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December 24, 2004

Reframing Environmentalism -- and the Left

Adam Werbach's speech is finally available, and what it has to say about refraiming, the Kerry campaign, and the Apollo Alliance (which Werbach helped create) is very interesting:

In 2003, in Erie, Penn. and Akron, Ohio, the Apollo Alliance did focus groups among undecided, working-class, swing voters – the very people who would determine the outcome of the 2004 election. I had the luck to observe the focus groups from the other side of a one-way mirror.

Instead of starting the focus groups by asking people what they thought of global warming [which is what Werbach says enviro pollsters ususally do], our pollster Ted Nordhaus simply asked them how things were going. This open-ended question led, invariably, to focus group participants describing the collapse of the local economy. They would list, in depressing detail, the shutting of Hoover Vacuum and Timken Ball-bearing factories; gone to Mexico. They explained that the jobs that had been created in their wake -- mostly service sector jobs in places like Wal-Mart – paid half as much and offered no health care or retirement benefits. Many said they were working two jobs to make ends meet.

We then asked them what they thought of the idea of a major federal investment program to accelerate America’s transition to the clean energy economy of the future: research and development, manufacturing of wind turbines and solar, energy efficiency. We didn’t have to prove to them that such a program would pay for itself; they knew it would intuitively. Hadn’t a similar program succeeded in the post-war period? Of course it had....

And then something extraordinary happened. Nearly every single person in the room started to sound like Sierra Club members. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. They waxed poetic about solar panels. They spoke of their children’s future – their future – and the planet’s future. They remembered episodes from the area’s local history – like when thousands of jobs were created to retrofit smokestacks after the passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment – things that James Watt and Rush Limbaugh want them to forget. But more than that, Apollo tells a narrative about American greatness, our history of shared investment and prosperity, of our ingenuity, and how we build a better future....

We did a poll and found that more than 70 percent of voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania supported a $30 billion annual investment in energy efficiency and clean energy. Having never seen such high numbers supporting any government program, the pollster to the Steelworkers, an Apollo ally, stressed in a poll question he asked that the $30 billion annual investment would come from TAXPAYER money. A funny thing happened: support for Apollo went up.

Posted by RalphTaylor at December 24, 2004 10:12 AM

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