Climate change: what the world needs now is ... politics.

It is no exaggeration to say that unchecked global warming will kill more people and drive more animals, insects, and plants into extinction than has any other industrial pollutant in human history. Where I live, in Oregon in the northwestern United States, scientists believe that warmer temperatures will cut the snowpack in the Cascade Mountains in half by around 2040, with the rest disappearing by the end of the century. A 50-percent reduction in snowpack means dramatic reductions in summer stream flow, with devastating consequences for clean water, for farmers, for salmon, and for the health of the streams on whose banks our regional culture and economy have flourished. Here in Oregon, we are rich enough so that we can adapt to year after year of summer drought. Drought will breed social conflict, we will be poorer, but we will survive.

Elsewhere, however, the story is grimmer. The 6 million people of Lima, for instance, depend almost exclusively on the snow-fed Rimac river for their drinking water, but the Andean snowfields are disappearing, and within 20 years the Rimac may be dry six months out of the year. And from arctic populations of polar bears to mountain pikas in my back yard, global warming will soon surpass habitat destruction as the century's primary driver of mass extinction. According to a recent report in Nature, global warming alone could commit to extinction up to a million terrestrial species by 2050. This is 35 percent of the estimated number of creatures and plants on the planet.

It is also no exaggeration to say that stabilizing the climate poses a political challenge of unprecedented scope. Needed emission reductions on the order of 80 percent can only be achieved through a rapid transition to clean energy technologies--and not only in the rich countries, but in the developing world as well. Journalist and climate activist Ross Gelbspan argues that "given the magnitude and urgency of the accelerating pace of climate change, the only hope lies in a rapid and unprecedented mobilization of humanity around this issue."

Yet many of the "solutions" to climate change offered by U.S. environmentalists fall far short of this mark. Instead we often see a focus on lifestyle changes, combined with public education and lobbying campaigns: ride bikes, change light bulbs, buy green power, build a green building, brew your own biodiesel, write your senator. These twin strategies evolved in the 1970s and 1980s: educational and lobbying campaigns mobilized citizens for short-term legislative gains, while lifestyle changes would create the foundation for longer-term, widespread cultural change. But the new dominance of a virulent anti-government ideology in Washington has rendered traditional grassroots pressure tactics ineffective. Consider the people with power and influence in Washington today: George W. Bush, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Dennis Hastert, James Inhofe, Larry Craig, Antonin Scalia. These are not your father's Republicans. No amount of lobbying, no tidal wave of moral pressure, will ever convince the current Republican establishment to seriously support policies as visionary as those proposed by Gelbspan. And stopping global warming simply cannot wait for cultural change; it requires short-term, massive investments in efficiency and renewables, driven by government policy. Where does this leave us?

MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS

Progressives of my generation grew up under the mythic influence of the civil rights struggle. The lesson that many of us took is that, in America, political change happens in this way: People adopt a moral cause (abolition, women's suffrage, labor rights, civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear) and build a movement to educate the public. They demonstrate in courageous ways the depth of their conviction. They build a tide of moral sentiment that eventually converts even the existing political establishment. Eventually, the movement's demands are codified in national legislation.

Inspired by this vision, in 1999 some wonderful colleagues and I founded a non-profit organization called The Green House Network. Our core idea has been to multiply leadership supporting the clean energy revolution that we need to stop global warming. As other key organizations did during the labor and civil rights movements, we bring together citizen activists and educators and provide information, networking, tools, and organizing models. These leaders return home to engage in action and education--giving talks, organizing conferences, holding media events, meeting with political and opinion leaders--all helping to stop global warming. I am very proud of the work that hundreds of Green House Network members have done. But six years on, we are now further away than we were in 1999 to the Holy Grail of American single-issue political movements: substantive national legislation.

In the 2004 election, overshadowed by issues of war, terrorism, and the economy, global warming was barely mentioned. Even if John Kerry had won the presidency, however, he would have been hard-pressed to achieve action on climate change, because of deep ideological opposition in the U.S. Congress. Over the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic, hard-right turn in the political perspective held by a large and powerful minority of U.S. political leaders, reflecting an odd combination of libertarian economics and Christian social fundamentalism. On reflection, the civil rights story about American political change--from morally grounded grassroots movement to sweeping legislative accopmlishment--is incomplete: it leaves out the politics. Our civil rights forebears were able to overcome a discredited (albeit powerful) racist ideology, moving the existing political establishment through the sheer moral force of argument. By contrast, our movement faces extraordinarily modern, politically ascendant, and well-organized and -financed ideological opponents. This is not just the economic opposition of the coal, auto, and oil industries; we confront a deep-seated ideological opposition to the very idea of any far-reaching government initiative. Civil rights-era tactics fueled by deep moral commitment--education campaigns, marches, and even civil disobedience actions--will not be enough. We need, above all, to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.

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LIFESTYLE POLITICS: NO SUBSTITUTE FOR THE REAL THING

Whenever I talk about global warming, someone in the audience always wants to pin the blame on the greedy consumption habits of American consumers, their (not our) slothful ways, and their (not our) love of SUVs. My response is to ask them if they ever fly in an airplane. Because I do, a lot--and two cross-country plane flights wipe out the greenhouse gas benefits of driving a hybrid car. Because I fly from Oregon to Tennessee to see my dad, or to distant conferences for work, I am responsible for a lot more global warming emissions than most of my SUV-driving neighbors. Lifestyle changes can be an important entree into progressive political action, but when it comes to global warming, they are no substitute.

We do need to talk about values, but our focus needs to be on right and wrong policies, not right and wrong people. Government--our collective voice--has consistently made the morally wrong choices, subsidizing big fossil fuel producers and failing to support clean energy technologies. Not as individual consumers, but as a political society, we have failed to demand increased fuel efficiency in our vehicles, and as a result we see our oil dollars fund terrorism in the Middle East, our young people suffer from an asthma crisis in our cities, and our planet's climate grow increasingly unstable.

If, instead of focusing on the need for change in Washington and in our state capitals, we talk instead about our neighbor's lifestyle choices, most of us can rightly be charged with failing--miserably--to practice what we preach. More importantly, blaming instead of engaging our neighbors will get us nowhere. Global warming will not be solved by lifestyle changes or any shift to simple living, desirable as those changes might be. We need to pledge our lives, our creative energies, and our broad-ranging collective talents to creating a political movement powerful enough, in a few short years, to launch the new clean energy markets and global forest preservation efforts that will mark the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.

LESSONS FROM THE NORTHWEST

There is no doubt this can be done, and Oregon is a case in point. The state, like the country, appears in newspaper maps as polarized into red and blue regions: blue mostly on the coastal side of the Cascades, solid red on the interior east side. Oregon faces the same ideological warfare that plagues the rest of the country, with economic libertarians bent on union-busting and deregulation, especially of land use, and cultural conservatives hot to impose social controls on sexuality.

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This was the scene confronting Jonathan Poisner and his team at the Oregon League of Conservation Voters in the late 1990s. The OLCV was founded in 1972, and for its first couple of decades followed a typical post-1960s liberal strategy, focusing on public education. As Oregon's electoral landscape turned increasingly conservative, however, the organization saw the need to reinvent itself as a serious political organization. Between 1998 and 2004, OLCV more than doubled its annual budget, with much of that money going to pay staff supporting the volunteers running new county-by-county chapters. In the 1996 elections, OLCV fielded 100 volunteers statewide. That number grew to 350 in 1998, 1,100 in 2002, and 1,500 in 2004--all of them making phone calls, knocking on doors, holding house parties, raising money, talking to their neighbors. In this process, OLCV managed to unite the environmental community in Oregon--single-issue folks working on salmon or sprawl, forest health or clean air, transit or environmental justice--around an electoral agenda.

In 1996, conservative Republicans dominated the state Senate 18 to 12. In the 2004 elections, however, the Senate had swung solidly back into the pro-environment camp. Thanks to the hard work of many progressive groups in the state, Oregon in 2004 had the highest voter turnout in the nation, at over 80 percent. Oregon has not yet entered a new progressive era. The state House of Representatives remains controlled by anti-government social conservatives. But OLCV has shown how, through straightforward organizing, it is possible to stem the red tide. And Poisner thinks that there is a lot more energy to be tapped. "There are 150,000 Oregonians who belong to environmental organizations," he said, "and we have only 5,000 members." That is a lot of potential volunteers.

Progress in Oregon in galvanizing the environmental vote has paralleled success in other states. In 1997, just 12 states had Leagues of Conservation Voters, and only four had full-time staff. Now 32 states have leagues, 28 of these with full-time employees. Environmentalists for many years have been suspicious of--or uninterested in--electoral politics, content to support education and lobbying groups. In recent years, less than 1 percent of all grants to environmental groups have been directed towards organizations involved in electoral politics. But over the last few years, people who care about the natural world have at last begun to wake up to the new political reality. The American Right has coalesced around an anti-government ideology, and at both the state and national levels has been running and electing candidates who share that worldview. The era of bi-partisan cooperation on environmental issues is over, and the new message is clear: if we are serious about stabilizing the climate, we need--above all--to elect progressive politicians.

The fate of a million species, and of hundreds of millions of poor people in poor countries, could well be decided by the pace of the energy transition set in the next decade. Over the next few years, state and regional campaigns--to promote wind power, biodiesel, and other renewable fuels; to adopt California Clean Car-style mandates; and to cap power plant emissions--provide places to grow the movement to stop global warming. Working within the existing political establishment at the state level, we can win, and are winning, important victories that give us heart. More importantly, in this arena we must build the clean-energy political machine we need to elect the rock-solid majorities necessary to make real progress at the state, and within five years, the national level as well.

Eban Goodstein is Professor of Economics at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. This essay is adapted from a book in progress, to be titled Life in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Reshape the Future.