It’s the movement, stupid

Charles Ashurst has penned a column so full of hippie angst that Jane Fonda must be trying to buy the movie rights to it.

“It’s the movement, stupid” blames the absence of a climate activist movement to get things moving on the green agenda. No, really:

What has been lacking is the movement. Geeks of America: get out from in front of that computer screen and - yes, this is a really hard one for all geeks - one understands perfectly your trepidation here - relate to others. Either find or form a movement. A loose affiliation of geek loners is not how one succeeds at activism. Even a slight majority people who sort of kind of support the cause is not how one succeeds at activism. The opposition can steam roll over that effortlessly. Child’s play. You have got to have a movement.

According to Ashurst, the reason greens are failing is because there is no activist movement to make it work. He has a point, but it’s not the one he thinks he’s making. The greens have plenty of activism, witness the WWF, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, NRDC, Green parties and the Alliance for Climate Protection (plus innumerable other green groups) all aligned in their greenthink activism. Greenpeace is annoying everyone by climbing things that don’t belong to them, but at least they’re ‘out from behind their computer screens‘ - surely that would count as something Ashurst could recognize as activism? The real problem is that all these groups have just one thing in common; they are ineffective. What Ashurst really wants is to press the reset button on the failed green movement and get a do-over with some competent activists that won’t let the cat out of the bag with videos of exploding tots.

He goes on to bemoan that the movement he longs for lacks a leader :

And who is perhaps the model of all times for how one runs a successful effective movement? Martin Luther King Jr. There’s the play book to read from. It’s not enough for geeks to sit before monitor lit darkness writing millions more lines of prose on the subject. That’s not going to cut it.

…

The movement needs to know how to make a public spectacle. The movement needs a voice that is a moving song that rises up from the crowd and thrills the onlookers to reach within themselves to find the inner strength they didn’t know they had to accomplish the impossible.

Wanted: a Martin Luther King Jr. for the climate change movement.

I’ve got bad news for Charles Ashurst: the ‘movement’ you’re looking for exists, but it failed; done in by the weight of real evidence against manipulated models and hokey hockey sticks and the relentless hyperbole of hippie doomsayers who blamed everything from cow farts to carrier bags for global warming until green fatigue made everyone tune them out.

The leader you wanted is alive and well and failed too, or perhaps you never heard of Al Gore.

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