We’ve made it to the fifth and final piece in our self-action series! Over the past month, we’ve explored how people are pushing for a clean, green, and just future in their personal lives, in the courts, at work, and within their communities. Today’s story focuses on a vehicle for systemic change that may not at first seem like a space for personal action: politics.
Most Americans agree that the United States should implement more ambitious climate policies, but influence them as an individual may feel out of reach. In this piece, the experts explain why they see elections as the most important space people can get involved in, and how focusing on this kind of action can even help us leave behind personal carbon footprint guilt.
The vision
We want to be in the business of creating more environmental voters. Because if we do, the politicians will follow. They will follow, or they will no longer become politicians, simply because every politician has to win an election.
Nathaniel Stinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project
The spotlight
When Molly Kawahata worked as a climate consultant in the Obama White House, she recalls interns were horrified that they didn’t have recycling bins in their office. How could the team work towards sustainability in their work but ignore something as fundamental as recycling? In fact, she says, the building has a recycling system out back that offers greater efficiency, something she routinely explained to shocked interns. But she got her thinking: Even if we were tossing the recyclables in the trash, the impact we would have on the policy we’re pushing would be much more significant, she says. I mean, it blows it out of the water.
This notion that there might be some sort of hypocrisy in caring for or fighting for the climate while leading a less than perfectly sustainable life irritated Kawahata. You’re taking a system based on fossil fuels and placing the blame on the end user who is forced to use it, he says, an effort that seeks to discredit the voices of people attempting to change that system.
Today, Kawahata focuses on psychology as a tool to propel the climate movement towards hope and systems change, and travels as a speaker and consultant. He says the number one question he hears from the people he talks to is what they can do to help fight climate change. Usually they think I’ll tell them to go vegan, she says. They don’t expect me to say that elections are the answer.
But, in his view, political change is the path to large-scale systemic change, and voting is how people influence politics. While many people don’t immediately see them as environmental actions, building the electorate and getting more voters to the polls is where he believes people can really make an impact for the climate. If the people doing it are also vegans who recycle, she’s not overly concerned.
It starts with winning the election, Kawahata says. It’s a short-term individual action that everyone can take [help] win elections for pro-climate candidates and get more environmentalists to vote.
I wish every climate activist understood one thing, says Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project (which made our 2016 Grist 50 list). Whether you vote or not is public knowledge. So campaigns look for who votes and then focus only on those voters and their stated priorities.
By simply voting regularly, Stinnett says, you increase the visibility of the issues you care about and the likelihood that politicians will act on them. On the other hand, not voting basically guarantees that your priorities will be ignored.
Stinnett worked for over a decade as a political campaign consultant in the early 2000s. He and the teams he worked with paid close attention to election polls, and he was consistently frustrated to see that very few voters pointed to climate change or other issues environmental issues as a top priority.
In 2014, after running an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in Boston, Stinnett was taking a break from politics while he and his wife were expecting their first child. I was just having lunch with a friend of mine who is a pollster, and we were going through some data together and something caught my eye, he recalls. It was a rare poll that blew the priorities of both voters and non-voters. Stinnett saw that among non-voters, climate change and environmental issues seemed to rank higher.
It hit me like a ton of bricks, she says. Maybe the climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a participation problem.
Stinnett founded his nonprofit to focus attention on this issue. The Environmental Voter Project, or EVP, is now active in 19 states and has participated in more than 100 elections this year alone. It’s always Election Day for the Environmental Voter Project somewhere, he says gleefully.
Stinnett and his team use a combination of data science and behavioral science to identify environmentalists who don’t vote and turn them into more consistent voters. She describes the approach as really, really nerdy. When he first started the nonprofit, he knew the concept was solid, but never in my wildest dreams did I think the volunteers would be thrilled with it, she says.
Emily Church, one of the organizations with more than 6,000 volunteers, embraces nerdiness. She began phone banking with EVP during the 2018 shoulder season.
We need to pass meaningful legislation and we need voters who care about climate change to vote [in order] to get there, he says. And it turns out we know how to do it, so let’s just do it.
Since last year, Church has been running a propaganda campaign in Pittsburgh, where he just finished his freshman year as a biology professor at Chatham University. He says canvassing with EVP has helped her not only feel like she’s making a difference to the climate movement, but also help her feel more connected to a new city.
Stinnett cites one more reason why focusing on voters appeals to volunteers: Unlike many other types of climate action, the battles in elections are small and the results tangible.
Last month, the EVP involved hundreds of volunteers in mobilizing environmentalists to vote in Denver’s mayoral election. It’s much smaller than trying to save humanity, Stinnett says. And while the organization doesn’t approve applicants, Stinnett and his team make sure volunteers can see their victories clearly in other ways, often through data.
Even if the election doesn’t go the way you would have liked, if we get 300 people to vote for the very first time, they’re going to show up again and again and again and start driving policymaking, he says. Those are victories. These are examples of systemic change.
In the 2022 midterm elections, clean energy turned out to be a winning issue in some key races, and nearly half of voters cited climate change as a major issue in their decisions, according to one poll.
Kawahata, who recently joined the board of the Environmental Voter Project, attributes political victories like the Inflation Reduction Act to this growth in the climate electorate. It all goes back to community organizers on the ground in Georgia, largely organized by Stacey Abrams and her organizations, Kawahata says. [They] people registered to vote at historic rates and also went the extra mile to fight voter suppression and in that process, flipped a state that everyone said had no chance of flipping, which became the winning margin for us to get something passed like the IRA.
To be clear, Kawahata praises people making green lifestyle choices if that’s in the cards, she says. But what he opposes is making people feel guilty or ashamed for not doing everything in their power to circumvent the prevailing system. If I turn off the lights at night and live in a dismal, dark house, am I a climate hero? she jokes.
When people feel sick or anxious about simply living a normal, modern life, they fear not only the crippling effects of climate action but also the impacts on psychological well-being.
On some level, it’s just a shitty thing to do to people, Kawahata says. It isolates people and effectively controls the environmental movement.
Conversely, acting as part of a community has proven to be an antidote to climate anxiety for some. There is so much power in the solidarity of being part of a movement and part of a team that is all focused on tackling the same thing. It’s the perfect tonic for a very scary moment in time, says Stinnett. And the voter mobilization movement doesn’t just happen every four years, it runs year-round, she says, providing plenty of opportunities for meaningful action from the local to the national level. Every election can be a lever for change.
Claire Elise Thompson
More visibility
See for yourself
Are you in the habit of voting in every election in your area? Have you gone even further, to help friends and neighbors do the same? And do you feel that being a voter is part of your identity?
Reply to this email to tell us about your relationship with voting. (And if it’s helpful, vote.org is a good one-stop shop for checking if you’re registered at your current address, making up for it if you’re not, and finding other resources like election memos and mail-in vote request information.)
A farewell shot
The United States isn’t the only country where climate action is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in elections. Ahead of the first round of last year’s French presidential election, thousands took part in a March for the Future in cities across France to urge candidates to heed the warnings of the IPCC’s latest report. In this photo, a young protester in Toulouse holds up a sign that reads, I vote for the planet.
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Image Source : grist.org