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He Changed the World by Revolutionizing Scientific Instruments

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beckman’s inventions would bridge such gaps.

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

A Blacksmith’s Son and Budding Chemist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hoot” Beckman Improvises

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

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

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

A Marine and His Sweetheart

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

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

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

Bell Labs Sets the Stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Inventor of Scientific Instruments Comes Into His Own

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Haagen-Smit and Smog, Beckman Gets Crafty

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

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

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

As Beckman recounted years later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom.

Self-reliance.

Patriotism.

Neighbors helping neighbors.

Jobs.

Economic Growth.

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

A brighter future for your children and communities.

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

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

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

1. political power,

2. electric power, and

3. economic power.

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

How?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As William Becker says:

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

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

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

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

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

2. Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs).

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

1. Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs)

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

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

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

But that doesn’t mean our interests can’t converge.

For farmers, one way for you, your community, and your country to benefit is by leasing a portion of your land to utilities (and other energy providers) for renewable energy projects.

“Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.”

For example, the IOU MidAmerican in Iowa:

• has invested approximately $15.8 billion in wind and solar energy projects;

• paid approximately $45.7 million in 2025 to over 4,000 landowners for wind projects and $60 million in property taxes;

• generated through their wind projects enough electricity to power over 2.4 million households.

These long-term leases provide financial stability, helping to avoid the need to sell the farm to land developers, permanently taking the land out of agricultural production.

Indeed, as the “agrivoltaics” movement proves, harvesting the sun and wind in Rural America when done right can complement and enhance rather than compete with more traditional cash crops, as research from the National Renewable Energy Labratory (NREL) shows. Renewables are simply another cash crop.

For hard working farmers there are other benefits. William Becker puts it well:

Renewable energy is a dream crop for farmers. It generates income without heavy equipment, labor, expensive inputs, fuel costs, 5 a.m. milkings, or worries about trade tariffs and commodity prices.

The benefits don’t stop there. As mentioned above, contributions to local taxes improve schools, fund police and fire fighters, build and maintain roads, and help keep other taxes low. In Texas, for example, wind energy provided $288.3 million in state and local taxes in 2021.

But what if your interests don’t converge, especially if you are generating your own renewable electricity? In that case you have become a competitor to investor-owned utilities.

As state-sanctioned monopolies, they don’t like red-blooded American competition, and they are doing everything in their power to snuff you out, or at least make you pay. Their political allies have established high mandatory fixed fees in 27 states so far. It doesn’t matter if you use any of their electricity, you still end up with a big monthly bill.

One example is Doug Goyings and his family, who farm about 5,000 acres of barley, soybeans and corn in Paulding county, Indiana.

“I don’t have to pay an electric bill at all, on the generation side. But the transmission and distribution [charges], it’s outrageous …” Speaking of his utility, American Electric Power (AEP): “They got these fees that they put on there.” He used no electricity from them in March. But AEP charged him $918 in fees.

So IOUs will work with you if it benefits them, and work against you when it doesn’t. It’s all about them.

2. Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs)

It is the exact opposite with Rural Electric Cooperatives or RECs. What benefits you benefits them and vice versa. That’s because you are them.

As with any coop, RECs are owned by their customers. Today RECs “serve 42 million people” and “power over 22 million businesses, homes, schools, and farms in 48 states” covering “56% of the American landscape.”

They began in the 1930s because investor-owned utilities couldn’t make enough profit off of rural residents in sparsely populated areas. So RECs were created so folks in most of Rural America could have electricity.

Their main goals were and continue to be reliability and affordability. The latter is crucial, because 1 in 4 households served have annual income below $35,000 and they provide electricity to “92% of persistent poverty counties.” RECs have been about affordability long before it became a political buzz-word.

In contrast to the deep financial pockets of the state-sanctioned investor-owned for-profit monopolies, Rural Electric Cooperatives are not-for-profit organizations that each year “return more than $1 billion to their consumer-members.” They don’t hoard capital. They give it back to their customer-members.

But to keep achieving reliability and affordability, especially today and into the future as demand is rising, requires new capital investments. And homegrown renewables are now the best cost choice for new electricity production. So where can RECs get the capital for such investments since they don’t have deep pockets?

Traditionally, a key source has been US Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs. But other creative options are out there as well.

One way for RECs to achieve reliability, affordability, and a cleaner environment is locally harvested electricity by individuals, groups and local businesses. Given the high expense of maintaining aging long transmission lines over the vast rural landscape, and the increasing vulnerability of such systems to extreme weather and growing demand, RECs are tailor-made for the local clean electricity production by individuals and families, by Community Solar, and by renewable-powered micro-grids. All of them generate power where it is used, avoiding the waste and cost of long transmission, and increase reliability when power outages occur on the “macro grid”.

Such local clean electricity production is anathema to investor-owned monopolies because they are competition. But they totally fit the bill for RECs because they are neighbors helping neighbors, and local businesses, schools, and civic groups generating power for themselves and their communities, all while achieving reliability, affordability, and a cleaner environment.

So why isn’t this happening more quickly? Answer: finance. What is needed is public investment to make this a reality.

With the proper support one study showed that Rural Electric Cooperatives could rapidly deploy renewable energy, reduce their wholesale electricity costs by 10-20%, and retire all coal plants — all the while maintaining reliability.

Affordable, reliable, clean and climate-friendly. We can have it all. But only if we marshal our P³ to push for these investments that are good for Rural Americans and in our national interest.

Our political power and our electric power must join forces to help us create economic power — something Rural America desperately needs.

Studies show there are twice as many rural counties in economic distress as there are prosperous ones. “On average, rural places lag behind non-rural places on nearly every measure of economic well-being from poverty rates to labor force participation,” according to the Economic Innovation Group.

To sum up, Rural Americans can do well by doing good with:

• renewable leases,

• renewable ownership creating electricity self-reliance,

• neighbors helping neighbors with community solar,

• local micro-grids, and

• agrivoltaics.

All of this can help family farms stay in family hands and keep money in the local economy via the local multiplier effect, generating $2-4 for every $1 spent — another way neighbors can help neighbors and their communities while also creating self-reliance from economic empowerment.

Affordability, yes. But so much more. Time to claim and grow your power, literally — and not just electricity, but political power and economic power.

Finally, The Climate Movement can make those who become involved in a P³ movement in Rural America stronger if we join forces. (And if you want to become a part of The Climate Movement as well, then join us!)

So let’s create P³ in 250 to celebrate real freedom and energy independence in America. Joining together we will have moral power, people power, and staying power to make the changes needed to create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything — and overcome climate change to boot.

What are we waiting for? Let’s roll.

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In our last post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, Arie Haagen-Smit had just discovered the answer to the questions “What is LA smog and how is it created?”

Having the answer is one thing. Convincing others is quite another. It took him over five years for his photochemical theory of smog to gain acceptance.

Haagen-Smit faced opposition not only from the Oil Industry and its hired guns or “experts,” the Stanford Research Institute or SRI. Like nearly all new scientific findings he faced skepticism within the scientific community as well, including some colleagues at Cal Tech who felt the controversy might be harmful to the university.1 Initial efforts to get his findings published in a peer-reviewed journal were rejected.2 Haagen-Smit’s explanation first appeared in Cal Tech’s university magazine in December 1950.3

Of course this wasn’t some sleepy scientific affair argued only in journals. As we have seen, smog was a major political issue created by public outcry and bad press. Haagen-Smit had been hired by the Air Pollution Control District, and they had been making his findings public. The LA Times caught wind of his breakthrough, and on Nov. 20, 1950 published a major article with the headline: “Puzzle of Smog Solved by Caltech Scientist.” On Nov. 27 he presented the chemistry of smog at a public hearing of the California Assembly’s Air and Water Pollution Committee.4

Vance Jenkins, the head of the Oil Industry’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, which had hired SRI, reports that by late 1950:

“the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District accepted as proven fact a theory on the origin and nature of smog proposed by one of its consultants [Haagen-Smit]. This caused a change in the nature of the Stanford Research Institute program which, since that time, has been concerned largely with investigations designed to determine the degree, if any, to which this theory coincides with facts.”5

Because they believed Haagen-Smit’s understanding of smog was now accepted by the regulatory agency, the Oil Industry and SRI drew and even bigger bullseye on his back. While they could continue to sow doubt about the lack of knowledge with the general public, with the regulators they could no longer get away with saying nobody knows; they must now say that Haagen-Smit was wrong.

But even as his views were gaining notice despite opposition and skepticism – including by some of the public who thought his findings were “a plot by ‘the interests’ to put the blame on the little man’s automobile,”6 – Haagen-Smit was the one who had to stand up to the skeptics and deniers and convince the public and the policymakers.

To get his own message out, Haagen-Smit would give lectures where he would whip up flasks of smog and release it into the room, making his audience cough, teary-eyed. He became known in Southern California as “Dr. Haagen-Smog.” In a PR stunt of his own, a student helped him build a “smog chamber” made up of materials found in a junk yard. They set it up in the Air Pollution Control District’s parking lot, where employees “voluntarily exposed their eyes to smog from the chamber while workers with stopwatches timed how long it took for tears to stream down the volunteers’ faces.” After breathing extremely high levels, Smith Griswold, who later became the head of the agency, developed bronchitis.7

Haagen-Smit later recalled SRI’s role in particular: ‘I didn’t have any public relations agent, but they had. And it was very unpleasant.’”8 As a result, SRI was a constant in press stories, and whiz-bang puff pieces appeared like the one in Popular Mechanics entitled “Smog Sleuths,” touting SRI’s methods and expertise. There was even a documentary film made promoting SRI’s views with a Noir-esque title, “The City that Disappears.”9 (It’s a mystery.)

In one attempt to discredit him — point #2 in operationalizing the message as part of The Denier’s Playbook — SRI claimed to have run his experiments without being able to produce the same results; indeed, his formula created something that “was no more irritating than fresh outside air.” Haagen-Smit fought back by showing that SRI “had not replicated his experimental method at all – it had ignored several important procedures crucial to his laboratory findings.”10

In an attempt to marginalize him, he was not even invited to speak at the first ever major scientific conference on air pollution organized by SRI in Nov. 1949.11

After early rejections, Haagen-Smit’s work and that of his colleagues was starting to appear in peer-reviewed journals, including one on the injury to plants submitted in July 1951 and published in January 1952.12 Haagen-Smit brought it all together for the educated layperson in an excellent article in Cal Tech’s magazine in May 1952.13 By this time the Air Pollution Control District had recognized the soundness of his findings and began to suggest it was time to consider how to deal with emissions from vehicles.14

But SRI kept running The Denier’s Playbook by opposing Haagen-Smit in public with their message of denial, as well as implementing Step #3 in operationalizing the message — we don’t know enough; more research is needed; the science isn’t settled.

In late 1953 an SRI representative told the local press that the smog problem was still way too complicated to say anything definitive. Pollution from “thousands” of sources “somehow meet in the air and undergo some mystic sort of chemical reaction to produce smog” (emphasis added).15

Mystic? When you have scientists appealing to spiritual mystery to justify their denial, a whiff of desperation, and maybe something else, is in the air.

But that was their story, and they were sticking to it. As such, “from so many potential sources, no single class of violators could be condemned.”16

And there you have it, a message straight out of The Denier’s Playbook. If you can’t deny the problem exists (Talking Point #1), then deny we know enough (Talking Point #2) and deny culpability (Talking Point #3).

It’s a mystery! So our guys shouldn’t have to do anything.

In a major report in Jan. 1954 for the Oil Industry’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, which was “distributed in the public interest,” SRI proclaimed this same basic message:

“It will be apparent to all who read this report that there is yet much to be learned before a complete understanding of the smog problem in Los Angeles is attained. Few problems have been more oversimplified than this one. … It appears that many factors enter into causing smog – some of them unknown or not yet fully understood.”17

Apparently, what should be obvious is that when it comes to smog nothing is apparent. In other word, SRI was still on message: we don’t know.

But with a plausible theory from Haagen-Smit, SRI couldn’t just keep on saying we don’t know. Even as they tried to discredit both Haagen-Smit and his approach, they did end up throwing out alternative theories during this time, which, of course, denied the culpability of the Oil Industry.

For example, Zarem theorized that stratospheric ozone seeping down through the inversion layer was the cause. Haagen-Smit explained how such a scenario was wrong by noting simply that smog was much worse during daylight hours, consistent with his photochemical theory.18

Another message pitched to the public from SRI’s major report for the Oil Industry found its way into Time magazine: “The real villain [of smog] is Southern California’s much-touted sunshine, reports the Stanford Research Institute after a seven-year study.”19 It’s nature’s fault, in other words, not ours.

Through 1954 many scientists, regulators, and elected officials continued to believe we didn’t know enough to take costly regulatory action. As one scientist put it in June 1954, “‘ the more we investigate, the less we seem to know.’”20

Thankfully, Haagen-Smit’s findings were already accepted by the Air Pollution Control District and by his friend, Arnold Beckman, who in the Fall of 1953 was appointed by Governor Knight to chair a special committee on smog. At the Governor’s Air Pollution Control Conference on Dec. 5, 1953, Beckman’s committee made its findings public, affirming Haagen-Smit’s chemistry of smog.

In an effort to deal with smog based on facts, and to reach a consensus on what they were, on Nov. 2, 1953 local businessmen, industries, and government officials came together to create the Air Pollution Foundation.21 Their sponsored research over the next several years – even by several SRI scientists – confirmed Haagen-Smit’s chemistry of smog. Not only that, research by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, also affirmed his work. These confirmations were presented at what Haagen-Smit called an “historic meeting” of the American Chemical Society in September 1955, and another one organized by the Foundation in February 1956. As Haagen-Smit would later narrate:

“This signified the end of the controversy. The photochemical origin of Los Angeles smog through the action of sunlight on a mixture of oxides of nitrogen and hydrocarbons was no longer in dispute.”22

The Fights Over Smog Science and Climate Science: A Comparison

From the perspective of the fight over climate science, the collapse of the “we don’t know” position of SRI and others is remarkable. The fight over the science of smog lasted about five years. In contrast, the climate science fight is at least 40 years old and is perceived as still continuing by a significant sector of the population.

When the SRI “smog sleuths” were basically the only players on the field with scientific authority, the message they put forward – we’re on the job, it’s a complex problem you wouldn’t understand, more research is needed – could carry the day, even though for some of those paying attention it was wearing thin. As a spokesperson from the LA Farm Bureau and the hard hit agricultural community remarked in Nov. 1953, SRI “‘spent $1,250,000 given by the oil industry and still professes to know nothing about’ smog.”23

Even with such criticism, the opposition was able to continue their “we don’t know” stance until it became clear that it was scientifically indefensible. Once the opposition had to prove or disprove Haagen-Smit’s theory and his scientifically demonstrated results, once they had to employ the scientific method and be transparent with their own results, the game was up. Sadly, the game still isn’t up on climate science.

Arnold Beckman Was Key

But Haagen-Smit’s success would not have happened without Arnold Beckman. He brought Haagen-Smit into the fight and recommended him for the consultantship at the Air Pollution Control District, thus assuring that his findings would be heard by those in a position to act on them. As the Oil Industry’s Vance Jenkins reports, when the regulators took Haagen-Smit’s conclusions seriously, that’s when SRI on behalf of the Oil Industry had to “determine the degree, if any, to which this theory coincides with facts.”

And when Beckman’s Commission for the Governor affirmed Haagen-Smit’s work, that was the beginning of the end for “we don’t know.”

The Oil Industry/SRI Vs. Haagen-Smit: In a Nutshell

Finally, I want to lift up a story recounted by Dr. Harold Johnston, who became one of the world’s leading atmospheric chemists and a National Medal of Science recipient.24 This story reveals both the depth and tenor of the opposition to Haagen-Smit and the compromised nature of the SRI-Oil Industry relationship.

Johnston was teaching chemistry at Stanford and had recently received his Ph.D. from Cal Tech. He attended a seminar at Stanford where someone presented Haagen-Smit’s findings. Johnston recounts that he stood up and “politely pointed out” a small problem with Haagen-Smit’s smog formula.

Sitting in the room, not saying a thing, was Vance Jenkins. Thinking that Johnston was an ally, Jenkins told his SRI colleagues to hire him as a consultant to poke holes in Haagen-Smit’s approach. So SRI hired Johnston, suggested the possibility of presenting his findings to SRI’s Board, and that future funding could come his way. According to Johnston, they also said “terrible things” about Haagen-Smit and attacked him “vociferously,” especially the Oil Industry representatives.

“I was given the job of disproving the theory of this quirky, perhaps dishonest, scientist. I was given the job of overthrowing his theory entirely” (emphasis added).25

And what did Johnston find?

“I rapidly concluded that Haagen-Smit was a genius! Everything he said was based on experiments he had carried out, and his techniques seemed to be sound. I told them it seemed to me that he was right, across the board” (emphasis added).26

Johnston made a slight correction to Haagen-Smit’s formula and presented his findings to his manager at SRI.

And what was the response?

“The [SRI] manager said, ‘Oh, this is important, this is very important, but we must be careful. We have to do more research before we can bring this out.’ They postponed my appointment with the board of directors. They made no more reading assignments, and my consultantship lapsed.27

Afraid of the Truth? Attack First With The Denier’s Playbook

When it comes to uncovering the “mystery” of smog, was Haagen-Smit simply brilliant while his opposition were merely pedestrian? Maybe. But they attacked him after he put forward his theory; they didn’t want to find the truth; they didn’t want to see the truth. Shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.

Why? Because they thought they were guilty.

If they would have stopped running The Denier’s Playbook for a second they would have seen that there was important overlap in their positions that could have served the interests of the Oil Industry, as suggested back in 1977 by UCLA law professors Krier and Ursin. “A point of implicit agreement in the great scientific controversy between Haagen-Smit and SRI was that the automobile was a significant contributor …”.28

While the public and the press continued to blame the oil refineries for the problem, Haagen-Smit implicated vehicles as the primary culprit. As noted earlier, in doing so he was criticized by some in the public for being in cahoots with corporate interests in trying to scapegoat “the little man’s automobile.”

So it wasn’t the oil company’s refineries that were the main problem. It was the burning of their product by their customers. Given that the solutions everyone reached for at the time were point-source end-of-pipe technological ones, they wouldn’t be the main targets.

Why didn’t they see the common ground they had with Haagen-Smit? He was a very reasonable guy and a member of the Chamber of Commerce who palled around with the retired chemical director from Uniroyal. He had done research for various agricultural interests. In later years he would have good relations with his research counterparts in the automobile industry, even as he fought with them to make changes in his capacity as member and then Chair of the state’s Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board.29

The Oil Industry and SRI could have used Haagen-Smit’s findings to bolster their own position. But they reached for The Denier’s Playbook instead. It seems that the only thing they needed to know about him was he appeared to be in their way. And yet he really wasn’t.

The industry was right in its concern that initially there was a rush to judgment that cost them money, and could cost them more. When there is a serious problem like smog, people want answers quickly, they want to find solutions and solve the problem. This was not only the general public, or the media. It was Dr. McCabe, the first head of the LA Air Pollution Control District, and other experts of east coast and midwest smog.

But Dr. Haagen-Smit wasn’t a part of that. He was simply doing science, following the facts, and reaching conclusions based on those facts. They attacked him anyway.

And that’s exactly what the corporate fossils and many of their hired scientists have done to legitimate climate scientists simply for telling the truth. Shoot first and keep shooting. Don’t ask questions later.

Climate Movement: Time to Employ Our Power In Service of the Truth

When the corporate fossils feel they must pick between truth and profit, they’ll pick profit every time. For them they are simply following the logic of the system they are in. They’re in the business to make money. Everything else is secondary. As Milton Friedman famously argued, the only ethical obligation for corporate leadership is to increase stockholder value. Thus, we must change the “logic” of this system.

That’s a key reason why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most important thing we can be doing right now. We must be able to exercise our three forms of power — moral power, people power, and staying power — to push our societies to not simply reign in the corporate fossils, Big Producers of Polluting Products.

No, we must replace them. And not just them. We must replace the government-run and government-owned Big Producers of Polluting Products as well with a clean energy transformation at the speed and scale necessary to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Join us!

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So here’s the deal of the year. You get to do the right thing — and save 20-45% on your electric bill right now! Do right by the family budget and the Earth’s climate pollution budget. Reduce them both and be a hero in the process.

What’s the catch? To get this particular deal you have to live in New Jersey in the United States where you can sign up for what’s called “Community Solar.” Other states like Virginia are also rapidly expanding Community Solar.

What Is Community Solar?

As pictured and explained above by the Coalition for Community Solar Access:

“Community solar refers to local solar facilities shared by multiple community subscribers who receive credit on their electricity bills for their share of the power produced.”

As the Coalition states elsewhere:

“Community solar installations are larger than [individual] rooftop systems but smaller than utility-scale projects, interconnecting at the local distribution level. Their placement on schools, brownfields, parking lots, fallowed agricultural land, and farmland reduces grid congestion, improves reliability, offsets utility investments [that would be paid for by customers], and brings [clean energy] to communities.”

Aren’t able to have your own solar panels? No problem. With Community Solar everyone can have pollution-free electricity, a clear conscience, and in many situations like in New Jersey save money to boot.

What’s Happening in New Jersey

450,000 homes in New Jersey will be able to participate in Community Solar over the next three years and start saving 20-45% on their electricity bills.

An incredible volunteer group in South Orange New Jersey, Electrify SOMA, has done a terrific job of explaining Community Solar to potential participants in their area (where PSE&G is their utility). Their info below gives a basic sense of how a program is run:

Virginia and Other States

It’s not just New Jersey. Gov. Spanberger in Virginia (VA-D) just signed a slew of bills to make electricity clean and affordable, including expanding the availability of Community Solar by 625 megawatts. This more than doubles what was previously allowed and is enough, conservatively, to power around 160,000 homes.

Right now, before these new policies take effect, Virginia has gotten nearly 10% of its electricity from solar, enough to power 850,000 homes.

This amount of solar was hard fought, given the laws and red tape that made it difficult to install new solar and made it much more expensive. In most situations nationwide red tape costs for residential solar are nearly 80% of the total cost of a system.

This package of bills will change that in Virginia, saving up to $6,000 for the installation of a household system and more than doubling the capacity of Community Solar.

Other states — Colorado, New Mexico, Maryland, Minnesota — have also passed legislation related to Community Solar.

Obviously, much more needs to be done!

The Monopolistic Old Guard Ain’t Happy. Don’t Fall For the “Cost-Shifting” BS From Utilities

Community Solar is great! But the state-sanctioned monopolies, i.e., investor-owned utilities, don’t think so. That’s because Community Solar is cutting into their profits; they don’t get $$ for their investors and themselves from energy they don’t generate.

As the Coalition For Community Solar Access puts it in an excellent primer:

“Utilities often oppose customer-driven, third-party owned energy projects like community solar because they threaten shareholder profits. They use ‘cost-shift’ … as a false flag.”

As one seasoned utility observer, Karl Rábago, noted, they are crying crocodile tears for consumers over misleading claims about “cost-shifting,” a situation where certain groups can pay less while others pay more for benefits everyone in the group receives.

But, as Rábago explains, the monopolistic utility system is built on cost-shifting, including shifts from the poor to the rich:

High fixed charges increase overall costs for low-usage customers and allow higher-usage customers to benefit from lower per-unit costs. Connecting very large homes to the grid costs much more than connecting apartments. And customers located near generation resources pay the same transmission rates as everyone else, despite imposing lower costs on the system. Customers at the end of long lines pay the same as customers in the heart of the system, despite often requiring more infrastructure and maintenance to achieve reliable service.

Furthermore, those trying to confuse people about cost-shifting conveniently leave out all the ways Community Solar benefits the group, i.e., all ratepayers.

Rábago:

Utilities claim that when some ratepayers benefit from community solar, others unfairly bear the cost. Studies from multiple states have proven this blanket claim to be false — the benefits of distributed energy resources outweigh their costs.

In other words, when you include all the benefits and costs, Community Solar comes out ahead. For example, in Maine, Community Solar and similar projects deliver $1.23 in savings for every $1 invested.

Climate Action, Affordability, Health, & Wellbeing Go Together

As The Climate Movement here’s what we’re about: overcoming climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

This includes making our energy/electricity not just affordable — but cheap, clean, plentiful, and available to all.

Heck, let’s just go ahead and make it FREE — at least some of the hours.

A pipe dream? It’s already happening in Australia where millions of users will get three free hours of electricity midday. Why? Because of all the solar energy they are producing.

In the US we’re behind on this free energy revolution. But with The Climate Movement on the team we can make this happen, and Community Solar can play an important role at the needed speed and scale once we push governments to let them.

Join us!

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As I discussed in my earlier post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, when the people of Los Angeles and its business and political leaders finally began to get serious about smog they had two basic problems: (1) no government had proper jurisdiction, and; (2) no one knew what made up smog or how it was created.

On June 10, 1947, California passed a law giving counties the authority to create Air Pollution Control Districts with enforcement powers. This was a major turning point. By October 1947 the LA Air Pollution Control District or APCD was up and running. With a budget of $178,000 and a staff of 47, it quickly became the best funded and staffed air pollution agency in the country.1

What Is LA Smog? Beckman & Haagen-Smit to the Rescue

But the second problem still hung over the effort. What exactly was LA smog? What made it up? How was it created? Who was responsible?

Incredibly, no one really knew – even though they thought they did. Just about everyone assumed it was the same smog that occurred in heavily industrialized areas of the East and Midwest. Experts from Pittsburgh and St. Louis were brought in to explain what smog was; sulphur dioxide was the culprit, they said, because that was true for those areas.

With the public clamoring for action, the first head of the new LA Air Pollution Control District, Louis McCabe, Ph.D., a former Army officer and an engineer by training, began negotiating with industry to reduce SO2. One of his key connections to the larger business community was Dr. Arnold Beckman, a longstanding member of the LA Chamber of Commerce and its designated smog point person since 1946.

The smog problem was not new to the LA Chamber. They had been working with local officials since 1944 out of a concern that a patchwork of local policies would unfairly target some areas and not others, leading to business costs that wouldn’t solve the problem and a frustrated public egged on by a “hysterical movement” (i.e., the activists) demanding even more be done. The Chamber sponsored research, encouraged its members to reduce pollution voluntarily, especially by increasing efficiency of equipment, and worked closely with elected officials to keep any needed policies as business-friendly as possible. This included providing draft ordinances put forward by local officials.2

In contrast to the Oil Industry, the Chamber was not running what I call The Denier’s Playbook. They had the entire economy and its diverse business interests to consider, and pollution was becoming a real problem for certain sectors. And so the Chamber found itself in the middle of the smog fight in more ways than one.

A group particularly hard hit were farmers, who had deluged the Chamber with concerns about unusual crop damage, which began showing up as early as 1944. They were losing about $250,000 a week when smog was bad, and eventually 10 types of vegetables would be eradicated from the area due to smog.3 In 1946 as the public became more and more aroused, and farmers and their own members were looking for answers, the Chamber turned to the Chair of its scientific committee, Arnold Beckman, for leadership.4

Inventor of scientific instruments and creator of his own company that sold such instruments, and former chemistry professor at Cal Tech, Beckman was perfectly situated to be the Chamber’s point person on smog.5 In this capacity he served as liaison to policymakers and civil servants like McCabe. An added bonus – Beckman and McCabe already knew each other, both having received degrees from the University of Illinois.6 Beckman so impressed McCabe and the Air Pollution Control District’s leadership that he was hired on as a scientific consultant (1948-52).7

As a chemist Beckman knew sulfur dioxide (SO2) when he smelled it, which has a distinctive odor even in small amounts. He was convinced the problem was not SO2, and that McCabe’s program would cost business plenty and not solve the problem. So he told McCabe flat out:

“Lou, for the love of Pete, you don’t have sulfur dioxide in the air. … Before you spend millions of dollars putting in recovery or replacement plants, you’d better find out what’s in the air.”8

“There’s no time for research,” McCabe replied hastily.9 But he eventually agreed to let Beckman pursue the matter, even as he moved forward on regulating SO2.

A seasoned microchemist was required, and Beckman knew where to find one: his former Cal Tech colleague, Arie Haagen-Smit.

And so it was the Chamber’s point man, recently appointed as the regulatory agency’s scientific consultant, who launched Haagen-Smit’s career fighting smog.

It turns out that Haagen-Smit, his own scientific curiosity piqued one especially smoggy day in 1946, had already done a little poking around himself with his own equipment and techniques. He had begun to suspect that a major culprit was ozone.

One of the strange things happening in LA at the time provided a clue: tire manufacturers were reporting that rubber was cracking much faster than elsewhere. To begin to solve this mystery, Haagen-Smit and a friend, Dr. Charles Bradley, a retired chemical director from Uniroyal,10 began some very simple experiments exposing rubber tubing to various mixtures of polluted air. The more ozone there was, the quicker the rubber tubing cracked.11

And so due to his own curiosity Haagen-Smit had begun to unravel the mystery of LA’s version of smog even before he was approached by Beckman.12

Curiosity is the driving force behind scientific discovery, and Dr. Haagen-Smit was first and foremost a scientist. Like Beckman, he was also a member of the LA Chamber of Commerce. In contrast to the activist types, he remained dubious of the respiratory health impacts of smog and died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. His pathbreaking scientific articles on smog listed “crop damage, eye irritation, haze, smell” as the problems arising from it.13 Even years later he still had a blind spot when it came to the health effects. “Smog is an aesthetic and economic nuisance.” People shouldn’t “believe stories that death in the form of smog stalks the streets of Los Angeles.”14

With Beckman’s request Haagen-Smit was asked, basically, to do scientific pro-bono work. So between classes and his other projects, and utilizing his pineapple study equipment and techniques, in fairly short order Haagen-Smit discovered the basic ingredients of LA’s version of smog – and SO2 was not one of them.

While he didn’t have a complete understanding of how these basic ingredients became smog, he felt the results of his initial experiments were sufficient to begin to address the problem by reducing the pollutants that came together to produce it. He reported his results to Beckman in the latter’s capacity as scientific advisor to the Air Pollution Control District, which released the findings to the public.15. Haagen-Smit told Beckman he would be getting back to his real research.

Smog? Check. Done. Now back to the pineapples.

Ah, not quite.

Unfortunately for Dr. Haagen-Smit, his early volunteer work on smog would end up in the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, at least in these early years. The Oil Industry and SRI didn’t like his results. Up until Haagen-Smit came on the scene, SRI was the only real voice speaking with the appearance of scientific authority. He couldn’t go unchallenged.

And so in what would turn out to be a major turning point in our nation’s history of addressing pollution, Abe Zarem, the head of SRI’s LA office, gave a talk at Cal Tech where he attempted to discredit Haagen-Smit. Zarem, a brash 31 year old with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cal Tech, was a rising star who the next year would be recognized nationally by the Chamber of Commerce as one of “America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men.” He would go on to a distinguished career and be elected to the National Academy of Engineering.16

But on this day, nurtured as he was by SRI’s symbiotic relationship with their Oil Industry compatriots, he was suffused with misguided purpose as he participated in operationalizing The Denier’s Playbook against Haagen-Smit.

Beckman had invited Haagen-Smit to join him in hearing Zarem, and they sat together. As Beckman described it, Zarem asserted that Haggen-Smit’s theory was not consistent with what SRI had found. He thought it sad that Haagen-Smit would make such a serious mistake.17

In other words, at his home institution, in front of his colleagues and students, SRI’s man said Haagen-Smit didn’t know what he was talking about in an area utilizing Haagen-Smit’s expertise.

Thus, when it came to operationalizing The Denier’s Playbook, Zarem fulfilled Steps One and Two:

• Hire scientific consultants (i.e. SRI) to do research, propose theories friendly to the Industry’s interests, and help proclaim the message of denial.

• Attack and discredit legitimate scientists.

Haagen-Smit was furious. This former boxer, horse-piss tester, and pineapple flavor expert was the wrong guy to pick a fight with.

“‘I’ll show them who’s right and who’s wrong,’ he muttered as we left the room’” Beckman recounted.18

Thus began a feud between the Oil companies, SRI and Haagen-Smit that would last for years and linger for decades, even after Haagen-Smit’s death.19

Instead of returning to his pineapples, Haagen-Smit took a leave of absence from Cal Tech and devoted over a year to the study of smog. Steps were taken in March 1949 by the Air Pollution Control District to hire him as a consultant and they set him up in a lab a few months later.

Haagen-Smit Cracks the Smog Case

Beginning in the fall of 1949 Haagen-Smit teamed up with scientists from the University of California-Riverside who had been studying the damage crops were experiencing. It was during this time that Haagen-Smit’s personal breakthrough occurred in understanding the basic chemistry of smog formation.

Earlier when he had condensed down LA’s smoggy air he found oily organic substances, partially oxidized hydrocarbons from petroleum. He guessed that these hydrocarbons were being oxidized by ozone. When he exposed smog-sensitive plants to such a mixture they showed the same damage as those exposed to LA’s smoggy air. But where was the ozone coming from?

“Now Haagen-Smit remembered reading that organic material could be oxidized by air if initiation by light and nitrogen dioxide were provided. He tried such a system and found it to be successful in producing smog symptoms.”20

And so it all fell into place. As Beckman puts it:

“He painstakingly delineated the photochemical process by which organic materials in the air—mostly hydrocarbons—are oxidized through the combined actions of oxides of nitrogen and sunlight to become smog.”21

Understanding it is one thing. Convincing others is another. As we will see in our next post in this Subseries, it would take five years and a bruising battle with the Oil Industry and SRI before Haagen-Smit’s answers to the questions “What is LA smog and how is it created?” would carry the day.

Haagen-Smit’s courage and tenacity in standing up to the fossils and their flacks are the kind we need to have the staying power necessary to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything. Like Haagen-Smit, we have the truth, and the truth still matters. We must be steadfast on all of our Olympian Fields of Action until victory is ours. Join us!

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I thought it might be helpful to summarize how I see what we are trying to do through the Climate Movement by utilizing an approach that some of us are familiar with — the categories and forms of strategic planning.

Articulating vision, purpose, goals, and objectives has been a mainstay of strategic planning that some of us have gone through. You may love it; you may hate it. You may think it’s a big waste of time because the plan is never implemented, or changes so much that you wonder why we bothered.

Many negative feelings about strategic planning have to do with a failure of leadership to implement what everyone worked hard to agree to. Fair enough.

Another turn-off: some folks can become strategic planning fundamentalists, especially about the ideational categories. “Oh, that’s not a goal because …”

Oy vey.

Finally, if implementation of a strategic plan is so rigid and joyless that you end up hating it, well, something has gone terribly wrong.

For us, the thinking of strategic planning and the concepts it utilizes should serve the Climate Movement, not the other way round.

So why am I bothering with this?

For three reasons.

First, as I’ve said, its forms and style are familiar to some of us. Such familiarity can aid in communication leading to understanding, and hopefully to common ground and acceptance.

Second, at a meta level, movements and strategic planning share a need to articulate what our efforts are trying to do. But whereas with a strategic plan the group can affirm it, not so with an entire movement. No one is in charge of a movement, including ours. No governing body, no single leader, is in a position to approve a strategic plan. Nor can everyone in a movement, including our Movement, participate in the creation of a strategic plan.

But the more people in a movement who can agree on the vision, purpose, and major goals of that movement the better. As I have written in the Together Enough Subseries of posts, movements include collective entities or social forms like organizations and campaigns that can affirm vision, purpose, and goals. Just like with individuals, the more social forms that affirm the same or similar vision, purpose, and goals the better.

Throughout this Climate Hope Together Substack, I have articulated what I consider to be our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, and I have done so all wrapped up in a single 18-word package:

In much of my writing I simply call this text our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, as if it was universally recognized to be so. I do this for convenience and shorthand, but also in the hope that many of you will accept them!

The third reason I am employing strategic planning concepts here is the emphasis on articulating measurability and timeframes. Measurability shouldn’t become a dictator, trying to run everything, trying to fit everything we do into some measurable form. But it has important benefits, especially in helping to clarify what we are trying to do within a certain timeframe. As you will see, I have tried to put forth ambitious but achievable goals to help us imagine both the challenge and the opportunity the Climate Movement presents.

Of course, there’s a huge difference between what I will put forth here and an actual strategic plan. My presentations using the style and forms of strategic planning are another way to communicate and sum up what we are trying to do and achieve as the Climate Movement.

But an actual strategic plan is the result of a process by a group of people who, at the end, affirm the plan. It is both process and product — and the process, resulting in buy-in, is just as important as the product. Obviously, the process hasn’t happened here.

So while the content I will present in this post is in the form of a strategic plan, it isn’t a real strategic plan because a group hasn’t worked on it together and approved the final product.

Besides articulating what I think we should be trying to accomplish, this is also a bit of a thought experiment. If the Climate Movement were able to create a strategic plan, what would it look like?

Of course, any of you could take what I have written as a starting point, either for yourself, or for any of the social forms you may belong to. I certainly hope you will!

However we end up doing it, it will be good for as many of us as possible to affirm a basic agreement on what we are all trying to achieve.

Before we launch in, a note on a term I’m using: Climate Movement Artist-Athletes. This is not a special role. It refers to every member of the Climate Movement. We’re all special! We all bring our gifts and creativity to our participation. Your creativity might be in how to facilitate a meeting that makes everyone feel welcome and their contribution worthwhile. Or it might be how to plan an event, or lead singing, etc. We all can be creative in our own way. That’s why all of us are Climate Movement Artists.

We also are all Climate Movement Athletes. I use the Olympic Games as our main metaphor for understanding who we are. We are striving for victory on all of our Olympian Fields of Action.

So we are both Artists and Athletes. We are Climate Movement Artist-Athletes.

Without further ado, here we go.

Vision, Purpose, and Major Goal of the Climate Movement

Movement-Building Goals

To achieve the vision, purpose, and Major Goal of our Climate Movement, we must become these seven characteristics/imperatives/goals.

1) Big and Broad and Active Enough

a) The Climate Movement will be 5% of the total human population or 400 million by 2030.

b) We will be 10% by 2040.

c) By 2030 we will have enough Climate Action Artist-Athletes to achieve victory on every Olympian Field of Action needed, including but not limited to:

• constituents at every political level around the world;

• students;

• retirees;

• scientists and engineers of all kinds;

• farmers and foresters;

• those connected to every business that can help or impede our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — consumers, owners, employers, employees, consultants;

• Climate Solutions Workers — those connected to creating, improving, and implementing clean energy, natural climate solutions, and other solutions-related fields;

• every profession and trade — e.g., nurses, plumbers, law enforcement officers, electricians, fire fighters, welders, doctors, carpenters, teachers, auto manufacturing workers, computer programmers;

• finance and banking sector professionals;

• every faith tradition;

• every civil society group;

• those who create art — musicians, songwriters, composers, YouTube and TikTok videomakers, photographers, actors, all those involved in filmmaking, writers of all kinds, painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, quilt makers;

• all the needed groups I haven’t thought of.

d) We will have the strength in numbers and the diversity of all of the types of social forms necessary to achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal.

e) We will be active enough by having public events:

• at least weekly in large countries like the US with population sizes in the hundreds of millions or more, as well as medium-size countries with over 200 million;

• at least bi-weekly in medium-size countries with less than 200 million;

• at least monthly in small countries under a million.

2) Passionate Enough

a) 75% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will rank climate change as their top concern starting in 2027, increasing to 85% by 2030.

b) 100% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes by 2027 will take actions at least monthly to help achieve our Major Goal; such actions will be both personal and strategic, and in addition to policy advocacy.

c) From day one all Climate Movement Artists-Athletes are willing to make sacrifices to advance our cause.

d) 20% of Climate Artist-Athletes will be willing to engage in strategic civil disobedience by 2030, and we will maintain this level as long as necessary.

e) 100% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will make a lifelong commitment when they join to make our future come faster, thereby ensuring that we overcome climate change at the speed and scale necessary.

3) Deep Enough

a) By 2027, at least 70% of Climate Action Artist-Athletes, and 80% by 2030, will have asked these or similar questions:

• What do I think makes life meaningful?

• What do I think life is all about?

• What are my strongly held values?

• Why do I think climate action is the right thing to do?

• How does remaining faithful to climate action help me to live out my values, to have a life of integrity and worth, to make a difference?

Climate Action Teams or CATS will help achieve these goals by asking these or similar questions of all CAT members.

b) By 2027 all Climate Movement Artist-Athletes recognize and name people we care about who we are fighting for.

c) By 2027 at least 80% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be able to clearly articulate why climate action fulfills their most cherished values and protects who and what they love.

d) By 2027, 70% or more of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will have affirmed: (1) our Ten Movement Values, including that we are fighting for justice — to stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, and; (2) the Better Future Covenant, to create a better future for children and subsequent generations, which is their due.

e) 80% will be in meaningful weekly communication with other Climate Movement Artist-Athletes by 2027.

f) Whenever we come together, at meetings, marches, etc., we will sing movement songs (e.g. Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready; Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come), or popular songs adapted for our Movement (e.g., Seal’s Crazy; REM’s Stand; Taylor Swift’s Only The Young; Tab Benoit’s Night Train; Little River Band’s Cool Change).

4) Dynamic Enough

a) Have regular discussions about balancing: 1) the tried-and-true, 2) discipline, 3) freedom, and 4) creativity.

b) Implement tactics and strategies from the past that best fit current circumstances.

c) Maintain discipline by remaining true to our Movement Values and all of our goals and objectives.

d) Regularly encourage one another to have the discipline to stay the course and achieve our seven Movement-building goals and our vision, purpose, and Major Goal as we make hope happen, our world more just, and our future come faster.

e) Regularly remind everyone that freedom — i.e., choices that create a better world, the fullness of freedom — is at the heart of our Movement.

f) At every meeting have as an agenda item to ask whether there are any new ideas to discuss, including tweaks to current approaches.

g) Regularly encourage a variety of: 1) tactics, such as marches, boycotts, etc., and 2) targets, such as fossil bank credit card holders.

h) Recognizing the need for speed and scale, combine passion with the tried-and- true, discipline, and creativity to produce continuous actions within each country so that there are one or more organized actions happening at least weekly. Once they have occurred, post these organized actions on a map all Climate Action Artist-Athletes can see.

i) Establish prizes/medals for the most creative ideas in a variety of categories, e.g. targeting, tactics, communications.

j) Educate Artist-Athletes about the creative process and ways we all can enhance ours.

5) Organic and Strategic Enough

a) Achieve our goals on all of the Fields of Action we create, which are designed to help us attain our vision, purpose & Major Goal.

b) At every meeting encourage Climate Action Artist-Athletes to bring forward new ideas and for others to add to these ideas ones that make them even better. Be open to the spontaneous when it arises from the interactions between group Artist-Athletes, utilizing wisdom to discern the value of implementation.

c) Regularly raise the issue of balancing organic change with the need for efficiency, effectiveness, targets, timelines, and the strategic employment of resources at key moments and places to achieve our goals so that the organic and the strategic make each other better.

6) Together Enough

a) By 2028, 70% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be a participant in one or more social forms.

b) By 2030 this will increase to 80% and will be maintained or increased thereafter.

c) From their beginnings, all of our social forms will fulfill the three aspects of being together enough: shared goals; action events; meeting together regularly.

d) By 2028 half of all businesses will earn climate-friendly profits and actively encourage employees to work together to come up with better processes and products.

e) By 2035 such businesses will increase to 70% and continue to grow thereafter.

f) By 2027, 30% of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes will be part of a Climate Action Team or CAT.

g) By 2030 this will increase to 50%, which will be maintained or increased thereafter.

h) All Climate Action Teams or CATS will meet in synchronous or real time at least once a month — but ideally once a week — to support one another and plan actions together, including at least one joint major action each month.

i) CATS will help individual members discover and/or affirm their gifts and abilities and how they can be utilized in the roles they play on the CAT and in the Climate Movement.

j) All CATS and other social forms will meaningfully incorporate the Arts into meeting together, and also find ways to have fun and enjoy one another.

7) Long Enough

a) 70% of individual Climate Action Artist-Athletes maintain their commitment to the Climate Movement throughout their lives.

b) 50% of climate organizations will still be active in 2050.

c) 50% of environmental organizations currently engaged will still be working on climate change in 2050.

d) Climate organizations and environmental organizations and other organizations with a focus on climate action will make employee retention and job satisfaction a top priority.

e) Coalitions/alliances/networks/associations, faith community efforts, campaigns, and initiatives will create supportive conditions for all participants so that the goals and related timelines are achieved, and, if possible, lay a foundation for new goals/timelines to be adopted.

f) Members of Climate Action Teams or CATS will make up a third of the Climate Movement starting in 2030 and grow to half by 2040.

g) CATS will help all of their Climate Action Artist-Athletes to recognize and claim their roles and support them in fulfilling their roles.

h) CATS will appoint “keepers” for each of the values affirmed by the CAT. Each one will report regularly their observations and suggestions. The CAT will also designate a “joy-spotter,” who highlights joys within the team and throughout the Climate Movement.

i) All Climate Action Artist-Athletes will experience the hope and the joy that come from joining together to be a part of bringing forth a better world by overcoming climate change while creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

Strategic Significance of the Climate Movement

Victory Is Up To Us

Friends, we are the hope we’ve been waiting for! But we are not the only source of hope. The other three Catalytic Sources of Transformation — Climate Action Supporters, ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change, Governments-&-Markets —also give us hope. And yet without us they will not achieve their full hope-potential. That’s why we are indispensable. We must continually drive everything forward to victory. Victory is up to us, but we have help.

And because victory is up to us, we won’t be complete without you. We need your help. We need you for victory. Join us!

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The Bottom Line Up Front.

It’s well past time to make our outdated electricity system:

• keep rates cheap and affordable with clean solar and wind power combined with energy storage;

• one that is consumer-friendly, climate-friendly, and kid-friendly by making our air clean and their future bright.

When Negative is Positive.

All over the world clean energy is cheaper than dirty. More than that — there are times when we are producing so much clean energy that the wholesale prices actually go negative!

This year Southern California is experiencing negative wholesale pricing once again, as they did in 2024 when it went negative 15% of the year. The graph below shows electricity pricing going negative in New England.

This is happening all over the world. For example, “in France, the number of hours with sub-zero pricing nearly doubled this year compared to 2025, while Germany has also witnessed a 50 per cent increase.”

Ok, Why Not Already?

We can actually do our bottom line — clean, affordable electricity — right now. So why aren’t we? What’s stopping us?

Here’s what’s going on.

Our current outdated electricity system, with a power grid designed in the 20th Century for state-sanctioned centralized monopolies, won’t allow renewables make your electric bills more affordable.

Huh?

It’s all about supply and demand — except with solar and wind the system won’t let this most basic market dynamic work in our favor. That’s because when solar and wind supply more energy than consumers are demanding, prices can actually go in negative territory in the wholesale market if there is no place to store this clean electricity (e.g. batteries).

Why would clean power producers have their prices go negative? Because it can cost more money to be switched off and on, and some can still generate revenue via subsidies and power purchase agreements.

Affordability Needs Energy Storage

Ok, so why doesn’t the electricity system help with affordability and keep prices low by storing this surplus clean electricity and then releasing it when high demand would normally drive up prices?

Because our outdated 20th Century electricity system was designed for transmission, not storage.

For most power plants their energy storage was in the form of unburned fossil fuels, primarily huge piles of coal. They weren’t designed to store electricity, only to create it at centralized power plants and transmit it on demand via long, obtrusive, and vulnerable power lines. So in the 20th Century system utilities balanced supply and demand via chunks of coal, which they burned to create electricity when it was needed.

But today batteries and other forms of energy storage are already cost-competitive and are becoming cheaper by the day via innovation. We can dump the dirty stuff and store the clean stuff.

We Must Demand Affordability: Clean Power Via People Power

It’s well past time to nix this tired, dirty, old system for one that produces affordable, reliable, and clean energy for consumers. Now is the time for investments in power grids and energy storage that work for us and lower our bills.

And who is going to make that happen? We can’t leave it up to politicians on their own. We’ve got to push to have the power of renewables make our lives better and more affordable.

We need to elect politicians who will fix the system so that consumers enjoy the benefits of cheap, clean, affordable energy, and stop defending state-sanctioned centralized monopolistic utilities.

We need people power to generate the political power we must have to make our electric power clean and affordable.

And the best way to ensure that your power can make a difference is by joining with others in The Climate Movement to make it so. Join Us!

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In our first post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, I introduced what I call The Denier’s Playbook that the Oil Industry developed in the first half of the 20th Century to attack pollution reduction efforts.1 As I explored in the second post, it all came to a head with the smog challenge in Los Angeles. As we will see through the remainder of this Smog-Climate Subseries, The Denier’s Playbook was operationalized in the late 1940s and early 1950s to a degree of scale and sophistication not yet seen before.

Here, again, is …

I. Part One — Pound Home a Simple Message for Public Consumption: Deny, Deny, Deny

1. Deny there is a problem (if you can).

2. Deny we know enough.

3. Deny culpability.

II. Part Two — Operationalize The Message

1. Hire scientific consultants to do “research,” propose theories friendly to Industry interests, and help proclaim the basic 3-part message of denial.

2. Attack and discredit legitimate scientists telling the truth.

3. Proclaim to media and elected officials/policymakers that we don’t know enough to act; more research is needed; the science isn’t settled.

In Los Angeles beginning in earnest in the 1940s there was no denying that smog was a problem without denying what your senses were telling you: you could see it, smell it, and taste it.

Because the Oil Industry had no recourse in the LA smog challenge to the first message point – denying the problem – they simply moved on to the next two message points: deny we know enough and deny culpability.

They began Part Two of The Denier’s Playbook: operationalizing the message. Step One is to hire scientific consultants to do research and help deliver the message both behind the scenes and in public. So in March 1947 they hired the newly formed Stanford Research Institute (SRI).2

Today what is now called SRI International is a world-class research institute with 20 locations around the world and an annual budget of approximately $400 million. Their best known contribution would be Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, created through a Defense Department program (DARPA). Their promotional materials have boasted millions of lives improved or saved by their work and $4 billion of R&D in the last decade.

But back in 1947 when it was hired by the Oil Industry to help with operationalizing their message, in this case attacking Dr. Haagen-Smit (step two), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was a brand new organization struggling financially that had a significant relationship with the Oil Industry.

When I first started looking into SRI’s history with the Oil Industry and smog I had two basic thoughts about why SRI did what it did. Both turned out to be wrong.

First, I thought they must be in desperate financial circumstances and needed the money.

My second thought was that influential Board members with deep ties to the Oil Industry unduly influenced SRI.

Both these ideas suggested that SRI’s innocence and integrity were compromised by the need to survive, and once they had done so, they doubled-down, with their own guilt and insecurity fueling their contest with Haagen-Smit.

I was wrong – not about the facts, just my interpretation of the facts.

First, when SRI took on smog, when it began Step Two to operationalize the Denier’s Playbook with its attack on Haagen-Smit, the organization was indeed in serious financial difficulty threatening its survival. Without crucial infusions from the Oil Industry in the form of contracts, grants, and loans, SRI may not have made it; they literally needed oil money to make payroll.3

Second, those affiliated with the Oil Industry were indeed influential, but not unduly so in the sense of corrupting SRI’s own understanding of its moral integrity.

The whole point behind the creation of SRI was to have science help industry achieve economic growth. Given that industry employed most scientists up until this time, such an aspiration was nothing new. But SRI’s founders felt science was being underemployed and insufficiently utilized by business, to its detriment, and they hoped to help rectify this problem.

SRI’s Charter states4 that its purpose is:

Science that fosters “commerce,” the “beneficial utilization of natural resources,” and “industrialization.” In the late 1940s, oil fit this bill.

This helps us see that SRI’s major players – the founders of SRI, Stanford University’s Board and senior leadership, SRI’s Board, and SRI staff – would have viewed their positive relationship with the Oil Industry as good, natural, and vital to economic progress and well-being. If we were to single out the Oil Industry as some odorous influence it probably would have struck them as odd, a comment coming out of nowhere. That is because there was no daylight between them.

A final point to explain SRI’s close relationship with the Oil Industry has to do with interpersonal relations. The individuals involved respected one another; they liked one another; they trusted one another; they wanted to help each other.5

One of the best examples of this is Bill Stewart, the same Oil executive who convinced his colleagues not to oppose the smog legislation and would go on to become the Chair of the American Petroleum Institute’s Smoke and Fumes Committee, responsible for financing pollution research by SRI and others.6 Stewart was on SRI’s Board and arranged for loans and grants when SRI was in financial difficulties, including one for $125,000 in 1948.7 He was a mentor in a brotherly fashion to both SRI’s second CEO, Dr. Jesse Hobson, and Abe Zarem, the head of SRI’s LA Office, who became the chief nemesis of Haagen-Smit. Indeed, it was Stewart who encouraged the creation of the LA office with Zarem as its head, and they became “close friends” during the smog fight.8[8]

Thus, the smog work was not about SRI being co-opted or corrupted by nefarious Oil men. Rather, the smog project was one of the ways they helped SRI as mentors, friends, and business partners. They were part of the same world; they were on the same team.

It comes as no surprise, then, to see this comment from authors of one of the first major treatments of the history of the smog fight. SRI: “seemed not at all shy about occasionally adopting the posture of a petroleum industry spokesman.” They quote as an example this comment to the local press in October 1953 by an SRI representative:

“the [oil] industry is concerned lest final judgements be taken too soon about smog’s causes which could result in the industry being forced to take measures which would not eliminate smog and would be extremely costly.”9

This SRI representative is not imparting scientific findings; this is not even strong representation for a client. This is defending one’s team.

As we will see in the next post in this Subseries, Arie Haagen-Smit was perceived to be on the opposing team, and SRI attacked him, running what I call The Denier’s Playbook, as if victory was on the line. They only saw him as an opponent, when in fact his research would largely exonerate the local oil refineries who were being blamed by the public and the press. It was the burning of their product by vehicles in sunny California that was the problem, not their refineries.

Stay tuned!

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1

Those aware of the excellent work of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway may mistakenly jump to the conclusion that they are telling the full historical story of how the fossil industry has fostered denial of environmental problems, including climate change. That’s not what they are doing, as they state explicitly in the book. Theirs is “a story about a group of scientists who fought the scientific evidence and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time,” especially tobacco (p. 8). Right at the top of the cover it states that their focus was on “a Handful of Scientists,” namely Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow. These men are the “Merchants of DOUBT.”

The story I’m telling is that there were many others in the Oil Industry before them sowing doubt through what I call “The Denier’s Playbook.” Mine is also not the full story. I’ll leave that to someone else!

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All of the seven characteristics/imperatives/Movement-building goals of the Climate Movement are interrelated. But the last two are in a mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship. To fulfill the Better Future Covenant, to live out our Ten Movement Values of love, justice, beauty, freedom, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability and success, to stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, to make hope happen, our world more just, and our future come faster, on all of our Olympian Fields of Action we must be together enough, long enough.

That’s because 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.

In the US the Trump years have taught us this. Not that we needed such an awful lesson. The climate challenge itself should have taught us that it demands decades of sustained commitment to collective action.

Being together enough is essential to our being active long enough; it can keep us together longer; and the need for longevity can motivate us to keep coming together, because being together enough, long enough is essential to achieving our Major Goal.

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.

Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

In the United States and around the world pollution activists have been at it since the 19th Century, about 150 years of activism, of people just like us trying to make our world a better place.

And of course our heritage includes all those striving for freedom and justice throughout the 200,000 years of human existence. The interwoven threads of justice and freedom are bound together in every human heart — in our hearts.

They are bound together in the hearts of the Hebrew Prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Dorothy Day, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rachel Carson, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Harvey Milk — as well as contemporary leaders like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.

These are our forebears and our leaders today. Their lives, their examples, tell us to stay true to our calling, our commitment to climate action, to stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better.

CATS Have Nine+ Lives

As a lone individual, how long will you last? On a Climate Action Team or CAT — where we meet, support, and act — you can double, triple, quadruple, quintuple that. Maybe more.

How long will your CAT last? If your CAT is supported in some way by an organization, a coalition, a faith community or some combination, you will last longer, perhaps much longer. Your CAT can have at least nine lives!

CATS worldwide could last longer if they appoint members to be “keepers” or guardians of each of the Ten Movement Values (or the values affirmed by the CAT) and the Better Future Covenant. The keeper’s role is to keep each one alive by facilitating the actualization of their particular Value. Keepers will be on the lookout for how the CAT is living in and living out their Value, and report to the CAT their observations, praising the group for fulfilling the Value, or encouraging the CAT to more fully live in and live out love, justice, beauty, creativity, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, sustainability, and success.

Similarly, the CAT can appoint a “joy-spotter,” who raises up joys within the CAT and those throughout The Climate Movement.

This is the great cause of our time and one of the greatest expressions of freedom of of our age. It can be the great cause of our lives; it is one that will outlive us.

Our lives themselves are ephemeral pools, which makes every moment so utterly precious as it will never come again. Finitude, history, and the fact that there will never be another you combine to create a continual kairotic stream of opportunities. As chronos time ticks by, we have chance upon chance to seize our kairos moments to come back again and again and again to take the field of victory on all of our Olympian Fields of Action, to make a difference that no one else can, to claim our destiny, to create justice and a better world, to live our lives like they matter — because they can; because they do.

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.

It’s time to say Yes — today, tomorrow, and the next day and the next, until our sands of time have run their course and we pass the baton to those who will keep us moving towards victory.

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Santa Marta, the first international conference by nearly 60 countries to begin the process of phasing out fossil fuels, is now in the books. Here are some of my initial thoughts, my first take. (See my earlier post pre-conference putting Santa Marta in context.)

One of the outcomes of Santa Marta was a sense of hope by veterans of international climate efforts.

As The Guardian reported:

“The mood here in Santa Marta is euphoric,” said Tzeporah Berman, the founder and chair of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break – all that pent-up experience, knowledge and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

Yes — hope is contagious. It is a renewable resource for action. But it is also birthed by action. Hope gives us emotional fuel to keep moving forward. But hope dies when such momentum is not maintained.

Thankfully, this was not a one-off meeting. A second is now planned, co-hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland. With those two countries taking the lead, my sense is that the second conference will be another meaningful one.

Two Kinds of Hope

As I have said, for us there are two kinds of hope: vision-hope and action-hope.

Vision Hope: At Santa Marta, people began to see how countries might start coming together to end the corrupt, deadly reign of the fossils and really get us going on climate action.

Action Hope: If there was one word that rose to the top of the discussions it was “roadmap,” a ubiquitous term in climate talks.

I’ll be honest. “Roadmap” doesn’t send our hearts aflutter.

“Roadmap … oooh … aaah …”

Ah, No.

But what it stands for, well, that’s something to get excited about.

We’ve got this vision, we’ve got people hungry for action to make this vision a reality.

But doing so is, frankly, complicated and messy. Our problem is a systematic aggregate problem that can’t be solved by individuals. To change the system requires government action. To untangle the government-fossil entanglement requires The Climate Movement’s three forms of power: moral power, people power, staying power. But it also requires careful plans by governments to untangle each society from fossil’s deadly grasp.

And that’s what is meant by “roadmap”: how to untangle your country from fossil’s death grip. How we get from here to there: Action Hope.

During the conference France put forward their roadmap for dumping coal by 2030, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050.

Fast enough? No. But it’s a start.

Going Forward: Workstreams

The final report from the co-chairs of Santa Marta highlighted that the conference created three main areas, or what they called “workstreams,” where countries will work together with relevant experts to help each nation create and implement its roadmap. These workstreams are:

1. Creating country roadmaps.

2. Getting rid of fossil subsidies and other needed changes to the financial system.

3. Creating “a fossil fuel-free trade system … this workstream will consider how to make transitions people-centered and territorially grounded, therefore tackling the revenue exchange problem, while advancing energy sovereignty.” In other words, help fossil consuming countries kick their addiction to the product of the fossil pushers by helping them create homegrown clean energy.

Our Job Remains The Same

As I said in my earlier post, for us in The Climate Movement, our job remains the same. We are to be the catalyst of the catalysts, leading the other three of The Catalytic-4 to help make all of this politically possible in every country on Earth. Our goal is to become 5% of every nation, 400 million worldwide, by 2030.

We are to encourage those 80+% who already say they are in favor of climate action in polls to intensify their commitment and claim it as a top priority, becoming Climate Action Supporters, our Second Catalytic Source of Transformation. When we combine Climate Action Supporters with Climate Movement Artist-Athletes we can supply the moral power, people power, and staying power needed for each country to play its part.

Santa Marta is good news. And so are we. Nothing less than greatness is our calling. We are making hope happen as we pull our destiny into the present, becoming the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. Together we are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster. Join us!

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In our first post in this Smog-Climate Subseries, I introduced The Denier’s Playbook that the Oil Industry developed to attack pollution reduction efforts.

I. Pound Home a Simple Message for Public Consumption: Deny, Deny, Deny

1. Deny there is a problem (if you can).

2. Deny we know enough.

3. Deny culpability.

II. Operationalize The Message

1. Hire scientific consultants to do “research,” propose theories friendly to Industry interests, and help proclaim the basic 3-part message of denial.

2. Attack and discredit legitimate scientists telling the truth.

3. Proclaim to media and elected officials/policymakers that we don’t know enough to act; more research is needed; the science isn’t settled.

So the first thing The Denier’s Playbook suggests is to deny there’s a problem, in this case pollution, which is too much of something in the wrong place causing harm. Denying there’s problem has worked quite well for opponents of climate action such as Exxon and their allies. But as we will see, it wasn’t possible for the Oil Industry in their opposition to smog reduction efforts.

By the time one of the heroes of this fight, Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit, took on smog beginning in the late 40s it had been occurring in Los Angeles since around the turn of the century. Its first ordinance for controlling “smoke” (as air pollution was then known) was passed in 1905.1 But things got much worse with the population boom during and after World War II. Between 1940-1950 the population went from 7 to 11 million and registered vehicles from 2.8 to 4.5 million.2

Smog really captured the public’s attention on July 8, 1943 when it was so thick downtown you lost a sense of direction. “Blinded drivers jerked from side to side to avoid collisions. Mothers snatched up frightened children into ornate lobbies for shelter.”3 Eyes welled, faces and throats burned. Rumors spread that it was a Japanese gas attack.

As concerns continued during the coming weeks LA’s mayor, Fletcher Bowron, pledged to eliminate the problem in four months – the first of many unfulfilled promises about smog.4

There were two very basic problems that Mayor Bowron and nearly everyone else failed to grasp.

First, there was a lack of proper jurisdiction; no government entity had the power to reduce pollution everywhere it was occurring; restricting pollution sources in the city wouldn’t prevent it throughout the LA basin.

Second, and even more basic, no one really knew what made up LA’s version of smog – and, as we will see, here is where Prof. Haagen-Smit would come to the rescue. If you don’t know what it is, you can’t properly regulate it.

Their failure to grasp these points is understandable once we recognize that, unlike today, there was no environmental consciousness and its outgrowth, the environmental movement and its national organizations. Nor were there government agencies like California’s Air Resources Board or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).5

Precursors to the LA Smog Challenge

To be sure, by the 1940s our country had a strong conservation tradition focused on land stewardship and preservation. And for thousands of years people the world over had complained about smoke and unhealthy air in relation to cities. This included here in America beginning as early as 1823. Complaints turned into action after the Civil War due to the explosive rise in coal use, which went from 20 million tons in 1860 to 650 million tons in 1918, a 3,200% increase. Most of this coal burning occurred in and around cities using the more polluting bituminous coal rather than the less smokey anthracite coal.6

In response, for over 50 years before the LA smog fight three types of groups across the country fought for “smoke abatement”: (1) activists; (2) engineers; (3) civic/business leaders.

Women’s groups were the initial leaders, who were joined by engineers and civic organizations – including local chambers of commerce. Most efforts began by targeting polluters like a specific plant for direct action. When that proved insufficient, they moved on to the courts and the passage of laws, the first of which were quite ineffectual or were struck down by the judiciary, requiring proponents to try, try again. Pittsburgh passed its first ordinance in 1869, and other cities like Chicago followed.

By 1916 such efforts achieved some modest success. First, the vast majority of major cities had “smoke abatement bureaus.” Second, after numerous setbacks in the courts, a series of court rulings beginning in 1900 affirmed the government’s authority to regulate. Third, an important achievement was in the area of public attitudes. At the beginning of the struggle many found it hard to overcome the argument of industry that pollution was a positive sign of economic progress. “As Harper’s Weekly noted in 1907, no longer was a visibly active stack a ‘badge of great prosperity.’ Perceptions had changed, as many urbanites looked upon the dark clouds and saw no progress, only pollution.”7

However, enforcement mechanisms were weak, cumbersome, or non-existent, and many of the engineers put in charge of the smoke abatement departments preferred to educate and persuade rather than enforce. Standing on the outside, the women activists wanted more. The efforts of the men, the engineers and businessmen, led to mixed results.8

In addition, these early efforts by activists were episodic, flaring up when pollution got worse, and then fading when a decision was made, such as passing or defeat of a local ordinance. This was due in part because the women reformers had a wide variety of issues they were fighting for, not just smoke abatement.

The reformers/activists were crucial as catalysts. But another lesson to take from these early years was that when it comes to chronic, systemic problems like air pollution, permanent organizations that remain true to the movement’s goals are needed to help ensure pollution gets reduced. Action proponents need staying power.

LA Smog Challenge Helps Create Environmentalism

It is the LA smog challenge that helps usher in an environmental consciousness/movement, including the creation of national environmental organizations fighting against pollution, and such laws as the Clean Air Act (1970) and the creation of the EPA (1971).

One reason it begins to emerge in LA During the late 1940s is because smog had reached epidemic proportions. Newspapers published a rash of letters from people leaving the area. One couple who had lived there nearly 60 years left “with pity in our hearts for all the poor souls who have to live and take it.”9 People were dying in traffic accidents because they couldn’t see. More and more planes were grounded.

Just as was the case decades earlier in eastern and midwestern cities, moms seized upon their moral power and began to demand action because it was making their children sick. They watched their children gasp, lose sleep, be unable to concentrate at school, and come down with infections.10 In the fall of 1946 after several smog attacks hundreds marched in protest at city hall.11 Look magazine went so far as to call smog “evil.” It even showed up as a surprise “star witness” in a trial about air pollution when smog enveloped the witness stand.12 One of Dr. Haagen-Smit’s colleagues, Margaret Brunelle, recalls driving through thick smog in Pasadena. “I’d have to pull over by the side of the road because my eyes were tearing so badly I couldn’t see to drive,” she said.13

In contrast to climate change, you didn’t have to convince anyone that there was smog; on a bad day, all you had to do was look out the window or venture outside. Newspaper coverage became a common occurrence. The Los Angeles Times led the way after Dorothy Chandler, wife of the publisher Norman Chandler, marched straight into his office from a smoggy drive to tell him something needed to be done.14 Such coverage helped turn it into a political issue.

For the Oil Industry, it was a front-page article on December 11, 1946 that finally pushed them into action. The paper had a huge aerial photo of one of their refineries, suggesting it was responsible for LA’s smog.15 In response a committee was formed, the “Petroleum Industry Committee on Smog,” which eventually became the “Smoke and Fumes” committee.16 Even though it had been 3 ½ years since smog captured the public’s attention, the Oil Industry was nevertheless still ahead of the game in comparison to the political process and the government’s ability to mount an effective response.

But the industry could see the writing on the wall. Because LA had a diverse economy, because it was not a “company town,” the Oil Industry couldn’t run roughshod over those with concerns. Smog was a problem for major segments of the economy: agriculture, tourism, and, to a lesser extent, the movie industry (where it interfered with shooting outdoors). It struck at the very heart of Southern California’s appeal and the area’s sunny image of itself that it projected to the wider world. The Oil Industry blamed the media for stoking such fears, as if there were no there, there.17 But at the end of the day all of this meant the Oil Industry would be unable to prevent legislation – not that they didn’t try.

At the beginning of the 1947 legislative session Assemblyman A. I. Stewart of Pasadena, one of the hardest hit areas, introduced Assembly Bill No. 1. It was designed to begin to fix the problem of the lack of proper jurisdiction by giving counties the ability to create pollution control districts with enforcement powers whose boundaries were coterminous with the county.

The Oil Companies realized they couldn’t win this fight in public, given the common belief that the problem was real and action was required. Instead, they led the charge behind the scenes to gut the bill with loopholes designed to allow them to keep on polluting.18 But when newspaper editorials exposed what they were doing to the light of day, senior oil executives met on May 19, 1946 to discuss the situation.

Harold Kennedy, legal counsel for Los Angeles County, who drafted the initial version of the bill, was in attendance.19 In his brief history Kennedy recounts the turning point that helped clear the way for the bill’s passage. One executive, whom Kennedy described as “public spirited,” provided “invaluable” leadership. His name was William L. “Bill” Stewart, Jr. His concern for the LA community was a family tradition dating back to his grandfather, Lyman Stewart, who considered life as a missionary before becoming founder and President of Union Oil, as well as founder of Biola University and Union Rescue Mission.20

Bill Stewart “argued that smog was a far reaching community question affecting not only the comfort and health of the entire community, but also its future prosperity.” As such, Union Oil “believed they must make their contribution to Los Angeles County, and to Southern California …” by not trying to gut the legislation.21 Mr. Stewart carried the day.22

On June 10, 1947, the first basic problem in dealing with smog, that of proper jurisdiction, began to be addressed when Governor Earl Warren (the future Supreme Court Chief Justice) signed into law an air pollution bill that gave counties the authority to create Air Pollution Control Districts with enforcement powers. This was a major turning point in the smog fight. By October 1947 the LA Air Pollution Control District or APCD was up and running. With a budget of $178,000 and a staff of 47, it quickly became the best funded and staffed air pollution agency in the country.23

However, allowing substantive legislation to go forward didn’t mean the Oil Industry would stop their opposition to pollution control efforts that would hurt their bottom line; far from it. In other words, they continued to run The Denier’s Playbook.

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We have come to the end of this sub-series on our sixth characteristic and Movement-building goal of the Climate Movement, being together enough.

I’m not going to wrap things up in a long summation. I just want to say a final word. 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 joining with others and making a difference in the greatest cause of our time.

There is joy in living in and living out our Movement Values.

There is joy in helping to bring about justice — stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better.

There is joy in using our talents and all we are to create a better world, both now and for today’s children and subsequent generations.

There is joy in living in and living out our love and experiencing the love of others.

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, this joy, it is impossible not to have hope. Together, we are the hope as we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster. When we make hope happen there is joy. And in the joy there is hope.

Climate consequences are drenched in fear, anger, despair, and sadness. We know this only too well, because we do not shrink from climate reality.

But as the psalmist said:

And Emily Dickinson adds:

When we are together enough, powered by love, seeking justice, working to create a better future for those we love, we open every door, our new days dawn — and with them cometh joy.

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This week a conference of nations is taking place in Santa Marta, Columbia, cohosted by Columbia and The Netherlands to move forward the effort to transition away from fossil fuels, explicitly for the purpose of dealing with climate change. (Our friends at The Climate Reality Project have a good brief primer on the Santa Marta conference.)

Those attending are “57 countries representing more than half of global GDP, 30% of the world’s population and 20% of global fossil fuel production.”

As you can see from the list above, what we don’t have are the three largest polluting countries: China, the US, and India. Does that matter? Surprisingly, no.

This conference grew out of the failure of last year’s international climate negotiations called COPs (or Conference of the Parties to the 1992 Rio Climate Treaty) to live up to their commitment at COP 28 in DuBai in 2023 to transition away from fossil fuels. Rather than continue to be stymied by fossil-states at the COPs, these 57 countries are coming together to create “a coalition of the willing” to move forward at a faster pace. It is intended to complement, not replace, the COPs.

Here’s a positive view of what could be accomplished by Ingmar Rentzhog of We Don’t Have Time:

A group representing more than half of global GDP and one-fifth of fossil fuel production is large enough to begin shaping markets. Not by announcing the end of oil tomorrow, but by creating policy certainty around what comes next: clean energy investment, fossil fuel subsidy reform, debt relief, legal protections for climate policy, transition planning for workers and communities, and national roadmaps aligned with science (emphasis added).

Santa Marta Can Help

What we want, market-wise, is to drive the fossils off a cliff in a way that overcomes climate change while simultaneously making the transition to clean as pain-free and just as possible, especially when it comes to workers, communities, and low-income folks.

Tipping point market transformations driven by tech change don’t require everybody or every business or every nation. They just require enough to create the tipping point. Could this “coalition of the willing” provide it for clean tech driving climate action?

Unlike the international climate talks, tech change market transformations like dirty-to-clean don’t need an international consensus of nation-states.

The same is true with overcoming climate change by stopping the bad stuff, i.e. greenhouse gas pollution enough to hold warming to 1.5C. As I discussed in an earlier post, we already have the market conditions necessary to do so: about 75% of needed mitigation efforts are cost competitive today (55%) or nearly so (20%).

These favorable market conditions mean clean energy is dominating new investment and has surpassed coal in terms of power generation, as this snapshot from Ember illustrates:

So, in general, profits and price are on our side, and these factors will continue to grow. Good.

The Iran War fiasco has also made it clear that energy security = economic security. And economic security creates conditions for stable and productive societies.

Economic security from energy security. Also good.

Bottom Line — it’s pretty simple: cheap, home-grown, clean energy is much better than dirty fossil energy, especially if it’s imported.

Unfortunately, the climate-friendly clean-tech tripping point market transformation has a major impediment standing in the way.

Untangling the Fossils From Government

There’s no “free” market in energy, dampening and even neutralizing the power of profit and price. Governments are heavily involved. This is true for both the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

On the production side, according to our friends at Carbon Majors, in 2024 “state-owned companies accounted for 54.0% of emissions,” while major investor-owned companies accounted for about 24%. Furthermore, their pollution is growing: 54% of state-owned companies increased their pollution, while 57% of investor-owned companies reduced theirs.

So governments don’t just allow the Big Producers of Polluting Products to pollute. Many of them are Big Producers: they have a controlling interest or they own-and-run fossil energy producers.

On the consumption side, many countries subsidize fossil energy to make it cheaper for consumers to buy. Some also subsidize investor-owned fossil companies, which is justified by the same rationale: keep consumer prices cheap.

An excellent new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) shows that:

Here it is in graphic form:

Worldwide, 90% of these subsidies went to consumers and 10% to producers. But it all helps the fossils because consumers are buying their deadly product; the subsidies are really going to them; they may “help” the consumers, but the fossils end up with the $$.

In effect, consumers are just a pass-through for taxpayer $$ going to fossil corporations. This is reverse “money-laundering” taking clean taxpayer $$ and making it fossil-dirty by the consumer pass-through.

Another new IISD report highlights that the consumer subsidies are regressive, with most of the benefits going to the wealthy. For example, “In middle-income countries, the top-earning 20% of the population receives 11 times as much in subsidies as the lowest 20%.”1 Instead of subsidizing the price, a better way is direct cash transfers to the lowest 20%.

Furthermore, the countries most vulnerable to fossil fuel price spikes due to things like the Iran war are subsidizing their own dependence. Here’s their dirty v. clean scorecard:

• 2.5 to 1, dirty v. clean

• for every $1 dirty gets, renewables get $0.39.

So how do we untangle this government-fossil dysfunctional relationship? How do we break the pusher-addict destructive spiral?

Our Challenge: keep prices cheap and job transitions fair as we switch from dirty to clean while we creating speed and scale needed to overcome climate change.

We can’t just get rid of fossil subsidies without having cheap clean energy and related technologies ready to take the place of the fossils. We don’t want yellow-vest type protests popping up in countries where the cost of climate action is suddenly thrust upon working people. We also don’t what this because it would be, you know, frikkin’ wrong.

But we also must tackle the governments-as-producers side. We must get them out of the pollution business. That’s why we can’t just shape markets or even reform fossil subsidies. In addition, there are all kinds of laws and public investments in infrastructure designed with the fossils in mind. It’s a deep entanglement. However much Santa Marta can help will be beneficial. But we must be realistic about what it can accomplish.

The Catalytic-4 Together Is The Answer

Since the Industrial Revolution ARTC (or the accelerating rate of technological change) and markets, with some modest help from government, have created waves or “great surges” of economic and societal transformation. These are historical facts.

However, past is not prologue, or prophecy. Concerning tech-economic change, the future will be different — but it won’t be that different. How new waves/surges happen won’t exactly be the same. But will we continue to have them? Yes.

Here’s the difference as I see it: for past waves/surges there has never been the deep structural, financial, political, and policy entrenchment like we have with the fossils.

The good news is that we’re in the midst of a beneficial surge: the transformation from dirty to clean energy. The bad news is it won’t happen fast enough.

Markets, mainly on their own, combined with ARTC, can create transformative waves/surges.

Governments, on their own — i.e., without sufficient popular support and pushing from The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters — can help markets with economic change driven by tech waves/surges. But not fast enough for our needs.

Bottom Line: Each of The Catalytic-4 on their own or in binary combos won’t deliver speed and scale in time to avoid 1.5C or even 2C — let alone do so by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

But together they can.

As I’ve discussed previously, polls show that in most countries we already have the volume of popular support we need — 80% or greater supporting action. But what we need to do is intensify that support so that climate action is a top priority. In other words, we need this 80+% to become Climate Action Supporters, our Second Catalytic Source of Transformation.

We need all four of The Catalytic-4 working together. But that won’t happen without The Climate Movement working to make it happen — we are the catalyst of The Catalytic-4, the catalyst of catalysts.

To intensify popular support, to make ARTC strategic, and to have Governments-&-Markets working together to create speed and scale will require The Climate Movement to pull its destiny into the present and become what we are meant to be.

The more countries who kick the fossil addiction, as importers, exporters, consumers, and producers or any combo thereof, the faster we can bring our future into the present.

To stop the bad stuff, greenhouse gas pollution, we don’t need all of the countries of the world to agree at the same time. Santa Marta can give us a needed boost.

But it is The Climate Movement pushing the rest of The Catalytic-4 that will bring us home. That’s why growing and improving The Climate Movement is the most important thing we can be doing right now. Join us!

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Six thousand pounds of pineapples. That’s how much the Pineapple Research Institute of Hawaii sent Professor Arie Haagen-Smit of Cal Tech in 1945 so that he could study what made up pineapple flavor.1 Some of his colleagues speculated at the time that his work could lead to a Nobel Prize. Instead, in a few years he found himself in a fight with the Oil Industry, one they and their hired scientists picked to discredit him and sully his reputation. As he would later remark about its potential career impact: “It was a case of being handed your own death certificate.”2

Before this Haagen-Smit was an unknown scientist, toiling in obscurity with his pineapples, whose publications included such page-turners as “Über den Einfluss unbekannter ausserer Faktoren bei vermischen mit Aven sativa,” and “The excystment of protozoa: Isolation of crystalline excystment factors for Colpoda duodenaria.” His day job didn’t pay enough to afford to buy a house in the expensive SoCal market. So he tested racehorse urine for doping as a side gig.

It turned out Haagen-Smit, or “Haagy,” had what Tom Wolff called The Right Stuff to stand up to the Oil Industry’s intimidation. What they didn’t know was that in high school Haagen-Smit had become a formidable boxer.

This former boxer, horse-piss tester, and pineapple flavor expert was the wrong guy to pick a fight with.

No doubt the Oil Industry didn’t care one whit about pineapple flavor, except as something they tried to push Prof. Haagen-Smit back to studying; they wanted him chastened and forgotten, a cautionary tale to other scientists.

The Oil Industry’s Concerns that Pollution Could Hurt Profits Began Early

What they did care about was how pollution could impact their bottom line, a concern that stretched at least as far back as the creation of the American Petroleum Institute (API) in 1921. In its founding year3 the API created a committee to deal with problems arising from pollution caused by the production and use of their products. During the early decades interest waxed and waned throughout the industry, committees were formed and reformed.4

It was smog in the Los Angeles (LA) area that brought this concern about pollution into much sharper focus.

Why I Became Interested in the LA Smog Story: Creation of The Denier’s Playbook

I stumbled into the LA smog story as someone who’s been fighting climate change for over 30 years. When I saw that the same basic arguments were trotted out against addressing smog, as well as the same modes of attack against those trying to tell the truth, I felt compelled to investigate.

So I’m telling the smog story from the vantage point of a climate veteran. I’ll be comparing the smog and climate struggles for what they can teach us as we continue on our Olympian Fields of Action.

I also discovered the inspiring stories of two men – Haagen-smit and Arnold Beckman – who were absolutely essential to the success of the smog fight.

In The Beginning There Was LA Smog, and It Wasn’t Very Good

The smog story begins in earnest after World War Two, when LA became ground zero for the early pollution fights with the Oil Industry. It was during the late 40s and early 50s that the industry’s modus operandi or M.O. against pollution control efforts was put into effect.5 Leading the effort was the “Petroleum Industry Committee on Smog,” later to be known as the “Smoke and Fumes Committee.”

In the fight against climate action, some have suggested that opponents mimicked the tobacco companies in their attempts to sow doubt. What the smog fight reveals is that the Oil Industry already had their M.O. at least as far back as the late 1940s.

In struggles like these each side tries to choose the field of battle and occupy the ground most advantageous to its cause. A key strategic decision is whether to pursue your goals behind the scenes using one’s relationships and influence, in public, or a combination of the two.

For the Oil Industry the smog fight was to be a combination. I will concentrate primarily on the public fight.

The Denier’s Playbook

So when we look at how the Oil Industry has fought both action on smog and climate change in public, some basic patterns emerge, what I call The Denier’s Playbook, hope-stealing in action. This consists of two basic parts.

I. Part One — Pound Home a Simple Message for Public Consumption: Deny, Deny, Deny

1. Deny there is a problem (if you can).

2. Deny we know enough.

3. Deny culpability.

II. Part Two — Operationalize The Message

1. Hire scientific consultants to do “research,” propose theories friendly to Industry interests, and help proclaim the basic 3-part message of denial.

2. Attack and discredit legitimate scientists telling the truth.

3. Proclaim to media and elected officials/policymakers that we don’t know enough to act; more research is needed; the science isn’t settled.

In subsequent posts I will tell the story of how The Denier’s Playbook was run against Prof. Haagen-Smit in the Oil Industry’s attempts to thwart smog control efforts that would cost them money.

But I will also show that there was another path available in this smog fight to members of the Oil Industry and their scientific allies, one trod by Dr. Arnold Beckman — scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, CEO, and conservative Republican. It was Beckman who first asked Haagen-Smit to study smog and supported him at crucial times during the fight. Without Beckman there would have been no Haagen-Smit. And without Haagen-Smit, addressing smog may have been significantly delayed.

Finally, the smog fight provides another lesson from the history of fighting air pollution. As I’ve already highlighted, stretching back into the 19th Century there have been three main types of individuals seeking to address pollution: (1) pro-action types; (2) scientists/engineers, and; (3) business leaders. They haven’t always gotten along or even liked each other, but each is essential to success.

Today these types are found in The Four Catalytic Sources of Transformation or The Catalytic-4. The pro-action types are our first two catalytic sources: The Climate Movement and Climate Action Supporters. Scientists/engineers are key to our Third Catalytic Source: ARTC or the accelerating rate of tech change. And business leaders are important players in our Fourth Catalytic Source: Governments-&-Markets.

Truth Matters

The truth matters. It is the only thing we can build a realistic future upon. The hope-stealing Denier’s Playbook is having its last hurrah with Trump & MAGA. They will have to live with their consciences and history’s condemnation. Some, sadly, will die deniers.

As a moral movement, we are committed to the truth: to facing the truth about climate change, but also the truth that we can overcome it. We are also committed to the truth that justice for today’s children and subsequent generations requires that we build them a better future as part of our Better Future Covenant.

So 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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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.

As I write this post I am struck by how inadequate it is, pale descriptions of and suggestions about the subject matter itself.

This post is a minimalist, incomplete, stick-figure sketch done with crayons. Its purpose is simply to awaken us to the possibilities of how the Arts can bring us together and inspire us to stay the course. I hope that you will be intentional about having the Arts help you and those you join together with in our common cause.

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

So let me begin.

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 their narratives are not to be found just in these storytelling forms, but are in all forms of human communication, whether explicit or implicit, intentional, or otherwise, or some mixture. This includes all Social Media: Bluesky threads; TicTock videos; FaceBook and Instagram posts, etc.

In general, stories have a narrative, a sequence that leads to meaning or comprehension. This may or may not lead to a resolution or end, as in “The End.” Narratives can be open-ended. This includes cultural and societal narratives that are so endemic as to be part of the way we view reality, part of that much overused word, “worldview.” We have all kinds of stories and narratives in our heads that we don’t even think about or even realize are there.

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.

As I have been saying, we are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful as we make hope happen, justice a reality, and our future come faster. That’s our story in a nutshell.

When we meet together in CATS (Climate Action Teams) we must be inspired by our narrative vision of the future contained in our vision, purpose, and Major Goal, by the stories of others striving to create a better world, including our teammates, and by uplifting stories we find in all the storytelling forms out there.

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 (e.g. We Shall Overcome), anthems, hymns, and adapted popular songs (e.g., Seal’s Crazy, R.E.M.’s Stand, Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, KC & the Sunshine Band’s Keep It Comin’ Love). Lyrics can be direct and raw; they can tell stories, both straightforward and more veiled.

I strongly encourage the singing of songs when we come together as CATS or at action events. To help tap into our passion and depth, we must literally sing our hearts out.

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. While it is good for us to see visual arts at the same time when we are together, that is not necessary for each of us to be touched and inspired in ways that draw us together through a common shared experience and knowledge that occurs at different points in time. For example, a CAT could talk about a film everyone has seen, or they could see it together.

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. Photos of us being together in meaningful action can bring us together like few things can. I strongly encourage the taking and sharing of photos. (Just be sure to get permission of those in the photos when you share, especially via Social Media platforms.)

Dance

Finally, dance is another of the Arts that can bring us together and inspire us, whether we are watching others, especially talented dancers, or we ourselves are participating in the dancing. Dancing has probably been one of the ways people have been coming together since the beginning of humanity. As we have become more fragmented it has fallen by the wayside for many of us. But 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.

So Let’s Make Beauty!

I hope this post has sparked your imagination about how to incorporate the Arts into your commitment to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything, especially as we do so together. Consider this your invitation as we make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful, our world more just, and our future come faster. Join us!

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The Threat From Nuclear Zombies Just Won’t Die

So why did Mr. Trump start the criminal war with Iran in the first place? There have been all kinds of shifting rationales floated by Trump & Co. But one has remained constant: to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

The Iran War has brought into sharp relief an old existential threat that continues to rear its ugly head. Nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation, and the real threat that such weapons could be used are now once again haunting our reality around the globe.

Nuclear Zombies.

Here’s a quick snapshot.

• North Korea’s April 19 ballistic missile tests, banned by the UN, which continues an acceleration of advances and testing of both missiles and nukes, including one that could reach the US. The Iran War has most likely quickened North Korea’s pace to add to its already substantial nuclear arsenal and made them even more essential.

• Putin’s nuclear saber rattling related to his criminal war against Ukraine — and the Ukraine war itself, which some may conclude wouldn’t have happened if Ukraine hadn’t relinquished the nukes they had from when they were a part of the former USSR.

• Continual tensions and armed skirmishes between nuclear powers India and Pakistan that have been recently heightened.

• The lapsing in February of New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), the last active nuclear arms treaty between Russia and the US; nothing now holds each country back from creating a new nuclear arms race.

• And now the Iran War’s two-pronged danger: Mr. Trump’s veiled threat to use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran, and; the likelihood that Iran will pursue nuclear weapons, which now they can do quickly, regardless of whether or not they strike some kind of deal with Trump.

These Nuclear Zombies just won’t die.

Ugh. We don’t get to pick the time in which we live. If we did, there might be a long queue to get the heck outta here.

But as Gandalf counseled Frodo, while we can’t choose our time, we can choose how to live in it. Our hope lies in using our three forms of power — moral power, people power and staying power — to answer these threats.

In the US We’ve Gone From Reagan’s Dream to the Nightmare of Donald Trump

When I was a footsoldier in the Nuclear Freeze Campaign in the 1980s Ronald Reagan was, frankly, our arch-nemesis. He seemed to us a walking, talking destabilizing factor between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, the US and the USSR. He criticized the latest nuclear treaty called SALT II.

Early in his first term in a March 1983 speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, under a banner that said “Change Your World,” he called the USSR the “evil empire.”

His Administration’s strategy was to act tough and outspend the Soviets. At one point in August 1984 he quipped, as a joke:

It seemed to reveal what Reagan really felt.

But historians have demonstrated that from the very beginning Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist, starting after the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a vision he never surrendered.

For years I never thought I’d say this, but oh, for the days of Ronald Reagan! Mr. Trump, the anti-Reagan, has me pinning for those good old days.

We have gone from Reagan’s dream to the nightmare of Trump.

Alas, Reagan’s dream never came to pass. The fruits of Ronald Reagan’s nuclear diplomacy and his vision of a world without nuclear weapons have, sadly, died on the vine. The crowning outcome of his nuclear diplomacy, the START treaties, are no more. The New START nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired on February 5, 2026, removing the last legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

Today we find ourselves in a much less stable world where Mr. Trump issues veiled threats to use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran:

Mr. Trump’s Narcissism Is Why We’re In This Mess

It is Mr. Trump’s narcissism that has gotten us into this mess. Because he believes he always can make a better deal, he trashed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 that took two years to negotiate, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This was an hard-fought, serious agreement between Iran and the US, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany and the European Union or EU. It required Iran to limit its nuclear program—dismantling much of it and increasing inspection access—in exchange for major sanctions relief.

So the world had a deal to limit peacefully Iran’s nuclear program, but Trump and his arrogance knee-capped it. Already suspicious and mistrustful of the US, this has made Iran even more so. Since then Iran’s ability to create nuclear bombs has accelerated.

In 2022, a senior Iranian nuclear scientist and nuclear-hawk, Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri, confirmed, according to an Atlantic Council post, that

Tehran can speed up uranium enrichment to 99 percent, build a nuclear warhead, and use it as both “deterrence” and a bargaining chip in interactions with the West “like North Korea,” which, according to him, gets away with “bullying” the world.

Where Does Trump’s Dangerous and Deadly Arrogance Leave Us?

The sheer narcissistic arrogance, stupidity, and destructivity of the Iran War is on full display day after day.

• The war has killed Iran’s old hardline leadership and replaced it with a younger one that is even more hardline, where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now has even more clout. Because it’s rally around the leader time: (1) the regime has been able to crack down even more on the resistance, and; (2) the patriotism of government critics has even many of them supporting the regime during the war.

• The war pushed Iran into a corner to play one of its few remaining cards, an “In Emergency Break Glass” kinda situation — asserting control and closing the Straight of Hormuz, wreaking economic havoc across the world.

• Even with a temporary cease-fire the economic repercussions of the still-closed Straight continue to reverberate throughout the world economy. For example, according to the New York Times in a piece on the Asia-Pacific (April 20):

“Even if there is a peace deal soon, the future of this industrious region that has driven global economic growth for decades will likely include months of canceled flights, surging food prices, factory pauses, delayed shipments and empty shelves for products long considered quick and easy to buy worldwide: plastic bags, instant noodles, vaccines, syringes, lipstick, microchips and sportswear.

Collectively, according to many officials and experts, if the war’s strangling of commercial traffic through the Middle East lasts for even a few more weeks, and uncertainty lingers, shortages could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession.”

• The International Monetary Fund or IMF now projects slower growth, but Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is worried the Iran War could lead to a global recession.

• And of course in the US there’s the Trump-inflicted inflation, beginning with his vindictive tariffs and now thanks to Trump’s criminal Iran War the increased price of oil products, most visibly the cost of a gallon of gas. As a result, US Consumer Sentiment is at its lowest ever recorded.

• Now all eyes are focused on the closed Straight and how to get it open again.

• The biggest complicating factor in reaching a deal may be the mistrust Iran has with Trump, for launching the war while negotiations were ongoing, scuttling the earlier nuclear agreement (JCPOA), and his history of reneging on earlier deals large and small.

Some are suggesting that Iran’s newfound control of the Straight of Hormuz and the power that represents could potentially ease their need for nuclear weapons. But a more likely scenario is they will see the need for them, or at least the threat of developing them, as even more important.

“There are a lot of reasons to believe that the [Iranian] regime coming out the other side of this may have more incentives to covertly race for the bomb” said Christine Wormuth, President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

On Friday Trump said Iran had agreed to turn over their “nuclear dust.” The Iranians said he made the whole thing up. He can’t bully or lie his way out of this war. He can’t go in and take their nuclear material without a massive troop presence and the potential for heavy casualties. And now he’s pushed them into controlling the Straight.

So if you’re the hardline Iranian regime, why settle for bullying the world with the Straight, when you can also do so with nuclear weapons like North Korea does? Why not pretend to give something to Trump nuclear-wise, get a bunch of concessions in return they would have never gotten pre-war, and all the while have a secret program to produce nukes?

So to sum up: Trump, Mr.-Art-of-the-Deal, skuttles the deal to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, then starts a criminal war to deal with the resulting accelerating nuclear program, then issues a veiled threat to use nuclear weapons to push Iran to reopen the Straight of Hormuz that was closed because of the war he started. And, of course, we don’t yet know what concessions Iran will wring out of Art-of-the-Deal Trump to reopen the Straight and (pretend?) to put on hold their nuclear weapons program.

More broadly, this current Nuclear Zombie time makes nuclear proliferation much more likely, given:

• the extinction of the last remaining nuclear treaty between the US and Russia and a possible new arms race,

• the Iran War with its veiled nuclear threats by the US, and

• what happened to Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, nations without nuclear weapons who were attacked.

All of this may lead other countries without nukes to feel they need them.

As one analysis put it:

There is a danger that many states watching these developments will absorb a straightforward message: nuclear weapons deter attack in a way that conventional capabilities cannot.

So Where’s The Hope?

Climate change, and now you pile on nuclear zombies. Where’s the hope amidst these two existential threats?

We are the hope — and here’s how. We must:

1. stay focused on achieving our vision, purpose, and Major Goal: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything;

2. become big and broad and active enough, our first characteristic/imperative/goal— 5% of the population or 400 million worldwide and 16 million in the US by 2030;

3. lend our support at strategic moments to efforts to diminish and eliminate these nuclear threats.

It’s the combination of our three forms of power — moral power, people power, staying power — that will allow us to make a difference with these nuclear challenges while we simultaneously stay focused on climate change.

The need is great. The opportunity to make a difference together is profound. To realize this opportunity you can join what will become the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world 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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If we ever were to attain all of justice it would only be the beginning of a just world, part of the abundant life. We seek justice precisely because it is lacking.

Justice is not simply the absence of bad stuff, or the lack of injustice.

Justice is the presence of good stuff.

It is making amends for wrongs. It is the creation of the good life that is the birthright of every person and the rest of nature. It is healing. It is wellbeing. It is the freedom to have a life well lived.

That’s why our vision, purpose, and Major Goal is to overcome climate change in ways that create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

That’s why the three actions of justice are to stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better. It’s part of our job to help find out what these actions should be in each situation.

Justice Manual? Nada

There is no manual of justice, a book that spells out how to achieve justice in each case, i.e., how to give everyone and everything their due in each situation.

Laws are not such a manual.

Laws prescribe what those in power think laws should be at certain moments in time. They may help us find justice — or not. It’s always worth remembering that just about everything Hitler did was legal.

To be clear: we are for the rule of law. No doubt about it. No ifs, ands, or buts. The absence of the rule of law is chaos or capricious tyranny. Neither existence will overcome climate change.

Being for the rule of law doesn’t mean you think every law is good. That’s why societies with some modicum of freedom have ways to change bad laws.

There are also times when we haven’t yet been able to change an unjust law or one that no longer contributes to the common good, and we choose to break one law to protest another unjust law by participating in civil disobedience. As John Lewis put it, we get into “good trouble.”

In this we are not working to overthrow the rule of law. Just the opposite! We are opposing certain laws or actions of governments — whether legal or illegal — by breaking certain other laws. And we are willing to submit ourselves to the legal system, the rule of law, to be arrested, to spend time in jail. In other words, we simultaneously break certain laws as we uphold the rule of law.

The rule of law avoids chaos, lawlessness, and tyranny. But it does not guarantee justice. Nor do laws automatically create justice.

To sum up: there is no manual of justice and laws can help or hurt in our striving for justice, i.e., to give everyone and everything their due.

But We Do Have Principles of Justice

If humanity has developed anything close to a manual, or, more precisely, to underlying ideas that should inspire and guide the actualization of justice, it is the articulation of principles of justice. Examples include The Principles of Environmental Justice and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But they don’t tell us how to secure these principles and rights. Nor are they self-enforcing. They are aspirational. One only has to look at much of the sorry history of the UN Commission/Council on Human Rights to see how if aspirations are not backed up with moral power and people power, those opposed — in this case national governments — can undermine them at every turn. And that’s exactly what they’ve done.

The same is true for Environmental Justice (EJ). There have been some victories. But not nearly enough. Even the victories are partial and can be reversed when the pressure is off, or when the government turns hostile, such as the Trump reversal and destruction of Biden EJ policies and programs.

And so we continue in our search for justice; we move forward in our struggle for justice.

We Do Have The Five Dimensions of Justice

To help guide The Climate Movement as we strive for justice, I have observed that there are five interrelated and overlapping dimensions of justice that are at the heart of our Movement and help fuel our passion for action:

• Generational

• Distributive

• Environmental

• Climate

• Justice for Nature.

These help us see in broad strokes our justice landscape and what we are working towards.

And We Do Have The Three Actions of Justice

So we have principles and ideas and dimensions and visions of justice to help guide us. They tell us, broadly, what to do. But in every circumstance we must determine what justice is.

How, then, do we begin to achieve justice? We do so by doing the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better. And how do we know what these actions are in each situation?

In most cases the suite of possible actions to take are clear to people of good will who want to do them. We begin by asking and answering questions.

• What is harming people and/or nature and creating an injustice? Then let’s stop doing that.

• How can those accountable make amends? Help in some way to heal the harm? How can those harmed be restored and made whole by those accountable and/or society?

• How can we help create the positive things everyone and everything is due so they can live the lives intended for them? Where all are thriving? Where wellbeing and realized potential are the hallmarks of lives well lived?

Then we discuss the range of actions to take and agree on what they will be in each situation — which, admittedly, could spark vigorous debate.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone or any group would be opposed to such actions, but injustice is as old as humanity itself. Those who don’t want justice may try to cloud the issue or simply undermine or oppose our justice actions.

How Do We Carry On?

Striving for justice is challenging. It can be a hard road. For a few of us it can even lead to the ultimate sacrifice. So how do we keep going? How do we refuel our staying power?

We do so by journeying together, inspired and guided by our Movement Values, beginning with the most important one, the L-word, Love. Love is the heart of justice. Love for our loved ones. Love for each other. Love for others. Love for nature. Love for God, or what you consider to be greater than ourselves. For most of us, without love there is no striving for justice. And without each other almost all of us will exhaust ourselves and fall by the way.

Love and each other. That’s the key. That’s our staying power formula.

Hope & Justice?

Ok, I’ve had this big long Series asserting that these two not only go with one another, but are a mutually beneficial symbiosis.

Yea, yea, yea.

But these words together — do they create a bit of cognitive dissonance or mental tension for you? Not as opposites, certainly, but as things that, well, don’t often go with each other. Do they seem odd together? Strange bedfellows? Fluffy versus Spiky? Or maybe just an unfamiliar pairing that you don’t quite know what to make of?

I hope if you have partaken of this Hope & Justice Series that any strangeness has been dissipated or even dispelled.

It is our unjust reality that creates a dissonance between hope and justice, not something inherent in the concepts themselves. Quite the opposite. Deep within nearly every human heart we hope for a just world, a fair world, where everyone and everything is given their due.

And what are we due? An abundant life, wellbeing, a life well lived. This is our hope for every generation, which is why we have our Better Future Covenant.

Our hope for justice inspires us to create justice. That’s why we have two kinds of hope or double-hope: vision-hope and action-hope. Every step towards justice creates what we hope for, and such hope empowers us to strive for more justice — all of which is beautiful. As such, we are justice-seekers, hope-makers, and beauty-creators.

The Climate Movement is a moral movement, and the beating heart of our being a moral movement is our striving towards justice. Without this we won’t create the people power needed to fulfill our vision: to overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.

As you can see, justice informs and inspires our vision at every step. Together with our moral power and people power and staying power we are making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!

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I hope to have many more posts about CATS as we journey together — especially about what particular CATS are doing, maybe even yours!

But this post marks the seventh and final one in my introductory CATS Series, which, while it stands alone, is also a subseries of my broader Olympian Fields of Action Series. That’s because CATS help those of us in The Climate Movement be together enough, our sixth movement characteristic/imperative/goal — as well as our other seven characteristics.

If we aren’t together enough we won’t achieve all we must. And CATS are essential for helping us to be together enough.

CATS Must Be Strategic

As we all know, CATS are independent. They are one of the greatest expressions of freedom of our time. CATS can do vital things just by themselves, like helping with the most important action we can be doing right now — growing and improving The Climate Movement, helping us create the moral and people power and staying power we need to have our nations play their parts.

But if all individual CATS do is their own thing, if they aren’t connected to other, larger, strategic actions, then their ability to help us achieve success will be severely limited.

Bottom line: 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 help 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. They can be in the form of a nation-wide march or day of protest, or a campaign with strategic goals. These are other ways we must be together enough.

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!

Self-Herding CATS

We look out from our CAT and we see CATS, then more CATS, then even more CATS, then even many more CATS, then CATS as far as the eye can see …

From our CAT we see that these CATS are forming ever larger circles of CATS working together. CAT circles within CAT circles.

Your individual CAT helps your CAT members to do and become more than they ever would on their own as you become both organic and strategic together. Each CAT is valuable in and of itself.

But what about bigger strategic efforts?

Here’s the thing. 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 this might be organized.

CATS Community

The first circle outward is made up of CATS Communities that have something in common. These are CATS that share a connection and join together to help one another. That connection could be geographical — other CATS in your neighborhood or city or region, or, in the US, your state. The connection could be your school or place of business. Other connections could be a common profession or trade — CAT doctors, CAT plumbers, CAT teachers, etc.

CATS United & CATS Council —

After these rings of various CAT Communities, the next expansion outward would be to make connections with all participating CATS in a country, or “CATS United!” To be successful, this would likely require paid staff either in an existing organization or a new “CATS United!” organization. Respecting the freedom of CATS and the voluntary nature of all CAT activities, such a program or new organization’s role would be to facilitate and coordinate, not dictate.

Within a country there could be a CATS Council made up of representatives of CAT Communities that creates collective CAT efforts — campaigns, coordinated local events nationwide on a single day, etc. Each individual CAT would be free to decide what to participate in.

I’d love to see all CAT activities displayed online on dynamic maps of each country (another task paid staff could implement). You could simply click on the pin for each upcoming action giving you the pertinent information needed to participate. Once the action is finished, clicking on the pin would give you info on what was accomplished, an “after-action report.”

CATS Worldwide and a Council of Councils

The outermost ring of CATS joining together would be 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. Such a worldwide Council could organize marches, same-day local events globally, campaigns, and statements of agreement. Just as with CATS United, this would probably require some paid staff and/or organizational support.

We Must Be Ourselves, Not Somebody Else

To play its strategic role, one thing all of these concentric circles of organized CATS must strive for is not to duplicate unnecessarily the function of other existing entities, e.g., the Climate Action Network (CAN) or 350.org. We must be aware of what other climate action entities are doing, and if they are doing certain things well, then let them do them!

Our job as CATS is to be ourselves, not somebody else. That’s especially the case when we start self-herding into organized CAT communities and councils. We must focus on what we can do that they can’t, such as herding our CATS into coordinated actions, whether such actions are organized by entities like 350 or by CAT councils. In some cases it’s a “the-more-the-merrier” situation where we organize similar complimentary actions. But what we don’t want is competing actions and potential discord. That’s wasted time and energy, and the climate-clock says we don’t have time for that.

So, in a nutshell, what’s the bottom line? Teamwork!

Each of these concentric circles of self-herding CATS could accomplish great things and become, together, the greatest power in The Climate Movement.

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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This post is based on two simple premises: (1) what’s bad for Mr. Trump and MAGA is good for climate action, and; (2) we must never let our climate victories be turned to ash ever again; to do so we must become the greatest political force for good in our lifetimes.

What’s Bad for Trump/MAGA …

So what’s bad for MAGA today? Trump.

Mr. Trump’s disastrous and criminal war against Iran, its economic ramifications, including a 40% jump in gas prices at the pump that are projected to end up costing families $1,000 this year, and his ever more desperate genocidal threats in relation to it, are all leading to growing discontent and criticism within the MAGA movement that, at least on Truth Social, is even stronger than that in relation to the Epstein Files.

An Axios analysis published Wednesday suggested that MAGA’s “most powerful voices are working to keep Trump in check if not bring him down outright, accusing him of betraying the ‘America First’ promises that built the movement.”

For example:

Tucker Carlson delivered a 43-minute monologue Monday [April 6] framing Trump’s Iran rhetoric as morally corrupt and even “evil.” He expressed personal outrage at Trump’s Easter post threatening to bring “hell” to Iran, and urged U.S. officials to defy any orders that could kill civilians.

Clearly such criticisms have landed, because on Thursday Mr. Trump lashed out in a long Truth Social post:

But it’s not just well-known voices that have become negative. A NYTimes analysis of Truth Social posts by Mr. Trump’s true believers have found many who are now disillusioned.

More than half responding to Trump’s threat to wipe out Iran’s whole civilization — which he reiterated he was willing to do — were critical.

To top things off, just last night Mr. Trump posted a picture of him as a Jesus-like figure healing the sick that has outraged prominent MAGA Christians, as well as a post and comments highly critical of Pope Leo, potentially alienating some of his Catholic supporters.

More broadly, recent polling shows that Mr. Trump is the best at being the worst in terms of approval rating at this point in a presidency — 35%, the lowest ever. He even beats Biden.

And the thing that got him elected, perceptions concerning his handling of the economy? His approval here is now at the lowest it’s ever been for him: 31%. Among Republicans, he’s seen a 14 point drop since January, from 85% to 71%.

So, to sum up the Trump presidency thus far: Crazy vindictive tariffs driving up prices and inflation, thug-like behavior from poorly and quickly trained ICE/Border Patrol “agents,” innocent protesters shot dead with no consequences, the Epstein Files cover-up, an unpopular “Big Beautiful Bill” for the wealthy with our kids stuck with the check, rank corruption that stinks to high heaven, attacking Pope Leo and portraying himself like Jesus, treating allies with utter contempt, and the criminal Iran War causing gas prices to go through the roof and making inflation even worse than Trump already has. No wonder then that, as one polling analyst concluded:

… Is Good for The Climate Movement

Anything that weakens Trump/MAGA is good for us, the US, and the world.

Why’s that? Hmmm. Let me see. Well, Mr. Trump’s clean energy policies are totally irrational based on his narcissistic whims. For example, wind energy is bad because of a confrontation years ago concerning one of his golf courses in Scotland.

His stupid, immoral attacks on climate action are literally insane, i.e., not based on reality but on his inflated sense of his own opinions, confusing them with scientific facts — indeed, not understanding the difference between facts and his opinion. For Mr. Trump, climate is a hoax because he says so: he’s the fact-meister.

These characteristics, infused throughout Trump-2, have led some to suggest “The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.”

As Aaron Rupar, a journalist who has watched Trump more than anyone, put it:

“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is. That’s kind of how people are trained to do political journalism. It’s like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy, what’s new?’ So you kind of pick up those things and convey them to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent (emphasis added).”

Already back in February, 30% of Republicans thought Trump was acting “erratically.” Since then things have gotten worse. His mental state is now a legitimate question “among retired generals, diplomats and foreign officials. And most strikingly, it can be heard now on the political right among onetime allies of the president.”

Catching a ride on the Trump/MAGA crazy train are the fossil companies and the anti-climate ideologues. They are having their last hurrah with Mr. Trump and his Administration, a sympathetic Republican Congress, and the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.

As with all last hurrahs, it won’t last. But untold damage has been done to climate science, clean energy development — in short, anything related to climate action. And, sadly, there’s more to come.

When their bloated, greasy, greedy, pollution-party is over, these agents of destruction want to walk away and leave the mess for the rest of us.

Well, the fossils don’t get off the hook for their accountability for climate consequences or their responsibility to actually help. Like us and every human being on the planet and every one that has ever lived or ever will live, they are called to do the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better. Obviously when it comes to justice they’ve got a lot of work to do, and it will be the responsibility of some of us to hold them accountable for past actions. More than that, we hope such opponents will change course and act on their responsibility for helping the rest of us achieve our vision.

Besides the fossils and anti-climate ideologies, we’ve watched as many institutions and businesses have buckled to the pressure by going quiet, or have cut back or dropped climate and clean energy-related initiatives and programs they may have been pushed to do in the first place.

We Must Become The Greatest Political Force For Good in Our Lifetimes

The Biden-era climate action momentum in the US, initially spurred by The Climate Movement, scored significant victories.

But then we’ve had the great climate action reversal with the Trump-2/MAGA climate meltdown and the retreat by fair-weather “friends.”

Both of these together must make one thing crystal clear to The Climate Movement. Our two synergistic forms of power — moral power and people power — are nowhere near what they need to be, and nowhere as stable as they must be to ensure this awful scenario — where many of our victories are turned to ash — is never repeated. We must have staying power that does not wain but gets stronger. We must have the strength to not only protect our accomplishments, but continue to score and achieve even greater victories on our Olympian Fields of Action.

More broadly, our moral and people power must help ensure we never allow someone like Trump and MAGA to hold political power ever again. In the US, our power must simultaneously overcome climate change and keep democracy and the world safe by electing leaders of character who will do both. Climate champions with political power must also be people of character who are seeking the common good — putting the people over the powerful, creating wellbeing for everyone and everything.

In short, The Climate Movement must become the greatest political force for good in our lifetimes. To paraphrase the prophet Isaiah: We must walk and not faint; we must run and not grow weary; we must mount up on wings like Eagles. Join us!

Join Mvt!