By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
In my 2023 book, Environmentally Sustainable Growth: A Pragmatic Approach, I argue that the goals of clean air, clean water, reduced toxics and personal wellness remain shared American and indeed human values despite deep political polarization. These shared values can provide a foundation for bipartisan support of environmental policy. They did so in the 1970s and 1980s when all the foundational U.S. environmental laws were enacted. Hunters and anglers from the West joined urban environmentalists in a common cause to protect the planet. Today, our politics monetizes differences and deemphasizes shared values. The environmental movement, like most American political advocacy movements, raises money these days by scaring people about the “enemy”: their political opponents. When they have a majority, as they enjoyed during the Biden years, the strategy brings “victories”; when they are no longer in power, all the government programs they fought to achieve start to disintegrate. As red state renewable energy projects are defunded, we learn that even projects that were thought to be immune from MAGA blowback still end up cut in the interest of an extreme form of ideological power play.
Our political polarization is, in part, a result of the entry of endless financial resources into political competition by the Supreme Court’s ill-advised decision in the Citizens United case, essentially equating financial contributions to political campaigns as protected free speech. Coupled with the internet’s destruction of shared media and replacement by algorithm-enabled, focused, echo-chamber media, we have built a political process that considers compromise to be evil. We must “own the libs” or “destroy the fascists.” For environmental groups, the Trump Administration has created a crisis that they are finding difficult to combat. In my view, part of the problem has been that many of these groups have not tried to understand the impact of their messaging on people who come to oppose them. Their focus is on their core supporters who help pay their bills. The threats to environmental advocacy are discussed in a recent New York Times piece by reporters David Gelles, Claire Brown, and Karen Zraick. According to their report:
“After a series of stinging defeats and other challenges, some prominent environmental groups are adrift. This week, the Sierra Club’s executive director was fired after a rocky tenure in which he oversaw several rounds of layoffs and clashed with employees. Greenpeace is facing a $670 million legal verdict that could put its future at risk. Rewiring America, a nonprofit group that works to electrify buildings, has slashed nearly a third of its staff. Actions by the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress have set the environmental movement back years, activists said. Chief among them has been the passage Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill, which curtailed many of the core elements of the Inflation Reduction Act… Across the environmental movement, there is a widespread sense that money from donors will be harder to come by in the years ahead.”
Sadly, some of these wounds are self-inflicted. The most fundamental is the belief among many environmentalists that protecting the environment requires sacrifice and that people whom advocates have decided are “overconsumers” should be made to feel guilty for their lifestyles. In this mindset, suburban parents buying SUVs to cart their kids and sports equipment are part of the problem, along with wealthy environmentalists traveling to climate conferences in private planes. For many climate advocates, the way to decarbonize is to tax fossil fuels and make energy more expensive so people use less of it. This neglects the fact that energy is a major element of a household’s essential expenses. According to some overly ideological environmentalists, people who eat red meat should be ashamed of the greenhouse gases generated by their consumption. I have long argued that this high-handed arrogance is an idiotic, self-defeating political strategy.
Our emphasis should be on reducing the cost of energy by working on innovative technologies that reduce the cost of generating and storing renewable energy. Fossil fuels need to be phased out, but the transition will take time; by rushing the transition, we—paradoxically—have probably delayed it. We’ve empowered the fossil fuel interests, who are emboldened by their ideological allies in Washington. Our argument should have focused on the need to modernize our decaying, unreliable, and expensive energy system. Instead, climate is termed an existential threat, and greenhouse gas pollution must be ended immediately. Of course, we cannot reduce greenhouse gases immediately without stimulating a politically destabilizing and incredibly destructive global depression. But advocating a moderate, gradual approach won’t raise the funding that would be raised by convincing donors that the climate crisis must be addressed immediately, regardless of the cost.
A fundamental fact of American politics is that huge majorities favor action to reduce air, water, and toxic pollution. More and more corporations are working to reduce their environmental impacts. The political disagreements about environmental protection come from the type of policies adopted to reduce pollution. Regulations that seem punitive and “tell people what to do” tend to be opposed. Policies that incentivized electric vehicles were coupled with policies to eventually ban the internal combustion engine. This provided an opening for fossil fuel interests to argue that freedom of the marketplace was impaired by these policies. The argument was correct, and the policy was regulatory overreach. When the automobile replaced the horse, we did not tax the horse; the car was just a better technology. That is true of electric vehicles, and EV technology is rapidly improving. Unfortunately, advocacy in a polarized age demanded that the internal combustion engine be presented as evil. That overreach opened the opportunity to end subsidies for EVs and solar panels. MAGA defined the issue of EV adoption as one of freedom of choice.
Advocacy remains mission-driven, but it has also become a business. Nonprofit groups create their own institutional dynamics and, over time, demands for increased resources. Many create research teams, enhance their communications capacity, and increase their professionalism. These increase the quality of their advocacy, but also their dependence on resources that may not be secure. Both environmental advocacy and anti-climate change non-profits have become considerably larger over the past quarter-century, although pro-environmental groups are now under growing financial pressure due to the reduction of federal government support for their environmental justice programs. According to Open Secrets, environmental lobbying grew from $6.6 million a year in 2000 to $32.2 million in 2024. Of course, this is small potatoes when compared to the lobbying undertaken by the fossil fuel industry. Again, according to Open Secrets:
“The oil and gas industry spent around $2.8 billion on federal lobbying from 1998 to 2023, OpenSecrets’ analysis found. Since the early years of Exxon’s campaign to diminish concerns about the use of oil and gas, the fossil fuel lobby has expanded its influence to create obstructions to emissions-reducing measures at every step of the policymaking process.”
Given the disparity of resources, environmental groups would be wise to avoid demonizing fossil fuels and their customers. Instead, they might want to build a coalition around a positive vision of environmental sustainability. Rather than messaging about the existential threat of climate change, they should focus on the benefits of clean air, clean water, physical wellness, and health, along with a more reliable, lower-cost, and decarbonized energy system. The environmental movement was at its strongest when it focused on obvious, visible threats and proposed solutions that required new technologies but did not attempt to limit private consumption. Climate impacts have become more visible due to obvious warming trends and the destructive power of extreme weather events. Environmental groups should advocate for enhanced emergency first response, resilient infrastructure, and less politicized funding of reconstruction. The goal should be to construct a broad and deep consensus and avoid alienating people due to culture-war-created differences. As difficult as it may be in this highly polarized era, the goal should be to expand rather than narrow the base of support for environmental protection.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
