The Old Climate-Activism Playbook No Longer Works. What Else Can?

 

 

 "With Sun Day, McKibben hopes to recapture the spirit of the first Earth Day, in 1970, th e earliest wide-scale mobilization of the environmental movement, which helped catapult issues like pollution and conservation onto the national agenda. Like Earth Day, McKibben told me, Sun Day is meant to be “a giant potluck supper” for activists around the country: “We’ve set the date and the theme, and everyone’s bringing their own dish to the floor.”

In some ways, focusing on renewable energy right now is a logical bet. In March, the United States hit a new milestone when fossil fuels generated less than half the nation’s electricity. In June, solar was the largest source of electricity for the European Union for the first time ever. Last year, over 90 percent of new power globally came from clean-energy sources. The United Nations announced in July that solar power is now on average 41 percent cheaper than fossil fuels. “For the very first time in this saga, the force of economic gravity is working in the right direction,” McKibben said. His hope is that engaging people in small ways, where they live, could hasten the clean-energy transition that is already underway in the U.S.

But Sun Day also feels like a tactical swerve for McKibben. Climate activism over the past decade has been defined by global protests against fossil fuels, by Greta Thunberg’s student strikes, by the emergence of the Sunrise Movement. McKibben has been among the strongest exponents of that era’s climate-activism strategy — confrontational, morally stark, bent on shutting down economic activity that endangered humanity in the long term even if it meant reducing corporate profits and curtailing Americans’ lifestyle options in the short term.

Now McKibben is taking a different tack, one that seems to share a message with a more moderate, adaptationist wing of the climate world while also harking back to the innocence and idealism of Earth Day. “This is clearly the thing that we can work on at the moment that stands a chance of making a difference,” he told me. His own shift in strategy comes as many activists are asking themselves some difficult questions: What has climate activism really given us? And where should it go from here?"

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