This is material that helped shape the thinking behind the OpEd,
“Climate Change: When It’s All In The Family.”
SUMMARY: A strategy focusing on elites and opinionmakers. Recruit surprising new names to jolt public awareness. In the style of speakers at the Clinton Global Initiative, leaders describe their personal journey in recognizing climate change’s danger; sign on to a lowest-common-denominator statement positioning it as “the greatest challenge facing the world,” and outline what their companies, institutions and organizations will do to end “business as usual.” Launch when the group includes some people who work in the fossil fuel industry.
Achieving changes at the scale and speed we need will require buy-in from mainstream elites and decision-makers: C-level executives, heads of major organizations, and other influential and well-known people.
So far we have mostly progressive companies, e.g. the BICEP coalition (Businesses for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy) announced early in 2013 http://climatedeclaration.us and individuals like Richard Branson, Jeremy Grantham, and Tom Steyer. We need many more “go-to” corporate and financial.
Recruit surprising new names to “come out” and jolt public awareness. In the style of speakers at the Clinton Global Initiative, leaders will describe their personal journey in recognizing climate change’s danger; sign on to a lowest-common-denominator statement positioning it as “the greatest challenge facing the world,” and outline what their companies, institutions and organizations will do to end “business as usual.”
Plan a high-profile “coming out” event — but say it won’t happen until the group includes some people who work in the fossil fuel industry. Finding leaders can happen in part through “Mom & Dad, What Did You Do About Climate Change,” as families reach out to other families to identify and recruit people to come out — and be whistleblowers in the fossilfuel industry.
Possible partners: Clinton Global Initiative, 350.org, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), CERES, BSR, CleanEdge, other sustainable and diverse business and community organizations.
NOTES:
Here’s an example of a diversified energy CEO moving in the right direection: David Crane, CEO of NRG: Here’s how the energy industry will reinvent itself:
And make no mistake about our children. They will hold all of us accountable — true believers and climate deniers alike. The day is coming when our children sit us down in our dotage, look us straight in the eye, with an acute sense of betrayal and disappointment in theirs, and whisper to us, “You knew — and you didn’t do anything about it. Why?” And for a long time, our string of excuses has run something like this: “We didn’t have the technology. … It would have been ruinously expensive. … The government didn’t make us do it. …”
But now we have the technology — actually, the suite of technologies — and they are safe, reliable and affordable as well as sustainable….The time for action is now; we have run out of time for more excuses.
How Quickly an Industry Can Change: 1996: whistleblower Jeffrey Wiegand, VP of R&D at Brown & Williamson, appears on 60 Minutes to describe company efforts to increase nicotine in cigarette smoke. (He later founded Smoke-Free Kids and the film “The Insider” was based on his story.)
1996: Liggett & Myers CEO Bennet LeBow acknowledges that tobacco was addictive and caused cancer; the fifth largest U.S. tobacco company breaks the industry’s united front, settling 22 state lawsuits.
1998: Top four companies sign the Tobacco Master Settlement. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/29/us/liggett-myers-to-assist-tobacco-industry-inquiry.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement
2009 UK Anti-Smoking Campaign: kids ask their parents to stop smoking– also some US campaigns. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkmlGWdpXko a very sincere video http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/news/archive/cancernews/2009-09-15-children-ask-parents-to-quit-smoking-in-new-government-campaign http://smokefree.nhs.uk/