Tuesday, 9 Apr 2002

AUSTIN, Texas

6 a.m. My three-month-old daughter wakes up. The day begins!

Abigail Jane Altman.

Get to the office, plug in, pour coffee, and we’re off! I review my “must-do” list to help keep me focused for the day, and then check my email and get responses out. I ask a prominent climate scientist who wants to write to Exxon’s board if he’ll share his letter with me, and I ask an investor in London if we can move a planned meeting to a later time. (I’ll be in London toward the end of this month trying to sell investors on the importance of responsible corporate climate policy.)

Today I’m deluged by emails from Empowering Democracy. The background is this: About a year and half ago, I was looking for some training opportunities to learn more skills and strategies for use in corporate campaigns. I couldn’t find the training I needed, so I called up people I knew personally and people I’d heard of at various socially responsible organizations (In Fact, Shareholder Action Network, Rainforest Action Network, Friends of the Earth, and Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility) and pitched the idea of working together to design such a training. A working group formed and in six months we had the first corporate campaigner’s training in Dallas — organized to coincide with ExxonMobil’s annual meeting. (There’s a report on our website.)

Baldemar Velasquez of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee speaking at the 2001 Empowering Democracy Training.

This year, the training is organized around the annual meeting of Citigroup. Citi is a target of many activists for their complicity in rainforest destruction, predatory lending, global warming, and a host of other ills. Rainforest Action Network has a campaign focused on Citi.

My organization is a fiscal sponsor of Empowering Democracy, so I get to do a lot of panicking as I watch the finances go up and down. On top of that, I’m organizing and preparing workshops. Speaking of which, I’m behind on scheduling calls for those workshops (“How Corporations Got So Powerful” and “Taking on Corporations in Your Community”), so I spend the next 30 minutes leaving messages and sending emails.

My main priority for today is to find a reporter to cover our new study on ExxonMobil. I’m working with the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics and long-time shareholder activist Bob Monks on a study evaluating the impact of ExxonMobil’s position on global warming on shareholder value. We have a great consultant working with us, too, and he’s found some very interesting results. We are all very excited about getting media coverage for this study.

Corporate Campaigners at the 2001 Empowering Democracy Training.

After checking my notes on the main points and reviewing the report again, I decide I’m ready to call the reporter. I tell her who I am and pitch the story, and — nope, she’s not interested. Next I call up a fellow who is spending one day a week advising corporate climate campaigns. After I explain the report, what our major points are, and what I need, he says he’ll read the report and get back to me with some ideas.

Next, I hop on a call with Ross Gelbspan and an ExxonMobil shareholder whose grandfather was one of the company’s builders. We are strategizing about how to get ExxonMobil to meet with us to talk about global warming. ExxonMobil is usually very keen to spend time explaining to large investors why they don’t believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, or the National Academy of Sciences, but now suddenly they are shy and don’t want to meet with our friend or her family. We spend some time thinking about short-term steps and long-term ideas, and then I’ve got to hang up to take a call from an Empowering Democracy organizer with whom I’ve been playing phone tag.

After that, I get back to wrapping up work on the workshops I’m running. (Only one more speaker switch and a moderator who can’t make it — about par for the course.) Then I get the latest version of the Exxon report and print it out, thinking I can start reading through it later tonight as I walk my daughter to sleep. If only these reports had more pictures, I could try reading them to her. The ultimate in horrible multi-tasking!