We now know the U.S. Senate will not pass climate-change
legislation this year. Postmortems have
pointed to a number of challenges: the lack of leadership from the White House,
unified GOP opposition to the Senate cap-and-trade bill, the structure and
rules of the Senate, and the complicated nature of cap-and-trade legislation.

There has been one major omission in much of
this analysis: the absence of pressure
from Americans across the country demanding that serious action be taken to
address climate change. Few Americans are
currently engaged in this great societal challenge in a way that would generate
the necessary political will to act. It
is the absence of this public pressure, above all else, that has resulted in the
current state of political inaction.

Take the most broadly transformational political
acts in the history of the U.S. — the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation
and the approval of the 14th Amendment in the 1860s, women’s suffrage in 1920,
the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s, the establishment
of the EPA and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act in the early 1970s, to
name a few. They all required some form
of political leadership, but that leadership was exercised in response to the
abolitionist, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and environmental
movements of the time, social movements
that forced the issues into our national conscience and made inaction politically
untenable. These social movements consisted
of large numbers of people, united by a strong sense of shared values and moral
purpose, who stood up to the deeply held assumptions and powerful vested
interests of their times.

Environmental organizations and foundations spent
well over $200 million in the attempt to enact climate change legislation. Several of these organizations built
alliances with some of the largest corporations in America in an effort to
promote a watered-down bill. And even
this effort failed. Why?

The top answer is that we failed to build a social
movement equal to the task. In the
absence of a real climate movement, we are likely to continue to see even
inadequate half-measures fail again and again. Only a broad-based social movement around
climate change can get the job done, fueled by the same passion and underpinned
with the same moral conviction that characterized the historical movements that
ended slavery, promoted suffrage, secured civil rights, and mandated a cleaner
and healthier environment.