Big Green

Hello everyone. Today we have another chapter from the Crisis Palace book, continuing our look at how money is a source of power in the struggle for justice, including in the climate movement, and how it can be both a force for good and a force for not good.

This one is an ax that I have been grinding for many years regarding imbalances in the environmental movement that have kept it largely in the realm of white technocrats and rich people, as a result alienating many grassroots activists and people who are most likely to suffer the worst consequences of environmental devastation. It's a problem with very high stakes as it relates to climate change, which is really only technically an environmental issue, but too often remains cordoned off in the conceptual world of polar bears and Keeling Curves. And a big part of this divide comes from the people who are funding the movement.

This is a problem that I think about a lot, including as a mutual aid organizer. The work that we all do to care for our community, especially in a place like Arizona, could be considered mostly climate resilience work. But I don't think many mutual aid people, though they do believe in and worry deeply about climate change, would characterize what they do as climate action. And you don't see a lot of climate activists in the streets distributing water to people suffering from heat exhaustion. It's just true, and it bugs me.

That is changing, to some extent, and in the last issue, Doug Tewskbury was talking about how his students don't really separate climate change from issues like AI, the housing crisis, inequality, or authoritarianism. It's all kind of the same thing to people who grew up in this shit. Which I think is a good development, but we still have this problem of the ivory tower nature of environmentalism and the philanthropic institutions that keep it there. So now, I will do some savage dunks on the people responsible. Hope you enjoy.

Big Green

Who we presume to be the heroes in the climate fight, and who we presume to be merely obstacles in the way

By Tate Williams

Every mass movement has its divides, and the climate movement is no exception, but it’s rare to see one illustrated so clearly and dramatically as we did in a scene that unfolded during COP25 in Madrid.

The now-annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences are always a part-encouraging, part-nightmarish mishmash of government diplomats, representatives from Big Green NGOs, mobs of corporate lobbyists, and climate justice and Indigenous activists, this final group often protesting what a horrible job everyone is doing and how it’s destroying their homes. The COPs kind of remind me of this joke I saw on the internet where a baseball fan was watching a game with his significant other who was not a baseball fan, and there were no runs scored and it was getting late and she said, what happens if nobody scores? And he said, it just keeps going. And she said, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And that is kind of what climate negotiations are like except it just keeps going and then after a while we all die.

In this particular moment, one of those protests was planned at COP25 (“The 25th time’s the charm!”) right before the secretary general was scheduled to speak. A crowd led by predominantly Indigenous people, women and nonbinary people, and people from the Global South unfurled a banner demanding that rich countries who benefited most from fossil fuel expansion pay for climate loss and damages, a routine sticking point at these negotiations. As Sriram Madhusoodanan, who was deputy campaigns director for Corporate Accountability and in attendance, recounted to me shortly after it happened: 

As soon as they did that, they were met by a pretty strong response and aggressive reaction from the UN security forces. Activists were bullied, pushed, kicked out of the space of the plenary and pushed out into the cold. In addition to that, there was this really kind of, I don’t know, it was a remarkable moment and maybe tells us more about how these conferences have been going than anything else, where the door was being brought down with the activists outside and an entire line of security guards basically blocking them from reentering.

The moment he’s referring to was captured on phone cameras and went viral, as UN security “went berserk” in response, herding protestors out of the space through a giant metal door that’s honestly reminiscent of the shield doors on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back. Security formed a line along the threshold and then the door shut, leaving hundreds outside in the cold. Some 320 people were “debadged,” meaning their credentials to enter the negotiation space were temporarily revoked, an unprecedented move. 

“Why is the UNFCCC so afraid of hearing these direct stories from activists and civil society on the frontlines of this crisis? When, if anyone looks around, they will tell you, and certainly millions of people on the streets are saying, that what this process has thus far delivered is far short of the ambition that’s necessary,” Madhusoodanan told me. “Many activists were there, many of them with their belongings or their coats and things like that still inside. And we’re all just thinking wait, why is the UN seeing us as the threat here?”

That image of the line of security guards and men in suits and the big metal door cutting off state governments, corporations, and mainstream NGOs from frontline activists perfectly encapsulates a schism that has existed throughout the history of the movement, between what I’ll reduce to climate elites and the climate justice community. There are a lot of dimensions to it—rich and poor, Global North and Global South, corporate and grassroots, professional class and working class, older generation and younger generation, men and women, big NGO and local NGO—but it’s a divide that’s impossible to ignore and one that endangers the communities represented by those outside the metal door, but really the entire climate movement and all of the outcomes we’re fighting for. 

UN conferences are where these divides become the most evident, mainly because they are the spaces where all of these parties gather together, which you might think would be a good thing, but it usually makes it clear just how disconnected stakeholders are on the issue, marked by a very obvious spatial difference between people inside the halls of the event and people outside the halls. One weird phenomenon, especially apparent when I was spending more time on climate social media, is that you’d see these sharply discordant attitudes about how the talks were going in any given year, with little Twitter avatars in suits proclaiming how exciting and important the talks have been, and after the announcement of whatever hollow promise of the day, they’d all sort of agree, “This is a really, really big deal,” as if a memo went around saying, celebrate, always celebrate. And simultaneously, you would see protestors and advocates, some on the inside but most on the outside, more or less saying that this whole thing is a gigantic crock of bullshit. That we are basically watching elites shuffling around deck chairs, in denial about the extent to which the economy needs to be disrupted, unwilling to do anything that might disturb profits or economic growth or fossil fuel extraction, and generally tolerant of some level of consequences that will mostly harm countries and communities that did nothing to cause this problem.

That conflict is represented in a lot of ways, including the comfort level that climate elites have with permitting industry representatives to participate in negotiations. During COP28, a report found that the fossil fuel industry had a record number of lobbyists in attendance, with 2,456 representatives, far more than all but two nations at the summit. That was a huge increase from the previous COP (636 lobbyists), only because for the first time, attendees were required to disclose who they represented, meaning thousands of lobbyists were attending incognito. COPs have been described as “a corporate circus” and a “Global North greenwash festival,” featuring a maze of commercial booths you might see at an industry expo, offering candy and desserts and even one booth with mock polar bears in life vests. There are stark gender and age divides, too, as that same year, of 130 presidents and prime ministers in attendance, fewer than 10 were women and the average age was well over 60. 

It’s not just the UN gatherings, though. In the past 10 years or so, cities around the world have been holding periodic “climate weeks” or “climate assemblies” during which what scholar Edouard Morena calls the “climate glitterati” stand together at podiums and congratulate each other on their cities’ progress, while thousands of protestors engulf the event on the outside, kept in check by hordes of police. And all of these events reflect conflict that exists at pretty much every level of the climate movement, whether it’s funding, lobbying, diplomacy, or technology. It’s a problem that runs deep in the environmental movement’s history, perpetuated by power structures that engineer climate action to be only of a certain kind, as well as misconceptions about climate justice that hold back even well-intentioned segments of the movement. 

White Technocrats

Much of the story here is a very familiar one of the wealthy protecting their material interests: after decades of conspiring to delay any action or even acceptance of the problem, wealthy nations, corporations, and individuals are now taking control of the processes by which climate action occurs so as to minimize their own sacrifices and cement their own dominance after whatever transition occurs. A lot of it, however, is rooted more specifically in the history of the environmental movement and the early days of the climate movement in which colonialists and later white technocrats set the green agenda. 

That history is fully compatible with the wealthy protecting their material interests, but speaks more to the specific problems of race and class underlying environmentalism. And it all starts with American environmentalism’s white supremacist origins. John James Audubon, for example, was a slaveholder whose research was made possible by the labor of Black and Indigenous people. Political scientist Prakash Kashwan writes that Sierra Club founder John Muir “described Native Americans and Black people as dirty, lazy and uncivilized. In an essay collection published in 1901 to promote national parks, he assured prospective tourists that ‘As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.’”

The list goes on, though, including abhorrent views held by Teddy Roosevelt; population control enthusiast Aldo Leopold; or Henry Fairfield Osborn, an associate of Muir’s and head of New York Zoological Society who helped establish the American Eugenics Society. Or Madison Grant, who helped found the Bronx Zoo and led conservation efforts to protect the American bison and California redwoods, and also wrote a cool ass book called, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, which was used to push for restrictions on immigration, and would later influence Anders Breivik, the Norwegian Neo-Nazi who murdered 77 people in 2011. Teddy Roosevelt was also a big fan of the book, and even blurbed it in later editions.

For a set of those who built the American conservation movement, mastery of nature was the right of men and their scientific expertise, and for some of them, that meant mastery of people who are not white. Aside from the more explicitly racist ideas of these founding fathers, the resulting philosophy of conservation still lingers in the movement today, which is that the wilds of nature are either a playground or a temple for European colonizers, and Indigenous people occupying these lands are mere obstacles to overcome in obtaining and protecting this precious green space.

I want to be clear that environmental groups and the people who work for them generally do not hold the views of these organizations' founders or intellectual antecedents (although I’m sure some honestly sort of do). I, for example, have worked at green groups at various points in my life and the ideologies of the people I worked with were pretty much that of your typical well-meaning American liberal. They did important work there and most continue to do important work. Like much of the movement, a lot of them have come around to the idea that economic and racial justice need to be centered in environmental work. But as we all know about American liberals, what they claim to support doesn’t always make it into reality, and in many cases, environmentalism’s nastier DNA peeks through in the decisions they make, the decisions they don’t make, and which people are allowed to make these decisions in the first place. 

One of the most prolific scholars on this topic is Dorceta Taylor, whose 2016 book The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection, brought to light several of the revelations listed above. But much of Taylor’s research focuses on the makeup of environmental groups today. In 2014, Taylor’s study on the state of diversity in mainstream NGOs, foundations, and government agencies found that the percentage of ethnic minorities on boards and staffs never exceeded 16%, and in most cases people of color who did work in environmental groups held low-ranking positions. There has been, to an extent, a reckoning on the whiteness of the environmental movement, with large NGOs hiring people of color in prominent positions, expanding their environmental justice programming, and working to improve diversity in the field. Green 2.0, the organization that carries on Taylor’s research, has charted improvements in diversity, but in 2024 found that progress had not only stalled, it had reversed. Another of the consistent findings of the group’s research is that many groups still refuse to even share demographic data, including about half of the top foundations supporting environmental work. Meanwhile, the war on DEI seems to have prompted Green 2.0 to back away from reporting racial demographics entirely out of safety concerns for the sector's staff.

Exacerbating the whiteness of mainstream environmental groups is the dominance of the professional class, especially in the climate movement, where early spokespeople were climatologists and biologists. That makes a certain amount of sense in that early testimonials were mostly trying to tell policymakers that this was, indeed, a real thing. In the decades since, the predominance of engineers, scientists, and nature writers as iconic figures in climate discourse persisted, perpetuating the reputation of environmentalists as crunchy middle-class white people who often care about the protection of trees and animals far more than what they might describe as unrelated “social issues.” 

In his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Matthew T. Huber builds a Marxist argument for worker-driven ownership of energy production, arguing that part of the reason the climate movement has been mostly unsuccessful is the outsized presence of the professional class in climate advocacy and discourse. Part of the reason this happened, Huber writes, is a result of the broader rise of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the professional-managerial class, which led to a kind of technocratic, wealthy liberalism lacking in class analysis. But from the start, environmentalism was especially steeped in science and expertise, including the formative publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and developed into a professional-class model of change that looks to scientists and policy experts to inform the decisions of policymakers on both sides of the aisle, with the assumption that they will be compelled to listen to reason. Huber writes:

This has two consequences for climate politics: first, professional-class climate politics fixates on its own relatively comfortable consumption as the core driver of climate change (and tends to ignore industrial production). Second, the role of education in class formation leads professional-class climate politics to fixate on the science of the climate crisis and ecological collapse. The professional class centers its politics not on material struggle over resources and power, but on “knowledge,” or the belief or denial of climate change itself. It also tends to marshal technocratic knowledge to propose nonconfrontational “smart” policy fixes that brim with logic and good incentives, but fail in terms of mass appeal or clear material benefits.

Huber makes a powerful case that the climate movement has been hobbled by its fixation on the need for a professional middle class to change its consumer behavior, the scientific debate of climate acceptance versus denial (witnessed in the meaningless proclamation, "in this house, we believe in science"), and the belief in policy and scientific experts as the heroes of climate action. These components of climate action remain the overpowering theory of change for mainstream NGOs, climate diplomats, Democratic politicians, corporate allies, and everyone else inside the halls of COP negotiations. And it edges out other necessary ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s an act of mass violence carried out by the rich against the poor, and that it’s a product of capitalism’s vast imbalances in power and control of resources.

The dominance of a technocratic perspective, and the banishment of these other perspectives to beyond the metal door is in many ways a vestige of the environmental origin story that it is the job of smart white men in power to dominate and protect nature, and anyone else is an obstacle to overcome.

Big Green

I mentioned before that part of what has led to this elite environmentalism being pitted against the climate justice community is a special interest story of those with wealth doing everything they can to protect it in a time of change and uncertainty. So let’s get back to that because while much of this divide reflects these historic hierarchies in environmentalism, its persistence is often driven by wealthy donors, who generally prefer technology and market-based solutions, and have far less interest in challenging industry, making change at disruptive speeds, or redistributing wealth and power in ways that the climate justice movement typically demands. 

There’s been a longstanding pattern in philanthropic and corporate funding for climate and the environment that showers the largest, mostly white, industry-friendly NGOs with the lion’s share of support. There are stacks of data on this topic from a variety of sources, but one recent study comes from our fave Dorceta Taylor, who in 2023 looked at 30,000 grants over a three-year period and found that, among other disparities, individual mainstream environmental groups in the dataset received more funding than all environmental justice grantees combined. The Sierra Club received almost five times what all EJ groups did, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute received more than three times EJ’s combined total. 

The Nature Conservancy—one of the more conservative, business-friendly of the big green groups, known for its Teddy Roosevelt-like strategy of privately purchasing large tracts of land for conservation—had a staggering $1.5 billion in revenues in 2023, with $875 million coming from dues and private contributions. TNC eventually took up the cause of climate change, as have pretty much all conservation groups, and its webpage on the topic leads with, “We will use the power of nature and the strength of policy and markets to reduce emissions, support renewable energy, and store carbon to reach our goal of avoiding or sequestering 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.” Note the muscular descriptions of nature, policy, and markets, and the nod to carbon sequestration, a favorite climate solution of billionaires and industry, in that it is the only one that leaves an opening to continue burning fossil fuels forever. About 11% of TNC’s contributions come from corporations, featuring a murderer’s row of polluters like Alcoa, Dow, PepsiCo, and none other than Shell Fucking Oil. Shell, it should be noted, has sent the most delegates to COPs out of any oil and gas giants, and its climate change adviser has even bragged that he helped to write the 2015 Paris Agreement.  

While the biases of foundation support aren’t as nefarious as those of corporate donors, and climate change even today remains a relatively small focus of philanthropic giving, the influence of big funding institutions looms large over the direction of the climate movement, especially as it gained some political traction in the 2000s. One of the most instructive anecdotes of the way climate funders and technocrats took the helm and failed miserably was one of the first big pushes for federal climate action—USCAP and the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill of the Obama era. This now-historic failed attempt was more or less engineered by elites in boardrooms—a combination of large NGOs, foundations, lawmakers, and industry representatives. A partnership called USCAP, in particular, set out from the start to pursue the most industry-friendly, market-driven compromise they could, with partners including business-friendly EDF and NRDC, along with BP, Duke Energy, PG&E, and ConocoPhillips. The end product was a cap-and-trade bill that died unceremoniously in the Senate in 2010.

Wealthy donors and foundations played a big role in shaping this strategy, after they pooled resources in the late 2000s on an agenda-setting report called “Design to Win,” and a resulting NGO called the ClimateWorks Foundation. While neither project focused solely on cap and trade, and ClimateWorks has supported a lot of other work over the years, these initiatives championed the idea of a national carbon market, with Design to Win predicting that it would “prompt a sea change that washes over the entire global economy.” Foundations, donors and NGOs threw significant weight behind a cap-and-trade policy, and more broadly, set the table for the engineering- and economics-heavy framing of climate change that has dominated for years. 

While there are many theories as to why Waxman-Markey fizzled out exactly, I tend to agree with the analysis that rushing to the center as a starting point meant voluntarily capitulating to an unpopular compromise bill that nobody really liked all that much. It banked too much on the importance of lukewarm industry and GOP support and not enough on public will (other incarnations of this strategy have limped along sadly ever since). Related, it was an elite-driven campaign that had little connection to the grassroots or actual people. As organizer and academic Marshall Ganz put it, the big green groups behind it had become “bodiless heads,” to their own detriment. I’ve harped on this story a lot in various venues, mainly because I think it is a powerful example of what the climate movement did wrong for many years, and continues to do. And it’s an example of how the wealthy and powerful, even if they have good intentions, can lock out theories of change that challenge the status quo, divorce themselves from the human experience of climate change, and impose their own doomed agendas that end up holding back progress.

If we’re looking at the bright side of things, which my therapist always tells me is important, there have been improvements in funding patterns since the Obama era. Namely, somewhat in response to the racial justice uprisings of 2020, climate justice groups saw a spike in funding that they had never seen before. Big green groups still vastly out-fundraise the climate justice movement, but large foundations and even billionaire donors at least began carving out chunks of their giving to climate justice organizations and funding intermediaries. We’ve also seen a remarkable shift in who holds the power in the climate movement, as mass organizing and cultural currents have lifted the climate justice movement to be in contention with the climate elite in a way it hasn’t before. While people are probably ambivalent at best about the Biden administration’s climate record, what there is to be celebrated can largely be traced back to the influence of climate hawk Democrats like Jay Inslee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ed Markey, but also climate justice and youth groups, several of which participated in a task force that developed the incoming president’s agenda. 

All of this is a testament to the rise of the climate movement and its growing insistence that Indigenous, working class, and people of color are in the driver’s seat or at least at the table or whatever metaphor when it comes to setting agendas for climate action. It speaks to the intersectional lens that Standing Rock forced the movement to look through, the power of local organizing in places like Flint and Cancer Alley in the Gulf Coast, and the relentlessness of youth organizers, whose power was demonstrated in the 2019 Climate Strikes. 

But the divide remains nonetheless, and even setting aside the way money and power work to keep the big metal door in place, there remains this particular viewpoint that is held, even among well-intentioned people and organizations in the climate space, that confuses who the subjects are and who the objects are in climate change. It’s a viewpoint that needs to be persuaded away or overpowered, or it will greatly limit any just outcomes of the energy transition, but really our overall ability to respond effectively to climate change.  

A Dangerous Game

Even though the metaphor I’m using here is a big metal door separating the climate elite from climate justice, the reality is that the door is porous. Or maybe another way to think of it is that there are many people who sort of straddle the line between the two camps, or seek to benefit both sides, but are inadvertently perpetuating power imbalances with a certain paternalistic attitude that haunts the environmental movement. In other words, many people who theoretically support climate justice view it through a fucked up lens that actually holds it back.

One perfect illustration of this was an article in Politico that was published at a very interesting time, in that the climate justice movement’s ascendance I described above was in full swing, and a lot of people were acknowledging its importance and interrogating the flaws of the environmental movement, but were still relegating it to a position of lesser importance in the climate agenda—a charitable add on to our priorities. The article includes a lot of accurate unpacking of the historical tensions between the environmental and the environmental justice movements, and hits some of the points I do here regarding the legacy of racism, and cap and trade missteps. But it uses an astonishing framing of the problem that climate justice activists are standing in the way of progress. That includes weird misfires in attributing modern momentum to the work of big green NGOs, who haven’t been nearly as culturally or politically relevant as youth movements like Sunrise, Tribes fighting pipeline battles, or organizers behind the Green New Deal. But the whole problem is really unmistakable in the headline and subhead: 

Environmental Groups’ Greatest Obstacle May Not Be Republican Opposition

Big environmental groups have an ambitious agenda, but success requires satisfying their Black, Latino and Indigenous critics.

That's an enraging combination of nouns and verbs, which presents us with a narrative that progress on climate change lies in the hands of wealthy and prestigious environmental groups, which have an ambitious agenda if only they can overcome the complaints from “Black, Latino, and Indigenous critics.” The comma in the subheading following “ambitious agenda” conjures a big metal door all its own, looming above an article that actually outlines the power of climate justice activists and the repeat failures of the mainstream environmental movement. It can’t help but slam the door down to place the white NGOs inside the halls of power as ambitious decision-makers, and herding the others outside, into the role of mere critic or obstacle to overcome.

Honestly, nobody even remembers this Politico article existed at this point, but I bring it up because it’s a perfect distillation of how we can’t seem to stop ourselves from sliding into the Teddy Roosevelt mode of protecting nature by conquering it, if only we can overcome annoying opposition from Black, Latino and Indigenous people. And you see it all the time. I’ll just keep picking on white commentators for a little while longer and point to a tweet from this guy Alex Steffen, who I guess is a “futurist” who writes a lot about environmental issues, and he once said: 

“The idea that climate action is something unfair that needs to have social justice measures attached to it to become fair is outdated. I think we’re going to be seeing with [increasing] clarity that bold climate action is itself the best mechanism we have for furthering justice.” 

There’s a lot going on there, but I’m interested mainly in the way that Steffen severs and discards “social justice measures” from climate action because presumably any climate action is just by definition. I’ve argued over this very point with a lot of people, and not just an argument that involves me yelling at a computer screen—conversations with people at foundations, other writers, even a local climate activist here in Tucson, who tried to preface allyship with mutual aid groups with the reminder that, “Decarbonization is the number one goal. Sometimes that can come at the expense of lower-income people.”

The problems with this perspective are many and they are profound. To start off, there’s a pretty straightforward just transition argument that climate action is not necessarily a mechanism for furthering justice. There is abundant evidence that low-income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately from environmental and climate impacts, despite contributing less to the problem. If we don’t actively counter that fact, we could transition to an entirely new energy economy and still end up with deep, perhaps even worse inequality. The obvious examples here are in the workforce, where the idea of just transition was born, as wind and solar power expand and the jobs that replace those in extractive industries tend to be lower-paying, non-union jobs, mainly as a result of an overall backslide in worker power. So coal and gas jobs tend to be more secure and pay better, because they are older industries, and it's perfectly understandable that such workers would be concerned about their fate in a post-fossil fuel society. 

There are also certain climate actions that may reduce warming but still have damaging effects on the most vulnerable. For example, solar geoengineering proposes that we spray particles into the atmosphere, which in theory would lower the global temperature, but would not improve air quality and could yield any number of unknown impacts on agriculture and public health. Carbon dioxide removal would create an entire new layer of fossil fuel infrastructure, massive plants and pipelines of the kind that historically impact poor and rural communities—an endless parade of new DAPLs.

We’re also seeing the likelihood of renewable energy being harmfully extractive of natural resources and vulnerable communities. In the United States, much of this is, predictably, falling on the shoulders of Indigenous people. Massive lithium mining operations are underway to meet booming battery needs, steamrolling concerns from local tribes. The Navajo reservation in the Southwest is currently on the front lines of the American energy transition, with the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant on Tribal land, being shut down and then demolished in 2020. Activists like Nicole Horseherder have been working to find economic security in the aftermath of the coal plant, and to ensure that the new energy economy actually benefits the Diné and doesn’t replicate the nation’s extractive relationship with coal. The power station once lit up the Vegas strip while many on the reservation lived with no electricity. As Andrew Curley, a Diné scholar and assistant professor at the University of Arizona, put it: 

“We were part of an energy economy for 50 years. (Coal) transitioned out, and we were left with all of its costs. … How do we prevent that from happening again, regardless of the technologies involved, whether that be solar or wind?” he said. If “we’re selling (energy) to Phoenix and Tucson, and suddenly there’s something else that comes on the horizon and they don’t want our wind anymore (and) they don’t want our solar, who is going to be left to clean up the cost? Again, it’s going to be us to bear the cost of the transition. Energy is a dangerous game to get into. If you do clean energy in a colonial setting, you’re still in a colonial setting.”

Another highly possible scenario here is what I’ve come to think of as a world that has been cleaved in two, with one on top that is a green, clean place of abundance and renewable energy, and a second underneath that is dirty, poor and vulnerable to disaster. This is a dark path of ends justifying means. On balance, such a world might reduce emissions and avert some of the very worst catastrophes—and yet, the gulf in remaining suffering would be enormously unjust, with half or some other to be determined percentage of the world bearing more suffering and death than the most exploited communities in today’s world, so that the rest can live in this shiny new future. It would be the big metal door, as applied to the entire world. 

A slightly more favorable, but still paternalistic way environmentalists often frame social justice concerns is that there are indeed people out there who are more vulnerable to climate catastrophe and we—the people with all the money, power, and solutions—have a moral obligation to address their concerns. Even people arguing in favor of climate justice often fixate on outcomes in this way, that we have to be altruistic and consider people in need as we carry out the actual work of energy transition. While it is the case that environmental justice groups fight for the needs of people who are often left behind due to economic inequality and structural racism, their vulnerability doesn’t capture why climate justice is such an important movement, reducing it to an interest group that must be satisfied due to some sense of fairness. What that argument gets seriously wrong is that it casts people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts as passive victims of a problem. In other words, climate change is what happens to poor unfortunate people, and climate solutions are things that other people do for them and sometimes to them. 

In contrast, climate justice as a solution is a far more powerful argument—that we can’t get to the level of political power and sweeping change necessary without the most impacted communities playing a central role. This is basically an organizing argument—that among other things, you need a powerful, engaged activist base, and historically, that’s the people who are feeling the pain of a problem. In that sense, it’s not about “attaching” justice or fairness issues to climate action. Bold climate action requires engagement with justice and fairness issues. It’s a matter of mobilizing human beings around the ways they are currently experiencing the problem.

“That’s frankly where our strongest base of support is,” Roger Kim, former head of the Climate Equity Fund and Asian Pacific Environmental Network, once told me. “And we haven’t invested enough in that pillar of support and power, to be more active and in a leadership role in tackling this issue.” The Climate Equity Fund supports multiracial organizing in places like New Mexico oil and gas country, where Indigenous communities, labor groups, and more mainstream environmental groups are aligning and chalking up wins. It's one of several “green intermediaries” that have emerged with a goal of channeling substantial philanthropic dollars toward the grassroots in an effort to bypass the dominance of the Big Green NGOs. Part of the reason these organizations have remained atop any number of movements, aside from power dynamics, is that money tends to be sticky. Where there is a lot of money, more money tends to gravitate in that direction. There are some longstanding philanthropic practices that disguise themselves as matters of practicality but are actually very intentional barriers blocking the disaggregation of wealth toward many smaller agents of change. One such example is the policy at many foundations that only organizations of a certain size can receive a grant, with the justification that small organizations are not able to absorb a large influx of dollars. It’s a preposterous idea that MacKenzie Scott more or less singlehandedly debunked by showering hundreds of small organizations with massive grants, which shockingly allowed them to be more impactful. Green intermediaries offer one solution to this disconnect between funding and more impactful, albeit smaller organizations. 

Of course, this kind of entity can recreate the same gatekeeping dynamics we see in other forms of funding, an unfortunate trend that has emerged since they became popular. But when they are driven by climate justice organizers themselves, and when they truly act in partnership with organizations they are funding, they can drive substantial impact. As I wrote for one such intermediary, The Solutions Project, sustained climate justice funding is beginning to yield impressive outcomes in terms of greenhouse gas reductions, workforce and public health benefits, and the fortification of a powerful climate movement. 

• Since 2021, TSP’s $42 million in funding to climate justice groups helped ensure over 1 million people received direct climate solutions and services in their local communities
• In the same period, TSP’s grantees contributed to 53 climate policy and campaign wins
• Just 20 of the climate wins stand to benefit 106 million people through employment, improved overall health, heat relief, and lower rates of deadly diseases
• Three recent wins in New York alone are on track to cut 1.25 million tons of carbon emissions annually, the equivalent of taking over 250,000 cars off the road

We’ve seen bumps in funding for climate justice groups, but it continues to ebb and flow, marked by periodic windfalls from high-profile foundations and donors, which tend to wane as some new shiny object grabs their attention. This is not to say that the future of climate action hinges on the whims of some billionaire. One of the impressive takeaways from emerging research about climate justice groups is that they can do a lot with a little. Grassroots groups benefit tremendously from grassroots funding, relatively small donations in large numbers.

But the bigger lesson of the giant metal door that separates climate elites and climate grassroots is that the wealth inequality and capitalist hierarchy that drive climate change also poison the movements that are seeking to undo climate change. Just as climate action must be on one level a class struggle that shifts who holds power over our resources and controls energy production, part of the work of the environmental movement is to change who holds the resources and the power within these organizations. A wealthy, elite-driven climate movement will only recreate the injustices of our current energy economy, and likely won’t even muster up the power to avoid the worst impacts of the crisis. Likewise, even an elite movement attempting to act on behalf of those most at risk in the name of justice is a weak movement, a decapitated head. 

Communities being impacted by climate change and those of us fighting for justice and liberation in a post-fossil fuel world are not a burden for problem-solvers to bear. They are the people with the fortitude to stand up to industries and governments that are perpetuating our suffering, and the local knowledge and commitment to build what comes next. They’re the leaders that the world can’t solve this problem without. The environmental justice community is not a box to check or a critic to appease. It is central to the fight, and central to the question of who we presume to be our heroes in this story, and why. And who we presume to be merely obstacles in the way.

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