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Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
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Summary and Keywords
The past two decades have transformed how interest groups, social movement
organizations, and individuals engage in collective action. Meanwhile, the climate change
advocacy landscape, previously dominated by well-established environmental
organizations, now accommodates new ones focused exclusively on this issue. What binds
these closely related trends is the rapid diffusion of communication technologies like the
internet and portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. Before the diffusion of
digital and mobile technologies, collective action, whether channeled through interest
groups or social movement organizations, consisted of amassing and expending resources
—money, staff, time, etc.—on behalf of a cause via top-down organizations. These
resource expenditures often took the form of elite persuasion: media outreach, policy and
scientific expertise, legal action, and lobbying.
But broad diffusion of digital technologies has enabled alternatives to this model to
flourish. In some cases, digital communication technologies have simply made the
collective action process faster and more cost-effective for organizations; in other cases,
these same technologies now allow individuals to eschew traditional advocacy groups and
instead rely on digital platforms to self-organize. New political organizations have also
emerged whose scope and influence would not be possible without digital technologies.
Journalism has also felt the impact of technological diffusion. Within networked
environments, digital news platforms are reconfiguring traditional news production,
giving rise to new paradigms of journalism. At the same time, climate change and related
issues are increasingly becoming the backdrop to news stories on topics as varied as
politics and international relations, science and the environment, economics and
inequality, and popular culture.
Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
Luis E. Hestres and Jill E. Hopke
Subject: Climate Change Communication Online Publication Date: Sep 2017
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.404
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science
Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
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Digital communication technologies have significantly reduced the barriers for collective
action—a trend that in many cases has meant a reduced role for traditional brick-and-
mortar advocacy organizations and their preferred strategies. This trend is already
changing the types of advocacy efforts that reach decision-makers, which may help
determine the policies that they are willing to consider and adopt on a range of issues—
including climate change. In short, widespread adoption of digital media has fueled broad
changes in both collective action and climate change advocacy. Examples of advocacy
organizations and campaigns that embody this trend include 350.org, the Climate Reality
Project, and the Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” campaign. 350.org was co-founded in
2007 by environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and several of his former students
from Middlebury College in Vermont. The Climate Reality project was founded under
another name by former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore. The
Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” fossil fuel divestment campaign, which is a
partnership with 350.org and its Go Fossil Free Campaign, was launched in March 2015
at the behest of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.
Keywords: activism, advocacy, journalism, internet-enabled activism, digital activism, 350.org, Climate Reality
Project, the Guardian, collective action, divestment
The first two decades of the 21st century have brought forth two distinct yet closely
related trends in activism that carry important implications for the future of climate
change–centered collective action. The first trend involves the growing importance of
digital communication technologies—most prominently among them the internet and
mobile technologies—to the various processes and activities commonly associated with
activism and advocacy campaigns. The second trend involves the growth of climate
change advocacy, including the establishment and expansion of new organizations
dedicated exclusively to activism and advocacy of aggressive solutions to the climate
crisis, such as keeping the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere below 350
parts per million (350.org, N.D.-B, N.D.-C).
This article analyzes the trajectory of both trends, their convergence in the late 2000s,
and how this convergence has changed the climate change advocacy landscape. To better
illustrate this convergence, the article features detailed profiles of three climate change
advocacy campaigns and organizations: 350.org, the Climate Reality Project, and the
Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground.” campaign. 350.org was co-founded in 2007 by
environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and several of his former students from
Middlebury College in Vermont (Hestres, 2014, p. 329). The Climate Reality project was
founded under another name by former U.S. vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al
Gore (German, 2010). The Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” fossil fuel divestment
campaign, which is a partnership with 350.org and its Go Fossil Free Campaign, was
launched in March 2015 under the direction of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger
(Rusbridger, 2015B). After profiling these three campaigns, the article discusses the future
of climate advocacy in light of ongoing technological innovation and its consequences for
meaningful action to tackle climate change.
Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
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Technology and Evolving Models of Activism
and Advocacy
From Union Halls to Armchairs
Social and political activism has evolved hand in hand with changes in information and
communication technologies. In the decades before access to computers became
widespread, face-to-face contact was the most common method of political organization
(Nielsen, 2012). In the United States, it was fairly common for individuals to belong to civic
and political organizations—labor unions, religious groups, civic groups like the Rotary
Club, the Lions Club, advocacy organizations like the NAACP, and many others—that
required them to meet regularly in person to discuss civic and political issues and
organize themselves to act. Robert Putnam’s influential book Bowling Alone: The Collapse
and Revival of American Community (2000) chronicles the drop of membership in these
associations and argues for a significant disadvantage to the decline of such regular face-
to-face contact: significantly lower levels of social capital in American society. Putnam
defines social capital as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms
of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (2000, p. 19). He argues that
lower levels of participation in civic organizations has led to the weakening of positive
forms of social capital.
Theda Skocpol (2003) partly blames this decline of social capital on the public interest
group “boom” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Conceptually different from the chapter-
based civic organizations such as Rotary Clubs and similar types of organizations such as
professional associations (e.g., American Medical Association), public interest groups
have been conceptualized as having no work-related obstacles to membership and being
organized around ideas or causes (Walker, 1991). Jeffrey Berry (1977, p. 3) defined a public
interest group as “one that seeks a collective good, the achievement of which will not
selectively and materially benefit the membership or activists of the organization.”
Although such organizations have existed for a long time, their numbers increased
markedly in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Skocpol (2003) lists a number of factors
responsible for this trend, including the rise of rights as an organizing principle for policy
after the Civil Rights Movement, the shift in importance from citizen input to expert
lobbying in policymaking, and a change in the very definition of membership from
participation to membership-by-mail.
The last factor underlines how technological change can help drive changes in activism
and advocacy models. For example, the redefinition of membership from participation to
membership-by-mail was made possible to a large extent by the invention of the computer
and its subsequent adoption by corporations. Before this technological breakthrough,
chapter-based civic associations like the ones Putnam highlights had no choice but to
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adopt the chapter model in order to raise funds and take action together in pursuit of the
same non-rival and non-excludable common good, such as a raise of the minimum wage—
in other words, to take collective action (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2005). But after the
development of mainframe computers and their adoption by businesses, it became
possible to produce large-scale, database-driven direct mail appeals to individuals
(Bimber, 2003; Karpf, 2012).
The organizations founded during the late 1960s to early 1970s advocacy boom took
advantage of this technological leap to establish relationships with supporters nationwide
—relationships based on an “armchair” or “checkbook” activism model that focused on
fundraising to subsidize professional advocacy based out of Washington, D.C. or similar
places, or asked supporters for relatively low-threshold actions such as letter-writing but
little else (Karpf, 2012). Examples of this development include many of the large
organizations that have been staples of the environmental advocacy ecosystem, a group
of national organizations that often cooperate to achieve common policy goals but also
compete for donors, membership, and influence, and have been active for many decades,
such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), and others (see Bosso, 2005, pp. 19–22
for a comprehensive list). For good or ill, such a shift would not have been possible
without the invention and popularization of a new set of technologies—namely, the
mainframe computer and the electronic database.
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From Armchairs to the Internet
Ever since Mancur Olson (1965) published his seminal book The Logic of Collective Action,
the relative cost—whether measured in money, time, effort, risk, etc.—to individuals of
working with others to attain a public good—a public road, clean air or water, etc.—has
been at the core of the study of collective action. Olson theorized that rational individuals
would be too tempted to “free ride” in an environment where it would be hard to notice
an individual’s contribution to achieving the public good, and too tempted to not
contribute at all if not enough individuals contributed. Olson’s solution involved the
distribution of selective incentives and penalties through formal organizations. In
subsequent theorizing, social movement scholars adapted Olson’s theory to explain the
existence of social movement organizations (SMOs) and related groups, and their
necessity for mobilizing large amounts of resources, in a theoretical framework known as
resource mobilization theory (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Although scholars have since
included many other factors in their analysis of collective action, such as framing,
political process, and opportunity structures (McAdam, McCarthy, & Zald, 1996), resource
mobilization has remained an important part of the theoretical mix.
But the technological context of modern society, anchored in inventions like the internet,
the World Wide Web, wireless data networks, and mobile devices like smartphones and
tablets, has led some scholars to question the centrality of organizations to modern
collective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Shirky, 2008). The core argument is that, by
reducing the costs of political participation, the internet and related technologies also
reduce the need for brick and mortar organizations that typically mobilized resources on
behalf of users. There is some empirical support for this proposition. Although not
directly addressing the role of organizations in political and/or civic participation, Borge
and Cardenal (2011) argue that by reducing participation costs, use of the internet may
diminish the role of political motivation in participation, leading frequent and skilled
internet users to participate in politics even without political motivation. Similarly,
Mossberger, Tolbert, and McNeal (2008) find a correlation between voters’ online news
consumption and their likelihood of voting in a presidential election. They attribute this
correlation to the internet’s ability to reduce information costs by delivering news almost
instantaneously, cheaply, and from a nearly infinite variety of sources.
Although researchers studying the role of digital communication technologies generally
agree about their role in reducing the costs of participation, they continue to debate the
outcome of this development. Earl and Kimport (2011) point out key methodological and
theoretical divergences among researchers studying internet-based and internet-enabled
protests who have split among two camps: broadly speaking, one argument states that
internet use merely supersizes the practice of activism. For example, online petitions
make the process of gathering signatures for a petition and delivering it to decision-
makers more efficient and cost-effective than the analog version of this tactic, but it does
not fundamentally change the tactic—it merely supersizes the petitioning process (Earl &
Kimport, 2011). Others argue that digital technologies can fundamentally change the
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collective action process—what Earl and Kimport call theory 2.0 effects. Seemingly
spontaneous flash mobs and similar instances of what Clay Shirky (2008) has called
organizing without organizations would be typical examples of this effect.
Bennett and Segerberg (2012) posit an alternative logic of connective action, which differs
from the more familiar logic of collective action (Olson, 1965) in important ways. Unlike
the logic of collective action, which depends on strong organizational coordination and
organizational affiliation being prominently foregrounded, mobilizations that reflect a
logic of connective action feature only loose organizational coordination, if they feature
any at all, and what formal organization there is recedes to the background (Bennett &
Segerberg, 2012). The logic of connective action also privileges personal action frames that
“are inclusive of different personal reasons for contesting a situation that needs to be
changed” over collective action frames that require greater adherence to a movement’s
framing of a social problem (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 73).
Finally, the role of digital communication technologies (DCTs) differs between the two
logics of collective and connective action. While under traditional collective action
organizations use such technologies to coordinate actions, under connective action
individuals take advantage of pre-existing social technologies—e.g., Facebook, YouTube,
Meetup, email, Twitter, open source content management systems, etc.—to engage in
“mass self-communication” (see: Castells, 2007, p. 246). The Occupy Movement, the Arab
Spring, the Indignados movement in Spain, and the Put People First global anti-austerity
movement are just some examples of variations of the logic of connective action (Bennett
& Segerberg, 2012, p. 740). All of these movements featured very loose or no formal
organizational coordination, a high adoption of personalized action frames (e.g., “we are
the 99%”), and extensive use of multiple online communication platforms that in essence
replaced traditional organizational resources (e.g., Hopke, 2016).
For the purposes of climate change advocacy, however, one of the most important
developments in political advocacy has been the rise of what David Karpf (2012) has called
internet-mediated advocacy organizations. Their advocacy models stands in contrast with
the “armchair activism” model exhibited by organizations founded during the advocacy
group boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Skocpol, 2003). Karpf (2012) divides the new
breed of organization into three categories: issue generalists, online communities of
interest, and neo-federated organizations. Issue generalists communicate primarily via
email and maintain sparse websites (e.g., MoveOn.Org); online communities of interests
are web-based gatherings of individuals that contribute content to these communities
(e.g., the community blog Daily Kos); and neo-federated organizations retain a semblance
of the chapter-based structure of traditional federated organizations but focus on offering
online tools for offline action (e.g., Democracy for America, founded by former
presidential candidate Howard Dean).
The Hybrid Mobilization “MoveOn” Model
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Karpf also addressed some of the organizations featured in this article (such as 350.org),
referring to them as “[i]nternet-mediated issue specialists,” which share many other
characteristics with issue generalists except for their issue specialization (2012, p. 49).
These groups display a hybrid mobilization model most commonly associated with
MoveOn.org, (henceforth “MoveOn”), which “sometimes behaves like an interest group,
sometimes like a social movement, sometimes like the wing of a traditional party during
an election campaign” (Chadwick, 2007, p. 284). The “MoveOn model” is worth dwelling on
because of its widespread influence on internet-enabled activism—including climate
activism (see, for example, the ongoing search for a so-called “MoveOn of the Right”;
Catanese, 2010; Kane & Weisman, 2008, para. 4).
MoveOn’s origins can be traced to an online petition that technology entrepreneurs Joan
Blades and Wes Boyd circulated to their friends via email during U.S. President Bill
Clinton’s impeachment in 1998–1999 (McNally, 2004). Blades and Boyd, frustrated with
what they saw as “the partisan warfare in Washington D.C. and the ridiculous waste of
our nation’s focus at the time of the Clinton impeachment mess,” circulated a petition to
“Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the
Nation” (MoveOn.Org, N.D.). Although President Bill Clinton was nonetheless impeached,
the 1998 petition went viral, collecting an unexpectedly large number of signatures that
Blades and Boyd used as the basis for what became MoveOn: a permanent, internet-
enabled vehicle for individuals to engage with progressive issues and candidates
(MoveOn.Org, N.D.; Wolf, 2004). MoveOn’s mix of online-only tactics, such as email-driven
petitions, donations to candidates or its own political action committee (PAC), and
boilerplate letters to newspaper editors or members of Congress, online-to-offline
activism such as “house parties,” rallies or vigils, and lobbying meetings with public
officials, has served as a model for other organizations, including Avaaz, Color of Change,
and ProgressNow, among others (Eaton, 2010, p. 175).
Another important aspect of MoveOn’s model is its redefinition of the concept of
membership (Karpf, 2012, p. 3). Unlike the organizations highlighted by Putnam (2000),
where physical participation plays a critical role in membership, or the “armchair
activism” groups criticized by Skocpol (2003, 2013), where membership is based on regular
dues and low-threshold activism, MoveOn’s supporters become members simply by
joining its email list (Karpf, 2012). Supporters are then free to choose their level of
involvement with MoveOn, from quick-and-easy activities such as signing e-petitions to
others that carry higher costs, such as attending rallies or hosting house parties. MoveOn
can afford to make the initial barrier of entry very low for its supporters because of its
internet-enabled model, which lowers the costs of building the online infrastructure that
supports a variety of both high- and low-threshold activities. The model also allows them
to draw from a rich and highly flexible action repertoire made possible by internet-
enabled activism (Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010).
1
Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
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Finally, the MoveOn approach and similar internet-mediated models such as the logic of
connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) fit in with broader trends in civic and
political participation that are leading individuals to seek less binding and more flexible
relationships with organizations that provide various kinds of support on issues that
matter to them. This model of activism stands in contrast to the older models profiled
above, in which concerned citizens identified strongly with one issue and organization
(Bennet, Breunig, & Givens, 2008). Despite the many advantages the “MoveOn model”
offers, however, it also presents challenges for MoveOn or any organizations trying to
adopt it. One such challenge is building a sense of community and cohesion among
supporters in the absence of the vehicles available to more traditional organizations, such
as regular meetings or the incentives usually associated with dues-paying membership,
such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) or the Environmental Defense
Fund (EDF) (Hestres, 2015B). Zeynep Tufekci (2017) notes that internet-enabled movements
can be more fragile in terms of capacity without the backbone of formal organizational
structures. In the social media “attention economy” a lack of formal organizing structures
can be a challenge for movements seeking legitimacy both in the public sphere and
among groups of demonstrators (Tufekci, 2017, p. 79). MoveOn has tackled this challenge
partly through the rhetoric of its emails, where it tries to “manufacture” community
online by deploying “identity framing” to define itself to insiders and outsiders (Eaton,
2010).
This brief chronicle of collective action from the era of chapter-based associations to the
present day shows the key role that digital communication technologies have played in
the definition of membership and the action repertoires available to both organizations
and individuals. As information and communication technologies have advanced, the
definition of membership has loosened, the range of options for organizations to engage
their supporters has broadened, and individual activists have gained greater flexibility in
their levels of commitment and options to engage with various causes. This flexibility is
perhaps best captured in the concept of the “logic of connective action,” which makes
most aspects of activism, from framing to level of commitment to vehicles for action,
highly contingent on individual preferences that are mediated by digital media (Bennett
& Segerberg, 2012). The next section of this article describes how the rise of climate
change–centered advocacy mirrors the rise of internet-enabled activism and how the two
parallel trends intersect in the mid- to late 2000s.
Climate Change and Evolving Models of
Activism and Advocacy
The Pre-Internet Era Environmental Advocacy Community
Internet-Enabled Activism and Climate Change
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Environmental and climate change advocacy mirror in many ways the trajectory of issue-
based advocacy. Many of the first and most enduring environmental groups, such as the
Sierra Club, followed the chapter-based model of groups such as the Lions Clubs or the
NAACP and remain active to this day (Bosso, 2005). As the importance of media-based and
legalistic advocacy strategies grew in the late 1960s to early 1970s and mainframe
computer technology became widely available and affordable, many new environmental
organizations were founded, such as the EDF and Greenpeace, which are still influential.
Although the organizations founded during that period coincided with the heyday of the
New Left’s radical critiques of capitalism and its effects on the environment, these groups
were generally more interested in reforming the system than completely restructuring it
(Rootes, 2004).
By the time climate change became a salient issue in the public agenda in the late 1980s
(Shabecoff, 1988), most of these environmental organizations had become well-established
players in an advocacy community that has been fairly stable since the 1970s (Bosso,
2005). Although most of them began as local, grassroots-focused efforts, they have since
evolved into large, national organizations that are a permanent feature of the political
landscape (Bosso, 2005). Groups such as the Sierra Club, EDF, and the NRDC have
incorporated climate change into their work and even made it a priority. But as
dissatisfaction with politics as usual was a contributing factor in the relatively recent
wave of internet-enabled advocacy innovation (e.g., MoveOn’s original petition), so was
dissatisfaction with the progress made on climate change by the mid-2000s a contributing
factor in the new crop of climate changed–focused advocacy organizations (Hestres, 2014,
2015B).
Perhaps the best example of the chapter-based model in the environmental community is
the Sierra Club, the oldest and still one of the most influential environmental organization
in the United States. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 on the heels of conservationist
John Muir’s work to transfer authority over Yosemite National Park from California’s state
government to the federal government in order to ensure its protection from excessive
commercial development (Bosso, 2005, p. 23). It has since evolved into a nationwide
organization with 65 state and local chapters and more than 2 million supporters across
the country—including more than 600,000 dues-paying members—that combines
environmental advocacy with activities that encourage enjoyment of the outdoors, such as
hiking groups and camping trips (Barringer, 2012; sierraclub.org, 2014;
sierraclubfoundation.org, 2012, p. 38). The Sierra Club has been involved in climate
activism for more than a quarter of a century—most recently through its Beyond Coal
campaign, which focuses on retiring one third of America’s coal power plants and
replacing the majority of them with clean energy alternatives (sierraclub.org, 2006, N.D.).
The Beyond Coal campaign can also be viewed through the lens of the Club’s broader
efforts to incorporate environmental justice principles into its organizing, such as
respecting the right of the community to determine its own agenda and working with it as
a supportive collaborator (Sandler & Pezzullo, 2007, pp. 325–326). The Club’s chapter-
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based structure is still critical to its functioning and democratic identity (Hestres, 2015B, p.
204).
EDF and NRDC are classic examples of the advocacy organizations boom of the late
1960s to early 1970s. Founded in 1966, EDF led the way in the use of the legal system as
a tool for environmental protection and conservation. Its first lawsuit eventually led to a
nationwide ban of the pesticide DDT in 1972 (Bosso, 2005, p. 42; edf.org, 2013). EDF has
since become a large organization with a reputation for “insiderism”; for applying legal,
scientific, and economic expertise to promote legislation and regulations; and for its
middle-of-the-road ideology (Nisbet, 2011). It was also one proponent of cap-and-trade
legislation in the United States and of a global climate treaty that embraced strong limits
on carbon pollution (Pooley, 2010, pp. 97–99). In 1970, meanwhile, Yale Law School
students established the NRDC, originally to work along the lines of the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund and the ACLU (Bosso, 2005). Over the years it grew into a large
environmental organization that embraced an advocacy model similar to EDF’s, building
a large stable of experts who conduct legal, media, and legislative advocacy. Also like
EDF, NRDC supported climate legislation in the U.S. Congress that included a limit on
carbon emissions and was part of a rapid response operation operated by environmental,
labor, and other progressive organizations (Pooley, 2010, pp. 419–420).
The Emergence of Climate Change–Centered Advocacy
During the first two decades of the 21st century, advocacy groups such as EDF, NRDC,
the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), and many others invested
significant time, money, and other resources in achieving strong policies to curb climate
change (Nisbet, 2011). Nearly all have program areas dedicated exclusively to climate
change; depending on the organization, this may include staff that concentrate on the
issue, digital campaigns, offline national, state, or local efforts, or collaboration with
other groups in digital or offline campaigns (Bosso, 2005; Nisbet, 2011; Pooley, 2010). But for
all these investments, by the late 2000s and early 2010s there had been few major
successes. Since 2003, when the first climate change bill was introduced in the U.S.
Congress, seven such bills have been introduced, but only one was approved by the
House of Representatives, and all seven have died in the Senate (Layzer, 2011, pp. 368–
377). When the U.S. Congress was closer than ever to passing an ambitious climate
change bill in 2009, environmental and allied groups spent approximately $394 million in
climate- and energy-related advocacy, with little to show for it (Nisbet, 2011). Even state-
based efforts to combat climate change in the United States were starting to falter: in
2011, New Jersey pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a regional
effort to control carbon emissions along the upper East Coast (Eilperin, 2011).
Some have criticized these organizations for relying on an “armchair activism” model
characteristic of many groups founded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or even before
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then. In a postmortem of the fight to pass an ambitious climate bill in 2009–2010,
Harvard University political scientist Theda Skocpol wrote:
The new organizational investments made to prepare for the 2009 opportunity to
pursue carbon-capping legislation focused much more on insider bargaining and
within the Beltway lobbying than on building capacities in states and localities for
a push from the left edge of the possible.
(Skocpol, 2013, p. 44)
Partially quoting renowned grassroots organizer and Harvard public policy lecturer
Marshall Ganz, a similar postmortem about the 2009–2010 climate bill failure reached a
similar conclusion:
“To think that a deep reform of our energy policies was going to happen because
somehow it was going to be negotiated in D.C., it was just ahistorical, it was
unreal,” he said. Part of the problem, Ganz has written, is that civic organizations
such as the green groups have effectively become “bodiless heads”—
professionally staffed, Washington-based organizations that are largely
disconnected from the public they purport to represent.
(Bartosiewicz & Miley, 2013, p. 71).
It is difficult to overstate how much this and previous failures have served as a driving
force behind the formation of new, climate changed–centered organizations—some of
which embraced an internet-enabled, MoveOn-style flexibility from the early stages of
their activities. For example, key staff members from 350.org and the 1Sky campaign,
which was founded in 2008 and merged with 350.org in 2011, mentioned the need for
internet-enabled grassroots organizing in the wake of previous climate activism failures
(Hestres, 2014). These organizations, along with the millennial-oriented Power Shift
Network (formerly the Energy Action Coalition), the globally oriented TckTckTck, the
Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN, based in the Washington, D.C. metro area),
and others, form part of this latest, internet-enabled climate advocacy boom.
In recent years, climate activists have increasingly utilized social media applications and
other digital media technologies, such as email listservs, to organize and share
information about both localized and transnational actions on climate and energy issues.
In research on the role of Twitter in protest ecologies surrounding the Copenhagen COP
15 in December 2009, Segerberg and Bennett argue that the platform plays a “role as
both networking agent in and window on the protest space” (Segerberg & Bennet, 2011, p.
200). They find that Twitter newsfeeds serve as “crosscutting networking mechanisms”
and gatekeeping functions while also evolving an organizational function over the course
of a single protest event (Segerberg & Bennet, 2011, p. 197). In research on the
transnational anti-fracking Global Frackdown social movement, Hopke (2015) found that
activists employed Twitter to strengthen a transnational collective identity centered on
banning fracking and promoting renewable energy, in the context of concerns over
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climate change impacts. Global Frackdown activists used Twitter to make connections
with like-minded movements and share information quickly in real-time between
languages and wide geographical areas (Hopke, 2015).
In the lead-up to the 2009 COP 15, the number and diversity of civil society organizations
expanded. In analysis of the network structure of civil society organizations in the context
of COP 15, Jennifer Hadden (2015) finds that the Copenhagen climate talks was a tactical
turning point. She finds the network to be made up of “two related but largely
independent, components of a massive transnational civil society network” consisting of
mainstream legacy environmental organizations and those part of the “Climate Justice
Now” contingent, which got its start during the 2007 Bali climate summit (Hadden, 2015,
p. 3). This increase in the organizational actors working in the climate advocacy space on
a transnational level resulted in the “emergence of a divided network,” splitting those
taking a more radical, climate justice approach from ones engaging in conventional
climate politics (Hadden, 2015, p. 10). According to Hadden, large-scale protests are
becoming the norm at international climate meetings, with a shift on the part of the more
contentious civil society actors away from a focus on the UNFCCC toward targeting non-
state actors, including individuals and corporations (p. 174).
Below are brief profiles of three groups and campaigns that belong to this emerging
climate advocacy ecosystem: 350.org, the Climate Reality Project, and the Guardian’s
“Keep It in the Ground” campaign.
350.org
In late 2007, environmental writer, lecturer, and activist Bill McKibben, along with six
former students from Middlebury College in Vermont, founded 350.org (pronounced
“three-fifty-dot-org”) after a national day of climate actions, called Step It Up, which they
had organized primarily through the web the previous summer (Fisher & Boekkooi, 2010).
Their goal was to start “a global grassroots movement to solve the climate
crisis” (350.org, N.D.-A). 350.org has never spelled out a detailed policy platform: instead it
endorsed the 1Sky platform, along with more than 600 other organizations, which called
for creating millions of green jobs while cutting carbon emissions to at least 40% below
1990 levels by 2050 (Hestres, 2015B). 350.org’s chosen name conveys its ultimate goal. The
group took its name from a scientific paper co-authored by Dr. James Hansen, then-
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a prominent climate scientist
and activist. The paper argues that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere must be
reduced from their (at the time) current level of 385 parts per million (ppm) to no more
than 350 ppm to avoid the worst effects of climate change (Hansen et al., 2008). McKibben
writes that the group chose its name “reasoning that we wanted to work all over the
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world . . . and that Arabic numerals crossed linguistic boundaries” (McKibben, 2013, loc.
164).
The group at first focused on movement-building actions designed to develop a global
climate movement. In seeking to build a global climate movement with political strength
and power, 350.org organizers sought to show what social movement scholar Charles
Tilly (2004) has called WUNC (Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment). Examples
include the 2007 Step It Up rallies that gave birth to the organization and the 2009
International Day of Climate Action, during which asked supporters to take pictures
depicting the number “350” and post them on Flickr (Fisher & Boekkooi, 2010; Hestres,
2015A). Later, 350.org focused on challenging fossil fuel industries so as to weaken their
influence on the political process, particularly in the United States, and also stigmatize
them in the court of public opinion. Since the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks and
the U.S. climate change bill, 350.org has launched campaigns to end fossil fuel subsidies,
persuade various institutions to divest from fossil fuel investments, and train new
grassroots leaders.
350.org’s most successful campaign to date aimed to block approval of the Keystone XL
project—a $7 billion pipeline that would span nearly 2,000 miles and connect Canada’s oil
sands to refineries near Houston, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico. The effort to stop the
pipeline under the Obama administration included a civil disobedience campaign during
which more than 1,700 activists were arrested in front of the White House, more than
10,000 activists surrounded it a few months later, and supporters sent more than 800,000
email to Senate offices (Henn, 2014; Hestres, 2014; McKibben, 2013, loc. 590). After years of
protests, delays, and deliberations, President Obama rejected the permit to build the
pipeline on November 2015 (Obama, 2015). 350.org has also built a significant
international presence in a relatively short amount of time: as of July 2017, of its 116 staff
members, 66 (or 56%) were based outside the United States (350.org, N.D.-B). 350.org’s
commitment to international climate activism was evident as early as 2009, when it
organized an International Day of Climate Action, and continues to this day (Hestres,
2015A).
Part of 350.org’s success to date is due to its effective use of online tools to spur offline
action, the results of which are documented and then disseminated via other online tools,
thus creating a virtuous cycle of online-to-offline-to-online-etc. climate activism. The
group has also relied on McKibben’s effectiveness and visibility as a writer to create a
mutually reinforcing dynamic between traditional media outlets. For example, when
McKibben’s 2012Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math,” was
published online, 350.org distributed it widely through its social networks and email list
and encouraged supporters to do so as well (350.org, 2012; McKibben, 2012). 350.org’s
aggressive marketing of McKibben’s piece generated more than 140,000 Facebook likes,
more than 15,400 tweets, and nearly 13,000 comments on the Rolling Stone website. In
turn, the article and its accompanying social media activity reinforced attendance to
2
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350.org’s “Do the Math” tour that featured climate-centered concerts and rallies
(Hestres, 2015A).
After its Keystone XL success at pressuring former U.S. president Barack Obama to halt
the pipeline, 350.org organized or participated in campaigns and actions more explicitly
aligned with the Climate Justice Movement, which is most concerned with the disparate
impacts of climate change on the world’s poor and ensuring the greatest greenhouse gas
emitters bear the heaviest burden for solving the crisis (Pettit, 2004). In 2014, 350.org was
a key organizer behind the first People’s Climate March, a large-scale climate activism
event that took place in New York City, during which an estimated 300,000 marched
through the city’s streets demanding action from an upcoming UN climate summit
(Foderaro, 2014). Another Bill McKibben article in Rolling Stone announcing the march
explicitly tied it to fossil fuel non-extraction and environmental justice, noting that a
“loud” movement “. . . finds powerful leadership from the environmental-justice
community, the poor people, often in communities of color, who have suffered most
directly under the reign of fossil fuel” (McKibben, 2014, para. 11). Studying social media
during the 2014 People’s Climate March, Thorson, Edgerly, Kligler-Vilenchik, Xu, and
Wang (2016) show that organizers and march participants used Twitter to converge and
draw broader public attention to climate issues. Employing the hashtags #climatemarch
and #peoplesclimate, they co-created a sense of “shared visibility” through a “big tent”
digital communication strategy (Thorson et al., 2016). 350.org also helped organize the
Global Climate March, which took place in lieu of a large march scheduled to take place
in Paris before the COP 21 climate talks but was prohibited after the November 13, 2015,
terrorist attacks. Co-organizer Avaaz.org estimated that more than 500,000 people had
participated in marches around the world (Grimson & Fieldstadt, 2015).
Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 350.org rallied its supporters to confront
President Donald J. Trump’s support for fossil fuels and to support local fights against
fossil fuel infrastructure, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline, which traverses Native
American Lakota treaty lands in North Dakota and was the focus of widespread
grassroots protests in the fall of 2016 (Boeve, 2016). On April 29, 2017, 350.org
spearheaded a second People’s Climate March, as part of the Peoples Climate Movement,
calling for “jobs, justice, and climate action” (Peoples Climate Movement, 2017). Climate
march organizers used social media to mobilize supporters largely around a message of
resisting Trump (Hopke, 2017).
Climate Reality Project (Formerly We Campaign/Repower America)
This organization is the offspring of a merger between two advocacy organizations
founded by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore: The Alliance for Climate Protection and
the Climate Project. Gore founded the Alliance in 2006 as a vehicle for climate-centered
advocacy in the United States, while the Climate Project was conceived as a global
educational project derived from Gore’s climate presentations. By merging the groups in
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2010, their leaders aimed to create “one of the largest non-profit educational and
advocacy organizations focused singularly on climate protection issues in the
world” (German, 2010).
The Alliance’s first major intervention in the U.S. climate debate was a $110 million
television and mass marketing campaign called We Can Solve It (aka the We Campaign)
that Gore envisioned as “the first big-budget attempt to use the tools of mass marketing
on behalf of the planet” (Pooley, 2010, p. 25). Its centerpiece was a series of television ads
featuring bipartisan pairs of high-profile political figures, such as then-House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, or Revs. Pat Robertson and Al
Sharpton, in which the pairs jokingly reaffirmed their overarching political disagreements
while pledging their support for strong action to curb climate change (Walsh, 2008).
In July 2008, the Alliance launched the Repower America campaign to support Gore’s call
to shift 100% of U.S. energy production to clean energy in 10 years (McDermott, 2008).
This later became the Alliance’s chief vehicle to support comprehensive climate and
energy legislation under consideration in Congress in 2009–2010 through paid field
organizers and a targeted advertising campaign in swing congressional districts and
states (Sheppard, 2009). Repower America’s online centerpiece was a twist on the petition
tactic: the Repower Wall, which allowed supporters of Gore’s agenda to upload photos,
videos, and written messages of support and featured posts from the likes of Melissa
Etheridge, Bill Nye (the Science Guy), and Michael Bloomberg (Littman, 2009).
Since the failure of the comprehensive climate change and clean energy bill in 2010 and
the merger of the Alliance and the Climate Project, the Climate Reality Project has
concentrated on rebutting climate science denial and training volunteers around the
world through its Climate Reality Volunteer Corps to educate their communities on the
facts about climate change and the urgent need for action (climaterealityproject.org, N.D.;
Nisbet, Markowitz, & Kotcher, 2012).
With the merger and rebranding of his campaign, Gore’s objective was to make denial of
climate change as morally objectionable as denial of racism has become in modern
society thanks to the Civil Rights Movement (The Huffington Post, 2011). In addition to
volunteer presenters, Climate Reality has used online advertising to drive its anti–fossil
fuel message, including an advertisement that ran on news sites: “when a browser clicked
on a dead link, the ad said THIS PAGE DOES NOT EXIST. KIND OF LIKE CLEAN
COAL” (Pooley, 2010, p. 304). Regarding the Trump presidency, Gore has expressed
optimism, hoping that Trump “will work with the overwhelming majority of us who
believe that the climate crisis is the greatest threat we face as a nation” (Gore, 2016, para.
4).
The Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” Campaign
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Along with activism, the shifts toward more fluid, internet-enabled networks are also
altering the field of journalism. With networked modes of digital production, journalism is
an increasingly fractured field. It is evolving toward what scholars have alternately
termed networked journalism (Jarvis, 2006), participatory news, and citizen journalism
(Deuze, Bruns, & Neuberger, 2007). These forms of journalism-as-process (Jarvis, 2009)
emphasize collaboration between professional journalists and their former audiences,
boundary crossing and shifting journalistic norms (Deuze et al., 2007), networked
gatekeeping, crowdsourcing of elites, and affective, emotion-laced news streams shared
through social media (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). Digital news platforms are
reconfiguring traditional news production norms through hybrid cultural practices, giving
rise to “new paradigms of journalism” (Hermida, 2013, p. 295).
In March 2015, under the leadership of then-outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, the
Guardian, a leading British newspaper with a strong digital presence and online versions
in the United States and Australia, launched a digital climate change advocacy campaign
called Keep It in the Ground (Rusbridger, 2015A). The Guardian has two thirds of its
readership outside of the United Kingdom and won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in
2014 for its coverage of the Edward Snowden NSA surveillance leak (Rusbridger, 2015B).
In the first phase of the digital campaign, the Guardian partnered with 350.org, and its Go
Fossil Free campaign, to pressure the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the
Wellcome Trust to divest financial assets from the top 200 oil, coal, and natural gas
companies within the next five years (The Guardian, 2015; Rusbridger, 2015A).
Then-Guardian editor-in-chief Rusbridger decided to take a personal stand on climate
change after having met climate activist Bill McKibben while both were in Stockholm to
receive Right Livelihood Awards (Abbruzzese, 2015). Divestment is a socially responsible
investing tactic to remove assets from a sector or industry based on moral objections to
its business practices, with roots in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (Ansar,
Caldecott, & Tilbury, 2013). The Guardian won “campaign of the year” in the 2015 British
Journalism Awards (Press Gazette, 2015).
In the first stage of the Keep It in the Ground campaign, according to former editor-in-
chief Rusbridger, the publication emphasized the need for governments to take action on
climate change ahead of the COP 21 climate negotiations in Paris and embrace fossil fuel
divestment, as well as rescinding subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and its lobbying
efforts (Rusbridger, 2015A). Targeting an audience of scientists, in Nature Rusbridger
(2015B) writes that climate is a crucial news story but covering the topic is hard for
journalists who are used to event-driven, episodic reporting. A goal of the campaign was
to “energize and inspire people in a way that simple reporting sometimes does
not” (Rusbridger, 2015B, para. 6). In its first six months, the campaign garnered support
from more than 226,000 online petitioners (Howard & Carrington, 2015).
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In October 2015, the Guardian shifted the focus of the campaign to an emphasis on hope
in reaction to readers’ responses to the original campaign and ahead of the COP 21 Paris
climate talks at the end of that year (Howard & Carrington, 2015; Randerson, 2015B). In a
message to campaign supporters on October 5, 2015, assistant national news editor
James Randerson wrote:
You—the supporters of this campaign—have been its backbone since the
beginning. So we asked you where to take it next and your responses can be
summarised in one word: hope.
We aren't abandoning fossil fuel divestment but we will now focus on solar power:
the alternatives, the positive stories and its amazing growth and potential.
(Randerson, 2015A, para. 3–4)
With the second phase of the Keep It in the Ground campaign, the Guardian shifted its
emphasis from divestment to investment in clean energy technologies within the context
of the Paris climate talks, which took place between November 30 and December 12,
2015 (Randerson, 2015B). The goal was to show it is possible to make the transition to a
low-carbon energy system (Howard & Carrington, 2015). As Randerson (2015B) wrote to
readers, “A major strand of our climate coverage up to Paris and beyond will be about
climate change as a story of hope” (para. 25). In phase two of the campaign, the
publication focused coverage on transforming the global energy system and, in particular,
on advancements in solar energy technology (Randerson, 2015B).
Conclusion
This article has traced the parallel histories of internet-enabled activism and climate
change–centered activism. Some of the first and most enduring conservation
organizations in the United States, such as the Sierra Club, were established during the
chapter-based era of civic and political organizations. This model, which emphasized face-
to-face interaction and produced relatively high levels of social capital (Putnam, 2000), was
also a function of the communication technologies available at the time. Most of the large
environmental organizations that comprise what Bosso (2000) has called an “interest group
community” (p. 73) were established during the advocacy group explosion in the late
1960s to early 1970s, facilitated by the development of mainframe computers and
databases that made large membership mailings possible (Karpf, 2012; Skocpol, 2003).
Meanwhile, many of the climate-focused advocacy groups founded during the mid- to late
2000s, such as 350.org, embraced the organizational hybridity made possible by the
internet and related technologies (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Bimber, Stohl, & Flanagin,
2009; Chadwick, 2013). The technological hybridity that allows digitally mediated
organizations, regardless of their function, to share the same technological landscape can
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also facilitate organizational hybridity: case in point, the Guardian’s Keep It in the Ground
campaign, conducted in partnership with 350.org (Randerson, 2015B).
On a tactical level, it can be expected that climate change advocacy campaigns over the
next several years will have to navigate changes in the digital media landscape by
following users’ enthusiastic adoption of cutting-edge digital media audiovisual features,
including live video. To quote but one statistic, “[t]he number of hours people spent
watching videos on mobile is up 100% year-over-year” (Waters, 2016). In fact, anti–Dakota
Access pipeline activists have already used Facebook Live, a live video streaming feature
unveiled by Facebook in August 2015, to broadcast their protests (Sottile, 2016) in
conjunction with a Facebook location-based check-in feature (Kennedy, 2016). This trend
reflects a broader move by users away from textual content and toward audiovisual
(especially video) content in social media as evidenced by the growing popularity of
mobile apps like Snapchat and Instagram and online video across all social platforms
(Waters, 2016). This trend was anticipated by Mitchell Stephens (1998) in The Rise of the
Image, the Fall of the Word. Stephens theorized that the phenomenon described in his
book’s title was due to, among other factors, the image’s ability to convey information
more concisely than the word across language barriers and to its ability to arouse
emotion (Stephens, 1998, pp. 61–62). Given the scientific complexity of climate change and
the important role of emotions in social movements (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2009),
digital climate change campaigns are embracing this trend toward a heavily visual media
environment.
On a strategic level, perhaps the biggest challenge climate change advocacy groups and
campaigns face in the near future is Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States. As
a candidate, Trump repeatedly called climate change a hoax that helped China undercut
the United States in manufacturing (Jacobson, 2016). As president Trump announced his
intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement (Shear, 2017) and has
appointed former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt is a climate skeptic who spent much of his tenure as
Oklahoma attorney general fighting the EPA on climate change and other issues (Mooney,
Dennis, & Mufson, 2016). Given that political science literature suggests presidents usually
try to keep most of their campaign promises (Budge & Hofferbert, 1990; Krukones, 1984)
and the hostility Trump seems to harbor toward his predecessor’s climate policies, it
would not be unreasonable for climate activists to view the Trump presidency as a serious
threat to their long-term goals. In fact, 350.org has already indicated its intention to
confront Trump while also embracing local environmental justice struggles like the
Dakota Access pipeline protests (Boeve, 2016).
But the challenges that climate advocates face in the near future are not necessarily a
cause for panic or despondency. Attempting to explain the wave of innovation that
occurred throughout the progressive advocacy ecosystem in first decade of the 21st
century, which coincided with the presidency of George W. Bush, Karpf (2012, pp. 142–143)
has argued that political groups aligned with the party out of power have strong
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incentives to innovate technologically, tactically, and strategically. As one of Karpf’s
respondents put it, “Storming the castle is much more fun” (2012, p. 142). If this
explanation holds, the next few years may yield many setbacks and disappointments for
climate campaigners but also set the stage for digital climate advocacy innovations that
lead to meaningful policy gains in years to come.
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Notes:
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(1.) McAdam (1986) distinguishes conceptually between low- and high-risk forms of
political activism, using the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project as a case study.
The two types of activism differ in terms of transactional costs associated and levels of
risk. For example, signing a petition carries low cost and generally low risk, though in
some cases it can be a high-risk activity (McAdam, 1986). In the case of structural and
individual factors in recruitment to high-risk activism, such as that which carries risk of
arrest or bodily harm, McAdam finds that in the case of Freedom Summer, individuals
with a greater embeddedness in U.S. civil rights activist networks, as measured by
strong-tie connections to other volunteers, were more likely to participate (1986, p. 80).
(2.) The U.S. State Department, under President Donald Trump, announced approval of
the Keystone XL pipeline on March 24, 2017, with the Department issuing a permit for its
construction to the company TransCanada (Dennis & Mufson, 2017). As of this writing,
TransCanada was still seeking approval to run the 1,200-mile pipeline through the state
of Nebraska. If built, the Keystone XL pipeline would connect Alberta’s tar sands to
refineries on the Gulf Coast in the state of Texas.
Luis E. Hestres
University of Texas, San Antonio
Jill E. Hopke
College of Communication, DePaul University