Dear comrades in the movement to survive climate change,
Good on you. Its obviously a hard slog. Probably, you know what people mean when they talk about burn out intimately. Waking up thinking about the devastation humans have wrought on our environment, let alone how bad it could get, doesn’t help you get out of bed.
Amongst all this we need to be able to focus on the good things, the victories along the way. That’s in part why some of you are celebrating right now the re-election of the Andrews’ Labor government in Victoria as a triumph of reason over climate denialism. If you want to switch off and stop reading now, well I can’t stop you. But also I know you’re here because you’re not a denialist, so please don’t switch off. I promise I’ll try to be polite.
Also I realise you probably have not much of an idea who I am, to come along telling you stuff. Well I’m just some weird geek, but also in the first part of this recent blog, I tried to describe why I’m here in this movement, and where I’m coming at it from. TL;DR – For a pretty long time I’ve tried to play a supporting role in a bunch of different campaigns and projects, lending my skills and time to people I don’t always fully believe in, but believe they are worth a punt. This is a departure from that, deciding to weigh in and say what I mean and ask that people hear me out.
This decision has been sparked by watching and participating in the environment movement’s campaigns in the 2018 Victorian state election. For anyone who wasn’t watching, Victoria’s incumbent, nominally progressive Labor government won a massively increased majority at the expense of the Liberal party campaigning on a platform of anti-migrant law-and-order, cheap coal powered energy, and reducing carbon emissions by subsidising new TV’s and fridges. Labor also gained back space on the left from the Greens, running on their usual, actually progressive platform, but whose campaign was seriously undermined by their running of a mysogynist ozzie rapper, a man accused of sexual assault, and a Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
That the Greens were perfectly able to derail their own campaign, despite having other great candidates and actually progressive policies is a different argument. But I’d also give the climate movement, and Environment Non Government Organisations (ENGOs) some credit in supporting this landslide victory for Labor – and giving them back a lot of ground on climate action, by endorsing their climate policy nearly in its entirety. I share this scorecard produced by Environment Victoria (EV) not at all to heap to direct criticism on EV – in fact EV’s representation of Labor’s far from progressive environment record on this scorecard is a far greater mention than several other more grassroots groups of Labor’s failing on climate. 
And in fact, digging further past the scorecard and the front page of EV’s scorecard website, (which also gave Labor and the Greens big ticks on climate), the bottom of their more detailed scorecard did reveal Labor’s commitment to the fossil fuel industry, that they ‘encouraged offshore [oil and] gas drilling‘ and a coal-to-hydrogen project as well as welcoming AGL’s plan to build a damaging gas import terminal in Westernport Bay.
So what’s the problem here?
Well firstly, as an engaged, active and online environmentalist, I actually wouldn’t have heard about these large scale investments in new fossil fuel projects during the election campaign at all if it wasn’t for Environment Victoria’s website. (So truly this is also in praise of EV for continuing to publish and promote these sidelined issues).
Secondly, what I’m being told implicitly by this scorecard, and by the omission of the other environment orgs, that you can be a leader in tackling climate change, while still opening up whole new environments to fossil fuel extraction and whole new industries to do it (not to mention continuing the existing industry to mine, burn and export brown coal).
Thirdly, there isn’t a clear distinction between a tick for the differing targets of 40% renewable energy by 2025 and 50% by 2030 and 100% renewable energy by 2030 – or how that breaks down in policy, or whether the Greens promise is even enough.
Fourthly, we are told that while Labor are failing to ‘Restore and Protect Nature’ – largely referring to their government owned and managed illegal logging industry that is rapidly destroying Victoria’s remnant native forests, they can still be leaders on climate change. While the forest movement, especially through Friends of the Earth (FoE), campaigned hard during the election, and gained great traction, Act on Climate Victoria (AoC), another affiliate group of FoE campaigned solely against the Liberals and for Labor. Scrolling through their twitter feed, next to no mention was made of forests, offshore oil and gas, coal-to-hydrogen, new coal licenses, AGL during their campaign. The closest I found to a mention of these things was this tweet.
Community members hold up banners ‘Save Westernport’ ‘No AGL Gas’ – referring to the ALP supported project, along with Act on Climate’s anti-coalition banner. The message tweeted by @ActOnClimateVic is “community members have… a message for Mathew Guy and the Liberal Party!”
Presumably their twitter feed reflects their campaign IRL.
So those are my four problems with EV’s scorecard, and that brings me to four problems I have with what that reflects in the climate movement at large. These problems have been most accurately portrayed by AoC, but really reflect broadly on the big ENGOs and a tendency of the environment movement at large.
We’ve lost our concept of solidarity.
Solidarity between struggles like forests and climate, between affiliates of the same organisation. But more broadly, with campaigns that bridge the gap into other movements, such as the Djab Wurrung Embassies campaign to stop the destruction of their sacred trees to build a highway bypass. This is an outright, unnecessary and expensive act of desecration being fast tracked by Labor Minister Richard Wynne. This is a nature issue. This is a climate issue. Its also a really winnable issue (not that that should determine whether we speak up for it). But we forgot how much the environment movement owes to Aboriginal Australia, and we forgot about the Green-Black alliance that is the foundation of our movement. That its an action we can take to actually recognise the sovereignty we always talk about. And we didn’t lend a hand to make it an election issue, when I think it could have really helped. I respect that our movements and our selves are over-stretched, scattered, isolated, and its hard, but the environment movement not making a mention of it – while also campaigning for the Labor party who are carrying this out can only further that isolation .
Culture jammed Labor election poster during the 2018 election outlines some of Labor’s real policies
We’re a part of the disconnect between science and politics.
Scientists are telling us we have to take decisive action, stop burning fossil fuels and begin to draw down carbon now to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Meanwhile, ENGOs are telling us that the Victorian Renewable Energy Target (VRET) of 50% by 2030 is what we’ve been fighting for all along, and if we’re building new fossil fuel industries along the way, that’s OK. I think that many people see through this, not only rabid radicals like myself. They’ve heard the seriously dire warnings from scientists and don’t really buy that politicians promises of more renewable energy adds up to anything like the action that we need to take to mitigate and survive climate change. Indeed it is a hopeful message and it sounds nice enough to vote for, but its misleading and leading people away from taking urgent action.
As a web designer I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can change our messaging to more effectively overcome that disconnect. I believe that by not acknowledging the catastrophic consequences we are facing, and the urgency of action, we are actually inhibiting action. Helping people to face scientific, environmental reality, might actually help them to take effective action. I might write more on that soon but I think this local group has done a great job of it.
Back to the climate/forest issues being seperated out, and not campaigned on as part of a whole – I remember from my inner city primary school education that trees help us breath and we should look after trees, that forests are like the planets lungs. I believe that its a thing that people kinda get. Its really tangible and all around them, one of those things that feels like ‘common sense’. Not joining the dots from forests to climate, and cordoning it off as a ‘nature’ issue, or far worse not even mentioning it at all, widens the disconnect between science and politics, and between knowing there’s a climate crisis and taking action.
If its a winning strategy, what did we win?
I understand that some huge gains have been made from the VRET, from the ban on coal seam gas (CSG). I wasn’t involved in the campaign to stop CSG but from what I saw it was won by a huge grassroots campaign of rural people led by Lock the Gate and loads of work from Quit Coal and Friends of the Earth – putting political pressure on all sides of parliament. Sidling up to Labor and asking them nicely and not drawing attention didn’t win it. We’ll need similar campaigns against offshore oil and gas in the Otways, against new coal power plants in Gippsland. Parts of the environment movement not talking about these crucial issues during elections will make it much harder for them to get the attention they need.
When ruling parties do concede to our campaigns and give us a victory, there’s definitely a time to congratulate them and thank them for their part in making progress towards a safer climate. The ban on CSG was announced in 2016, the VRET was passed in 2017. Its November of 2018 and we’re still congratulating them. Labor went to the polls with no new environment policies of note, other than to pass the ban on CSG into the constitution. We can all strongly support that move, but its simply designed to get a second free kick on a policy they have already enacted.
If we all stand in the middle, the far-right will definitely tip us over the edge.
I should be clear that I do think there is a role for those people who want to work inside the halls of power towards reform. It definitely can be important tactic, as part of a broader movement. I don’t believe its whats needed right now, but really I’m all for an all of everything approach. For the movement to survive on this planet to succeed, we’ll need all the tools we have available, plus some more. My issue is that there isn’t a shortage of ENGOs available to fill this space, and that this reformist tendency is creeping outwards to take up the traditionally more grassroots spaces like FoE.
The far-out, far-left, feral freaks are scattered, and what’s left makes political parties like the Greens seem like the radicals. If we want parties like the Greens, with fairly reasonable, moderate suggestions in response to the climate emergency to come to power, the climate movement needs to keep its radical edge. We need to be clear that in fact the Greens policies and strategies are not enough. We need to shut down all fossil fuel industries now and we need to do it ourselves and not wait for the next electoral cycle to roll around. When the Greens themselves are retweeting EVs scorecard, they are getting pulled closer to Labor’s centrist position. As an electoral strategy, the climate movement needs to be foregrounding, and not forgetting about other fringe parties with more radical policies such as the Save the Planet party and the Victorian Socialists, as well as the Greens, giving them the space in the middle which they, not Labor deserve. Outside electoral politics even more so, we need outspoken communications campaigns and direct actions to actually take the focus away from the parliamentary farce, and push the boundaries of what is possible as a response to climate change. One way or another, those boundaries are going to be pushed.
I think the left, so used to being disempowered, has forgotten what we actually do achieve from outside the margins of acceptable society. We need only to look to our far-right, Hansonite fringe, whose growth is not so phenomenal, but whose influence on the Liberal parties renewed racist rhetoric, and in turn allowing Labor (a party committed to mandatory detention of refugees etc) to be hailed as anti-racists! The same can be said of the climate denialist fringe’s influence.
We need to build up the climate realist fringe movement, at the expense of maintaining one in the center.
I say build up, cause it is out there, I’ve just been ignoring it too much, too focused on my immediate circles and old haunts. I know your out there – I won’t add links here right now ’cause I don’t even really know who’s who in that space. But feel free to add links in the comments, also to discuss, pull me up on things I’ve written here. And if you’re a radical group responding directly to the climate emergency, and need a cook, a blogger, or maybe even a web designer, you’re welcome to hit me up.
Also, see you at the March for our Future on Saturday!
Absolutely! Why do eNGOS compromise before they’ve even sat down at the negotiating table. The right does the opposite. ENGOs are as or more culpable for confusion around the severity of our crisis than the hard deniers. Imagine if all eNGOs had been campaigning in the climate reality for the past 20 years. We wod be in a much different place.
Thanks Bryony – I really agree we could have done so much more in the past 20 years to bring people up to speed with the reality of climate change and move a whole lot faster on it. But I guess the question is what can we do right now. Now always being a best time, but even more so that Labor has won a landslide in Victoria, and will win the upcoming federal election – and that the urgency of the crisis has deepened as well of the public understanding of it. How can we make the ENGOs switch their gears right now to be slamming Labor until they commit to Stop Adani, stop all new fossil fuel projects, close down the existing ones. I think without specific intervention grassroots campaigns and youth organisations are forcing them to switch their gears anyhow, but the bureaucracies and salaries will slow down the process intolerably.
I think four years time we’ll need to be having an election campaign around local resilience and self-sufficiency, bushfire survival, agricultural sustainability, as well as renewable energy, so there’s a lot of gear switching to do…
We will not get the action require until we begin by acknowledging the dire situation we’re in and the behemoth amount of work we need to do at emergency speed.
I’m blown away by a campaign that began in Darebin (Vic) council based on climateemergencydeclaration.org. Since Darebin passed a climate emergency motion in Nov 2016 this has spread to 5 Aus Councils, 6 US councils – including Los Angeles, and 2 UK councils with London now about to declare a climate emergency and take appropriate action (zero by 2030). A stark contrast to ‘zero by 2050’ suicidal target condoned by ACF, the climate council etc.
The first step to getting what’s needed is to state what’s needed. Winning slowly means losing.
I think ENGOs have been campaigning on the climate reality for the last 20 years. It’s just really bloody hard, and there’s a lot of money behind climate denial.
Especially at the beginning, the message was all about conveying the facts of climate change and assuming that would be enough to prompt rational humans to action. But it hasn’t been enough, because humans aren’t always rational decision makers.
What the Right also does well is “slippery slope” initiatives. Passing something that appears reasonable but can be used as leverage for a more radical action later. They understand that what matters is the outcome, which can be reached indirectly. Sometimes ENGOs take this approach.
To me it seems like the ‘radical Left’ is still stuck in the ‘information-deficit model’ of the 1990s. As if showing people more hockey stick shaped graphs will win them over. It won’t. While listening to the science of climate change, we also need to listen to the science of communication. We need emotive images showing local climate impacts, for example. And we need conservative climate messages that the Left disagrees with.
I have to disagree that ENGOs are campaigning on ‘climate reality’. Sorry that’s a weird term to use, as reality is clearly different depending on whether your in Syria, or Bangladesh, inland Australia, the inner city, or the Eastern Suburbs.
Depending on were we are that reality is clearly different, and we need to be able to change *how* we’re talking about climate change depending on who we’re talking to, to connect this bigger story to their disconnected experiences. But in this case, I think its clear we are dramatically changing *what* we’re saying – that the Victorian Government are leading the way on climate change, that we can log forests and build new fossil fuel industries while doing that.
I think its not fair to say that the messaging of the big NGOs is more successful when they are actually changing the message to make it more amenable. Its easy to give people a feel good story, for sure, but Australians are still among the world’s highest per-capita carbon emitters, and that is not a fact you hear repeated around that much nowadays. I totally agree that the messaging of the radical left hasn’t been very effective, either, that graphs, images of burning planets, ‘exposing the truth’ approaches aren’t working.
But I wouldn’t say that either end of this spectrum are doing better than each other. The ‘hard left’ have a harder message to sell, some of the ‘soft left’ such as EV have taken the harder job of selling it to outer suburban audiences.
We have a lot to learn from each other, that much is clear to me, and it will be cool to make more opportunities to that because between all these decades of campaigning there is a whole lot of amazing skills and experience. But talking about what we could have done 20 years ago, talking about ‘winners’ and claiming victories without acknowledging the struggle ahead, talking about ‘losers’ and abandoning hope, neither seems like a real choice to me.
Actually I think whatever our arguments are here, we have to acknowledge and prepare for a long phase of the struggle where we become certain that the world will go well beyond *safe* limits of climate change, to be able to continue to survive and struggle for a *safer* world. For the world of difference between 3 and 4 degrees, 6 and 7 degrees. To continue to fight to survive, and adapt, and not just to burn more carbon for the rich to buffer themselves against the storm. ‘Winning slowly means losing’ doesn’t give me much hope in this situation, neither does Dan Andrews being sold to me as a leader on climate change, I’m shit scared of the world he’s leading us to.
Good food for thought. Thanks Backtofront.
Thanks Ruben, really enjoyed reading this post. Some very constructive feedback for the Vic environment movement.
I worked on the Environment Victoria (EV) election campaign so can explain the strategic decisions behind the scorecard.
Before that, though, letting you know my background. I came to EV after exploring voluntary simplicity, permaculture etc so I agree with your views on the value of a radical fringe. Since then I have also learned the value of larger ENGOs. We need an ‘ecosystem’ of different approaches and they can work together.
Anyway, some background on the campaign…
Since 2012, EV has done most of its organising in outer suburban south-east Melbourne. It was a pragmatic decision: those are the places where politicians pay attention. Our clean energy focus was aimed at these marginal seats (we made 100,000 calls, handed out 82,000 scorecards, enrolled 1353 young people and had 4.5 million impressions online etc) just in those areas.
We chose clean energy because it was a way to talk about climate change in suburbia, where most green groups don’t work, but where you need to win people over in order to convince governments of all stripes to enact strong policy. To establish this we did a literature review, ReachTel polling in the 4 sandbelt seats, then Facebook message testing. We tested everything, including leading with nature or focusing on climate change impacts (images of droughts floods etc). The best results were leading with clean energy then talking about the severity of climate change. This is consistent with much comms research in Australia and overseas.
In previous elections we’ve used more holistic scorecards, putting much more detail up front and showing the connection between nature, forests and climate change. While it was popular with educated people in inner city areas, it doesn’t cut through in marginal suburban electorates. Hence we chose a simplified scorecard.
One of the biggest problems with the environment movement is it has had little electoral power, especially in marginal suburban seats. This clean energy/climate campaign showed enviro messages could cut through in the outer suburbs. That’s huge. The Vic election will shift the whole debate to the Left. A few days ago the new Vic Liberal Leader was appointed, and in his first press conference he mentioned that our state needs to cut emissions. This is amazing, considering the Victorian Liberal Party has not had a formal environment policy since 2006.
I also worked on the 2014 state election campaign, and environment or climate change was hardly mentioned. So this is a massive shift.
In my opinion, current thinking in mainstream ENGOs is still heavily influenced by the ‘carbon tax’ framing debacle and defeat. So I think the movement has been very defensive…building support for renewables rather than directly arguing for regulation to cut emissions. I think this was necessary, but now the renewables debate has been won, it’s time to get on the attack again.
A lot of the big groups actually support the smaller groups. E.g. EV has helped grassroots groups with funding and resources over many years. Likewise, ACF has also done heaps of work to support grassroots, and they’ve done great work with Stop Adani (IMO). FoE, as you know, has done absolutely amazing work with lock the gate etc. AYCC did heaps of work with the recent schools climate strike. The list goes on…
Having said that, charities are constrained in what they can say, and so we need a whole ‘ecosystem’ of groups.
Groups sometimes run single-issue campaigns to avoid turf-cutting, and also to build up expertise. EV has been going for 50 years, and for many decades ran campaigns on forests, sustainable transport and waste. EV started working on climate over the last 15 years because it was increasingly urgent, and other groups (TWS, FoE) were already covering forests. We do work on nature laws (Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act), recycling, river systems (Murray Darling Basin Plan) and energy efficiency (e.g. rental standards) as well. Different groups working on different issues is a way of the movement assigning scarce resources.
I’d love to see a holistic nature/climate/solidarity campaign in Vic…it’s just hard to create! But yeah, let’s try it.
Totally agree that now is the time to go hard on much more radical campaigns. Especially “We need to build up the climate realist fringe movement, at the expense of maintaining one in the center.” That’s a good approach given Labor’s landslide win. However, I also think a strong, single-issue campaign on clean energy/climate in the last election was the right decision. It has given space and momentum for a more radical approach.
Great blog post, some useful criticism there.
I worked on the EV election campaign and scorecard so can explain the thinking behind it.
Since 2012, EV has done most of its organising in the sandbelt seats of south-east Melbourne. It was a pragmatic decision: those are the places where politicians pay the most attention. Our clean energy focus was aimed at these marginal seats. We made 100,000 calls, handed out 82,000 scorecards, 4.5 million impressions online etc, just in those areas.
We chose clean energy because it was an entry into talking about climate change in suburbia, where most green groups don’t work, but where you need to win people over in order to convince political parties to create better policies. To establish this we did a literature review, ReachTel polling in the 4 sandbelt seats, then Facebook message testing. We tested leading with climate impacts (droughts, floods etc), shutting coal, or clean energy then pivoting to climate change. What worked was juxtaposing clean energy and dirty coal, and using that as a way in to talk about the seriousness of climate change.
In previous elections we’ve used more holistic scorecards, putting much more detail up front and showing the connection between nature, forests and climate change. But for suburban marginal electorates it needed to be simpler, perhaps oversimplified, to cut through.
The Liberal Party has now learned that Abbott-era anti renewables and anti climate positions don’t go down well at elections, which opens up space for more radical progressive policy.
Personally, I believe current thinking in mainstream ENGOs is still heavily influenced by the ‘carbon tax’ framing debacle and defeat. So I think the movement has been very defensive…building support for renewables rather than directly arguing for regulation to cut emissions. I think this was necessary, but now the renewables debate has been won, it’s time to go harder on the attack.
A lot of the big groups actually support the smaller groups. We need a whole ‘ecosystem’ of groups working together…e.g. groups like Darebin CAN do a smashing job in the inner north and EV focuses on marginal south east seats. They have different audiences so require different messages.
Groups sometimes run single-issue campaigns to avoid turf-cutting, and also to build up expertise. EV has been going for 50 years, and for many decades ran campaigns on forests, sustainable transport and waste/consumption. EV started working on climate more over the last few decades years because it was a newish topic, and other groups (TWS, FoE) were covering forests/nature. It’s a way of the movement assigning scarce resources and there’s lots of collaboration.
Totally agree that now is the time to go hard on much more radical campaigns. Especially “We need to build up the climate realist fringe movement, at the expense of maintaining one in the center.” That’s a good approach given Labor’s landslide win. However, I also think a strong, single-issue campaign on clean energy/climate in the last election was the right decision for EV, especially because of the focus on outer suburbs.