The Climate Activism Model: Civil Rights, Prohibition, or Abolition?

The scientific community agrees that the world cannot release more than about 500 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents into the global atmosphere without causing global warming in excess of the two degree Celsius threshold that the global community has established as the maximum tolerable level of global warming. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to a level that is consistent with avoiding catastrophic global climate change will require fundamental changes in the United States energy economy. Addressing climate change will also require fundamental changes to individual personal choices about how and where people live, work, recreate, heat and cool their homes. While efficiency and renewable energy technologies may be able to carry us a long way towards achieving the 80% reduction in United States greenhouse gas emissions deemed necessary by the scientific community, full achievement of this goal is inconsistent with current US energy consumption patterns under which many Americans choose to live tens of miles from their places of employment, drive to work in large single passenger vehicles and fly long distances for recreational, social, and business reasons.The working assumption among institutions, organizations and scholars working on addressing greenhouse gas emissions is that the radical economic and social change necessary to address global warming will be driven by law and legal institutions. Much ink has been spilled discussing the relative merits of a whole panoply of legal tools, ranging from economic controls such as emissions trading regimes and carbon taxes to traditional regulatory controls such as emissions limits, to the extension of common law doctrines of tort liability or public trust as a means of controlling greenhouse gas emissions. The assumption behind these discussions is that, properly implemented, legal change is capable of prompting the sort of permanent social change that will be required to address climate change. Yet there are reasons to doubt the efficacy of legal norm generation to mediate the magnitude of social change necessary to adapt to a carbon free energy economy.Law-driven social changes of this magnitude are not unprecedented, but seem relatively few. Climate activists in the United States consciously draw on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in both their rhetoric and their tactics, hoping to repeat the relatively successful social change accomplished by 1960s civil rights legislation. But the Civil Rights struggle is not the only paradigm for fundamental social and economic change driven by law. Other examples of such fundamental change that come to mind include abolition, prohibition, the achievement of gender equality, and school desegregation. At least one of these social change initiatives (prohibition) was an abject failure, another (abolition) was a near complete success; the others have had moderate but incomplete success at achieving the degree of social restructuring. While the US climate activism movement likes to pattern itself on the model of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, some aspects of the climate activist movement bear an unfortunate resemblance to the ultimately unsuccessful temperance and prohibition movements. Unlike the Civil Rights activists of the mid-20th century United States, climate activists are largely not themselves the victims of the injustices wrought by climate change. More like the temperance and prohibition activists of the early 20th century, climate change activists cast themselves in opposition to an industry selling a product in widespread consumer use, including use by many of the very activists opposed to its distribution.The abolitionist movement may provide a better analog for climate activism, but with its own cautionary implications. Like modern day climate activists, 18th and 19th century abolitionists sought to change fundamental economic practices that had prevailed for centuries, and many of the early abolitionists acted out of an altruistic concern for the human rights of geographically and culturally remote others rather than protection of their own personal or economic interests. While the road to global abolition of slavery was neither smooth nor swift, the ultimate success of the global slavery abolition movement may provide the best model for a successful movement to phase out our fossil fuel powered energy economy.