What is the climate left doing?
Protesting Joe Biden thanks to a fundamental misreading of the situation
Potemkin Skocpolism
I would trace the derangement of the current approach back to some stuff that happened ... back in 2009-10.
My personal analysis of what went wrong there would draw heavily on one of my favorite books of political science, “Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why,” Unfortunately, while that is a great book and a great insight, it does not provide actionable advice of the sort that climate funders were seeking.
Instead, they turned to another great political scientist, Theda Skocpol, who published an influential paper in 2013 arguing that Waxman-Markey… absolutely was an elite-driven inside game... Skocpol suggested trying something else.
Her specific policy proposal is... a “cap-and-dividend” the stirring conclusion is more general than that and says you need popular mass mobilization around climate change:
Movers and shakers in the climate universe had an odd reaction to this critique.
They did not embrace cap-and-dividend as a policy (I think that’s probably wise given the fiscal policy realities) but more importantly did not embrace Skocpol’s view that real grassroots mass mobilization was necessary to make progress on climate.
Instead, they decided to invest a lot of money in creating a simulacrum of a vast and highly energized social movement funding lots of groups to “do grassroots activism” without genuinely building accountable membership organizations.
This Potemkin Village version of what Skocpol called for does deliver some of the benefits of real mass mobilization (mainly by fooling gullible journalists), but it doesn’t move the needle on things that really matter.
