Bringing more workers into the climate movement might also look like organizing for legislation that ties decarbonization to the creation of union jobs and lower energy bills, like New York’s Build Public Renewables Act, or BPRA. New Yorkers won the BPRA last year after years of campaigning by forging connections between political parties, environmental justice groups, and labor unions. This coalition built working-class support by simply talking to people: In the wake of blackouts that rocked New York during the summer of 2019, organizers canvassed working-class neighborhoods hit hardest by the shutoffs, drawing connections between electricity rate hikes, pollution, and climate change. The resulting campaign, boasting a huge working-class base, successfully pressured New York lawmakers to build out renewables on one of the most ambitious decarbonization timelines in the U.S. As the BPRA shows, base building is not about raising awareness. It’s about what happens after—the long, difficult process of talking to people, deciding what you need and want, and figuring out where you have the leverage to push for your interests, together.
This emphasis on base building is not meant to repudiate protest or militant forms of civil disobedience. As the cases of Keystone XL and Standing Rock demonstrate, in the context of clear goals and a broader strategy, infrastructure blockades are immensely powerful. Shutting down highways, meanwhile, has been an indispensable tactic in civil rights and racial justice organizing in the U.S. since the 1960s, a way for ordinary people to flex their economic muscle outside of the workplace. During Black Lives Matter protests in 2014 and 2020, highway shutdowns across the nation disrupted business as usual and built momentum for the movement, while clarifying the systemic character of police murder by tying it to the destruction of Black neighborhoods due to highway development. By taking over the streets or being called to physically block infrastructure, millions of ordinary people got a feel for their collective power, the sort of awakening that cannot be underestimated. There is no reason such tactics should be off the table for the climate movement, which will need true conviction in its power to win.
It is especially important to defend disruption as Republican legislatures around the country declare protest of any sort to be a criminal act. Responding in large part to the success of the Standing Rock encampment, at least 17 U.S. states have passed laws over the past seven years that qualify oil and gas pipelines as “critical infrastructure,” and damaging, interfering with, or merely trespassing on them punishable as a felony. Just one week after such a law went into effect in Louisiana, four people were arrested and charged for boating on public waters near an easement for the Bayou Bridge pipeline. And amid widespread and ongoing protests against Cop City—a $90 million, 85-acre police training facility to be constructed on Atlanta’s largest remaining forest area—more than 60 people were charged earlier this month with racketeering, money laundering, and charity fraud, arrests that have involved raids on people’s homes and denial of bond. Fossil fuel–aligned politicians take the climate movement’s disruptions seriously, and so should we. But relying on disruption alone without a solid political movement to seriously move the goalposts only puts protesters in danger—it doesn’t significantly move the needle.