How climate activists can help get things built Volts

In this episode, organizer Jeff Ordower of 350.org talks about how the environmental movement can shift its focus from blocking what it doesn’t like to building what it does.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
It is a much-discussed fact that the environmental movement cut its teeth blocking things — mines, pipelines, power plants, and what have you. It is structured around blocking things. Habituated to it.
However, what we need to do today is build, build, build — new renewable energy, batteries, transmission lines, and all the rest of the infrastructure of the net-zero economy. Green groups are as often an impediment to that as they are a help.
So how can the green movement help things get built? How can it organize around saying yes?
Recently, the activist organization 350.org hired Jeff Ordower, a 30-year veteran organizer with the labor and queer movements, in part to help figure these questions out. As director of North America for 350, Ordower will help lead a campaign focused on utilities standing in the way of clean energy.
I talked with him about organizing around building instead of blocking, the right way to go after utilities, the role green groups can play in connecting vulnerable communities with IRA money, and what it means to focus on power.
All right then, with no further ado, Jeff Ordower of 350, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Jeff Ordower
Thank you so much, David, for having me. I'm excited to be here.
David Roberts
Okay, well, I want to get to 350 and climate activism in a second, but first I'd like to just hear a little bit about your history in activism, which is mainly on the labor side. And what I'd really like to hear, and this is probably like a whole pot of its own, but insofar as you can summarize, I'd love to hear from your perspective when you were working as an organizer in labor. Looking over the fence at climate activism, what was your sort of take or critique like from the labor perspective? What did you think climate activism was doing right or wrong?
Or what did you think you could bring to climate activism from the labor side?
Jeff Ordower
Yeah, I both did labor organizing and I come out of base-building community organizing. I actually come out of the notorious ACORN was where I spent the first half of my organizing.
David Roberts
The late, lamented —
Jeff Ordower
Yeah. So it's very similar. But I started in labor, moved to ACORN very quickly, and then as ACORN was destroyed, both helped to start new community organizing efforts. And then lately, over the last few years have been involved with labor organizing. And it's interesting because I really started tracking what was happening in climate around Copenhagen, which was 2008, 2009, at the same time where ACORN was going through its difficulties. And we were trying to figure out what to build and how to build it and how to build something that was more intersectional. So I was — the personal piece of my story is I was working in St. Louis, which is where I'm from, and part of what we do as community organizers is think about how do we challenge the local power structure?
It's about power and it's about how we build power for folks who don't have the power that they need and help collectively do that. And St. Louis is, like many midwestern towns, is kind of a branch office for many Fortune 500 companies these days. So the most powerful players in the region were coal companies. Peabody Coal was the largest private sector coal company in the world. Arch coal was the second largest in North America.
Both were headquartered in the St. Louis region because it's at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. So, as the only Fortune 500 company in the city limits of St. Louis that was getting tax breaks, there were lots of reasons to fight Peabody and so started on a campaign about that, but there was also this tremendous excitement that was happening. So we were bot