Transition Culture

1 Mar 2007

New Stirrings & Targets for Activism - Steve Kretzmann.

One of the best presentations at last weekend’s **International Forum on Globalization** in London (of which more soon) was called “New Stirrings & Targets for Activism” and was by Steve Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International. He has very kindly given me permission to share it with you here…

“Times have changed dramatically and permanently. As we heard yesterday, the best science now tells us that we have only ten years left to peak global emissions if we’re going to stay below 2 degrees C. Ten years. Campaigners working on energy are at a moment where we face a fork in the road. Although the need for upstream campaigns has never been more pressing, the powerful levers for action are newly downstream related to public concern over energy security and global warming.

On the upstream side there is a massive global increase in fossil fuel extraction underway. According to an article in the Financial Times last week:

>All the world’s extra oil supply is likely to come from expensive and environmentally damaging unconventional sources within 15 years…It becomes unclear beyond 2020 that conventional oil will be able to meet any of the demand growth,â€?…The increasing reliance on unconventional oil will require a substantial reshaping of the energy industry.

This situation would seem to cry out for a correspondingly massive increase in the ongoing campaigns to blunt the impacts of the upstream conventional and unconventional fossil fuel industries.

On the downstream side, society at large is being overtaken by a groundswell in concern over energy security and global warming. We seem to have reached a tipping point on concern over climate in particular and this dynamic is almost certain to increase in its intensity to the point where it may eclipse almost everything else as public concern moves down the hierarchy of needs to a focus on sheer survival.

This presents a dilemma from a campaigning perspective. While intellectually the upstream and emissions issues are coherently linked, successful advocacy campaigns are not about intellectual elegance. Successful campaigners must focus and package their issues to eliminate many priorities and strike a resonant chord. It is our job to distill the complexities down to that essence which is both most resonant and most effective. Doing too many things, having too many priorities, communicating multiple messages all leave campaigns with no “pointy end� and thus little ability to drive forward. Furthermore, a primary purpose of strategy is to correctly anticipate where the issues are going and get out in front to a leadership position where we have the opportunity to set the agenda for action.

Its important that we understand we are not policy geeks who are advising legislators. We’re campaigners who are selling and creating systemic change in defense of the pre-existing natural systems.

Energy and climate issues have not been led by NGO’s in recent years, certainly not in North America. The nature of the debate, the solutions pathways, yardsticks for success have all been set by elites in the scientific, international governance, and media communities. As a case in point, the main rallying cry penetrating public consciousness in countries such as Canada and the United States is to “live up to Kyoto� – not only a pitifully inadequate agenda, but entirely reactive to boot.

Not only do NGO’s need to retool what they work on but NGOs are also faced with a profound reorientation in how they campaign on climate. For several years now, groups have been studying how best to communicate the message to the public through sophisticated studies. Many of the assumptions that have become commonplace are now in question. For example, it is widely believed that best results come when we avoid apocalyptic scenarios, avoid messaging around weather events and focus on positive solutions that individuals can undertake: “ten simple things you can do to cool the Earth.�

How many people have seen an Inconvenient Truth? What does Al Gore tell us to do at the end? Change a lightbulb? **Gore is still winning the debates and losing the campaign.** If we are indeed in the early stages of a serious crisis, and if people are indeed beginning to understand this this, then pedaling positivity may well become transparently patronizing.

Although this is less true for the groups in this room than for most of the big green NGOs, the predominant messages for public action on climate thus far have centered on simple actions that individuals, and households can take. The primary frame of this work has been around individual, often consumer action – not systemic change.

We are going to have to recognize the disconnect between the public’s growing understanding of the nature of the problem and the solutions advocated through our campaign prioritization and on our websites, fact sheets etc. We are going to have to find ways to advocate and campaign for systemic change.

As we shift to recognition that global warming is fundamentally a collective action scenario, we will consequently want to shift emphasis towards political - and corporate - campaigns. After all, government exists precisely to deal with systems requiring collective action, and it is often corporate needs that government is most responsive to.

Campaigns need to take the form of broad civil society organizing to manifest public concern into a “parade� that politicians jump in front of and also more sophisticated campaigns to intervene more directly in the political process, or in the financial sector.

An important implication for communications is that they adopt a consistent “pointy-endâ€? which explicitly targets the political decision-makers – Presidents, Congressional Representatives, even Corporate CEO’s. So, for example, if we choose our headline message to play to the national embarrassment of being the worst in the world on emissions, we do not want the implication to be that Americans should feel guilty and therefore change their lightbulbs but instead point directly at the politician who has so let us down.

This way we switch to focusing anger instead of getting stuck at generating shame. If we have to focus on light bulbs, the point should be that incandescent light bulbs be banned, (as has now been proposed in Australia) not convincing Americans one at a time to buy compact fluorescents.

How does this change our work?

Story and narrative are absolutely key to effective campaigns and political change – we could spend all session and all day talking about this – but I just want to point out that in the area of corporate power and corporate campaigning, this is one place where I think our story is very strong. This is the legacy of the anti-corporate globalization / global justice movement that IFG was in the forefront of. That corporations have too much power in our society is not a fact that is seriously in question on any part of the public political spectrum.

In short, the realization that corporations are the agents whose interests are being served by government is where our audience is, and its vitally important that our story base itself in the experience of our audience, first and foremost, if we’re going to organize people to demand change.

So, for example, the vast majority of people globally, and at different times depending on how you ask the question, even the majority of people in the United States, believe that oil, and access by US oil companies, is the underlying reason for the Iraq war.

We’ve talked about various different rules and laws here over the past few days, and while I understand and agree with many of them regarding peak oil and climate, I think the rules that really matter for us in thinking about what to do about all this are Saul Alinsky’s – the famous US labor organizer. The following ones strike me as particularly relevant for this struggle and this group:

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
6. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
7. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

So, how much power do we have, or do people perceive we have? A poll that was published last October in the US revealed that an amazing 42% of Americans believe that gas prices in the US have been “deliberately manipulatedâ€? to the benefit of the Republicans in advance of the election. Although there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that theory, there isn’t anything close to a smoking gun which proves it, and yet 42% of Americans apparently believed it – why? Because of the strength of the pre-existing story on corporate control specifically by the oil industry in this country.

More relevantly, as the polls that we talked about yesterday show, clear majorities of people in the US now express concern over energy independence and the need for alternative energy, and even express concern over global warming.

So there are elements of the story that people get, that are within the experience of our audience – but there are also many elements of our story that are outside the experiences of most of our audience – the need for a 2010 peak in climate emissions, 80% reduction by 2050, the sweeping changes in our lifestyles that are necessary, increasing war for oil, increasing push into frontier areas threatening the last pristine places in the Amazon, and the rights of indigenous peoples globally. Our task is to design campaigns that can introduce more elements of the full story, and empower people to take action against the root causes of the problem.

One glance at the polls I passed out yesterday tells us that Americans are fed up with the oil addiction and hungry for alternatives. Its now clear that sweeping change on the energy front is very likely over the next five – ten years – it is significantly less clear that the answer will not be increased domestic drilling, further militarization of the MidEast and other producing areas, nuclear power and liquefied coal.

What does this suggest, what then must we do?

To date, many of the corporate campaigns in the oil industry – particularly as undertaken by large environmental NGOs in Washington - have focused exclusively on defense. Campaigns on BP and Exxon have focused on stopping drilling in The Arctic Refuge. Most of the American environmental community has engaged in some variant of this campaign over the last twenty years, and while its been tremendously successful at building a base for these organizations, most of these campaigns have not attempted to link this shield with any sword, there hasn’t been any systemic analysis behind or around these campaigns that empowers further action. Oil campaigns have got to go beyond winning a few for the Caribou, and indeed, they’re starting to.

First, a very basic one that has a lot of potential to leverage change and operates from the principle of holding the enemy to their book of rules is a very simple campaign calling for transparency in oil reserves. Richard touched on this yesterday. Amazingly, no one knows with any reasonable degree of certainty how much oil is left in the world. We rely on Exxon and the Saudis to tell us how much Exxon and the Saudis have. Talk about the foxes guarding the henhouse. Many of us believe that there is a real possibility that increasing sunshine in this area will reveal whats really going on with peak oil, and thus drive a greater sense of urgency and change.

Second is the Separation of Oil & State campaign that has now been endorsed by more than thirty environment, development, and good government organizations in the United States.

Politicians of both parties in the US are taking steps to prove their independence from Big Oil. But there’s a long distance from proposing legislation that is unlikely to pass to actually ending oil addiction. For example, although Democratic leadership in the House and Senate has now fully embraced anti-oil rhetoric, they remain relatively timid in their policy prescriptions. Although the House recently passed HR6, which would eliminate roughly one fifth of domestic subsidies to the oil industry, the Bill is basically dead in the Senate, and seemingly has no chance of actually being passed.

Therefore the Separation of Oil & State campaign is focused not on policy prescriptions but on breaking the patronage relationship between the oil industry and Congress. It’s a relatively easy thing to promise possible legislation in the indeterminate future – its harder, but much more measurable and specific, to forsake oil industry campaign contributions and thus turn away from the industry.

These tactics are bearing fruit. In the last election:

* ALL of the incumbents who took no oil money won. Each and every one of the Congressional incumbents of either party that refrained from accepting campaign contributions from Big Oil in 2006 was successfully re-elected to office.

* Big Oil’s biggest friends lost. Four of the top five Congressional recipients of campaign contributions from Big Oil during the 2006 election cycle lost to cleaner candidates in close Senate races.

* The 110th Congress is the least beholden to the oil industry in a generation. The outgoing 109th was the most beholden Congress to the oil industry, ever.

These election results are no coincidence. Citizens generated at least 60,000 emails, letters, and calls to their elected representatives in Congress to demand a Separation of Oil and State. Over 5 million people were urged to Separate Oil & State by us and our coalition partners.

This changing political environment on the Hill is already creating new opportunities. Within the next two weeks, a bill will be introduced in the House of Representatives that will end all US based financing to the oil & gas industry by international financial institutions and export credit agencies. This effort is part of a growing international coalition of environment and development groups under the umbrella of End Oil Aid.

This is the result of years of campaigning by people in this room on the World Bank and export credit agencies – all of which has told the story of these institutions that consistently represent and entrench corporate interests globally – particularly those of the oil industry. Other, non-environmental campaigns are just as if not more important aspects of this story – lobby reform, campaign finance reform, trade policy reform and ultimately anything that increases civic participation and restores and deepens public faith in the political process and collective action.

Ultimately, the stories that we tell through our campaigns and how we choose to conduct them are as important as the targets we pick – indeed, if we’ve told the story well, in an inclusive way, our audience can feel empowered to pick their own targets over which they have the most leverage. With only ten years left to peak global emissions, we have to design campaigns that are capable of going viral, and over which we ultimately will have less control - but which I would argue have a better chance to inspire and empower people to take the solutions into their own hands.

*Steve Kretzmann is Executive Director of Oil Change International. The author acknowledges a debt to his friend and colleague Christopher Hatch, former Executive Director of Rainforest Action Network. This piece incorporates large elements of his thinking, our correspondence, and thus in some cases, his writing.*