Citizens Climate Lobby - creating the political will for a sustainable climate
abracad, · Categories: environment, externally authored, spiritual politicsInterview with Marshall Saunders
by Cher Gilmore
An interview with CCL founder Marshall Saunders, who discusses his mission to empower everyday people to exercise their personal and political power in the cause of saving planet Earth. Â January/February 2013
Marshall Saunders, a retired real estate broker, founded Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) in October 2007. According to the group's website, CCL "trains volunteers to speak powerfully to their elected officials, the media and their local communities in order to inspire members of Congress to be leaders and spokespersons for a sustainable climate. CCL volunteers meet with their members of Congress, launch letter-writing campaigns, write letters to the editor and op-ed pieces, and generate editorials to promote a sustainable climate."
As of December 2012, CCL had citizens lobbying teams in 72 US cities and 10 in Canada. CCL's volunteers have had 848 meetings with their Congressional representatives in the last three years to discuss the problem of climate change and legislative solutions such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, and have had over 1,000 newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces published.
Cher Gilmore interviewed Marshall Saunders for Share International.
Marshall Saunders, founder and President of Citizens Climate Lobby.
Share International: What motivated you to start Citizens Climate Lobby?
Marshall Saunders: I was part of an organization called the Microcredit Summit Campaign. A group of us met in 1997 and promised the world and ourselves 100 million little loans for very poor women by the end of the year 2005. It was a year later that we accomplished that goal of 100 million loans. But about 25 per cent of those women were in Bangladesh, and much of that country is virtually at sea level. I thought, here we are trying to get another 5,000 loans in Mexico, and we're going to lose half a million or so due to flooding in Bangladesh! That was one of the things that influenced me.
As far as starting the Citizens Climate Lobby itself, I saw Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. I went back to see it, and went to see it a third time within just 10 days or two weeks. I was struck by it. I had no idea we were in so much trouble. When I saw that movie I wanted to DO something. Okay, what do I do? I saw that Mr Gore and his team were going to train 1,000 people - this was 2006 - and I begged them to train me. So they trained me, and I started giving presentations. I clearly remember sitting at the kitchen counter one morning reading the San Diego Union-Tribune. I'd given about four or five of those presentations, and the paper said that the day before, Congress had voted 18 billion dollars to oil and coal companies in tax credits. I'd gotten about 18 light bulbs changed, I thought, and I said to myself, this is not going to work.
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is part of an organization called RESULTS [a citizens lobbying group formed in 1980 to generate the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty]. I had been a partner and a group leader here in San Diego, and I thought, what we need is an organization like RESULTS, but lobbying on the climate. So I started looking around for one. This seemed to be one of those moments when I had to do it myself or forget about it. Of course, I couldn't forget about it, so I called Sam Daley-Harris [the founder of RESULTS], and he said he'd help me. I didn't have an environmental mailing list and didn't know very much, but Sam said don't worry about that. So I called just about everybody I knew, and 29 people met in a local library. We talked for about three hours and formed three lobby teams, so it was a good start.
SI: What is CCL's mission?
MS: It's very simple and clear. We have two purposes. The first is to create the political will for a stable climate, and the second is to empower people to have breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power. Regarding the second part, when I first started with RESULTS and I met for the first time with a member of Congress, he was there in his blue serge suit, Republican tie, and shiny shoes. I was 50 years old and had done a lot of public speaking, but I was tongue-tied. Just being in the presence of what I perceived to be power, I forgot what I was going to say. Then some of my RESULTS teammates got me going and asked me a question or two and I did pretty well.
SI: You must have a way of training volunteers to do this kind of lobbying work.
MS: We do. The first thing we do is invite people to take part in our introductory call. We have this call every Wednesday at 5pm Pacific Time, and it goes for about an hour. We lay out the ground game for what we do and how we do it, and for those people who would like to start a group we ask them to call us back in the next day or two and we take the next steps. Then we'll coach and encourage people to invite their friends and come together for a group start meeting. That's about a three-hour presentation, very participatory. They practice having a meeting with their members of House and Senate, and we talk a lot about the bill we're in favor of. Then we gently encourage them to meet with their members of Congress and the editorial board of their paper.
We also have a monthly national call with guest speakers in which we train our partners ongoingly. We have economists who are leaders in the field of pricing carbon, and physicists, scientists and engineers on the calls. We have members of Congress telling us how to lobby them. Jim Hansen [a leading climate change scientist at NASA] has been a speaker two times, and Rob Shapiro, an economist. Really top people. So, we keep on training. And almost once a week the group leaders talk for about 45 minutes.
A lot of the training is encouragement, and seeing what's possible. People know how to do these things, but they just don't do them because they don't feel empowered to. They've never seen it done before. So we have reports from the field, and they hear, for instance, that the group in Norman, Oklahoma, has gotten an opinion piece published by The Daily Oklahoman. They hear that the group in Cleveland has gotten an op-ed or even an editorial published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. They begin to think, "Well, if they can do it..." It creates a possibility for people.
We also try to get them to talk about not just their successes, but also their failures. If they just talk about the successes, it's like "Oh, I could never do that." But if you hear that they called the editor of the opinion section 14 times over 10 months and never got to talk to anybody, and then for one reason or another he picked up the phone by accident and they were ready with a laser talk… If you talk to partners like that, you say, "Well, I could stumble through that."
Citizens Climate Lobby International Conference attendees, 2012, just before a lobby day. That week they visited 302 US Congressional offices.
SI: Can individuals participate if they don't have a group nearby?
MS: Yes. They would be on the national conference call, and then they'd go to the website and download the action sheet. We have a terrific action sheet of three or four pages every month for every national call. It gives the name of the speaker for that month's call, their bio, what the subject is, and two or three actions that people are asked to take. It will have a laser talk (which is the essential idea for the month) that we want to deliver to members of Congress and write letters to the editor and opinion pieces on. The action sheet may also have an example of a letter to a member of Congress or to a newspaper. So somebody could just do that.
I am sure that creating political will is a team sport. I don't think anybody can do it by themselves for very long, because they'll get discouraged. By the time you've called the editor of the editorial page 10 times and haven't talked to anybody, and you don't have a team with you to talk to and encourage you, you're not going to stay with it. And when you go in to meet with a member of Congress, you don't want to go by yourself. You might forget what you're going to say! We kind of do things for each other. You get an affinity for your teammates and you play the game together - like a football team.
SI: Are people getting involved in the large numbers that are needed, and are you having an effect?
MS: We've been doubling our numbers every year. We should easily visit every member of Congress, and I think by the end of 2013 we're going to have a group in all 50 states. We're in about 33 states now. Over the last three years, we've had about a thousand articles published. We are expecting, I think reasonably, 400 people to the international conference this year.
One of the reasons I think we're appealing is that we're not partisan, we're non-confrontational, and we're not trying to win with force. We are trying to be friends and appeal to people's highest interests. We think the reality is on our side, and we're going to keep saying it, and be friendly. We're not going to be mad at [the deniers]. We're not going to denigrate them. We're going to be their friends and keep talking to them.
For a long time [in the 1800s], it was forbidden to talk about slavery in the Congress. It was called the gag rule, and we've been facing something of the same thing. It's like Congress is forbidden to talk about new taxes, and forbidden to talk about climate change. But just about three weeks ago, Senator Murkowski from Alaska said a carbon tax is the talk of the town. It was anathema to talk about it just three months before. And then the American Enterprise Institute - very conservative - held an all-day seminar on carbon taxes, in combination with the International Monetary Fund, the Brookings Institute and one other group. So the silence was broken, and I think we played a big role in that.
SI: Would you see that as the group's most significant accomplishment so far?
MS: I think so - breaking the silence on a carbon tax in Washington. We're in favor of a steadily increasing tax over 10 years to get the tax up to $100 to $130 a ton. We think that's the foundation stone for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and that tax is really for carbon dioxide and its equivalents, like methane and hydrofluorocarbons.
SI: Do you think it's likely that a good carbon tax bill will be written and passed in the next Congress?
MS: Well, it's our goal. Is it likely? I hesitate to say, but I'm going to give it everything I've got - treasure and time - and all of our partners will too. We now have about 500 partners on these national calls. There's a lot of power against us, but we're going to stay right there. We're not going away.
SI: Isn't it important for all the organizations concerned with the environment to work together in joint efforts to get the needed traction for change?
MS: We have a very focused solution, and we believe that we're part of this whole movement. We can't do everything. For us to continue our very stringent focus on a carbon tax and rebate, it's difficult for us to turn our attention to a mass demonstration and all that that requires. I think about CCL as the point of the spear. A revenue neutral carbon tax is what has to be done. It's the foundational piece. But we're all working together, as I see it. Everybody's doing their part.
SI: Will we win?
MS: I read widely in spiritual literature from all over the world, and I keep something with me that I want to read to you. This is Sri Krishna talking to Arjuna. "What right have you to success or failure? What right have you to tell me what results are best for you? You work hard, select a selfless goal, give your best, put all your heart into it, and all your effort. It is up to me to give you the fruits of your action when the time is right."
SI: How can people help?
MS: There are a lot of things people can do, but I think if we don't adopt public policy then nothing else is going to matter. We need public policy, and we need people to give up their hopelessness and powerlessness. We need them to educate themselves and participate with a group of people and realize that public policy is going to occur in the United States Congress. We're in the extraordinary position of being a world leader, having access to our government, having a democracy and the power to talk, and we have the internet. We have all these tools to use, now let's use them!
SI: Is there anything else about climate change you'd like to say?
MS: We have absolutely got to wake up. Everybody knows the ice is melting, right? How do you keep ice from melting? Stop heating it up, and cool it off too. If it's melting at 390 parts per million [the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere], we need to go back to 350 ppm. So that's not just reducing the emissions - that's reducing the concentration. We have to do that. Human beings have to wake up to being responsible - not just for our own little selves, but for all of life. ALL of life. We are responsible for all of life.
There needs to be, frankly, a transformation of human beings. Ultimately that's what's at stake. Have you ever heard this quote from C.Wright Mills: "In our time what is at issue is the very nature of humankind, the image we have of our limits and possibilities. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits of what it means to be human." I think we're going to see whether human beings can learn to be responsible for all of life. Humankind is waking up, and that's what the second purpose of CCL means - wake up! Realize that you are responsible and you do have power that you don't know you have, and use it!
For more information: www.citizensclimatelobby.org
See also:
Filed in: environment, externally authored, spiritual politics
Leave a Reply