Now here comes good old Walter Russel Mead with a doozie in “The Big Green Lie Exposed” in The American Interest Online. I’m no huge fan of the USCAP/Green Group approach — I’ve weighed in more than once in endorsing the CLEAR act — but I’d say Walter’s a bit over the top on this one. Exhibit A:

Not since the incident at Chappaquiddick derailed the Ted Kennedy for President boomlet of 1969 has a political movement imploded so fast and so messily as the green crusade to stop global warming.

Leave you speechless?! Check out the rest of his remarkable piece.

What’s wrong with all this green-group bashing? Well first, if you study Mead’s piece, you’ll see that he actually doesn’t detail which ‘greens’ he is actually talking about! Yes, he mentions Gore and Kerry in passing — snooze — but he gives not one example to back up his generalizations (not to mention to illustrate why Fred Krupp resembles Ted Kennedy, circa 1970).

While Mead knocks down strawmen with a facile message that may appeal to some, those fighting global warming are, in the main, a sophisticated, savvy, analytical lot. Indeed, if he had bothered to study the rich array of current climate leaders, he’d have run into Mindy Lubber and CERES; Alex Steffen; Paul Hawken. These are hardly folks in retreat.

So if Mead had written this screed for one of my classes, I’d have told him to cool down, discover what it means to be empirical, and start listening.

There’s an even deeper problem with many of these ‘beat up the green groups’ pieces. They fail to acknowledge that making progress on climate policy is hard because it’s an insanely unprecedented challenge. As The Economist noted last December, it’s the mother of all public goods problems. And as Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom teaches us, even the simplest of public goods problems can’t be solved with a single ‘solution’ — they get better if we can build institutions that are founded on and sensitive to the contingencies of the particular time and place in which they arose.

To illustrate the limitations of Mead’s approach, take the good news posted over the weekend by Nick Englefried at Watthead: Oregon has the potential to be coal-free. What does that fact tell us about the effectiveness of green groups? Are they good (they’d like to think so) or bad (beyond incompetence, according to Mead)? 

Well let’s see. Is Oregon in this position because of the hard work by Bruce Nilles‘ shop at the Sierra Club and their state allies? Or is it because investors have a sense that directly — or indirectly (see my earlier reference to CERES) — carbon will soon have a higher price tag? Or is it because the electorate in that state is sympathetic to the core message of green groups? It’s hard to know.

The point is that the growing fight against coal in the U.S. will make progress as context-specific institutions evolve to diminish the negative effects of this public goods problem. What green inside-the-beltway groups advocate over a few years will have some effect on the future of coal in the Northwest, but not in the kind of deterministic sense too often implied by policy Johnny-one-notes.

In the end, Mead and other green bashers spend too much time using the same flashlight to look at the same problem. Of course USCAP has made mistakes; but — ahem — they’re facing the most sophisticated, most well-healed set of opponents that we have seen in the political realm in our lifetimes. And yes, they long ago should have embraced the pro-R&D message of the Breakthrough Institute (see my forthcoming piece with Rebecca Henderson on this in the ‘Getting to 350′ edition of Solutions.) The social psychology of the Breakthrough-Big Green fisticuffs will have to be analyzed by those more trained than me; I do know it’s been a terrible opportunity lost.

But none of these and other truths about weaknesses of ‘greens’ take away the fact that Mead’s essay is notable for its obviousness and its lack of depth.

• Put a cap on the sources of global-warming polution as they are introduced into the economy
• Give 75% of the revenues generated from that cap to everyone with a social security number – a total of about $1100 for a family of four
• Use the remaining 25% to invest in clean-energy and carbon sequestration so we can win the green-jobs race vs. China and others.

Indeed, here’s a suggestion: describe the bill that way to your friends and neighbors and see how they react.  If your experience is like mine, they’ll simply say: “How can I sign up?!” 

Sure, many green groups (and prominent green spokespeople) are against Cantwell-Collins.  In some cases, vehemently so.  Their biggest objection is that the bill is not stringent enough.  But that argument (which has holes in it – see this description by WRI on why their methodology undercounts Cantwell-Collins’ emissions reductions) completely misses the point: what makes cap and dividend such a great piece of legislation is that it represents something new, an approach to lawmaking that Americans are deeply thirsty for.     

And that is what this post is really about: that Americans are ready for a new way to make laws, for a new democracy that fully rejects insiderism in Washington DC.  And here’s the thing – I think we have the tools to spark just such a new approach.

My argument begins with what Lawrence Lessig describes so well in this week’s Nation.  Americans of all political persuasions – Tea Partiers and Move On folks alike – are disgusted by what Congress has become:

The source of America’s cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic.  … We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution “dependent on the People,” the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. … This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy.  

As many have noted (here’s my relevant take), this is one way to interpret the Scott Brown result: Americans are sick of all that seems corrupt, phony, and self-serving in our body politic.

And let me add something more.  As Jeremy Rifkin’s powerful new book suggests, there’s an “empathy gap” around the world right now – even as science is beginning to find evidence of how empathy is baked into our DNA.  As Arrian Hufflington recently summarizes in her review of Rifkin’s book:

According to Rifkin, the progress of civilization has been a constant struggle between empathy — increased human connection — and entropy, the deterioration of the health of the planet. It is, quite literally, a race against time. “We are on the cusp of an epic shift,” he writes. “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy.”

So if we want integrity and empathy in the way we govern, how can we begin … on a national scale?  For starters, we should take a page or two from the books of two recent green trends: slow food and slow money.  These two succesful mini-movements are built around characteristics that resonate not just with environmentalists, but with all Americans:

• They connect us with the mythic view of our past, a past in which indigenous people (many centuries), pioneers like Thoreau (19th century), Scott Nearing (20th Century) and many others seem to have attained a more connected life: a life that is slower. more patient and therefore more rewarding
• They are clear, straightforward ideas that provide concrete solutions to modern complexities. In our weird high-tech state of modernity, too many of us race around, not thinking about what we ingest and what are savings (should we be lucky enough to have any!) are really doing. Jointly, slow food and slow money not only help us to ease off the throttle; they also give us things to do in the time we free up. Enjoy a relaxing meal with friends; celebrate the difference your money is making in your community.  In this way, each is a double tonic.
• They help us to connect.  I haven’t seen data on this, but I’m guessing that both slow food and slow money have worked, in many localities around the world, in part because they are engines for connectedness.    

All told, each of these ideas is pretty darn brilliant: they connect us to the best of our past, provide timely solutions to our present, and lay the groundwork for empathy.

So here’s my punchline.  We need an equivalent idea for governance, a concept that feels grounded in our history, helps us all to ease up a bit, and connects us a bit more with folks of many inclinations in diverse localities.  In short, a simpler. more authentic form of democracy, a democracy of integrity and empathy. 

What to call it?  Alas, ‘slow democracy’ doesn’t work – that’s in some ways what we are all against! How about ‘deliberative democracy’? 

If you like that term, then check this out: such a thing is alive and well, as noted here.  For years now, scholars and practitioners have been using the tools of deliberative democracy – in which a randomly-selected group of citizens is convened to weigh in on an important policy issue – to bring about change.  Think of it as jury duty meets town meeting: as noted here by James Fishkin, the idea of deliberartive democracy is to promote decision-making that is ruled by “the voice of the people, when they are thinking.”  To learn more, check out the videos here, at Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy.  

This brings me back to Cantwell-Collins.  I am sure that DC-powers-that-be will not just walk away from cap and trade and embrace cap and dividend: human nature doesn’t work that way.  And I am even more certain that a certain brand of politician – Inhofe et al. – will not suddenly embrace the need to fight global warming.   

So how to move forward?  I propose that a couple of forward-thinking funders sponsor ten deliberative-democracy sessions, in ten
representative parts of the country, in which four alternatives for national climate policy are presented to the randomly selected Americans in attendance:

1. Do nothing
2. No Cap (the so-called Plan B energy bill)
3. Cap and Trade
4. Cap and Dividend

Based on the latest poll results from Yale 360 and what I hear everytime I talk about cap and dividend, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that choice 4 will win in such a deliberative setting -  hands down.

And such a country-wide exercise wouldn’t be just a vote for a specific piece of legislation (as important as so many of us think it is.)  It would be a vote for something even bigger: an approach to democracy that promises integrity, empathy, and also effectiveness.

And who knows, maybe when these ten deliberative sessions end, the participants will invite others to their homes, slowly cook up some food, and then discuss how they will invest in their local towns and farms. 

And if we all get it right, they’ll be able to do the same next year with a fresh $1100 in their pocket, thanks to Senator Cantwell, Senator Collins and a reinvigorated American democracy.

I say good riddance.  Sure, if you’re a climate-movement activist, it’s not hard to be bummed, big time, by Brown’s victory.  Here’s a guy that went from a supporter of the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — “Reducing carbon dioxide emissions in Massachusetts has long been a priority of mine” — to Limbaugh-lite — “I think the globe is always heating and cooling. … It’s a natural way of ebb and flow.”  Mitt Romney, Scott Brown — what is it about these Massachusetts Republicans?  Could it be that they are actually … politicians?!

Well, yes.  As it turns out, most politicians do actually change with the electoral tides.  And this time, the regular ebb and flow of Massachussets voter sentiment was swamped by the real emotions of these tough, tough times: There’s a tsunami of voter anger out there about jobs, Wall Street, and political business as usual.  Scott Brown needed to only slightly alter his course to catch this wave.

So how can this anger actually help rally the country in support of climate legislation?  Think of the Brown mandate not as the triumph of the Tea-Baggers, but as a 2010 call for change on top of 2008′s still-very-real call for Obama-fired change.  For when Jesse Jackson and the rest of the nation shed joyful tears as we watched Obama’s victory speech 14 months ago, we weren’t celebrating the fact that Democrats would have 60 votes in the Senate.  Far from it — we were rejoicing in the idea that America was poised to help “build the world anew.”

Guess what?  It hasn’t happened yet, and as we saw yesterday from all parts of Massachusetts, voters are angry (or indifferent — I’m sure that polls will show that the core Democratic base was simply not inspired by this race).

And that fact, I think, actually augurs well for climate-change legislation.  For here, in a nutshell, is what voters are angry about: 

• The economy has not recovered
• Wall Street is still having its way
• The Democratic leadership is out of touch

As quoted it today’s New York Times, here’s 73-year-old Marlene Connolly, a lifelong Democrat who voted Republican for the first time. “I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country. … If Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”  

Even more than the now-teetering health-care bill, the current global-warming legislative strategy — Waxman/Markey/Boxer/Kerry/Graham/Lieberman — is about giveways, literally.  In order to get — play that same dramatic chord again — the 60th vote, thinking to date has been to give away revenues generated by capping greenhouse-gas emissions to beltway powers-that-be: electrical utilities, labor, industry, coal, and — in part because the whole thing rests on a complex trading scheme — Wall Street.  Billions of dollars per month into the hands of clients of K Street, Wall Street, and Don Blankenship’s coal-paved Easy Street.  Want to know just how anti-consumer the current formulation is?  Check out the good work of Tyson Slocum and his colleagues at Public Citizen. 

I have the greatest respect for green leaders and climate-friendly politicians of all kinds (it is significant that the current bill is being shaped by a Democrat, a Republican, and an Independent).  For over a decade, they have worked so hard to get us where we are: a global-warming bill passed last summer in the House and one had a good chance of passing in the Senate — well, maybe until about 9:00 p.m. last night.  We owe hard-working staffers who have helped get us this far the greatest thanks and respect.  And moreover, we will need their wisdom and wherewithal to get us to the next level.

But ultimately, these leaders cannot outfox the times.  And these times do call for something new, an approach that is anti-giveaway and pro-pocketbook, an approach that is not built for special interests and Wall Street but rather built for Main Street. 

And we’ve got it in the CLEAR Act.  If there was ever a piece of legislation that celebrates simplicity and transparency while promoting the fortunes of the average American household, this is it.  It’s simple to explain.  Senator-elect Brown, check this out:

• Put a cap on sources of global warming pollution as they are introduced into the economy
• Give 75 percent of revenues generated from that cap to Americans with a Social Security number, equally, a few hundred bucks a year to every kid and adult alike
• Invest the remaining 25 percent in clean-energy and sequestration stuff that we need — and that will help us take on the Chinese and others in the job-creating green-arms race

Pretty simple, huh?  Pretty cool.

Survey after survey — even after all of the Climate Cover-Up pushback — shows that Americans do want to fight global warming and they do believe in the prospects for green jobs and clean energy.  But hard as it is for us climate junkies to admit it, something trumps even this: the desire for straight-shooting from our leaders, the desire for integrity.  And this is what I and so many others see in the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act (see this good recent analysis from Michael Livermore): a built-in integrity that has a real chance to connect with restless, even angry, voters — and to give each family of four, on average, about $1100 per year. 

In the quest for the 60th health-care vote, the Obama revolution did not arrive.  Nor will it arrive, for better or worse, in the quest for a 60th cap-and-trade vote.  But perhaps, in the words of my favorite kick-ass tune, the revolution starts now — in a simple, clear piece of legislation that favors Main Street over Wall Street and special interests, that is pro-jobs and pro-family, not pro-lobbyist. 

What do you think, all you good climate activists in Massachusetts — ready to try all of this on Scott Brown?

Why the confusion?  All these green groups do seem so worthy.  At first, it’s hard to resist those local watershed groups and nature centers.  But hold on, UCS does seem to tell it like it is.  But wait – Tidwell and his brilliant band at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network? – of course they are deserving!  In the end, each of us must choose to donate to a group based on personal conviction, previous experience as a contributor, and in many cases friendships.

To make my final decision, I’ve come up with five questions for leaders of these groups.  These are questions shaped by a simple truth of post-COP15 USA.  In the next few weeks, we need to write and promote a bill that speaks to the hearts, minds and yes pocketbooks of the American public. 

Furthermore, there’s a deadline: Obama must announce that he intends to sign a historic global-warming bill on Earth Day 2010.  For after that, we may well be stuck for a while.  November 2010 elections loom, the 2012 Presidential campaign soon thereafter, and I’m not at all confident that our elected leaders will have the wherewithal to stand up for science-based climate policy in the face of powerful naysayers and a mainstream media that is beyond pathetic.  (As I boarded my flight to Copenhagen, what’s on the airport TV monitor?  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer with a graphic that read: “Global Warming – Trick or Truth?”  When historians recound the story of the climate movement, they will reserve special scorn for such foolishness.)

So since I want to support a group that is properly geared up for this forthcoming fight of all fights, here are the five questions I’m asking of NGO leaders:

1.  What is your strategy to persuade the delayers that they are wrong?

Inside-the-beltway types thrive on their intimate understanding of the legislative process.  Yet for those of us in the hinterlands, this process seems to lull otherwise sensible folk into complacency.  THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING!  It’s not just some other bill about green jobs and clean energy and blah blah blah.  So dear NGO leader, when a congressional insider tells you that a climate bill will need to be delayed until after deregulation or a second stimulus package or another bill of no historic import, how will you convince them that this one can’t wait?  

2.  How will you stand up to the Wall Street crowd?

Were I on the dark side, I’d be gleeful right now.  For it may well be that otherwise well-meaning leaders in DC are about to make a terrible, terrible mistake: to get behind a bill that smacks of Wall Street’s worst sins, sins that the American public has no interest in forgiving right now.  As an economist, I love the logic of cap-and-trade.  But in an economy in which millions of suffering households are blaming Wall Street for their woes, the irrefutable theory about cap-and-trade’s cost-effectiveness must take second fiddle to a political reality.  Americans are really, really angry about an economy that doesn’t work for them, and a cap-and-trade system that seems all Goldman-Sachs-mumbo-jumbo will play into the hands of the tea party crowd – as perhaps it should.  So dear NGO leader, do you intend to support a bill that is, in the best sense of the word, populist?  If so, what are the elements of that bill?    

3.  Who are your allies in civil society, the states, and the business community, and how do you intend to work with them?

Another major failing of the mainstream media is the way they have punted on some truly good news (and I get it – it’s because the news is good that they are not interested!): the thriving climate movement that has done so much to get us to where we are today.  There are so many examples: Step It Up! forced presidential candidates to set 80% by 2050 as a greenhouse gas reduction target; yes a Republican governor in California has led the way in showing that clean-energy policies are good for households and the planet; CERES has rallied hundreds of big-time businesses in support of policies that make carbon-based fuels more expensive and mobilize capital for clean-energy.  The list of movement achievements really does go on and on.  So dear NGO leader, how do you intend to work alongside your allies in the climate movement to achieve your goal?  (And don’t tell me that you are going to build a grassroots force in 2010: we don’t have time for that, and besides if you aren’t already a leader of the USA’s climate groundswell, well I don’t know what to say ..)   

4.  What is your climate narrative?

This may be the least intuitive question – and perhaps the most important.  To explain, let me go back to Earth Day 1970 and the planning that went into it.  As a new decade arrived 40 years ago, Dennis Hayes and his band of merry warriors realized that America was ready for something new, a new narrative about who we are in the face of a threatened planet.  What they pulled off in a few short months was remarkable for its size: up to 20 milliion Americans cleaning up roadsides, planting treees, and feeling good about what we now call ‘going green.’  But what was even more important was the narrative that Earth Day 1970 introduced: there’s a planet to save, and each of us can help.  Well now we need a new narrative, a narrative for this time and place and which speaks to enough Americans – girl scouts and their troop leaders, big-city school teachers and preachers, retirees everywhere – that they want to join a new inexorable groundswell, a groundswell in support of a climate bill for the ages.  This is the hardest thing we need to do, and – with integrity and humility – we need to do it now.  So dear NGO leader, what is your American story (and it’s OK if you didn’t come up with it yourself!) and how will your group help tell this story to the American people in the weeks ahead?       

5.  What is your measure of success?

All of these groups will be back in December 2010, asking for another $100 – and I’m sure it will be just as confusing then to decide.  So dear NGO leader, how will I know if you’ve succeeded in the next year – what will you do that I can observe and assess?

Sure, these are tough questions.  But in our household, $100 is no throwaway.  Plus, I don’t have time for the equivocators, at least over the next four months. 

So with 36 hours left to write a check that I can deduct on my 2009 tax bill, I’m all ears.

If you’re like me, your inbox has recently been inundated with cheery, post-Copenhagen greetings from green groups of all kinds.  Bless their hearts, they’ve all suddenly developed an interest in wishing me well.

And let me confess: I love ‘em all.  Classics like NRDC and WRI, innovators like Clean Air-Cool Planet and 1Sky, hybrids like the Alliance for Climate Protection.  With all sincerity, I can’t say enough about the hard work and vision that most green groups have brought to our fight against global warming during the last few years.  With the most well-funded oppenents in lobbying history (in case you need convincing, check out the Climate Cover Up), green groups and their allies have more than held their own this year: a climate bill has passed the house, and two bipartisan bills (Kerry-Graham-Lieberman and Cantwell-Collins) are now in play in the Senate.  And that’s not all: in state after state, coal is on the ropes, in large part thanks to the legal brilliance of the Sierra Club and the hustling determination of I Love Mountains.  Grim as we all may feel about the recent roller coaster ride that took us from Hopenhagen to Nopenhagen, the emails that we’ve all just received tell an accurate tale: there’s lots to celebrate as we reflect on 2009.

But that was then; 2010 is now.  As I recently wrote, all of us need to gear up and build a plan for a grand four-month fight, a big push to get to an Earth Day 2010 signing ceremony in the White House.  Here’s the Rose Garden tableau that will be caught by the mainstream media if we get this right: Cherry Blossoms, Democratic and Republican leaders, and 350 kids from all all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories, all smiling as a reinvigorated Obama signs, let’s say, a bipartisan ‘Kids-vs-Global Warming’ bill. 

We will need all hands on deck to get there, in all corners of the USA (and among supporters around the world.)  In addition to offering our time and ideas (memo to self: gather friends in coffee shop next week; make plans to call our senators and representatives every day for next 116 days), I propose that each of us offer $100 to one green group.  That’s the least we can do to make sure that allies who get the whole inside-the-Beltway-thing can pave the way for Plan 10x.

Here’s the fun part: which one? 

While reporters were busy writing about the violence in Copenhagen they missed the alive spirit that came from the world’s citizens gathered to fight climate change. Photo: Greenpeace Finland via FlickrJust off the plane from Copenhagen, little sleep under my belt, I’m full of ideas for how to ratchet up the climate movement, big time. Over a late-night beer this week, Jessy Tolkan, coordinator of Energy Action, perfectly captured what we have to do. For the moment, I’m calling it 10X. 

A quote from Jessy — shared below — explains the name; let me first share some background. 

As the COP15 negotiations intensified during their second week, civil society leaders took words and action to a new level. And it wasn’t just the familiar rituals (on cue: ‘This is what democracy looks like!’) that have characterized every official U.N. climate negotiation since who knows when. The mainstream press documented some of that good stuff and way too much bad stuff: billy clubs + street protests = story that writes itself.

Not only did too many bigwig reporters fall back on that tired storyline. They seemed blind to something new that was afoot, something that’s hard to convey: how alive, how diverse, how forceful and beautiful really the world’s citizens can be when they assemble — particulary those dedicated to our grand fight against global warming

Walking through the U.N.’s Bella Center and the sprawling scene in Copenhagen, this is what I bore witness to (check out these photos too.) Tens of thousands of citizens, in traditional clothing and formalwear (a 350 tie brought status!), armed with drums and laptops, connecting by passing out business cards and texting, becoming instant allies. Collectively they had a presence that was transcendent. In every available corner of the city, they strategized and organized flash mobs, sang hymns and delivered petitions, cried and got really pissed off and found time to laugh. As Paul Hawken so keenly documents in Blessed Unrest, civil society of the 21^st century is a Gaia-like organism. In Copenhagen, connected by both wireless and trust — and despite the callous incompetence of the COP organizers — it blossomed. 

Now the stage is set for Jessy. Early in COP15’s second week, she and another ten distinguished leaders — this decade’s Diane Nash’s and John Lewis’s — arranged a meeting with a high-level member of the U.S. delegation. By their account, it was highly-charged, emotional, and as frustrating as any 30 minutes they have ever experienced. Behind closed doors, they witnessed what Bill McKibben and 350.org — incomparable leaders — were to discover so strikingly two days later; COP negotiators knew all along that their draft plan was nowhere near a trajectory to get to 350. And as the meeting ended, the official seemed to twist the knife when he looked at them and declared: “You haven’t done enough. You haven’t built the popular support that we need to get behind something like a 350 trajectory”.

But after some outrage and some tears, these inspiring leaders did what they have always done since the climate movement began to coalesce seven years ago. They vowed to work even harder, as hard as humanly possible, testing new ideas and mobilizing new resources, to win this fight of the ages.

Here’s Jesse’s money quote later that night, as a handful of us debriefed: “Never again am I going to sit in the room with an elected official and be told that our movement isn’t strong enough.  I’m going to go home and do my part to make it ten times as big.”  In other words, it’s time for 10X.

As I write this, listening live to the last proclamations coming out of COP15’s exhusted plenary (the Algerian minister noted that he hasn’t slept for 52 hours!), I’m not smart enough to know if the UNFCCC has produced a ‘good‘ Copenhagen Accord.  (Many NGOs, as the closing gavel now comes down, believe that it’s a disaster.) And I certainly don’t have a clue as to what transformative international arrangements will be needed, ASAP, to help us to really ‘begin the world anew.’  All that is for another day.

But I do know two things. I like the idea announced by Al Gore early in the week that we set Earth Day 2010 as the deadline for bold action on climate change in the U.S. For even the frailest international intention will vanish if the U.S. Congress doesn’t act.  (And Obama, I still love you, but you’ve gotta lead on this one.  The lame pending health care bill shows what happens if you don’t go all FDR-after-Pearl-Harbor.)  And I know that Jessy in right: it’s time for 10X.  If you are a U.S.-based climate warrior, do nothing but work you butt off over the next 125 days to get a world-changing bill

And indeed, that’s what I felt coming to life in the last hours of COP15, among our own particularly American civic Gaia, the globally-wired but U.S.-based warriors here for over a fortnight: green groups in their war room; 1Sky, Energy Action, and Focus the Nation; Climate Project volunteers; hip new app-driven groups like the Alliance for Climate Education and Kids vs. Global Warming; foundation heads.

And yet these and other American leaders now boarding flights out of Denmark are not the most important players in all of this over the next 125 days. Who must lead an unstoppable groundswell, in all fifty states, to force our elected leaders to follow game-changing precedents like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965? Americans. Americans in their churches, synagogues and mosques; in girl scout groups and small-town business groups; in informal social networks that bless our daily lives. It is the hearts and hard work of those who have been home all along that must comprise an unstoppable groundswell — in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the Territories.

And again, this is why the Earth Day analogy is good. In creative and crazy and app-driven ways that leaders are cooking up right now, we must spark not only a multi-million person celebration of who we are and what we do: we must make our leaders understand that this too is a transcendent moment.  Indeed, listen up: over the next few weeks, every time an inside-the-beltway type nods sagely that global warming legislation may have to be delayed due to the legislative calendar (blah blah blah), we’d better be able to say to them:  “No.  This is our time. This one can’t wait.  This is what Americans want, now.”  Mentally bookmark the conversation that Jessy and her colleagues had earlier in the week: this is what we must be able to say.

So pour more coffee. Gather friends and family in the kitchen. Work the IPhone. Fire up your block associations and classrooms. Schmooze your influential old friend. Write a letter a day to your local paper; call your senators’ and rep’s offices once a day. Find respected local political players in your state who are on our side and ask ‘How can I help?’ And enjoy this exhilarating four-month ride.

Until April 22, go 10x.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

****

As a matter of political strategy, many of the representatives of the US Administration at the UN climate negotiations here in Copenhagen are stuck in the 20th Century—nervous about upsetting Congress and repeating the 1997 Kyoto negotiations.  Kyoto, of course, was the all-important climate negotiation where Vice President Al Gore signed the United States to a global deal on climate change, but returned home to the knowledge that the Senate wouldn’t ratify the treaty, leaving the world in the lurch and the US negotiating team  feeling a bit sheepish.  

6.  New leadership
In the last couple of years, several key countries have elected new, more climate-friendly administrations.  Sure, at moments, the new US leadership in these talks looks unsettlingly like the old “leadership. ” But the science isn’t going to change, so the politics must.  And surely President Barack Obama should know about changing politics better than pretty much anyone.

Meg Boyle

whatwedo.org

What Hoover was to law enforcement during the King years, Glenn Beck is to a free press during the Obama years.  For each of these demagogues, a sacred foundation of democracy is nothing more than a means to a twisted end: promoting racially-driven paranoia in order to serve their own vanity.  Hoover’s insights into the vulnerabilities of others helped him become a consumate bureacrat; Beck’s channeling of ‘the paranoid style of American politics’ has helped him become a highly popular broadcaster.  Differences abound: Hoover did his bidding in private, while Beck is embarrasingly public. But in the end, each leads the same futile fight: trying to stop the steady growth of a more just, more diverse and more hopeful America.

Hoover came to mind this weekend with the announcement that Van Jones had resigned from Obama’s CEQ. Viewed one way, this was a victory for Beck and his Fox News patrons, and it was right out of the Hoover playbook.  Find a few seemingly embarrassing moments from your target’s vibrant past, cast them in the most damning light, and then let a well-oiled system take over.  And as the targeting of Levison and Rustin were meant to weaken King, so with Jones and Obama.  Progressives and climate-movement activists are rightfully outraged by all of this.

But with reflection, we can find solace in history.  It’s true that Levison and Rustin were each ‘thrown under the bus’ at key moments in the fight for civil rights.  Just as Hoover had hoped, disclosures about their past led King and his other advisers to shun these two for a time.  But you know something: it didn’t last.  After being cast aside, Rustin went on to co-organize the 1963 March on Washington; Levison was soon back in King’s inner circle.  Hoover, simply, could not stop them from shaping history’s grand push toward freedom. 

So I’m sure it will be with Beck, Jones and Obama.  Does anyone really think that Van Jones won’t be leading again soon, with renewed vigor? And does anyone really think that Glenn Beck’s vision for America – too grizzly to even detail! – will triumph over that of Jones? 

Indeed, what Jones has lead so brilliantly over the last several years, as the climate movement has come into its own, is the development of a new vision of a greener and more just America.  ‘Green jobs’ is not just a slogan.  It captures the muscular idea that our urban centers can be revitalized as we build a clean-energy economy.  In this Step It Up montage, one can bear witness to Jones’s vision – and how a new generation has worked alongside him to make it their own.  And it is this generation that will, as the years pass, implement Obama’s higher call.

To get there, what should we do right now?  For climate activists, two lessons from the Hoover-Beck analogy should ignite action.  First, note that the FBI head was allowed to corrupt national politics for way too long.  Amazingly, Hoover was in that position for almost half a century.  Beck is a relatively young man with, disturbingly, what might be called a ‘promising’ future.  Millions read his books and watch his show. It is right, therefore, for climate activists to re-double their efforts to stop him, so that his moment in history, unlike Hoover’s, is fleeting. 

To take away Beck’s power, we should start by supporting the consumer boycott led by the Color of Change.  By every account, it’s working.  And of course, we need to shed light on Beck’s despicable ways with our own research and words: here’s a great post from Juliana Williams and a new website that she has co-founded.  These and related online efforts will have a cumulative effect.

Getting Beck, though, is not the most important action for us now.  In fact, pursuing Beck in isolation might well play to his hand.  For what he and Limbaugh and others really thrive on is vitriol, bitterness and hate – whether provided by them or their opponents.  When opponents of birthers yell, it reinforces the Beck worldview that created the birthers in the first place.  If we just attack and yell, Beck wins.

Ultimately, what King, Levison, Rustin and all of the other civil rights leaders teach us is the power of anti-Hooverism, of anti-Beckism.  Indeed, it’s a lesson that cuts across the centuries.  When President Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, re-affirmed his faith in “the better angels of our nature,” he was reaching out to us now, reminding us now of the “mystic chords of memory” that bind us as we work to create a better future. 

Van Jones surely binds us from one age to the next, to the visions of Lincoln and King and to the leadership of so many of today’s young leaders.  We can thank him, we can honor him best by redoubling our own efforts to begin the world anew.

Want to get really angry about health care and global warming? Not the ginned-up rage of the Obama-was-really-born-in-Kenya crowd, but an anger that fires you up to take action in the name of justice? Anger like the rage felt by so many white Northerners and Southerners in 1963 when they saw Birmingham’s fire hoses turned on patriotic African-Americans, a rage so profound that they too joined the civil rights revolution?

Well I invite you, in a brief audio and video tour, to bear witness to what’s happening in Wise County, Virginia. This Appalachian region, only a few hundred miles from the policy fog in Washington DC, clarifies what the health care/climate policy fight is all about. And if you’re not angry enough to take action after hearing these voices and seeing these images, blame yourself when powerbrokers like Don Blankenship (more on him later) once again have their day.

Let’s start with what’s good about Wise County: its hard-working families. Taking a look at this community calendar, you’ll see all that is right with rural American communities and their urban counterparts. From January to December, the citizens of Wise County celebrate the legacy of Dr. King (January 19), perform plays (March 17), honor our country and its veterans (July 4 and October 8) and get involved in all of those glorious community, spiritual and volunteering activities that capture the essence of the American experience. In Wise County, it’s not hard to find the best of ourselves.

But one item on the same calendar reveals what is not right: the July 24-26 “Remote Area Medical Health Fair” at the local fairgrounds. Sound innocuous? Well take ten minutes to listen to this recent report from NPR on the event, hosted in Wise County, which served 2,700 “tired and desperate” people from 17 different states. In the words of NPR, it was “a Third World scene with an American setting.” It’s heartbreaking: entire families waiting in line overnight to get just some of the basic health care that they cannot afford. Hear about the young boy with a battered nose and an oozing ear; the single mom with a gallbladder so enlarged it’s about to kill her; and the many patients gettingall of their teeth pulled. That’s right — for over 20 years, while DC politicians have been promising a better health care system, your fellow Americans in and around Wise County have been suffering. Angry yet?

And take a guess what industry dominates this part of Appalachia. No surprise: it’s coal. Like in so many parts of the country, excessive reliance on coal means high levels of poverty — the kind of poverty that creates the need for this health “fair.” A recent study out of West Virginia University puts it clearly: “Coal-mining economies are not strong economies. [Coalfield communities] are weaker than the rest of the state, weaker than the rest of the region, and weaker than the rest of the nation.” There’s no doubt that the thousands of employees of the (increasingly capital-intensive) coal industry are hard-working, admirable people; the problem is that in the 21st century, coal helps them at the expense of others.

The second part of coal’s legacy in this area is mountaintop removal. Take this extraordinary virtual flyover of Wise County to view its devastation:

The human effects of this destruction are captured in the words of Wise County’s Kathy Selvage. Listen to her speak about the “terrible injustice’ created by coal, literally in her backyard:

And memo to the Birther crowd: if you think the fight against mountaintop removal is some godless liberal conspiracy, see this testimony from Kathy: “It was my Mother’s custom to have her early morning Bible reading on her front porch. [Because of mountaintop removal,] she was forced to move inside because she could no longer stand the noise, dust, and smell that was invading her ‘Morning with the Lord’.”

In Wise County, poverty, environmental destruction and powerlessness come together, and the result — despite the resilience of hard-working Americans who call it home — is sick families, destroyed mountains, a dysfunctional economy and at least one good lady who finds it harder to pray.

Now there certainly are winners in all of this: take Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Coal, a modern version of Daniel-Day Lewis’s ruthless oilman in There Will Be Blood. It’s hard to know where to start with this guy:

• Blowing up mountains throughout the country.
• Buying off judges in West Virginia. (Bonus: watch him punch an ABC reporter!)
• Polluting rural communities like no one else.
• And he seems to be a coward to boot. When James Hansen accepted Blankenship’s challenge to debate global warming, the Massey CEO suddenly backed off.

So climate warriors, let’s get angry: about inexcusable poverty, the destruction wrought by coal, and the lobby-laden system that helps Blankenship thrive while too many of the good people of Wise County suffer.

And if you are angry, what are you going to do about it? Will you be willing to get arrested standing up to Massey Coal, like Jim Hansen? Lead civil disobedience against Dominion Power, right there in Wise County? Or at least, show up to your elected officials’ town meetings and speak loudly and clearly in support of health care and climate change legislation? With some hard work, maybe we can reveal Blankenship and his ilk for what they are: the Bull Connors of the dirty-energy age. There’s no time to waste.