Theories of change.
“[The Sunrise Movement’s] theory of change is that we need to destroy [fossil fuel] companies to defeat their political power. And if that’s the case, then you don’t want anybody who has been associated with those in energy sector who might be seen as a defender or sympathetic to them. It’s a sort of a total victory approach to getting this done.”
But on the other side, there’s a group of people who believe we need “to push them and force them to see that they can’t keep doing what they’re doing and that there’s an opportunity for them to take part in this transition,” Jenkins says. “Some of them will have to go out of business and be bankrupt because they’re not willing to come into the future, but this transition is too big and too challenging, and we don’t have the time or the political power to think that we’re going to just have total, overwhelming victory.”
In other words, Jenkins says, everyone has the same end goal of getting to zero emissions to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. But they have different views about how to get there, who should be at the table, and what they’re willing to compromise.
On
.On the one hand, I do think this is correct in the way it articulates different approaches to the same problem. One the other hand: The fossil fuel industry has known since at least the mid 20th century that their industry was destroying the planet and actively spent money on covering that fact up.
Let them all burn.