As we face the climate crisis we not only have to do so with passion and commitment, but with thoughtful and effective strategies for action. Here you will find a closer look at current climate campaigns and movements and the strategies behind them.
NEW! The Keystone XL Series
Anti-pipeline protesters circle the White House in November 2011 - credit: Ben Castle
One of the largest US environmental campaigns of recent years has gathered behind the effort to prevent the White House allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to be constructed. The pipeline would have taken dirty oil from the Canadian tarsands to US Gulf Coast refineries and presented a huge environmental risk to local habitats, as well as the potential for huge carbon emissions from the extraction process itself. The coalition that called on Obama to refuse the pipeline permit included Nebraskan landowners, First Nations communities, and environmental campaigners of all ages and backgrounds. We interviewed many of those involved – from the leaders to the grassroots – on why they were participating and how they were winning the battle. First published on our blog, Getting Action, these interviews have now been compiled into a downloadable document that forms a case summary of the actors, messages and strategies used to win this important battle in the fight against climate change.
Please also check out our recent Getting Action post for the latest developments on the Keystone XL process. As of January 2012 President Obama has refused a permit for the pipeline. However that doesn’t preclude an attempt to construct the pipeline using a different route. While the battle has been won for now, the war may not yet be over…
Download the Keystone XL Series (pdf)
Getting Action: A Tale of Two Protests
Article by Jim Shultz on our blog looking at two important citizen protests, in Washington and in Bolivia, that share a common purpose — to hold supposedly ‘progressive’ Presidents to their rhetoric and promises to protect the Earth. The article can also be read on Alternet and in Yes Magazine.
Latin America finds a voice on climate change: with what impact?
Written in the wake of the April 2010 People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Jim Shultz looks at how the demands that came out of Cochabamba can become a part of the global decisions ahead.
Case study of success:
Switching off E.On – fighting new coal in the UK
This material comes from the Democracy Center’s ‘Beating Goliath: A Resource for Corporate Campaigners‘
The Story
In 2006 E.On (a German energy company) announced plans to replace Kingsnorth, a coal-fired power station in Southeast England, with yet another brand new coal-fired power station. The plan was to start building in 2012 and finish by 2015. The company’s timing was not good – a grassroots climate movement was growing fast in the country, and giant new facilities for burning coal were not what they had in mind for the UK’s energy future. According to the Guardian, ‘Kingsnorth became emblematic of the campaign against coal-fired power stations.’
Greenpeace sailbout outside of Kingsnorth - Kristian Buus/Greenpeace
A two-year campaign was waged by grassroots groups and NGOs to stop the company carrying out its plans. Campaigners took actions ranging from online pledges, to mass civil disobedience and, in one memorable event, completely shut down the power station. Towards the end of 2009, E.On announced that they were shelving the plans for the Kingsnorth power station. Meanwhile, the UK government had announced that they would not approve the development of new coal-fired stations without ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ (a promised future technology that has not been successfully implemented in any working power plant).
Strategy
Stopping the expansion of the Kingsnorth power station was the central, immediate goal of the campaign. In the context of a rapidly growing climate movement and public concern over climate change, the Kingsnorth campaign also served to highlight profits being made for companies like E.On at the expense of the climate. The campaign mobilized public action directly against the company, but the UK government was also a secondary target: the campaign was part of a larger effort to shift the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels like coal and oil. There were several other coal-fired power stations on the drawing board, that the climate movement also wanted to stop – so the campaign was not only about preventing Kingsnorth being built, but changing the policy environment that would allow any such projects to go forward. In addition to setting national energy policy, the government had the power to approve or deny E.On’s plans – and it was also in charge of a multi-million dollar competition to fund an energy company to build ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ facilities in the UK, which E.On had entered.
The campaign was centered around building and demonstrating public opposition to E.On’s plans. As the Camp for Climate Action put it at the time, ‘We need to stop Kingsnorth being built and we need to stop new coal in the UK. This means stopping E.On – targeting their brand, disrupting their operations and targeting their supply chain – we need to be face to face with E.On wherever they operate.’ In addition to proactively creating confrontations with the company, activists were able to use existing opportunities, like E.On’s sponsorship of the FA Cup (a major English football tournament), E.On’s efforts to recruit students in universities, and E.On’s sponsorship of a Guardian newspaper climate conference to draw public attention to the Kingsnorth plans.
Messaging and Framing
Messaging in the campaign was as varied as the groups involved. The Camp for Climate Action and Rising Tide UK took an uncompromising approach to the company, using language like ‘E.On be warned.’ Groups like the World Development Movement focused on the devastating impact climate change would have in the global South, coming up with dramatic figures, like ‘the new power station would have emitted more CO2 than Tanzania, and could have caused 20,000 people to become homeless and meant that 100,000 more people lost their dry season water supply.’
The campaign also made heavy use of satire and savage humor. In three days of action against E.On in 2008, many of the actions were satirical – from ‘cleaners’ scrubbing coal clean outside an E.On office, to games of ‘Carbon Capture and Storage British Bulldog’, to a posse of Santas invading E.On’s offices, delivering coal and telling the employees that they had been very naughty. Perhaps the funniest was the ‘occupation’ of the Kingsnorth replica at Legoland (sponsored by E.On) by one-inch tall climate change campaigners. According to an Indymedia report from the day, ‘The six campaigners appeared at the top of the construction at around 11am in the morning, before unveiling a banner saying STOP CLIMATE CHANGE down the length of the tower. Lego police are in attendance at the foot of the tower, along with a Lego police helicopter…Neither the campaigners nor the police would comment, because they’re made of Lego and therefore can’t talk.’
Co-ordination/Decision-making process
The structure of the coalition campaigning on Kingsnorth varied between formal and informal links. According to Jim Footner from Greenpeace, ‘The core group were campaigners from the key environment and development NGOs that met either in person or on the phone every week. Second to that was the formal Stop Climate Chaos coalition, under whose umbrella various organizations without a mandate to work on domestic UK coal and climate change were able to take part…In terms of funding, large organizations paid for their own contributions, and smaller orgs secured funding from groups like the European Climate Foundation, that funds climate change work in Europe. The final component was the grass roots, mainly in the form of Climate Camp. Whilst there was encouragement from the larger NGOs, they got involved entirely off their own back and brought with them a set of tactics only they could deliver. Taken together, it was a formidable coalition.’
According to Jim Footner, shared strategy was mostly put together by the core group of organizations and then proposed to the wider network: ‘The campaign went in phases (it started in 2006) so each phase required new plans, and we had to react to the company and the politics. On the whole, the core group would formulate the strategy and take it to the wider group for agreement, and discussion over a menu of options for their engagement. If a group fundamentally disagreed, then obviously there was no compulsion to take part. Groups like Climate Camp worked to their own strategy, to which individuals with particular knowledge would contribute, but was still their own process. The establishment groups did what they liked, but the direction of travel for each party was clearly in support of the overall objective.’
Tactics
direct action
E.On’s offices were invaded and occupied throughout the campaign. In August 2008, 4,000 people camped at Kingsnorth with the intention to – nonviolently – stop the station from running. Greenpeace targeted Kingsnorth with high profile actions, including painting the Prime Minister’s name on one of the smokestacks, and attempting to stop a coal ship docking at the station. In the most notorious action of the campaign, a lone activist got past Kingsnorth security and shut off the whole power station without being caught, leaving a banner saying ‘No New Coal.’ These efforts were met with a heavy police response, including undercover infiltration and the pre-emptive mass arrest of activists allegedly planning the peaceful shutdown of another E.On power station.
public protests
NGOs mobilized 1,000 people to form a human chain around the power station, and 1,200 people at another protest at the company’s headquarters in Coventry.
online organizing
Some of the groups working on Kingsnorth launched ‘E.On F.off’, a website coordinating and amplifying direct actions against the company. Greenpeace launched ‘The Big If’, where people pledged online what they would do if new coal development went ahead in
the UK – these ranged from not voting for given politicians to sending their dirty underwear to the minister for climate change.
targeting the government
When the UK Secretary for energy and climate change Ed Miliband said he wanted to be known as ‘the guy who sorted out coal’, he showed the impact that the UK climate movement was having. Actions that targeted the government directly, including the delivery
of written messages and vigils at government departments, helped to push the government to declare that no new coal power stations would be built in the UK without Carbon Capture and Storage. According to the Guardian, ‘[b]ecause the technology is unproven and needs government subsidy, it in effect amounted to a ban on new coal plants.’
trials of activists
Trials related to the campaign against E.On became tools, increasing public and media attention toward climate issues and campaigners. The first trial was of the six Greenpeace activists that had painted the Kingsnorth chimney – they mounted a legal defense of ‘necessity’, arguing that the threat to the climate made their actions defensible. During the trial, the defense called high profi le witnesses such as NASA climate scientist James Hansen. Filmmaker Nick Broomfi eld produced a short documentary about the case, and the trial gained widespread coverage for climate change issues. The jury eventually declared the activists not guilty. The second round of trials were of activists accused of planning the nonviolent occupation of another E.On power plant. While a number were found guilty of conspiracy, the trials exposed infiltration of the climate movement by undercover police and private security agents, putting these convictions in jeopardy and throwing other charges out.
Challenges
Unsurprisingly, the diversity of the coalition was challenging. Keeping the message ‘coherent’ and organizing logistics between so many different groups, across such a broad political spectrum, were major challenges according to Jim Footner. The policy complexity around coal-fired power in the UK was also a challenge: ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ was being promised as a solution by the coal and power industries, making the message ‘burning coal = dangerous climate change’ harder to communicate in a direct way.
What we can learn
making the specific emblematic
The Kingsnorth campaign both used and helped to create a huge upswing in concern about climate change in the UK. This general concern was made into a concrete question – would Kingsnorth be built or not? As Jim Footner puts it, the campaign ‘positioned a plan for a new power station into [one of the] key tests of the UK’s record on climate change,’ making the stakes of the campaign far higher than the fate of one specific power station.
working across difference
One of the great strengths of the Kingsnorth campaign was the range of groups involved – from establishment environment groups with inside political connections to anti-capitalist climate justice groups. Building alliances across this kind of political difference clearly had its challenges – but also enabled campaigners to use a huge range of tactics to pressure the company from different angles.
speaking satire to power
Messaging in the Kingsnorth campaign wasn’t always about the laughs, but it is notable for its eye catching, creative and bitingly funny actions.
planning ahead without being locked in
Kingsnorth campaigners took time and care to plan strategy, but were also flexible enough to take opportunities when they arose – as Jim Footner notes, the campaign ‘evolved as much through luck as design, but the need to take a modular, phased approach with such a long timeline is crucial. You just don’t know how things will unfold…’
