Obama's Organizing for Action Starts Multi-Year Campaign on Climate Change

Last night, Organizing for Action (OFA), which is using President Obama’s vast online campaign network to advocate for critical policies, held an online meeting on their agenda for climate change.

Instead of trying to push through concrete policies, such as regulating emissions on power plants through the EPA, they are focused on simply getting people to agree that climate change is indeed reality … and human-caused.

As you know, Congress has taken a huge step backward on the issue because of enormous pressure from special interest groups, to the point where legislation can’t even be discussed.

Therefore, Organizing for Action says it will begin a multi-year effort that resets those attitudes, laying the groundwork for legislative action on climate change.

Yesterday, OFA sent this email to supporters, inviting us to attend the online meeting:

"If we ever want to see real progress on climate change, we need to change the conversation in Washington – right now. We need every member of Congress to be part of the solution. OFA is going to hold these climate deniers accountable – even if we have to go one by one."

The first step is this video which is being blasted to the group’s 20 million subscribers. It’s a "greatest hits" compilation of what climate deniers have said in Congress, preventing even a hearing on the subject in the past four years.

"We are going to start to organize in a set of districts to hold those folks accountable for the fact that they deny climate change," Ivan Frishberg, Organizing for Action’s climate change campaign manager, told Huffington Post.

It will be the first sustained effort for OFA.

"Immigration and gun violence prevention — those conversations have moved a long way toward the goal line," Frishberg told Huffington Post. "And on immigration, there was a very long and hard fought movement to get to this point. On climate, in terms of Congress, we have a ways to go."

"It’s nice to see Organizing for Action going after climate deniers in Congress," Jamie Henn of 350.org, told Huffington Post.  However, "if President Obama approves Keystone XL it will irrevocably damage OFA’s credibility on environmental issues. Obama voters have made it clear, in polls and in the streets, that they want their president to stand up to Big Oil and say no to Keystone XL."

Frishberg counters:

"I think there is something that’s fundamental about starting the conversation by saying this thing is real. You can disagree or agree on different policy approaches. But if people are throwing out those premises – the impact on people’s lives, the clarity of the science – if they’re throwing that overboard, it’s hard to go much further."

Watch the video: