We Stand at a Crossroads: World War or Climate Action (w/corrected links)

Instead of escalating dangerously into direct war with Russia, can the climate movement shift us toward a safer and more sustainable future?

Welcome back to another weekly edition of The Connector, where I focus on news and analysis at the intersection of politics, movements, organizing and tech and try to connect the dots (and people) on what it will take to keep democracy alive. This is completely free newsletter—nothing is behind a paywall—but if you value it and can afford a paid subscription at any level, please hit the subscribe button and choose that option. Feel free to forward widely; and if you are reading this because someone forwarded it to you, please sign up!

My wife and I were living in New York City with our then-young children when 9-11 happened, and in the days and weeks that followed, we evolved a shorthand for talking about how we were dealing with the aftermath. On “Earth One,” we said, daily life continued. We got our kids off to school, we went to work, and we made plans for the future like buying the house we live in now. On “Earth Two,” we mourned with friends who lost loved ones at the World Trade Center, we tried not to panic from the anthrax scare, and we recoiled as the US veered toward war in Afghanistan (which at first appeared justified) and in Iraq (which never did). Earth One was the world we could touch and shape; Earth Two was the much darker and more dangerous world we also actually lived in but could barely affect.

I feel that way again now. Though in the context of this newsletter Earth One is the plans we are making and debates we are having about how keep building progressive power and defend democracy in America, and Earth Two is the danger that we are, as Joan Rohlfing, the president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, put it a few days ago, in “a moment as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Of course, there’s only one Earth and ever since the US and then the USSR got the Bomb we have been living in a MAD world, where the risk of mutually assured destruction has never been eliminated. But it's very hard to function every day with that reality in the front of your mind. I’m old enough to remember what it was like to worry daily that our leaders might deliberately or accidentally set off Armageddon. The very first cause I was involved in, as a teenager and college student, was the antinuclear movement, which from the late 1970s to late 1980s included people from the West and the East who did their best to counter the insane logic of nuclear competition. At its height that movement managed to push the leaders of both superpowers toward a series of arms control treaties reducing some of the danger. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and the public stopped paying attention. (More from me on this topic here.)

Meanwhile the United States, led first by Cold Warrior George H.W. Bush, then by draft dodger Bill Clinton (another man who also needed to prove he was “tough”), pressed its advantage over Russia. NATO, which was assembled to contain the USSR after WWII, became our vehicle for dominating all of Europe. Though many far-sighted leaders on both sides of the political aisle objected to this approach, starting with George Kennan, the architect of the containment framework, there was no mass movement giving their arguments heft. War hawks here and in Western Europe, and their allies in the defense sector, along with leaders of many Eastern European countries justifiably fearful of the Russian bear, all lobbied hard for NATO expansion. A different, less polarized, framework for actually ending Cold War rivalry was never developed. (If you want to dive deeper into how this happened, a very good book on the history of NATO expansion in the 1990s is Mary Sarotte’s Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate.)

And so here we are, with the hair-trigger reality of Earth Two staring us in the face. The horrifying images we are all seeing of Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine, along with the hyper-sympathetic media coverage, are generating an understandable but dangerous push for the US to get more directly involved in confronting Putin’s military. (As Trevor Noah acidly noted, the Western media’s racist response to this war is truly disgusting.) See for example this letter circulating in Washington from more than two dozen foreign policy experts calling for NATO to create a “limited no-fly zone” to protect civilians trying to flee through humanitarian corridors ostensibly agreed to by both Ukraine and Russia. Or this grand strategy statement from former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, which calls for more money for the Pentagon as well as (admirably) foreign aid, but says not a word about investing in a rapid transition from carbon energy to renewables. The stampede in Congress toward increasing the already-bloated US military budget has begun. And aerospace and defense company stocks are up by double digits since Russia’s invasion began, while the rest of the market declines.

So far, the only sensible call to action that I’ve seen in response to the crisis in Europe that doesn’t involve risking World War III has come from Fridays for Future (FFF), the global youth movement inspired by Greta Thunberg’s weekly protests addressing climate change. As Leanna Frist-Arai reported for Truthout, the initial call to action came from FFF activists in Ukraine, asking their colleagues around the world for solidarity and arguing that part of Russia’s motivation for the war was to seize Ukraine’s oil and coal resources. The movement responded with rallies in more than sixty locations. Longtime climate organizer Bill McKibben had a similar framing in The Guardian, arguing that the best way to reduce Putin’s power was to end our dependence on oil and gas. He wrote, “Now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.”

Amen to that. Naomi Klein makes a similar argument in a tour-de-force essay in The Intercept, where she manages to connect Donald Trump’s love for the “freedom convoy” truckers to Putin’s deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox nationalism and Steve Bannon’s efforts to build a transnational populist alliance of likeminded authoritarians. She writes,

“These alliances seem deeply weird and unlikely at first. But look a little closer, and it’s clear that they are bound together by an attitude toward time, one that clings to an idealized version of the past and steadfastly refuses to face difficult truths about the future. They also share a delight in the exercise of raw power: the 18-wheeler vs. the pedestrian, the shouted manufactured reality vs. the cautious scientific report, the nuclear arsenal vs. the machine gun…. The most urgent political task at hand is to put enough pressure on Putin that he sees his criminal invasion of Ukraine as too great a risk to sustain. But that is only the barest of beginnings. ‘There is a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future on the planet,’ said Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that organized the landmark report released this week. If there is a uniting political task of our time, it is to provide a comprehensive response to this conflagration of toxic nostalgia. And within a modern world birthed in genocide and dispossession, that requires laying out a vision for a future where we have never been before.”

Who Will Organize This Movement?

A week ago, The New Yorker published a long feature by Andrew Marantz on the Sunrise Movement that does an excellent job of explaining the rise and challenges of this upstart on the climate activism scene. It’s rare to see this kind of in-depth attention to the complexity of movement organizing in such a prominent publication. He situates Sunrise’s grassroots activism against the more staid and lawyerly world of the Big Ten environmental organizations, and nicely illustrates how its founders went from flailing idealistically at getting their campuses to divest from fossil fuel companies to consciously “frontloading” their new organization using the principles of the Momentum organizing network and then propelling the Green New Deal into the mainstream of climate policy debates.

I’ve been consistently impressed by Sunrise ever since it emerged on the scene as a deliberately millennial-led distributed movement. The group is really serious about being youth-led; if you self-identify as someone over the age of 35 (I mean, chronologically, not mentally), you get an invitation to read the group’s “35 Plus Supporter Guidelines” which gently explains why you need to take a step back: “In our society, there aren’t many spaces that trust and uplift the leadership of young people. Young people were searching for a space that would not only allow them to organize but would also give them the community they were searching for.” It adds, “Our youth-centered focus makes sure that we are building a community and an identity— vital ingredients to keep a movement together.” So don’t be an adultist!

As Marantz deftly shows, one place where Sunrise’s decentralized structure has led to internal problems is its desire to let local chapters and even smaller grouplets of as few as three members determine for themselves how to engage under its banner. That led to a self-inflicted black eye last year when the Sunrise DC chapter disavowed a voting rights rally because some Jewish groups attending supported Israel, and it also led to an impassioned but ultimately futile hunger strike by a few members that failed to move its target, West Virginia coal senator Joe Manchin.

While those episodes were stumbles for Sunrise, at least its distributed structure has protected it from the fate of 350.org, the other major new climate action group to arise in the last decade. As this story by Zack Colman in Politico details, 350.org hit a wall two years ago after growing rapidly—perhaps too ambitiously—for much of a decade. Run in a much more centralized fashion by May Boeve, a Middlebury student inspired by McKibben who is its founding executive director, it had 165 full time employees in early 2019 and hopes to increase its annual budget from $19 million to $25 million. When it failed to come close to that target, layoffs and internal recriminations followed, airing longstanding tensions between a mostly white senior leadership and younger, more diverse staff. Now it is a more modest operation, with a US staff that is drastically smaller.

Boeve is still running 350.org and says its finances have stabilized. But others Colman spoke to are dubious. “It’s like the world’s longest Irish wake,” a former staff member told him, referencing a sense of denial among its leadership. “It’s really been dead a long time but everybody’s standing around the coffin saying, ‘Doesn’t it look so pretty? They did such a great job with it. It looks so natural.’”

Who will take up the complex challenge of the Russia-Ukraine war and the climate crisis? Maybe it will be the young people of Sunrise and the Friday for Future movement. The latter has already put a new move on the chessboard: There’s a global climate strike called for March 25th, the first since last October and the first since COVID-19 restrictions began to really open up. Now that the Biden Administration and leading European partners have decided to end their importation of Russian oil, perhaps the climate movement can get engaged in what comes next.

—Related: Here’s a compendium of upcoming protests against the Russian invasion, most of which are in Europe. A glance at the events coming up in the US suggest that no major organization has really stepped into the moment; sponsors of the rallies include Students for Ukraine, We Together (an NYC-based collective of LGBTQIA+ people from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia), a Facebook community of Ukrainians in Denver, and various combinations of individual grassroots expat Ukrainians. Missing in action: the netroots left.

—Also related:

Odds and Ends

—While the People’s Convoy seems stalled in Hagerstown, Maryland, swamped by the DC traffic and the Ukraine news, this Twitter thread from historian Terry Bouton is a good reminder that it still a “movement-building event” and one that may bear more fruit for the conspiratorial right in the future.

—Ukrainians with relatives in Russia are dealing with a level of disinformation that those of us with QAnon believers in our circles might recognize. One Ukrainian-based answer is Papapover.com, a grassroots guide aimed at helping people get past the lies Russians are being fed about the war.

—Activists using the #Anonymous label have launched a grassroots effort to get people to text message random phone numbers in Russia with an anti-Putin message. I tried it and my message didn’t go through. Your mileage may vary.

Deep Thoughts

—There are no short-cuts to building grassroots power. That’s the main lesson of this excellent essay in The Forge by Katey Lauer, co-chair of West Virginia Can’t Wait.

—Peter Beinart takes a stab about what a progressive response to the Ukraine crisis might look like. The quick answer: revive our attention to international law.

End Times

—I can’t stop looking at this real time map of flight paths over Europe.