“For the climate change activist movement, however, it has been difficult to figure out exactly how to act as an affirmative force. Its biggest success has been the grassroots anti-coal insurgency — blocking coal plants. Its next biggest is EPA regulations — more restraints. Its most high-profile fight in the last year has been over blocking the Keystone XL pipeline. Its most treasured policy idea, carbon pricing (either tax or cap-and-trade), is essentially punitive, meant to raise the cost of dirty energy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Despite its bright-green rhetoric, in its actual presence as a political force, the climate movement is still primarily against things.

All of which is just to say that the climate movement could do more to define a positive vision and a positive agenda — and put activist muscle behind them. It needs to figure out how to midwife the new communities, systems, and technologies that can put us on a trajectory toward a future that makes sense. How can a movement that grew out of the “counterculture” become the culture? How can it get stuff created and built?

…I don’t know what the secret is to rallying a grassroots movement around small, positive steps forward. The right seems to be having great success in rallying a grassroots movement to block every-f’ing-thing, even imaginary things. It’s easier fighting for the status quo — or regression to an imagined status quo past — than it is fighting for change, especially in a political system riddled with veto points and flooded with money. But “less bad” just can’t cut it any more. It’s time to start imagining and building good things.”

David Roberts, aka my hero, @Grist.