Democrats Abroad France/Environmental
Policy Group Position Paper Feb. 25, 2006 - in
pdf form
Annex to: Smarter Approach
to Environmental Policy
Excerpt from a speech by former Sierra Club president
Adam Werbach given 8 Dec. 2004 [full
speech]
After a decade of framing global warming as a problem
of pollution and future disasters, we are in a weaker
place than we were when we started. The environmental
movement spent much of the last 20 years publicizing the
latest scientific evidence and engaging in a debate about
whether global warming is real, whether it's being caused
by the burning of fossil fuels, and whether anything should
be done about it. These debates went on for too long and
ultimately fueled skepticism that environmentalists were
exaggerating. The fossil-fuel industry used the debate
as an excuse to delay action.
Facing this political reality, most of my colleagues
have committed to arguing better, yelling louder and organizing
more people. But no amount of public relations or grassroots
organizing will move problems like global warming up the
list of issues Americans worry about. The problem is not
our failure to communicate.
Frustrated with the failure of environmentalists to penetrate
public consciousness, Ted Turner's foundation gave Susan
Bales and the FrameWorks Institute several hundred thousand
dollars to conduct a series of focus groups, polls and
interviews with Americans about global warming. FrameWorks
concluded that the nightmarish scenarios environmentalists
were telling about global warming so terrifies and repels
ordinary Americans that they retreat from engagement.
She found that the more you scared people about global
warming, the more they want to buy SUVs to protect themselves.
Miniature Arcs.
What if we stopped defining global warming as an environmental
problem and instead spoke of the economic opportunities
it will create? The call for a New Apollo Project for
jobs and energy independence is a political solution to
the problem of global warming that attempts to break from
modern environmental thinking. The idea is simple: invest
a massive amount of public and private capital in our
clean-energy infrastructure, creating millions of new
American jobs, ending our dependence on foreign oil and
reducing our contribution to global warming. We can follow
the model of the original Apollo Project to reach the
moon or the manner in which built the highways, or supported
the development of micro-chips, or created the Internet.
We have tried to define a vision around the values of
prosperity, freedom and opportunity—as well as ecological
restoration and interdependence—out of the belief
that this vision is more welcoming of the American people,
businesses and labor unions than more talk of "polluter
pays," "fuel efficiency" and "carbon
caps."
This kind of thinking has resonated least with the leaders
of America's largest environmental organizations and most
with ordinary Americans.
No wonder the public doesn't want to hear the truth about
global warming: Nobody's offering them a vision for the
future that matches the magnitude of the problem.
In 2003, in Erie, Penn., and Akron, Ohio, the Apollo
Alliance did focus groups among undecided, working-class,
swing voters—the very people who would determine
the outcome of the 2004 election. Instead of starting
the focus groups by asking people what they thought of
global warming, our pollster Ted Nordhaus simply asked
them how things were going. This open-ended question led,
invariably, to focus group participants describing the
collapse of the local economy. They would list, in depressing
detail, the shutting of Hoover Vacuum and Timken Ball-bearing
factories—gone to Mexico. They explained that the
jobs that had been created in their wake—mostly
service sector jobs in places like Wal-Mart, paid half
as much and offered no health care or retirement benefits.
Many said they were working two jobs to make ends meet.
We then asked them what they thought of the idea of a
major federal investment program to accelerate America's
transition to the clean energy economy of the future:
research and development, manufacturing of wind turbines
and solar, energy efficiency. We didn't have to prove
to them that such a program would pay for itself; they
knew it would intuitively. Hadn't a similar program succeeded
in the post-war period? Of course it had.
What had been a roomful of tired and semi-depressed working
folks transformed itself into a roomful of excited, optimistic
Americans in a period of just 20 minutes. The energy emanating
from the room was palpable.
And then something extraordinary happened. Nearly every
single person in the room started to sound like Sierra
Club members. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
They waxed poetic about solar panels. They spoke of their
children's future—their future—and the planet's
future. They remembered episodes from the area's local
history—like when thousands of jobs were created
to retrofit smokestacks after the passage of the 1990
Clean Air Act Amendment—things that James Watt and
Rush Limbaugh want them to forget. But more than that,
Apollo tells a narrative about American greatness, our
history of shared investment and prosperity, of our ingenuity
and how we build a better future.
Previous focus groups I had attended got defined upfront
by moderators in a hurry to test environmentalist messages
and slogans. As a matter of principal, environmentalists
don't hire pollsters to tell them not to talk about the
environment. "Tonight," these moderators would
often say, "we want to hear what you think about
a few environmental issues." You could almost see
the air leave the room. Here we were, interviewing people
worried about how they could afford to pay an increase
in the health care premiums, whether their children were
learning anything at school and how they could go another
night on four hours of sleep, and we were asking them
about issues that only three to five percent of them would
volunteer as the most important issues facing their community.
Invariably, these folks would voice support for environmental
laws, for clean air and clean water, and higher fuel economy
standards, though hardly ever with much enthusiasm.
What was different in the focus groups we did for Apollo?
It wasn't just that we addressed concerns like jobs and
economic development that are of a far higher priority.
It was also that we spoke to their aspirations, their
families, their communities and their country. We activated
a set of ecological values that, ironically, cannot be
activated through environmental rhetoric that is now more
than three decades old.
We did a poll and found that more than 70% of voters
in Ohio and Pennsylvania supported a $30 billion annual
investment in energy efficiency and clean energy. Having
never seen such high numbers supporting any government
program, the pollster to the Steelworkers, an Apollo ally,
stressed in a poll question he asked that the $30 billion
annual investment would come from taxpayer money. A funny
thing happened: Support for Apollo went up. Why? Because
Americans see the problems facing their communities and
their country as big problems and they want big solutions.
We shared the results of our research to everyone who
would listen: John Kerry, Karl Rove and all the major
environmental groups. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club and
Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers were on board from the
beginning. They, along with Senator Maria Cantwell and
Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., signed up as co-chairs
of the Apollo Alliance. Every major union in the country,
including the United Mineworkers and the United Autoworkers,
along with every major environmental group, endorsed the
Apollo vision.
We quickly learned that Kerry would divide his campaign
into four silos: the economy, foreign policy, health care
and energy independence. Apollo was to be put in the box
called "energy independence." We protested that
Apollo was a narrative vision, not an issue category,
and that it more effectively sold his vision for the economy,
foreign policy and energy independence than keeping them
in separate categories would.
Kerry's economic advisers objected to our investment
plan. "The country wants to see deficit reduction,"
they said. We showed them our economic modeling, done
by a leading corporate economist known for his work for
the Federal Reserve Board, demonstrating that Apollo's
investments would pay for themselves through increased
tax returns to the federal treasury. As for the political
argument, Ted Nordhaus analyzed 15 years of polling data
and found that deficit reduction has never made it into
the top 10 list of concerns; he also found that jobs has
hovered consistently in the top three.
Kerry's pollster, Mark Mellman, objected to our linkage
of jobs to energy independence. Separate issues, he grumbled.
What he was really saying was that the campaign didn't
need a single narrative. None of it mattered: our facts
didn't fit their frame. It wasn't so much a strategic
difference as a conceptual one: everyone treated energy
independence, the economy, foreign policy and the environment
as inviolable, unquestionably useful categories.
Kerry narrowly lost Ohio, home to our focus group participants,
and the election. The next day, James Carville, a consultant
to the Kerry campaign, went on television to describe
the Democrats' problem as the lack of a narrative—a
vision we want for the future.
I almost slugged a wall.
I still wonder about the laid-off Hoover Vacuum assembly
plant workers who are waiting for that great American
company to come to Akron and put them to work.
Apollo was no unique victim of the Kerry campaign. I
don't blame Kerry for the campaign he ran. I've come to
realize that the election was lost years ago. We are now
in a minority position, with a minority party as our advocate.
The obstacles we face are the same obstacles any progressive
faces when trying to explain the need to think differently
about problems and solutions to liberals who insist on
putting all problems and solutions in traditional, single-issue
categories.
What the American people want more than anything is a
compelling vision of the future and candidates who know
what they believe in. Great candidates, like great companies,
stick to their core values but are opportunistic when
it comes to their strategies. For too long liberals have
stuck to their strategies and been opportunistic about
their values.
------
Original paper drafted
by Laurie
Geller, with input and review from the DAF Environmental
Policy Committee. Comments and questions are welcome:
Environmentalpolicy@yahoogroups.com and [33] 06 68 52
98 92.
