The funder backing this weekend’s WHCD protests

Presented by

VERBATIM

If you have your Saturday evening disrupted by climate protesters outside the Washington Hilton, blame Margaret Klein Salamon.

Climate Emergency Fund, the nonprofit she helms, is funding a group that’s planning to blockade the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the Biden administration’s support for fossil fuels.

CEF also funds the groups that demonstrated outside Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) houseboat leading up to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, shut down I-495, threw soup at van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” and recently disrupted a snooker tournament. Their tactics have inspired a rich vein of research and debate over their effectiveness — but the fact people are talking about them is half the battle.

Salamon counts oil heir Aileen Getty and director Adam McKay as benefactors and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as an acolyte. The second edition of her 2020 book, “Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth,” comes out at the end of May.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s going to happen around the White House Correspondents Dinner?

In the big picture, this is part of the spring uprising that’s happening globally. Extinction Rebellion’s having a major demonstration in Westminster. Groups in mainly Europe — Germany and the United Kingdom — but also here in the U.S. and in some other countries are stepping up their disruptive tactics.

This new campaign in Washington, D.C., called Climate Defiance, is a youth-led campaign, heavily utilizing disruptive tactics to end fossil fuels in the United States. That is their goal. Climate Defiance is brand new. But they’ve already had a couple of successful disruptions of Biden’s national climate adviser, his speeches. This will be their biggest demonstration.

History and social science show that social movements, and particularly disruptive social movements, are the fastest way to create transformative change. And social movements are never popular, right? Because it’s a small group of people telling a much larger group of people that they need to change.

When you look back at history, it’s like, which tactics of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement and ACT UP, the AIDS movement, which of those tactics were too drastic, right?

The Inflation Reduction Act came out of Build Back Better, which came out of the Green New Deal. How do you take credit while also saying it’s not going far enough?

A grantee of ours, Insulate Britain, was doing disruptive protests, particularly road-blocking, for months, and then the United Kingdom passed a £1 billion investment in insulating public housing, which is exactly what they were calling for. In these instances, they never say, “Oh, we’re going to do this because of the activists.”

The Inflation Reduction Act could not have happened without the climate movement. There’s all this work that went into creating a situation where the Inflation Reduction Act could pass and bringing climate to the top of the priority list.

At the end, Climate Emergency Fund funded quite a bit of pushing for the IRA specifically: A hunger strike in front of the White House, and then activists who bird-dogged [Sen. Joe] Manchin at his car, houseboat and coal plant that enriches him in West Virginia, not giving him any peace. And he somewhat surprisingly switched his vote. You can never say exactly what causes what, but it seems it can be very impactful, these activists.

On one hand, it’s surprising, all these policy victories that they’re getting, but on the other hand, it’s like, it really works. The main airport in Amsterdam said they’re not going to have private planes anymore, after multiple months of disruptive protests on the tarmac. So movements work, building power works, disruption works. And we’re not even close to where we need to be.

To do this work is definitely to live in the kind of contradiction that you’re pointing to. It’s great. Things are going so well. There’s so much exciting stuff going on in the movement. And, on the other hand, we should have been doing this, like, 30 years ago.

You wrote, “We are told that changing our individual consumer decisions is a meaningful response.” Are individual consumer decisions meaningless?

Individual lifestyle stuff is fine. I do plenty of that stuff. But it’s also not politics. It’s not going to change any policies. It’s not going to draw other people into the cause, in all likelihood. It’s just oversold, like when people think about climate activism, that’s the main thing that they think of, like, recycling, because that’s just how it’s discussed.

Talk about your background as a psychologist and how it informs your strategy.

As a clinical psychologist, I have always approached the climate issue from a psychological perspective, particularly the idea that we’re in a mass delusion of normalcy, and we need to face the truth and wake up, a.k.a, enter emergency mode. Treat the crisis like a crisis. With that frame, you can see why disruptive climate activism makes so much sense. The activists are trying to shake us awake.

I have a program called Climate Awakening, where people from all over the world call in to have small group conversations about their climate emotions with strangers. They say remarkably similar things. They talk about how scared they are, how sad and grieving they are, how angry they are, and how alienated they feel. Fifty-six percent of young people think that humanity is doomed. So the feeling’s turning into political action. If you think you’re doomed, why not go join the climate campaign?

Talk a little bit more about the distance [between you and the activists] — are you specifically like, ‘We don’t want to know what you’re planning?’ The implication would be that you would be on the hook for any kind of liability, but how do you create that boundary?

It’s actually really easy to do because of just how busy everyone is, and how much these things change. When they apply for a grant, they give us the kind of broad outline of what they want to do in their campaign. But then, immediately, the conditions and planning are just constantly shifting and developing. So they just don’t keep us informed until the grant is over and they report on it. And otherwise we follow them on social media and in the news.

YOU TELL US

GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. We deliver data-driven storytelling, compelling interviews with industry and political leaders, and news Tuesday through Friday to keep you in the loop on sustainability.

Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us all at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

Want more? Don’t we all. Sign up for the Long Game. Four days a week and still free!

WHAT WE'RE CLICKING


— The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is playing a key role in an effort to keep a coastal Virginia military hub from ending up underwater, the Wall Street Journal reports.

— Meanwhile, out West, tech company data centers are wrestling with residents over drought-stressed water supplies. The Washington Post has that story.

— A Silicon Valley company says it has raised $250 million to boost production of machines that make clean hydrogen, according to the Associated Press.