Greenpeace's John Passacantando
On global warming, Bush, and the future of the environmental movement.
By Kay Steiger
October 17, 2007
While Al Gore may now be the most famous figure in the fight against global warming, Greenpeace USA Executive Director John Passacantando has been on the ground organizing against climate change for years. Passacantando is a former Wall Street analyst who studied economics at Wake Forest and New York universities. In 1993, he founded the group Ozone Action, one of the leaders of the successful effort to ban chemicals that were destroying the earth’s ozone layer. He took the reigns of Greenpeace USA in 2000. One of the world’s leading environmental organizations, Greenpeace has offices in 41 countries and claims over 2.5 million supporters worldwide.
Passacantando recently talked with Campus Progress from his office in Washington, D.C., about the future of the environmental movement—and why students are so integral to its success.
Campus Progress: Most people accept the theory that climate change represents a grave threat to the globe. Why is it so difficult for Congress to pass effective climate change legislation?
John Passacantando: The problem is that the legislative process is a sausage-making process. You always get half of what you ask for. It’s the moderating process of politics combined with the corrupting influence of money.
If we don’t do the minimum of what the scientists say we need to do to avoid the greatest impacts from climate change, we’re really in a lot of trouble. So the goal is to drive that ecological line: Left or right, radical or conservative, do what the scientists tell us we need to do.
On one hand, it must have been encouraging to see world leaders gather at the United Nations high-level meeting on global warming late last month. On the other hand, how discouraging was it that the world’s biggest carbon emitters—the United States, India, and China—didn’t send their heads of state?
It was encouraging in that it was the first time in history you had that many world leaders talking about global warming. The problem is that they were sitting around talking about how and when to get Bush to move and not feeling the political strength to do it themselves. [Unless] the country that is emitting 25-plus percent of the world’s greenhouse gases with 5 percent of the population moves, you can’t get other players to move. Unless [Bush] moves, [the other world leaders] can’t really get the Chinese, Indians, and others to engage as fully as they need to. So the United States is the logjam. But it was good to see the secretary general pull those people together. It was useful, in a diplomatic way.
The most important thing is for our country to move Bush aside and really lead on this. The various presidential candidates are lukewarm on doing the right thing on global warming. They’re still a bit timid.
And what about the U.N. meeting scheduled for December in Bali, Indonesia? What needs to happen there?
People are hoping to get the United States on board there. It’s really a long shot, but what [U.N. officials have] to do in Bali is get some forward momentum even while they wait one more year to be done with this oilman president. [They need] forward momentum to establish what they call “the second commitment period” that [sets] targets and timetables for the industrialized nations and the developing nations.
It’s a tall task, but Bush shouldn’t be able to undermine it because people know the game that he and his people have played. It’s been a fairly crude strategy for years. The public gets it now.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the new book by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus called Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. In it, the authors present a new, radical manifesto for the environmental movement. Will their arguments have an impact?
I haven’t read the book. But as far as the discussion that it has provoked, it was useful in that it was critical of the mainstream environmental movement. Criticism can always be useful.
I watched Shellenberger and Nordhaus present their thesis at a conference in Middlebury, Vermont. They leveled their criticism at national environmental groups and then at local groups. They pretty much said, “A pox on all your homes,” and, “We don’t really have the answer.” [They believe that] all these [progressive] issues need to be rolled into one—sort of a rainbow coalition of gay rights and anti-war and anti-global warming and jobs.
But that’s not how things work. Historically, people pick an issue and they win on that. They don’t link it to another issue and another and another and another to make it more powerful—that makes it weaker. And so I thought their premise was incorrect. It was rather sloppy.
What can students do to get involved in the fight against global warming?
Students can drive their campuses to be carbon-neutral. It’s a major trend, [and] it’s very important. There is this huge conference coming up, Power Shift, that’s going to be the largest gathering of students on global warming in history. Students are absolutely key to [the success of the environmental movement] because students have, through a range of social movements, held the moral line.
The Washington Post recently ran this big piece by the [global warming] skeptic Bjorn Lomborg that said, “Well, there are extremists on both sides, here’s my happy medium.” But that’s not how science works. Students understand that. Students understand science. Editors at the Washington Post don’t seem to.
That’s what’s very exciting about working with students. This is going to be a long fight. There is just no more room for compromise. Compromise on global warming is the 30-year delay that industry already won.
Kay Steiger is an Associate Editor of CampusProgress.org.
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John Passacantando didn’t “work on Wall Street.” He was a supply-side economist in the 80’s. (In fact, he worked for supply-side guru Jude Wanniski.) I went to college with Mr. Passacantando, and find it amazing that this part of his history is glossed over. Even more conservative, well-respected economists agree that supply-siders have done huge damage to the economy. How does Passacantando answer to that?
— Tina - Nov 14, 01:50 AM - #Even when he worked for Polyconomics, John always offered a contrarian view. We are all a composite product of our experiences. I’m sure John would say that his exposure to Wanniski and other supply siders helped shape his current thinking.
— kathy - Oct 2, 09:04 PM - #These non governmental organizations are attack dogs used by the United nations to change the laws in sovergn nations to what the UN wants them to be. This man will switch sides whenever it pleases him. I refuse to be a pawn of the false left/right system, this is classic Problem>Reaction>Solution, the corporations create a problem, set up NGO’s to handle the reaction, then await the solution, government mandated/funded solutions. Perfect scam, and the turtles are still in bad shape
— Researcher - Oct 23, 07:25 PM - #