Jun 13, 2021 Hot Take

The Sunrise Drama Is More Complicated Than It Looks

Hey Hot Cakes!

A lot of climate world spent last week watching Sunrise Movement fight amongst themselves in public. A lot of people had a lotta thoughts on the subject, but we couldn't help but feel like... damn, we hope they work it out. One of our researchers, Georgia Wright (also the co-host and producer of the great Inherited podcast) is a Sunrise member; she shared some great insights with us over text and we encouraged her to turn them into a post for the newsletter (thanks Georgia!). That's here, along with posts on re-thinking climate refugees, the latest climate coverage numbers, the California drought, the G7 Summit and climate, and of course the weekly digest of climate stories.

Happy reading!

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The Sunrise Drama Is More Complicated Than It Looks

By Georgia Wright

On Tuesday, the former Creative Director of the Sunrise Movement dropped a bomb of a thread on Twitter. Alex O’Keefe, a prominent Black leader within the movement who led projects such as Ed Markey’s Green New Dealmaker ad, claimed that he had been terminated as a staff member after sending out an internal letter.

The thread aired a number of concerns and complaints about Sunrise Movement leadership, from the personal to the structural. However, the narrative immediately became more complex. Within hours, Sunrise Executive Director Varshini Prakash had tweeted, “Alex, I love you... but this isn’t what happened. You haven’t shown up for work in months.” The next day, Prakash’s response was corroborated by a public letter signed by the remaining fifteen members of Sunrise’s full-time Black staffers.

As a former volunteer for the NYC chapter of Sunrise, I was one of many young people on a rollercoaster of conflicting emotions last week. It feels impossibly sad and complex to see the movement’s noble goals derailed by such serious claims, and it would be so much easier to come down hard on one side or the other, to throw my weight ferociously behind a single narrative and be done with it. But black-and-white thinking doesn’t get at the root causes of anything, even if Twitter rewards it. We have to lean into the nuance here.

What is helpful, I think, is teasing apart the personal claims (O’Keefe’s firing and behavior as a staff member) from the larger claims (Sunrise doesn’t contribute to mutual aid, for example). Let’s leave the personal claims to the side, then, and focus on the structural ones instead.

Some of these bigger allegations: Sunrise is co-opted by megadonors, Sunrise doesn’t care about mutual aid, Sunrise is abandoning the Green New Deal, Sunrise is failing to recruit and maintain Black membership. The problem with analyzing these big claims (and, probably, the reason that many of them exist) is that Sunrise has scaled up MASSIVELY in a short period of time. They are not the first movement to experience growing pains as they leverage their newfound political power (a seat at the table in the Biden White House!) while simultaneously managing the concerns of their base (an ever growing number of disparate, volunteer-led hubs springing up across the country).

So while I can’t synthesize everything from my vantage point, here is what my own experience analyzing the movement has taught me: Sunrise, on the whole, is very white. They’ve struggled with their partnerships with POC-led organizations, even as they’ve made good-faith efforts to repair them. There is often tension between the (paid) members of the National staff and the (unpaid) members who are the lifeblood of the local hubs, like Sunrise NYC. It is a struggle to communicate between leadership and volunteers. Often, it feels like the local hubs are completely discrete organizations from the conglomerate of paid folks at the top. Burnout is a big problem, particularly for the unpaid volunteers. And of course, the fact that most positions are unpaid means that many low-income folks (primarily folks of color, then) have an intrinsic barrier to entry.

Zooming out even further, we stumble upon an even bigger truth: extractive capitalism and white supremacy are terrifyingly powerful forces. They have a way of poisoning even the most value-driven nonprofits and grassroots organizations, they force well-intentioned people to capitulate and make tough decisions, they try to make us fail. They are the cause of the climate crisis. They are why a generation of young people is in the position of self-governance in the first place – our government has become too broken by these forces to respond appropriately to the crisis that these forces, too, have caused. It is the challenge of all of our lifetimes to resist them. Our future quite literally depends on it.

Instead of “cancelling” Sunrise, or defending it mindlessly, we can use the issues that have been raised over the course of this week to analyze how these big, harmful, deeply rooted forces are trying to shape our interpersonal relationships, our organizations, and our world. Engaging deeply is our only chance of survival. So let’s get to it.

Oil and Gas Refugees

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Last year, the New York Times and ProPublica collaborated on a masterful series on the climate migration phenomenon. It documented the places that are predicted to lose—and the one place that is expected to gain—population as the climate continues to warm, and all the legal red tape that keeps people from finding safe harbor.

I want to posit that there’s another rampant refugee creator out there that we don’t talk about nearly enough: the fossil fuel industry.

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California's Drought Is a Window Into Our Climate-Constrained Future

By Amy Westervelt

California had a historically dry winter, which means the state's snowpack hit zero percent of average by June 1st. As a lifelong Californian, that is fucking terrifying. For everyone else, though, let me explain what that means: California's water is directly tied to the snowpack in its Sierra Nevada mountains, it provides a third of the state's fresh water supply.

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No Return to Normal for Climate Coverage

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

As vaccines roll out—albeit with woeful inequity—the media landscape is finally offering space to more topics of discussion. While the pandemic might not be over, the panic about it is subsiding, at least in the United States. As far as media coverage on climate, though, a return to normal would be a mortal sin. We’ve never seen climate change get the robust, intersectional, vigorous discussion that it deserved. Thankfully, in May 2021, we saw signs that the media might finally be prepared to cover climate in a whole different way.

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If the G7 Want to Stick it to OPEC Once and For All, They Should Act on Climate

By Amy Westervelt

You know what's really fucking telling about how serious the G7 countries are about taking on climate? It's not a named topic. Officially on the agenda for the days in which global leaders have said they will be discussing climate change are: "economic resilience, foreign policy and health." I guess human survival is tied to all three, but... damn, Gina!

Before we get into their current discussions, a brief bit of history on the G7.

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