While environmental awareness has seeped into mainstream U.S.  society since the 1970s €” the era when 20 million people hit the streets on Earth Day to demand action €” the structures of power remain largely the same. The mass mobilizations around the original Earth Day helped spur then-President Richard Nixon to sign a series of ambitious environmental laws that helped to clean contaminated waterways, save the bald eagle from the ravages of pesticides and began to clear the air, which in the early 1960s was so polluted that people were passing out all over our cities. Most environmental victories since then have benefited from those changes in the law, but more fundamental changes seem as distant as ever.

Today€™s environmental movement is floundering, even though the stakes are even higher. While local grassroots campaigners continue to fight for endangered forests, challenge polluting companies in their communities, and confront the coal industry€™s assaults on the mountains of southern Appalachia, the best known national organizations can point to few recent victories. And they have failed to demonstrate meaningful leadership around what climatologist James Hansen calls the €œpredominant moral issue of this century€: the struggle to prevent the catastrophic and irreversible warming of the planet.

As British journalist Johann Hari reported in The Nation in his article, €œThe Wrong Kind of Green,€ in March, this is partly the result of a legacy of corporate-styled environmental organizations teaming up with the world€™s most polluting companies.

In response to the climate crisis, we have seen unprecedented collaboration between large environmental organizations and corporations seeking to profit from new environmental legislation. For example, the Climate Action Partnership (known as USCAP) has brought Alcoa, DuPont, General Electric and General Motors together with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy to push for the €œmarket-based€ approach to climate legislation known as €œcap-and-trade.€ This policy €” which passed the U.S. House last year €” would put a cap on the total amount of pollution, then allow businesses limiting their carbon dioxide emissions to sell €œpermits to pollute€ to dirtier companies. This would create a vast, highly speculative market in carbon credits and offsets, with gigantic perks for corporations and little benefit for the planet. The push for cap-and-trade legislation has receded for now under pressure from both right wing anti-tax fanatics and market-skeptical environmentalists, but Washington observers now anticipate an even worse Senate climate bill, to be announced later in April, which will be laden with far more blatant giveaways to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
 
It begs the question €” where has the environmental movement gone wrong?