Green David v. Brown Goliath

Rethinking the rules of engagement 10

slingshot

How does this thing work?

In last week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fascinating article, “How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break The Rules.” In his patented style, Gladwell weaves together story after story of underdogs who defied convention to defeat much stronger opponents. From the Biblical story of David defeating Goliath to a junior league basketball team of twelve year-old girls to the armies of George Washington, Gladwell offers us examples of how an underdog is only an underdog when he plays by his opponent’s rules.

He also offers the research of Ivan Arreguín-Toft, a political scientist who analyzed every war fought over the last two hundred years between strong and weak combatants:

The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 percent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time ... What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win ...”

What an intriguing piece of data. Gladwell’s article got me thinking about the movement to build a clean energy economy and what we can do to turn the tables and put the odds in our favor.

By most measures, we face an indomitable opponent. We seek to transition the economy off of fossil fuels, which represent the core business of the largest industry in the history of human civilization. In just the first three months of 2009, these companies spent $79 million lobbying Congress versus $4.6 million by our side—a 16:1 ratio—and a Common Cause study released yesterday shows that members of the critical Energy and Commerce Committee (where the climate and energy bill is currently being watered down) received an average of $107,230 from the energy sector in the last election. 16 to 1.

16 to 1. Those are tough numbers.

I wonder what would happen if we acknowledged our weaknesses and adopted an unconventional strategy. After reading The New Yorker article, I see four principles of a winning underdog strategy that we can apply to the climate movement:

  1. Make it a battle of wills, not a battle of skills
  2. Empower people to think and act in real time
  3. Attack your opponent where they are weak
  4. Defy social convention (and be ready to do what is socially horrifying)

Here’s my take on what some of the implications of these principles are for our movement’s strategy:

1. Make it a battle of wills, not a battle of skills. The first thing we must do is change it from a contest about ability, to a contest about effort. If it’s about the ability to pay for more advertising, to pay for more lobbyists, or to control the price of a gallon of gasoline, we will lose. Major environmental groups have invested far too heavily in Washington DC for the past twenty years instead of building our base of grassroots leaders across the country, which has only begun to change in the past few years. We must resist the temptation to staff up inside the Beltway again and remember where the battle can be fought and won. The passion for building a clean energy economy among ordinary Americans is our greatest strength and we need to build on that strength by expanding our grassroots movement to pass strong legislation and get the US to take a positive role in the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen. We need an all out effort from people who care about the future of this country - young people creating viral videos, grandmothers hosting salons in their living rooms, and families showing up to rallies. If we make this about who has more heart, we will win.

2. Empower people to think and act in real time. One of the advantages of being being a grassroots, decentralized movement is that we can operate in real time. We don’t need to wait for a CEO or Board of Directors to issue a statement. We don’t need to need to convene our leadership to make a decision. Our strength is our diversity, independence, and knowledge of the terrain. Our people know their local schools and communities and can fight the fight on the ground if we give them the tools and information. By using technology from blogs to iPhone apps to Twitter we can give our supporters the ability to counteract a much larger, stronger foe. The Exxons and OPECs aren’t equipped for this kind of contest. We should learn from the Obama campaign, which empowered local leaders with the tools to be constantly organizing, both online and, more importantly, offline. We will win if operate in real time.

3. Attack where they are weak. This might seem obvious, but time and again underdogs fail to identify where their opponents are most vulnerable to attack. While cheap fossil fuels have spurred tremendous growth over the last two hundred years, the dirty little secret is that the era of cheap oil is over. It takes more energy to pump less barrels of oil out of the ground and that trend will only continue. Job growth in the fossil fuel industry has stalled. For every $1 million we invest in coal and oil, only five new jobs are created. Yet, when we invest the same amount in clean energy, seventeen new jobs are created. The future of the American economy is clean energy, creating millions of green jobs that can’t be shipped over seas.

We’ve tried their way and it has led us right into a recession, two wars without end, and an uncertain future for our children. Strong climate legislation is the first step towards turning things around. Good legislation leads to more investment, which creates new jobs, now and in the long-term, and improves our national security. We need to position big oil and coal as a dead-end opposition, and win the public pr battle about how we can create new, good clean energy jobs.

4. Defy social convention (and be ready to do what is socially horrifying). I believe we are making tremendous progress toward strong climate change legislation, but we need to do more. We campaign, sign petitions, lobby congress, and raise awareness. All of that is necessary and important. But to really succeed, we need to go the extra mile. To do the unexpected and raise some eyebrows, while staying true to our values and principles. When Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat in 1955, she defied convention and the black community of Montgomery, AL followed through by doing what was “horrifying” and boycotting the public bus system. We increase our chances of winning, if we don’t play by Goliath’s rules. What will it take? Hunger strikes and fossil fuel infrastructure disruption? A March on Washington? A bus boycott? Remember how arresting the images of millions of New Yorkers biking and walking to work in 2005 was? We did that because we had no other choice and in freezing cold weather. Could we do it again this fall for a higher purpose? Maybe. Or maybe there is a better way ...

Bottom line is that in many ways we still seem to be fighting this battle on our opposition’s terms, and right now it looks like we’re losing. We need to rethink the rules of engagement. A conversation is happening across the movement about how to do just that. What do you think we should do?

Billy Parish is co-founder and coordinator of the Energy Action Coalition. Billy has taken four years off from Yale, where he was co-chair of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition and was majoring in Ethics, Politics & Economics. Billy was a 2004 Brower Youth Award Winner, 2005 Rolling Stone “Climate Hero,” Mother Jones magazine’s 2006 “Student Activist of the Year,” and was recently named a fellow by Ashoka, the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. A co-author of the report “New Energy for Campuses,” a guide for colleges and universities on how to cost-effectively cut their greenhouse gas emissions, Billy works to train students and equip them with the tools they need to implement local climate solutions. A native of New York City, Billy now works out of the Washington D.C. office of the Energy Action Coalition.

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  1. Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:44 pm
    14 May 2009

    The human community has been manipulated by Masters of the Universe (MOTU) who disingenuously have been perpetrating possible fraud by duplicitously engaging in the promulgation of 680 trillion dollars of toxic financial innovations. These dodgy financial instruments are called derivatives and are designed by self-seeking, self-proclaimed ‘financial engineers’ for the purpose of increasing their own wealth and the wealth of the “sophisticated ‘investors’” who play along with them. These “inventors” of what are known as asset and credit bubbles (note well, bubbles are known to burst) have had a large role to play in collapsing the global financial system and cratering the human community’s real world economy.Of course there are other groups of arrogant and greedy leaders who qualify as Masters of the Universe. What is important is that they know who they are. As anyone can imagine, they do not care to be called out or held to account for the unearned wealth they have accumulated and stashed in tens of thousands of Swiss bank accounts.It would probably take two volumes to lay out what is happening. The first book would present the ways Masters of the Universe distinguish themselves from others and a second book would contain a list of people who meet the minimum standards to be one of the MOTU.What the family of humanity needs to understand more clearly and quickly is this: Masters of the Universe among us serve nothing higher than themselves and no one other than themselves, co-conspirators and their minions in their pernicious efforts to recklessly and conspicuously overconsume Earth’s perishable fruits and to relentlessly hoard Earth’s non-perishable resources.

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  2. Steven Earl Salmony Posted 4:49 pm
    14 May 2009

    At the crux of many discussions in the Gristmill community, two groups of people make their appearance.In one group, we recognize the “people of the economy” who have managed to institutionalize the ‘goodness’ of greed and arrogance associated with their idolatry of wealth consolidation and the power to continue accumulating filthy lucre. These people will uniformly say that their drive for economic growth and the power wealth purchases is not only good but also primary. They make it crystal clear that the protection of the Earth from industrialization and big business is secondary. In the other group, we have “people of Earth’s ecology” who see, as you do, that the preservation of the Earth needs to be primary and the growth of global economy secondary because there can be no such thing as a manmade economy without the resources and ecosystem services the Earth, and only the Earth, can provide.The Earth can get along quite nicely without the Masters of the Universe and their idolatrized global economy; but I do not think anyone can sensibly argue with the point that the economy cannot exist without a planet to provide for its viability. Even so, most of us recognize that there are many ideologues who do voceriferously argue that the human economy can exist independent of the Earth. I call it “money for nothing” thinking of do-nothing people. We also know that these ideologues are the very people who actually produce nothing, but end up with most of the world’s wealth. In our time timorous emasculated, absurdly high-paid “talking heads” in the mainstream media support this perverse situation. People who are actual producers lose their jobs, health care, pensions, etc while the Masters of the Universe, who produce nothing, walk away with millions of dollars in neatly packaged “golden parachutes” into carefree lives of effortless ease.As I see it, this is a problem. The institutionalized power of a few million selfish people who currently organize and manage the global political economy {for their own interests primarily} is much greater than the power that belongs to the billions of people who have very little wealth but hold a priceless vested interest in the preservation of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.The struggle today between the “haves” and the “have-nots” — between the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and the people these masters call simpletons — can be likened to the Biblical confrontation between Goliath and David.Let’s make no mistake about it. The deceptive, avaricious Masters of the Universe among us are a modern representation of Goliath and the people these masters have dubbed simpletons, the ones who are honest, transparent, productive and accountable for their actions, are living examples of the courageous David.

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  3. Royal Enfield's avatar

    Royal Enfield Posted 9:53 pm
    14 May 2009

    The question posed was “What do you think we should do?”     What are their rules of engagement?  Different Standards.  It is a profoundly powerful tool.  They frame the rules, and we fall right in line. Facts.  They have manufactured different standards for facts.  We are held to the highest of standards.  They are allowed to say whatever they want.  If we make a factual error, it is cycled in the news ad nauseum.  If they make a factual error, there is zero consequence.  The result, we are afraid to tell it like it really will be if we don’t get a handle on emissions. Fear.  Different standards for accessing fear.  We are constantly ridiculed for fear mongering about any mention of climate impacts.  They on the other hand are free to fear monger all they want about how Uncle Sam will become Big Brother and the economy will crash while Al Gore makes millions off of his grand scam. Suggestion.  Break out of their different standards for facts and fear "rules of engagement:" Start painting the absolute worse case scenarios.  It's where we are headed anyways.  Everything is running way ahead of the climate models, so let's start acting accordingly.  Imagining a worse case scenario shouldn’t be that hard to do.  Think about what the world our grandchildren will inherit will look like if we get climate wrong.  Go code red.  Go all the way.  Don’t talk wonkishly about potential negative impacts.  Talk about the spread of disease, war, and famine.  Talk about governmental collapse.  Don’t talk about sea level rise compounded by subsidence.  Create an image of the statue of liberty under water up.  Don’t say shifts in agriculture.  Show starving American children with bloated bellies in front of the dust bowl that used to be our bread basket.  Don’t say economic impacts, show pictures of bread lines, wall street executives jumping out of windows, and ghost town suburbs.  Stop saying words like national security and start showing suicide bombings, domestic attacks, and shelled out cities.  Don’t say likely increased intensity of storms.  Show bloated dead bodies floating in the flood waters after a hurricane.  Don’t say intergenerational equity.  Juxtapose these unthinkable images with that of babies and drill into peoples heads that they are condemning their beloved children to an absolute living hell.  Scare people to death.  Why?  Because if we were truly honest with people we would tell them we now face the most terrible threat human kind has ever seen.  This is not fear mongering or fact stretching, it is just helping them understand the collective choice we are currently making.  Tapping into the fear centers allows people to make an informed choice about our future.  Evoke Dickens, be the ghost of climate past, present and most importantly future.   Perhaps in the spirit of “The Death of Environmentalism,” we should take a new spin on spin.  But while appealing to the motivating power of vision and values; perhaps we should also muster the courage to tell it like it is, or at least like it’s going to be if we don’t change our behavior and quick.   

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  4. Delay And Deny's avatar

    Delay And Deny Posted 12:56 am
    15 May 2009

    Indeed.Small and midsized businesses that eschew the e-Radar and current Government hegemony in setting the scientific and technology agenda will thrive.The current Internet in my estimate is becoming an unbearable Goliath.   Data must be kept small and writing too.Indepedent and unique actions are called for.

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  5. dbaker Posted 11:37 am
    15 May 2009

    I used the skills obtained in a misspent youth to survive goliaths attacks "socially horrifying"!I now use his momentum to throw him when he attacks, if you read the part after the soulution you will witness his attack,and my retaliation.Dennis Baker
    103-66 duncan ave west
    penticton bc canada V2A6Z3
    cell 250-462-2771
    fax 250-493-3463
    (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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  6. mwildfire Posted 8:12 am
    20 May 2009

    I want to discuss the ideas of the first two posters here. Salmony's diatribe was long, but I believe the picture he paints is accurate, and although he doesn't suggest a solution there is one implicit in his words. What he points out is that we have the advantage of numbers in this case. Goliath has the money, but we actually have an enormous advantage when it comes to potential troops. Unfortunately, there is that word "potential"--when you look at people's interests rather than their current beliefs, we have more than a lopsided advantage--we have 100% of the people on our side! The human people, that is. The corporate "persons" are a formidable enemy because they can use their monopoly control of the airwaves to persuade the public that Goliath should win.Royal Enfield alludes to this and then suggests fearmongering as the best tactic, with the important--indeed crucial--point that we need to PAINT PICTURES, not use abstract language, if we want to influence people. Some say that the fearmongering is counterproductive, that it suggests it's already too late and there's nothing we can do, thus disempowering people and encouraging them to cling to denial. My opinion is that we need to do both; paint his ugly picture of where we'll end up if we keep going down the path we're on, if we allow Goliath--really a machine we made and lost control of--to keep power over us. But even more importantly, we must draw and present an increasingly detailed picture of where we'll end up if we choose the other path. Another World IS Possible, but we're not going to get there unless we make it so real to the billions that they can see it, smell it, taste it, and thus be motivated to grab for it, and finally to fight for it. Can you imagine a world in which most everyone gets the power they need from their own individual or community windmill or solar array, in which large corporations have been banned and humanity has figured out how to implement genuine democracy? In which small communities make most of their own rules, and vary greatly from one another? In which people work fewer hours than today, consume much less, but enjoy what they use much more, and have much more time? In which the endless information stream that leaves us all so fractured and frazzled today has slowed to a reasonable speed? In which advertising is so heavily taxed it's become rare? In which religion has become a quiet, private matter as it's no longer effective in driving cynical agendas? These are some of my dreams, and I am looking for a way to vividly depict them.Thanks to Billy Parish for starting this conversation; I also read the piece he talks about and saw its applicability, but hadn't done anything with it.

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  7. randino Posted 5:38 pm
    20 May 2009

    I think we need a form of activism that is constantly changing, mutating, and taking on new tactics and strategies.  You cannot sit still for a minute, because the other side will figure you out and then you are dead.  Our greatest weapon, something the Goliaths are clueless about, is imagination.  Along with a sense of irreverence and a sense of humor.  I also think we have to re-examine how we organize ourselves.  Are the old non-profits up to the task of the present era? Reinvent, rethink, renew.  Those should be our watch words.  Read the old manuals of the past, and then use them to start your barbecue.  Keep moving.  Move light.  Move fast. Strike hard.Randy Cunningham, Cleveland, OH  

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  8. dbaker Posted 8:01 pm
    20 May 2009

    adaptability is our strong point.More often than not "Goliath" hates the spotlight.So I give you the oportunity see "Goliaths Face", and you all dances around with blinders.whats up  wit dat?dennis 

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  9. slgabel Posted 12:24 pm
    22 May 2009

    We need to find effective physical & virtual ways to meet the masses where they are.  Whether it's something like blockades into major offramps into city centers, or propagating appealing alternative "green" lifestyles to our personal online networks, we need to leverage forums where the masses can be engaged.  The provision of tools & information to make it easy for the "soldiers" to take effective action, and the persistence of assaults is critical.

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  10. dbaker Posted 8:52 pm
    30 May 2009

    they persist in the assaults on me

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