial-intelligence-climate-action nexus, it’s time for societies to get serious, and for them to find ways to work together. The Climate Movement must lead the way in creating the popular support necessary. Join us!

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Hope for achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — comes from the Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation, or The Catalytic Four.

They are:

1. The Climate Movement

2. Climate Action Supporters

3. ARTC or the accelerating rate of technological change, and

4. Governments-and-Markets

All are indispensable. They must be interrelated.

I haven’t yet written a ton on our Third Catalytic Source, ARTC, so I thought it was about time to start the discussion of one way ARTC can contribute: AI.

But first, a quick ARTC review.

ARTC Recap

Today’s accelerating rate of tech change wasn’t inevitable. Nor was it the result of some gradual historical process. As the graphs below suggest, tech change, the major driver of economic growth (responsible for about 85-90%) shot up like a rocket during the Industrial Revolution and continues its path straight up.

ARTC happened and keeps going due to the continual production of useful knowledge generated by what I call the “ARTC-Combo”: (1) specialization; (2) nonrivalry of knowledge, i.e., its endlessly copyable and useable nature, and; (3) market competition.

This combo isn’t stopping, isn’t slowing down. It’s speeding up, and AI will send it into hyperdrive.

What The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters need to do is push the ARTC-Combo to create strategic ARTC, i.e., ARTC that helps us achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

AI: Friend or Foe? Support or Oppose? Believe the Hype?

Let me get a few things out of the way first.

» Stop AI?

For those who oppose AI, is there a way to stop it, to put the genie back in the bottle?

NO.

There’s way too much $$ invested. For example, AI data center investment by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Oracle in the US will top $1 trillion next year, about 20% of total US business investment.

Even if AI advancement were to stop in the rest of the world, China would continue to go along its merry way. Given that its rapid advances, now rivaling Western counterparts, has taken place via open source software, if everyone else stopped it would slow them down. But it wouldn’t stop them. Their leader, Xi Jinping, has an expansive vision for AI.

There’s no stopping AI.

» Support or Oppose?

YES.

We should oppose:

• AI data centers that suck up scarce water, drive up electricity bills, and turn on fossil generated electricity, both old coal-burning power plants and new natural gas plants, as I discussed earlier; they must generate and store their own energy with renewables plus storage — not natural gas! — and find ways to keep their hardware cool without draining local water supplies;

• so-called techno-fascism and the current inherent tendencies with AI that make it amenable to fascism and authoritarianism;

• AI development without safeguards that ensure autonomous AI acts within appropriate ethical boundaries, as should artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI) once they exist.

But we should actively support efforts to have AI help us overcome climate change.

» Friend or Foe?

So is AI a friend or foe to The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters, the first and second Catalytic Sources of Transformation?

YES.

Our job is to help make sure that all types of AI are friends and not foes. For some of us, this is our Field of Action, our role, our calling, within The Climate Movement.

» Believe the AI/Climate Hype?

So, how much help should we expect from AI? Should we believe the AI hype about solving climate change?

NO.

As Ramesh Srinivasan and Emily Jacobi recently put it:

We’ve heard repeated promises from leaders like Sam Altman, who says AI will solve climate and affordability crises, if only we feed it enough water, energy and minerals. As technologists who have worked on machine learning tools, we know this to be a fantasy. Machine learning and language models can be helpful tools, but they cannot rewrite the basic facts of material reality.

The AI/Climate hype is just the latest version of what I call the markets-and-techno-magic BS that’s been around for decades: we don’t have to do anything really because the magic of the markets and unknown future tech miracles will swoop in and solve climate right at the last minute when we most need it. This markets-and-techno-magic dodge has been pushed primarily by politicians who didn’t want to do the early heavy lifting on climate action.

Now it’s being deployed by the tech bros, the broligarchy, to justify whatever they need to run the world. They tell us the tech miracle is almost here in the form of AI. Don’t worry, be happy. AI and the broligarchy will save our butts.

We need to make one thing crystal clear: we aren’t looking for AI and the tech bros to save us.

We Just Can’t Wait to Create Speed and Scale

Why isn’t climate being overcome right now at speed and scale? It’s not because we don’t have the tech to do so today. We do. We already have the tech we need.

Even though helpful tech is getting better every day, we don’t need to wait for better tech and cheaper tech to get going in a big way. We already have profits and price working in our favor — an absolutely huge accomplishment decades in the making! This means market dynamics can work for us.

But the fossils and their political lackeys and the physical, political, regulatory, and bureaucratic infrastructure of the 20th Century energy systems are holding us back. The fossils will do everything they can to wring out every last drop of profit from their death products, such as over $93 billion in windfall profits from the Iran War, almost doubling their profits from the previous year as climate impacts heat up. So we’ve got lots of work to do to have markets working for us like they should. This won’t happen without The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters pushing the fourth Catalytic Sources of Transformation, Governments-and-Markets, to do so.

We can’t wait for AI’s help with new and better solutions before we get going in a big way on speed and scale — and we don’t have to.

At the same time, we also must push for our Third Catalytic Source of Transformation, ARTC, to play its part and help us achieve speed and scale: strategic ARTC, focused-climate-action ARTC.

Real Justice, Not Technoblesse Oblige From the Broligarchy

And not just speed and scale. We can’t be for big and fast and unjust. We are to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. As we achieve speed and scale we must do so in ways that also achieve the three actions of justice: stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better. We must bring our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — to bear on our quest for justice. We won’t accept crumbs from the broligarchy, no faux technoblesse oblige.

AI & Climate Action

So with all these caveats, all these potential dangers, can AI help us?

Not if we passively sit around waiting for it to. Not if we simply say No because it’s easier to simplistically oppose stuff.

Thankfully, there are some who see the realistic possibilities for AI to help us with climate action and are working to make them happen.

We should actively help scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs working for better approaches vi AI, including those who are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes striving upon this, their Field of Action.

And what are these efforts? Stay tuned!

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In the US there’s a climate cowardice that is infecting Democratic candidates, driven by political elites, talking heads, and party pooh-bahs. These climate cowardice vectors, these climate silencers, just want candidates to shut the ____ up about climate change.

Unfortunately, the infection from these climate cowardice vectors has spread. Communication by congressional Democrats about climate has decreased 80% since 2021 as measured by their press releases.

I can hear the climate cowardice vectors now, telling us all not to worry our pretty little heads: “Oh, once they get into power candidates can do some stuff on climate change as long as it’s below the radar.”

So how do we do speed and scale below the radar?

These guys like short answers, so here’s one: we don’t.

Anyone impeding speed and scale thwarts our vision, purpose, and Major Goal to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

In other words, they’re working for the wrong team, whether they recognize it or not.

Climate Action Is For Winners, Climate Cowardice For Losers

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s 2035 Initiative tested the climate cowardice claims.

First, the 2035 Initiative found what Yale/GM and others have found (and what I’ve already written about), that climate action is a low priority overall right now. So while the climate cowardice vectors get this one right, their response is all wrong.

When support for action on the greatest moral cause of our time lacks intensity for most voters, a leader doesn’t act like a coward and run away from it. A leader finds a way to lead, to generate support for what’s right.

Furthermore, and importantly, that it is a low priority overall doesn’t mean it’s not a top priority for some, or worse, that it costs support.

This is where the climate cowardice vectors, the climate silencers are dead wrong.

Instead, talking in favor of climate action increases support much more than it drives opposition in voting. In other words, it will net votes.

People open to voting for a Democrat:

• for 66% their vote is based on who supports government climate action;

• 8% oppose.

Even Republican candidates can win on climate action. In their potential pool of voters:

• 52% support climate action and vote on it;

• 14% oppose.

Further, as seen below, being stronger is better. Voters are ready to reward climate champions. When asked whether they would support candidates that make it a top priority in comparison to just a priority, being a champion wins each relevant category:

“committed Democrats“ +9.5 (versus +8.4)

“open to voting for a Democrat” +7.2 (versus +5.9)

“open to voting Republican” +1.7 (versus -0.1)

Of course, even committed Democrats may not show up. Being a climate champion no doubt can increase turnout, make sure this +9.5 of committed Ds are motivated to show up, and get the +7.2 open to voting Democratic excited enough to do so as well. These numbers win elections.

So the climate cowardice vectors infecting candidates are setting Democrats up for defeat, whereas being a climate champion can lead to victory.

“But We Need to be Talking About ___________!”

The climate cowardice vectors want candidates to talk about affordability and healthcare. These are the top two issues by far for the midterms.

Should candidates talk about affordability?

Duh.

Should candidates talk about health care?

More duh.

Nobody’s talking about not talking about affordability and healthcare. We’re talking about both/and, not either/or.

So let’s talk about affordability and climate action!

Cue the fantastic Leah Stokes:

We can all see our electricity bills are too high. And Trump is pushing them higher by forcing families to bankroll expensive coal plants past their planned retirements. The tab so far: more than $300 million, tacked onto power bills across the country. One Michigan plant alone costs families $615,000 a day. Ratepayers could end up paying $6 billion a year to keep dirty, overpriced energy on life support.

Trump’s war in the Middle East has already cost the average family more than $525 at the pump. Add higher electricity and gas bills, and the Trump energy tax is on track to reach roughly $1,500 per household this year.

So Trump/MAGA are raising costs by forcing Americans to give corporate welfare to Big Producers of Polluting Products. They’re raising costs at the gas pump with their criminal, unnecessary war.

By contrast, in most situations clean energy is the lowest cost option for new electricity generation. And electrifying transportation via EVs, etc, is the way we’re going to ditch our oil dependence and stop US involvement in Middle East wars. That’s what real leadership looks like.

Let’s talk about health and climate!

Trump/MAGA are attacking health care coverage and increasing the uninsured, they are attacking clean energy and giving corporate welfare to big polluters, increasing pollution that sends kids to the hospital, they are attacking climate action as deadly heat and wildfires ravage our neighborhoods and pollute our skies.

Take away healthcare coverage as you help send us to the Emergency Room — that’s the Trump/MAGA healthcare plan.

Democrats can be healthcare champions and climate champions at the same time and connect the dots on how they are related.

In a nutshell: Democrats can be smart, courageous, and victorious — or not. They can be leaders with guts and win, or wimps and lose.

Our Part

We need to be electing climate champions, not climate cowards. But we can’t expect them to be champions all on their own. We must also play our part by growing The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters to provide them the political support they need to get the job done. We are in this together.

And how do we do this? We break the Climate Talk Taboo and actually talk to people.

As I posted previously, a Yale/GM poll found that if someone a person likes and respects asks them to volunteer for climate action, the numbers go up significantly across the political spectrum.

Here are the numbers for Democrats:

• Liberal Ds +43

• Moderate Ds +32

As for voting, my fellow Substacker Antonia Scatton has recently reminded us of what’s been known for decades: word-of-mouth recommendations from people we know and respect is the most powerful influencer of all, given that historically 9 out of 10 voters make their decision based on conversations with people they know.

In other words, we have the moral power and we are growing our people power to put climate champions in office. And our staying power will guarantee that our people will rule the roost for the rest of our lives, knowing we’ve got their backs.

So let’s get going. Join us!

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No, We’re Not

We aren’t going to let all of the terrible political stuff happening in the US and around the world lead us to despair, or worse, indifference.

We aren’t going to let the opponents of true freedom keep us from our climate callings, to be Artist-Athletes in the greatest moral cause, the greatest cause of freedom of our time.

We aren’t going to let climate impacts drain our energy for action.

We aren’t going to let all the hope-stealing personas — the doomsters and the pessimizers and the fatalists and the deniers and the grifters and the silencers — steal our hope.

We aren’t going to let down who and what we love. To hell with that.

As I’ve discussed previously, right now there is a lack of intensity in The Climate Movement. But when kindled, our intensity will help beat back such despair and propel us forward. And indifference? To hell with that.

Desire

To fan the flames of intensity we have a secret resource: desire. Our desires create intensity. It’s time to tap into our desires and unleash our intensity propensity.

Here’s what we desire, and we’re not going to stop until we have them.

The last one, the L-word, is at the heart of our Movement and keeps us going when all else fails us.

All of this is what will drive our climate action forward until we have overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for every and everything. This vision, our vision, is what we desire.

Our desires make us passionate.

Our desires for our values also create within us a depth that will see us through.

Embodied Desire

Desire drives us to embody the reality of justice, beauty, creativity, freedom — all our values.

Our desires brook no mere abstractions, no endless talk about such values that goes nowhere, no intellectual tail-chasing. If they never become real, then they are worse than worthless. As the old saying goes, talk is cheap. But not just cheap. It’s deadly in the real world, an inaction-enabler.

Desire is the antidote.

Desire drives action. The reality of what we desire, embodied desire, creates a better world, especially for those we love. We desire our values come to life because of our loving relationships, because that’s what we want for who and what we love. Like those who have come before us, we desire a better future for our children and their children and every generation thereafter, which is why we affirm the Better Future Covenant.

We Already Have What We Need

Friends and fellow Climate Action Artist-Athletes, we have what we need to become what we are called to be.

From out of the destructive swirl and untapped potential of our current political moment we will arise like the phoenix, driven by our desires, propelled by our passion, sustained by our love.

And from our desires will come our three forms of power to change the world on all of our Olympian Fields of Action, especially on the field of politics and policy, on which we all have a role to play.

Driven by our desires, our three forms of power will deliver the needed speed and scale of transformation that, guided and empowered by our desires, simultaneously creates a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

Desire & Hope

My friends, your desire may be visible for all the world to see.

Or not.

Maybe even you don’t know it’s there. Maybe even you think it’s gone. Snuffed out by the daily grind, the God-awful news, the ascendancy of those profiting from our destruction.

Let me tell you something. If you’re reading this, you care. You give a damn. That’s passion from desire. You give a damn because of your desire for a better world. That’s where climate action to achieve our vision will come from. From our desire. It’s still there, waiting to become passion and action.

Climate action is hot with desire. And from this desire and the action it spawns comes hope. Embodied desire is the heat of hope. And when we combine our desire with the desire of others who want the same thing we become the hope we’ve been waiting for. With the power of our collective desire we make hope happen and our future come faster.

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The Story I’m Telling About Power, Politics, Religion, & Climate Action

When taken together, my last six posts offer some pretty engaging fare, with an overarching narrative. Climate action requires political power, which must come from our people-power; even as our intensity is currently in the toilet, we have the potential to grow both our intensity-potential and our numbers-potential to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. In the US, faith communities and faith adherents are essential to this, but they haven’t yet fulfilled their callings. Religion and politics can be a combustible mix, but faith values transcend such concern, calling followers to lead society’s climate efforts as part of The Climate Movement.

Climate Action & Politics

Because of the need for speed and scale, climate action is inescapably political. Well past time for all of us in The Climate Movement to own this and use our moral power and people-power to change the calculus of politicians. We must form electoral alliances to defeat opponents of climate action and those not committed to bold action. That means defeating all Republicans and all fossil- and fair-weather Democrats.

People-Power

If we want to impact politicians and the policies they enact we’ve got to have people-power. In this two-part series I show two things. The first is where such people-power will come from as visualized in this chart.

The Climate Movement is what will push climate action forward. The Movement 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.

Second, I show the power potential we have as demonstrated by recent polls, including the results below from registered voters. On climate action, 58% of Liberal Democrats, 31% of Moderate Ds, 9% of Moderate Republicans and 6% of Conservative Rs will only vote for candidates who will supports increasing renewables. In tight primary races and general election swing districts, the pro-climate-action voters are the difference between winning and losing. As we grow the numbers and intensity of The Climate Movement, so too will we grow those who will only vote for politicians supporting strong climate action.

Climate Action Intensity: We’re Low, But We’ll Grow

If we want to impact politics we’ve got to up our intensity, something covered in the next two posts (here and here). The numbers tell us what we already know in our gut: our Climate Movement intensity is in the toilet.

Well, it’s time to get our climate action mojo back. We must have our passion ignite both our intensity-potential and our numbers-potential.

We must let our values of love, justice, beauty, and freedom create such passion within us. And then we must break the “Climate Talk Taboo” and reach out to others.

A Fall 2025 Yale/GM poll asked if folks would volunteer their time for climate action. Then the poll followed up with another question. If asked by someone they like and respect would they volunteer. Here’s how much the numbers go up:

• Conservative Republicans +9 (from 0 to 9)

• Moderate Republicans +14 (from 7 to 20)

• Moderate Democrats +32 (from 9 to 41)

• Liberal Democrats +43 (from 11 to 54)

• All +24 (from 7 to 31)

In total, 31% would volunteer for climate action if asked by a friend or family member. This is in keeping with results from other polls suggesting that the Climate Movement Potential in the US is about 30%. Given that our goal is 5%, we’ve got a big pool to recruit from! We gotta break the Climate Talk Taboo and start asking.

The Faithful Must Be Faithful — And Political

There’s an age old adage: don’t mix religion and politics. Well, Republicans have taken a sledge hammer, a blow torch, a chisel, heck, I think they may have even taken nuclear bombs to this shibboleth.

Climate action folks must nix this as well. Faith communities and faith adherents must recognize two things: (1) essential climate action is inescapably political due to the need for speed and scale, and; (2) all faith adherents and faith communities are called by their values to be a part of The Climate Movement.

But right now in the US some misperceptions and all the seemingly more immediate challenges of our current moment are blocking faith communities from realizing our climate potential. We must overcome them.

A promising way to organize and support climate action within faith communities is through Faith-CATS or Faith-Climate Action Teams. These are small groups that meet together and support one another in action: (1) meet; (2) support; (3) act. For many folks, this will be your primary Field of Action.

Conclusion

There are lots of obstacles to overcome for The Climate Movement to become its destiny: the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

But we will overcome them.

The catch is, we must do so faster.

We will realize our potential and exercise our power as we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!

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Preface

My audience for www.climatehopetogether.com is all of us in The Climate Movement, those who should be, those who will be, as well as those who support climate action, or Climate Action Supporters. I try hard to write to my entire audience, not only in my country, the United States, but around the world.

But today I’m casting my eyes on one part of my audience.

Faith folks in the US, you see me lookin’. Yep. I’m looking right at you. Why? We’re not realizing our potential. And we absolutely must.

Why? Two reasons.

1. The climate challenge is the greatest moral cause of our time.

2. The destiny of The Climate Movement is to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

Faith folks — we have a tremendous roll to play in this, including contributing 12 million of us to The Climate Movement. But as of yet we’re not doing it.

I think some misperceptions might be getting in the way, as well as many things clamoring for our attention right now (see conclusion). We’ve got to deal with anything blocking us and get to it. Time’s a wastin’, time we don’t have to waste.

Misperceptions Are Stifling Us.

Misperception #1:

Do we think that “The Climate Movement” is something outside, distinct from, our faith communities?

It’s not!

Misperception #2

Do we think that “climate movement people” or climate organizations or environmental organizations are in charge of The Climate Movement?

They’re not!

Misperception #3

Do we think that climate leadership comes from those in charge, those outside of us, and so we’re waiting for them to lead as we go about our other “religious” stuff?

We mustn’t!

Dispelling These Spells

Underlying these misperceptions is an “Us and Them” mentality. But there’s no “them”! There’s only us. It’s an “Us and Us” kinda situation. Not “Us and Them.” There’s’ plenty of overlap, and we’re in it together.

We’re not distinct and separate silos, so that we have a faith community silo and over there somewhere is the climate movement silo. And when we’re in the bogus faith-silo we put on our faith-self, and if we somehow find our way over to the other one we put on our climate-self.

And if we do imagine ourselves venturing into this bogus climate movement silo, we might think we have to shed our faith-selves when we enter.

But it’s our faith that gives us so much of our moral power! We can’t be Superman in our faith community, with all of the moral superpower it provides, and change into regular clothes and become Clark Kent as we enter the “climate movement silo,” hiding our strengths, hiding our light under a basket (Mt. 5:15-16). Our faith-selves and our climate-selves are one and the same.

There’s no faith-us and a separate climate-us. It’s always just us.

As for misperception #2, who’s in charge, the answer is: no one. No one is in charge of any movement, including The Climate Movement. So waiting for the person in charge of The Climate Movement is like waiting for Gadot. There’s no such person.

Someone might say: “If no one’s in charge, then everyone’s in charge.” Uh, yea. We’re all responsible to act.

As for misperception #3, climate organizations and environmental organizations and the people that make them up may indeed provide excellent leadership, strategic leadership for The Climate Movement. Climate campaigns may do the same. But that doesn’t mean they’re in charge of the larger Movement.

So let’s consider again the two points at the beginning. First, living a moral life is part of our traditions. We can’t be passive on the greatest moral cause of our time!

Second, the Climate Movement’s destiny to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement means the Movement must become its first characteristic/imperative/goal: big and broad and active enough.

In the US that’s simply not going to happen without faith folks. We are 70% of the population. Are we really supposed to just wait for someone we think of as outside our communities to tell us what to do about the greatest moral cause of our time?

I’m not saying listening to others would be wrong. We should listen to anyone trying to get us on the right path towards climate action.

What I’m saying is that this way of thinking makes us passive. It makes us completely miss the potential, the capacity within us, within our traditions and communities, that we have more to offer than just showing up every once in awhile when we’re told.

It’s time shake off these misperceptions and wake up to our own potential. Time to claim our climate calling.

If you feel you really need an Invitation, that you need to be asked, well, then, here you go. I’m inviting you. I’m asking. You’re invited! The party won’t be the same without you. Literally.

Our Callings Are Not Passive

Because of these misperceptions, and possibly other factors (see conclusion), way too many of us faith folk are in passive mode. But our faith traditions call us to a variety of actions that are anything but passive:

• create justice,

• have compassion,

• embody selfless service,

• heal the world,

• create peace,

• live in harmony,

• protect life and end suffering,

• live in and live out the Better Future Covenant.

Where the faith and climate circles overlap, all of these actions are in that shared space. This is our kairos climate moment. It’s decision time. But to do what?

Just Say No to the Individual Carbon Footprint Scam

I know what some of you are thinking.

“Ok, yes, our faith is calling us do something. Let’s all do better on our carbon footprints. Now where did I put that list of things individuals can do to reduce his or her pollution.”

Aaaahhh! Frikkin’ NO.

As I wrote about in an earlier post, we must dump the individual carbon footprint scam made popular by Big Oil to distract us from their culpability.

Valiant efforts by lone individuals to act on their own to reduce outcomes that are an inevitable byproduct of systems in which they are enmeshed, is, at the end of the day, delusional.

You can’t do it on your own. It’s crazy to think you can.

Stop Being Conned. Start Being True

Stop being manipulated and played for a sucker. Stop allowing the real culprits trap you in harmful guilt, ineffectually acting on your own as they continue to profit from products that foster death.

Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples he was sending them out as sheep among wolves, warning them to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16; cf. Lk 16:8).

With the climate challenge we must not be conned as marks, but rather be shrewd for good as we are true our moral calling. Together we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Only working together can we do this. Time to be true to who we are.

Responsible, But Not Accountable: Time to Join

As an individual you are not accountable for climate change. An individual cannot cause a systemic aggregate problem. It is the Big Producers of Polluting Products and the governments that allow them and who are them who are accountable.

But we are all responsible for joining with others in collective action to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

The only way we’re going to do this is by working together. It’s one of the hallmarks of faith communities. If anyone should understand the need and the power of collective action it is faith adherents. When you make a sustained commitment to collective action over time to do this, to fulfill this responsibility, you become a part of The Climate Movement. Ta Da! You’re in!

So there’s really only one thing listed on an individual’s climate action To Do List. Want to know what to do? Join The Climate Movement and work together.

Time to Lead

Faith communities in the US — we need to be leading! We don’t have to wait for others in The Climate Movement to lead. It’s time for us to step up! Time is running out to make a difference on the greatest moral challenge of our time.

The nature of the climate challenge and the need for climate action is this: we must act in the present to (1) avoid a terrible future and (2) create a better one. Time to make this better future come faster.

As such, climate change is something tailor-made for faith leadership for many reasons. I’ll highlight two: wisdom and justice.

» Wisdom

We are guardians of wisdom, painstakingly gathered from millennia of life’s lessons and stored in our traditions. Science is another great source of wisdom, providing us facts about our world that also guide our behavior, in this case the nature of the climate threat. With our response to climate change we are partaking from both of these great fonts of wisdom. When facing the climate challenge, wisdom counsels us to do exactly what the nature of the climate threat calls us to do: act in the present to avoid a terrible future and create a better one. Time to be shrewd for good.

» Justice

The classic definition of justice is to give each their due. Faith traditions have strong calls for justice, because each person is due dignity and respect. Poverty and unjust treatment of the powerless are denials of dignity. Climate change, wherein those most vulnerable who have done nothing to create this threat will nevertheless suffer the greatest harm, is a grave injustice. The innocent killed. The guilty rewarded. On its own this is enough for faith communities to help lead The Climate Movement.

Creating Power For Good

As faith communities we are uniquely poised to be major contributors to the creation of The Climate Movement’s three forms of power: moral power, people power, and staying power, or P³.

• Moral Power — The Climate Movement is a moral movement because climate change is a wrong that must be made right. Climate action is the right thing to do. Because this is inherent and self-evident, The Climate Movement doesn’t need a moral “seal of approval” from faith traditions. But there is no doubt that faith communities can bolster the perception and recognition of our effort as a moral movement. Pope Francis and Pope Leo have been tremendous leaders in this regard, lending their moral stature and the teachings of their tradition to our cause.

• People Power — The more faith adherents recognize climate action as part of their calling, the more The Climate Movement will grow. Our goal is to have 5% of the US population be a part of The Climate Movement by 2030. That’s about 16 million folks. Faith communities in the US are around 70%, and 70% of 16 million is 11.2 million. But we should do a little more. So I’d say faith communities should contribute at least 12 million.

  US Goal: 12 million Faith Adherents in The Climate Movement

  As I’ve covered before, polls show that the Climate Movement Potential in the US is about 30%. So 12 million? Easy-peasy. Polls also show that when folks are asked to do climate actions by someone the like and respect, the numbers increase by 24%, with Conservative Republicans at +9, Moderate Rs at +14, Moderate Democrats at +32, and Liberal Ds at +43. If there’s one thing faith communities know how to do, it’s ask people to do stuff.

• Staying Power — Our communities have been around for thousands of years. I’m hard pressed to think of any other institutions in society that come close to this. We know how to have staying power. We’ve helped provide it in social movements like the Civil Rights Movement. We can do so again.

I’ll say it flat out: every person of faith and every faith community in this country and around the world is called to be a part of The Climate Movement. What happens to our climate is not just the province of a select few. It’s all of us.

Faith-CATS

One way for faith communities to organize climate action within themselves is by encouraging and supporting the formation and existence of Faith-CATS, aka Faith Climate Action Teams.

CATS are small groups that meet together regularly to support one another in climate action: (1) meet; (2) support; (3) act.

Since every person of faith is called to be a part of The Climate Movement, Faith-CAT members aren’t the only ones in their faith community to be doing climate action. As I said, what happens to the climate is not the domain of a chosen few. But Faith-CATS can provide leadership within the community and be catalyzing and organizing agents of community action to make our future come faster.

Even if some faith communities and denominations don’t support climate action, people of faith can find one another and form Faith-CATS. The teachings of your faith give you all the permission you need. It is part of being faithful to your faith today.

So let’s start lots of Faith-CATS. Let’s start to organize these Faith-CATS together. Let’s create state-based faith-climate-action networks and organize these state networks at the national level. Time to get organized!

Only So Many Hours in a Day, But Time Is Running Out

There’s more than misperceptions holding us back. I know that faith communities in the US have a lot on their plates right now — including challenges created by the Trump Administration that are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Everything that’s clamoring for our attention and time, all that seems to be more immediate than climate change, these can screen out the greatest moral challenge of our time from our thoughts, short-circuiting needed climate action.

The nature of the climate challenge is telling us we can’t do that. The teachings and examples from our traditions are calling us to stand for climate action now, and to keep pushing for wisdom and justice to prevail. This is our kairos climate moment. Time is running out for us to be faithful to our calling and make our future come faster.

The challenges of our current moment aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and we must find ways to combine efforts and provide mutual support, what I call Climate Action+, a both/and approach that builds on the places where we are strong together, another way to be shrewd for good.

Everyone is called to be a leader in their own way on climate action by being active and proactive in the ways that you can. Some of you are even called to make climate action your life’s work.

And what about hope? We’ve got that covered, too, because we’re the hope we’ve been waiting for. Let’s go!

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Getting Back Our Climate Action Mojo

In my previous post I documented what those of us in The Climate Movement know in our gut: as a movement we’ve lost our intensity. We’re floundering. From whence will come the passion to ignite intensity’s potential?

How do we get back our climate action mojo? How do we get ourselves back on track to become our destiny: the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world?

Intensity From Within

Ultimately the passion that ignites our intensity-potential must come from within, from our Ten Climate Movement Values.

They are our values because they: (1) inspire; (2) guide, and; (3) are valuable to us. They allow us to be deep enough, our third characteristic/imperative/goal. And it is such depth that will keep our passion strong.

All of our values have emotional salience. They shape our thoughts. They are part of our interior lives. They are the highest and best of us. They have the capacity to help us become the people we’ve hoped beyond hope we could be.

But our values are just abstractions, mirages, ciphers — unless we embody them. We must live in and live out our values. The interior must become real in the physical world.

Our supreme value, love, gives us the greatest comfort, the greatest joy we’ve ever known or can know — but only if we make ourselves vulnerable. For love to be deep and vibrant and solid requires trust. But even with the greatest trust, finitude breaks every heart. Deep love requires courage to overcome the fear of vulnerability and loss.

When it comes down to it, our passion for climate action will be sustained if we have allowed ourselves to connect our vision and purpose to who and what we love. If we permit ourselves, especially with the help of others, to become vulnerable for the sake of those we love, vulnerable in giving ourselves to making their world better, if we allow ourselves to extend our circle of love as far as we can, and we pour that love into making our vision a reality, then our destiny is assured.

And so the passion to ignite our potential comes from the L-word, love. But it also comes from our values of justice and beauty and freedom, themselves all infused with love. Love makes us passionate for justice. Love makes beauty more beautiful. Love sets freedom free.

For many, a great wellspring of passion is justice. The classic definition of justice is to give to each their due. What does that mean for us? Justice is where everyone has what they need to live the lives intended for them so they can become who they were meant to be. Where circumstances fall short, that’s where we must implement the three actions of justice: (1) stop bad stuff; (2) set wrong right, and; (3) make things better. We do these to make progress on the Five Dimensions of Justice, as seen below.

Climate change has created, is creating, and will continue to create one of the greatest injustices in history — for some it’s the greatest injustice ever. When we see the injustice of climate change our hearts immediately cry out, “This is so wrong!” For many of us, it is this passion that can ignite our intensity potential like nothing else can. (As I explore in its own Series, justice and hope have a great symbiosis.)

Nothing stirs our passion like beauty, and beauty is all around us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Each of our steps within our five dimensions of justice are beautiful. Overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything is beautiful. Living in balance and harmony with the rest of the natural world is beautiful. Fulfilling our Better Future Covenant to leave our children and their children a better world is beautiful. Passion to ignite our potential, to set free our intensity — it’s in the beauty that each step in our journey creates.

Love is at the heart of it all. But the L-word takes courage, and for many of us the courage to love comes from one another. In our families, with our friends, in CATS (Climate Action Teams) or in other ways of being together we must support one another in igniting love’s passion that leads to justice and beauty and freedom, who themselves become sources of passion that in turn ignites intensity’s potential to create real change in the world around us, to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances the wellbeing of everyone and everything.

Let’s Remember Why

To engage our Climate Movement Values we must remember what inspired us to take climate action in the first place. To have our passion ignite our potential let’s remind ourselves why we are called to this, the greatest moral cause of our time.

The Facts

Our passion for action comes out of the combination of our values and the facts. When climate facts meet love and justice and beauty and freedom there’s nothing left to do but transform the world into their likeness.

The Bad Stuff: Climate Impacts

• Billions of lives impacted. No one escapes from climate impacts.

• Millions upon millions of deaths.

• One of the greatest injustices in human history, as the poor, who have not caused the problem, suffer its greatest injuries.

• A key driver in human-caused species extinction the likes of which the world has never seen.

• Consequences lasting for centuries.

We must let these terrible climate consequences ignite our passion for action.

We can’t eliminate all of the bad stuff. Overcoming climate change does not mean we will. Rather, we shall overcome it. Bad stuff has happened, is happening, and will happen. But we can lessen the impacts by adapting to them and creating resilience against them. By dramatically cutting and eliminating climate pollution and keeping warming to around 1.5C we can stop even worse bad stuff from happening, especially dangerous tipping points.

Is that it? Stopping the really bad stuff?

Hell no.

Justice calls us to do even more than just saying no to hell on earth. We must also set wrong right and make things better.

The Good Stuff: A Just & Prosperous Sustainability

We are on the precipice of the transformation we’re calling for. We’ve got the tech right now to do what’s needed. And more is on the way every day.

Here’s a little taste from a just released Ember report on solar and batteries:

• Solar is super abundant. Suitable land could generate around 125 times today’s electricity use; more than 90% of people live in places where local solar potential is at least 10 times current electricity demand.

• Batteries turn solar into high-uptime power. With storage, solar can move from intermittent generation to firm, high-availability power: nine out of ten people live where solar-plus-battery systems can exceed 80% uptime, and in the sunniest regions they can reach 99% uptime.

• Solar plus battery is already cheap where most people live.Four in five people can get 80%-uptime power for under $100/MWh; for half of humanity it is under $80.

• The opportunity is biggest where electricity is weakest. Around 760 million people still lack electricity, close to 2 billion have unreliable grids, and 95% of this demand sits in sunny regions where solar plus batteries can already beat planned fossil generation. … 89% of people without access live where that 80%-uptime cost is under $80/MWh; and effectively 100% of people live in regions where costs are under $100/MWh.

• New fossil capacity is increasingly exposed. Of roughly 850 GW of planned coal and gas capacity, about 590 GW sits in regions where solar plus batteries can already deliver 80%-uptime power for under $100/MWh.

• Costs will keep falling. By 2030, with projected solar and battery cost declines, solar-plus-storage power meeting the same uptime benchmark is likely to cost under $80/MWh for over 75% of people, and under $100/MWh for nine in ten.

Why will costs keep falling? Why will things keep improving? Because our Third Source of Catalytic Transformation, ARTC, or the accelerating rate of tech change, keeps churning upwards due to the continual production of useful knowledge turning science into invention and innovation. As a result, profits and price are now working in our favor in the economy.

But ARTC and markets on their own won’t get us to the speed and scale of transformation needed. Speed and scale are why we in The Climate Movement are indispensable. They are why our passion must ignite our intensity-potential for us to push the other three Catalytic Sources of Transformation to play their roles. This includes creating strategic ARTC focused on fulfilling our vision. It includes pushing governments to push markets to create speed and scale.

Our Vision

Speed and scale aren’t the only reasons The Climate Movement is indispensable and why our passion must ignite our intensity-potential. We must ensure what our vision proclaims: overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

ARTC on its own won’t lead to justice and the wellbeing of everyone and everything. Nor will governments and markets on their own or in tandem. We must join together with all people of good will to strive towards its reality as we push the other Catalytic Sources of Transformation to play their parts.

So when our vision becomes a reality, what does it look like? It’s where people having plenty of healthy and delicious food they enjoy, a clean and healthy environment, nice homes that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, reliable clean energy to power our sustainable lifestyle, work that is meaningful, and time to be creative and enjoy the good things in life. Prosperous sustainability means we are all flourishing as we live in balance and harmony with the rest of the natural world.

But without us, without our passion igniting our potential, if we don’t become big and broad and active enough (our first Movement characteristic/imperative/goal), without us pushing for it, it won’t get done.

Every step towards our vision is worth all the passion we can muster.

Intensity From Our Numbers-Potential

The numbers are telling us it’s right there before us, the potential to begin to create what is our destiny: becoming the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

Our numbers-potential is just sitting there, waiting for us to realize it.

From the results of three different questions from three different recent polls I determined what I am calling our Climate Movement Potential or CM Potential in the US to be about 30% — meaning that about 30% of the US population are prime candidates for being in The Climate Movement. One poll question suggests that a little less than 2% probably already are a part of The Climate Movement — whether they recognize it or not. (My Climate Movement definition: those who have made a sustained commitment to collective action over time to overcome climate change.)

So we’ve got about 3% left to recruit by 2030. Eminently doable.

That we are within reach of the numbers we need to push our societies to overcome climate change should inspire us and help raise our intensity level.

But I guess we’re gonna have to shout this CM Potential from the rooftops, because when it comes to our potential strength, perception is skewed.

Part of the answer is to stop underestimating the level of concern that exists.

As these Yale/GM graphs above show, 85% either underestimate (61%) or don’t know (24%) how worried Americans are about global warming. Some of the reason is that only 21% are talking to those close to them about climate change.

The same underestimation occurs when Democrats are asked about Democrats and Republicans about Republicans, as seen in the More In Common poll results below.

On speeding up climate action, Democrats think their support for this is a bare majority at 53%, when it is actually an overwhelming majority at 88%. For Republicans the reality is almost a majority at 47% for speeding up action, when they falsely think it is just 22%, a 25 point swing.

So part of our answer is to (1) stop underestimating, and (2) start talking.

Here’s the thing. It won’t matter how big we are if our intensity is in the toilet — which it is right now. We can’t be, as the saying goes, a mile wide but an inch deep.

As I’ve already covered, popular support for climate action and clean energy is pretty good right now. But big doesn’t necessarily mean passionate or deep. We are way down the list when it comes to priorities.

It is The Climate Movement that must change this situation with our passion coming from our values.

But there can also be a connection between growth and intensity that we must nurture: growth creates momentum, and momentum creates intensity. So once we stop underestimating and start talking we can grow our numbers. This can help create intensity and excitement within us, which can boost our efforts to ask or recruit others into The Climate Movement.

Once we start talking, once we break what I call “the Climate Talk Taboo,” we can get more people acting, we can get more people joining, and these things are feedstocks for intensity.

And whatduya know, there’s polling to back this up. As you can see below Yale/GM asked how many were volunteering their time to do political and policy stuff on climate change, and then asked how many would be willing to do so “if a person you like and respect asked you to.”

The graph above, created by me from the Yale/GM report, gives us a sense of both intensity and how many are willing to join The Climate Movement and engage in climate actions. If recruited by someone they like and respect here’s how much the numbers for each group go up:

• Conservative Republicans +9 (from 0 to 9)

• Moderate Republicans +14 (from 7 to 20)

• Moderate Democrats +32 (from 9 to 41)

• Liberal Democrats +43 (from 11 to 54)

• All +24 (from 7 to 31)

Talk about big and broad and active enough! This also provides another data point confirming our CM Potential of about 30%, given that the “All” category goes from 7 to 31% when asked. This is strong confirmation that reaching our goal of 5% in The Climate Movement by 2030, or 16 million in the US, is right there within our grasp.

So what are we waiting for? This is our time, our kairos climate moment.

Let us let the love we have for those we love, our strong sense of justice, the beauty of each step within them both, and the freedom that comes from creating our vision together ignite in us the passion needed to have The Climate Movement maximize its intensity and achieve its destiny.

Join us as we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster.

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We haven’t yet built The Climate Movement that is to become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world.

That’s our destiny. We haven’t yet claimed it.

But we must.

We have the potential within us. But we haven’t yet realized that potential.

It’s time.

The Current Political Moment for Climate Action

Our vision, purpose, and Major Goal as I have articulated them are all wrapped up in one statement: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

I have defined “overcoming climate change” as: to keep warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, or with minimal overshoot that is quickly brought back down; we then continue to reduce beyond 1.5C to a level that is natural for our time.

So how are we doing? The short answer: not good.

A recent report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and five other organizations looking at how things stand 10 years after the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, where 1.5C was enshrined as a goal, puts it succinctly: “global efforts across the highest-emitting sectors fall far short of what’s needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C).”

Around the world the political landscape for climate action has changed, and not in a good way. An Axios piece captures this with its headline: “The World’s Great Climate Collapse.” What it sketches is a political-optical retreat on robust climate action. Being bold on climate has gone out of political fashion, with so-called “leaders” putting their fingers in the wind and judging that climate action is no longer seen as the hot topic for cool kids.

As the Axios piece also notes, actual climate action in the form of the clean energy transition is still taking place. And the Iran War/Strait of Hormuz fiasco has given a boost to this transition.

But if we don’t change the political optics of climate action, we won’t come close to the speed of change needed, and maybe even the scale that’s needed. Clean energy is going to win, eventually. But it’s The Climate Movement that must turn this transition into a transformation with the speed and scale needed to overcome climate change.

If our current political moment doesn’t convince us it’s time for The Climate Movement to become our destiny — the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world — I don’t know what will. It’s time to step up.

Time to Get Unbefuddled

A scene in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation may capture something of our current moment. A middle-aged American actor, Bob Harris (Bill Murray) stuck in a rut whose career has stalled, in Japan shooting a whiskey commercial trying to say the lines “For relaxing times …” with more intensity, as the director yells at him in Japanese — is this a metaphor for where The Climate Movement is right now? Stuck in a rut in relaxing times that need more intensity as the world yells at us in a language we don’t understand?

Are we relaxing with intensity?

As Forrest Gump said, “I don’t know about that.”

We’re not in relaxing times, that’s for sure. But we are stuck in a rut. And we need more intensity. No doubt about that. Maybe we’re a bit befuddled, like Bob Harris.

Well, it’s time to get unbefuddled. Time to get unstuck. Time to get moving again. Time to get intensified. Bob Harris doesn’t have the answer. We don’t need a shot of whiskey. We do need a shot in the arm, and maybe even a kick in the pants.

Friends, the current political optics on climate action highlight a fundamental truth: The Climate Movement is indispensable to overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

This is our time. This is our kairos moment. We must seize it. We must realize the potential within us.

Today’s Intensity — In The Toilet

But the fact is, right now, our intensity is in the toilet. We are nowhere near what we need to be. The political optics on climate action for finger-in-the-wind politicians has changed because they don’t see popular support and a movement pushing them for bold action. Simple as that.

As I demonstrated in our last post, polls show good potential for growing our numbers.

But what about our intensity potential? The sooner we realize our intensity potential the sooner we’ll realize our numbers potential. The climate challenge is pushing us to move faster, ASAP.

» What We Need in the US

In Fall 2019 and early 2020, the ramp-up period before the Democratic primaries to pick who would run against Trump, polls showed climate action as a top three concern of Democratic voters, with one even having it #1 (see YouGov graph, below). Democratic candidates started tripping over themselves to offer a bolder climate program than their opponents. This included then-candidate Biden, who earlier put out a plan that I graded as a solid “B.” After these poll results he revised his plan to a solid “A.” During his Administration the boldest climate plan in US history was passed (sadly to be substantially reversed by Trump).

When politicians know of our intensity on climate action they respond.

What we need is for climate action to rate in the top three of voting issues for both Climate Movement Artist-Athletes and Climate Action Supporters.

» What We’ve Got in the US

As you can see from two YouGov graphs I’ve placed side by side below, we went from climate being the #1 voting issue for Democrats at 24.3% on Dec 31, 2019, to 9.4% on July 13, 2026.

As seen in the Table below, in a Fall 2025 Yale/GM poll, for those issues ranked “very important,” climate change ranked #13 for Liberal Democrats and #17 for Moderate Ds. For Republicans it ranked #24, or next to last, for Moderate Rs and #25 or dead last for Conservative Rs.

For Liberal Ds, it should be in the top two, for Moderate Ds, the top three. It should be in the top five for Moderate Rs, and top ten for Conservative Rs.

When the Yale/GM Fall 2025 poll asked what was the most important voting issue for the midterms, as can be seen in the Table below1, climate change is nearly non-existent: 2% for Democrats (Liberal, 3%; Moderate, 1%) and zero for Republicans.

What all these numbers confirm is what we already know in our gut: our offense is not on the Field of Action. Our offense is on the sidelines, and our opponents have the momentum and the ball.

No Hope-Dope Here

Is this some downer kinda message? What happened to hope?

You’ve come to the wrong place if you aren’t looking for the truth about where we are right now. Realistic hope, authentic hope, hope based in reality — that’s the only kind of hope I offer.

Hope isn’t a drug to dull our sense of reality. No hope-dope here. No feel-good false hope here.

It’s time to face the facts of our current situation as a movement. We’re dead in the water. That’s not to denigrate all those working hard not to make this so.

But it is so.

Hope doesn’t sit on its butt. Hope moves. Hope faces reality, sees what needs to be done, and does it. Every step forward creates hope and more hope.

Facing this reality honors those working to change it.

It’s also time to see what we will be — the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. That’s our destiny. It’s time to make it a reality, our reality. We’re not waiting for someone to give us hope. We make hope happen. We are the hope.

But to be the hope we’ve got to get in the game. We can’t be the hope on the sidelines. We can’t be the hope if our intensity is in the toilet.

We’re not settling for this. No frikkin’ way. Time to take the ball back and run with it. We’ve got to realize the intensity potential that is within us to make our future come faster.

Our Passion Must Ignite Our Potential

What we need is a sense of passion, our second characteristic/imperative/goal of The Climate Movement.

Here’s what I’ve said about this imperative:

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.

We have the potential. Our passion must ignite our potential. How?

Stay tuned for Part Two!

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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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