Last night, I attended a debate between Carl Pope, the executive director of the
Sierra Club, and Dave O'Reilly, the CEO of
Chevron. Given scheduling and, I imagine, some dragging of feet from both parties, it took the Commonwealth Club and the Wall Street Journal a full year to get this event organized.
On the bus home, a couple thoughts on the event stayed with me.
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I worked with the media team in Sierra Club national headquarters for a couple semesters while I was in school. One of the first things I learned about pitching a story was, of course, that it has to have a hook. One of the most compelling of these hooks is a "strange bedfellows" story, where two groups that wouldn't traditionally be lumped together share a common cause or campaign (such as Sierra Club's "
Blue Green Alliance" with the United Steel Workers or Sierra Club's work with hunters and anglers to preserve wildlife habitat).
Last night's event had a shade of that type of hook -- which is probably why it seemed like half of San Francisco was in attendance.
This is not to say by any means that Sierra Club and Chevron are in cahoots -- in fact, Sierra Club has long made the oil giant a target of campaigns around environmental justice and destruction.
However, at one point in the conversation, O'Reilly (consciously or not) conceded that he believes the coal lobby in Washington is too strong for natural gas to have a real chance of being implemented on a large scale. Pope jumped on the opportunity to invite O'Reilly to join him in D.C. to take a stand against the coal lobby -- and the two men shook on it. I'd guess Sierra Club will try to hold O'Reilly to this promise -- which he may not be able to wiggle out of, given that the event was swarming with local and national media and will be broadcast on NPR.
Beyond this potential lobbying duo becoming "strange bedfellows," I think it symbolizes a larger movement towards cooperation between the large nonprofits and environmental lobbies and the companies they've long been harshly criticizing. At Sierra Club, this move follows last year's
launch of the "GreenWorks" line with Clorox -- another case of unprecedented cooperation and dialogue between big industry and the club.
For us at
Bright Green Talent, this is hugely energizing. We, too, believe that there's no longer any way to tackle the world's environmental problems without everyone's cooperation -- this is, for example, why we've
chosen to work with Wal-Mart to help them grow their sustainability team. Many of the giant green nonprofits -- Conservation International, EDF, NRDC -- are pursuing similar private-public partnerships.
It's not just that strange bedfellows brings media attention: It brings together different groups of stakeholders who may never have seen themselves on the same side of the table. When I worked at Sierra Club, some of the most interesting conversations I had in pitching stories was with hunter and angler groups who
couldn't believe that Sierra Club wanted to side with them. Identifying goals and values that traditionally oppositional groups have in common is a powerful new direction in the environmental movement.
But don't worry -- we're not letting Chevron off the hook just for shaking hands with their adversaries.
Pope also called for Chevron and the other large oil companies to set aside 10 percent of their profits for 10 years to create a fund that would clean up all the communities and ecosystems that have been devastated by oil development over the past century.
And we side with Pope and the Sierra Club as they call for ambitious and significant decreases in carbon emissions (80 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050), rather than allowing industry to hide behind claims that those goals "just aren't realistic." O'Reilly predicts we'll be lucky if we can reduce emissions by just 25 percent by 2050.
We still need people and organizations to stand up for communities who don't have a voice -- such as the protesters who stood up last night to bring awareness to Chevron's legal troubles in Ecuador over environmental contamination.
Just because mutual goals have been acknowledged doesn't mean that both sides can't continue to pick at each other's arguments. Indeed, that continued criticism will make alliances ever stronger and more meaningful.
Most significantly, where there used to be a thick wall over which each party hurled insults and accusations, there is now a live and potentially constructive dialogue. Strange bedfellows or not, it's time to act together and move towards a prosperous low-carbon future.
Want to see it for yourself?
Watch for the event to be rebroadcast on NPR. Here's a
video from local news station ABC7 in San Francisco. Sierra Club has posted some
thoughts and with video highlights.
Reuters also picked up the story, with a great exchange:
Pope criticized U.S. energy regulation for not forcing utilities to buy more low-carbon electricity.
"Well, if you can get the government to move faster, then good luck," O'Reilly said.
Pope replied, to applause: "It would help if you would get out of the way."
Carolyn Mansfield is the community engagement associate at Bright Green Talent, which helps connect people with green jobs around the world.
Photo from Sierra Club
