The New Action Orientation

The appointment of Phillip G. Radford as the new Executive Director of Greenpeace in the United States marks a critical and decisive step toward constituency-based activism for the iconic green group. It also marks a move to empower a younger generation of campaigners who are fired up by the climate crisis and who were central to the Obama victory last November.

Radford, 33, is credited as Greenpeace's top grassroots organizer in the US, an experienced fundraiser and political activist with a reputation for focusing on measurable campaign outcomes. His arrival in the organization is recent -- 2003 -- but his impact has been significant. When I took over as Chair of the Board in 2000, Greenpeace in the US was a shadow of its former self: Self-absorbed, drifting, shrinking in stature, and bereft of strong, effective campaigns. Radford was part of the team (which included outgoing ED John Passacantando, Campaign Director Lisa Finaldi, and Ops Director Ellen McPeake, among others) that rebuilt the street-level presence and credibility that Greenpeace has always depended on to make its daring high-profile protests resonate in the living rooms of the nation. Into the bargain, the group has doubled its fundraising and invested heavily in the new American youth movement (through fellowships, mobilizing drives, and a quasi-militaristic foot canvass in dozens of cities). (Go here for the NYT story on Radford's appointment)

Among the big international green groups, Greenpeace takes the strongest stands, and -- contrary to the expectations which that might elicit -- gets the most done. That has been true around the world but hard to claim for the American wing since the early 1990s -- until now.

Old-timers in the rest of the Greenpeace world (and they are legion) may be nervous that the direct action roots of the group are disappearing under the thicket of grassroots lobbying tactics that Radford represents. But in America today, power is the sound of millions of feet on pavement, and that is where Greenpeace USA is finding its strength and inspiration.

(Go here for a vast compendium of high quality images of Greenpeace's past work.)

Carbon Capture Sucks the Big One

Everyone loses with carbon capture.

First, you and me Joe Taxpayer lose because Stephen Harper just announced he's going to plough millions into this speculative technology (for sucking CO2 out of fossil combustion) without bothering to give any economic value to carbon emissions. Duh. Without cap-and-trade or a national carbon tax, carbon emissions are still free, so how can carbon capture move from being an interesting lab experiment to a scaled-up, economically viable technology? It won't (see economist Mark Jaccard on this point). So research divisions of the fossil fuel companies, floating on fat public grants, win big, and... uh... you lose.

Meanwhile green groups like Greenpeace rail against carbon capture as the 'new nuclear debacle' -- by which they mean a pointless exercise in expensive technology when efficiency and renewables would do a better job. They happen to be right -- a coal-fired power plant outfitted with carbon capture would, for example, use up 30 to 40 percent of its energy output just to run the damn carbon capture process, so this technology actually has the potential to pointlessly increase carbon emissions. But.. I can't help thinking that a) Harper and his friends in Alberta (and, sigh... Washington) are going to fund experimental gizmos in this direction no matter what, and b) the world really needs Greenpeace to be focusing on the main event. Hello! You've got the tarsands in the bull's-eye in Canada and coal exports on the agenda in Australia, and you've got Barack Obama using the words 'carbon footprint' -- FOCUS my friends! FOCUS! Press the case for pricing carbon -- which every intelligent economist and policy wonk agrees with -- because it's the single most efficient, effective, and rapid way to stop carbon emissions from growing and start the necessary reductions.

But note: when we finally win policies to put a price on carbon, there is bound to be a plethora of viable ways to reduce emissions -- and that may just include carbon capture, which makes it even harder to stop because the very policies we need to protect our fragile atmosphere will give it the logic it needs to succeed. So there is very little mileage in building up public angst about it right now.

So to my friends in the green movement: Stick with actions to hurt the biggest, baddest, climate horrors, but don't get sidetracked by the built-in capitalist impulse to pour our wealth into new technology - after all, that's the impulse we want to harness for renewables, which are far more interesting to the public anyway.