There are more problems with The Sunrise Movement (TSM) which don’t seem to have been raised yet in this discussion.
I think they have an underappreciated propensity to actively oppose progress in environmental policy. Others have brought up their opposition to a carbon tax in Washington, as well as their hostility to nuclear power, but here one Sunrise local group is opposing cap-and-trade in Oregon, and here Sunrise is opposing carbon capture on fossil fuel emissions. Also, the same environmentalist-NIMBY problem we have seen with nuclear power is likely to repeat with geothermal energy: certain kinds of geothermal power are a bit controversial because they use technology which is similar to fracking, and as geothermal technology and industry mature this will likely become a bigger battleground where Sunrise may work for the wrong side. I also have reservations about how Sunrise-type activists react to natural gas and waste-to-energy technologies, two things which are legitimately controversial but still might be net positive. I can’t find a source for whether Sunrise has actually opposed waste-to-energy but it seems probable (others like them have). They also gave Biden an F for his climate plan; personally, I thought Biden deserved 2.2 points on air pollution on a −3 to +3 scale. Giving an F to someone with a pretty good environmental plan is a big red flag.
Second, TSM is not very focused on climate change; they perform activism and lobbying for a wider range of political issues. Insofar as TSM spends time and energy on other stuff besides climate change, this probably reduces their effectiveness on climate issues relative to more focused groups. Some of those specific political activities are discussed below.
Third, TSM’s non-climate-change impacts are plausibly harmful.
Housing policy—TSM has engaged in NIMBY opposition to upzoning, and here is Sunrise Honolulu commenting that all housing investment should be banned. I’ve heard that they have a bigger pattern of this. Such behavior is certainly bad for both economic and environmental reasons; see my writeup on residential zoning. At the same time they have promoted new housing in other contexts, it’s not clear if the good outweighs the bad.
Police reform—TSM has promoted Defund the Police. As I describe here, defunding police departments is a bad policy idea, in fact hiring more police officers is probably a good idea. That said, Sunrise has also promoted Black Lives Matter and perhaps some more reasonable forms of police reform, and this is more likely to be a good thing.
Deliberate electoral politics—TSM has endorsed political campaigns with farther-reaching impacts beyond climate policy, generally because they are a progressive left-wing group who wants to achieve a variety of progressive left-wing political goals. Some notable ones which stick out to me are:
They supported an unsuccessful primary campaign against Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which was probably good because Feinstein is a pretty bad senator, tho defeating her probably would have achieved nothing good for climate policy. In fact, Feinstein has sponsored a carbon tax bill.
They supported a successful primary campaign against Rep. Eliot Engel, who had been a strong congressional proponent of effective foreign aid programs including PEPFAR. Removing Engel has no discernible impact on the climate. He has since been replaced in his position as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee with Rep. Gregory Meeks who has no such record on foreign aid, altho hopefully he will become more active with his new position.
They supported Sen. Ed Markey against a primary challenge. Again this had no discernible impact on the climate, nor on most other policy issues frankly. I am happy that Markey won, but it is not a big deal.
They supported Bernie Sanders in his 2020 presidential primary campaign. On the merits, Sanders was pretty comparable to other Democratic candidates including Biden. But in terms of electability, he was inferior (see this essay where I use his campaign as a case study of electability). So this was a bad decision.
Inadvertent electoral politics—as other commentators have touched upon, some of Sunrise’s advocacy can inadvertently harm the Democratic Party. This is especially a consequence of calls to defund the police. As I argue here, the Democratic Party is generally superior to the Republican Party, so preventing the Democratic Party from winning elections constitutes harm.
Deprioritization of other issues—if TSM’s mechanism of change is to make Democratic politicians expend more political capital on climate change, that implies that the politicians will expend less political capital on other issues. It’s one thing to say that we need more action on climate change, but quite another to say that Democratic politicians should focus on climate policy before or instead of other things like healthcare, immigration and tax policy. I do lean towards saying that air pollution should indeed get more priority on the margin, but the downside for other issues still chips away at the expected value. Additionally, insofar as TSM pressures Democratic politicians to place more priority on other issues like criminal justice and public housing, that similarly detracts from alternative priorities, and here I’d be still less optimistic about the impact.
Certainly there is a difference between everything that TSM does, and the marginal impact of GG’s recommendation for their education fund. And certainly it is possible that the good parts of TSM’s environmental activism outweigh these downsides. And you might disagree with me on some of these political issues. But we must see strong arguments along these lines before prioritizing TSM for donations. And while I haven’t taken a close or systematic look at TSM’s activities, given all the red flags I tentatively expect that the Sunrise Movement does more harm than good.
Other commenters here have framed this stuff as a tension between the left and conservatives/moderates, but there are plenty of Democrats who criticize TSM too. Here’s Matt Yglesias saying “The problem with funding Sunrise is not that there is an objective scarcity of funds and other people need the money more, it’s that Sunrise is bad and should get $0.” And such views about TSM are pretty common at least on left-leaning Twitter. Recommending TSM without having awareness and counterarguments to these criticisms does not imply a need to listen more to conservatives or moderates (tho I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of listening more to conservatives or moderates), it suggests a more general need to keep closer tabs on the current political discourse. The synthesis of “EA should generally strive to be apolitical” and “some good causes are inherently political” should not be for us to naively support interventions because of the way that they attack one political problem while we ignore the risky impacts of those interventions on other parts of the political system.
Finally, I am less confident about this point, but I suspect that GG is being too credulous about TSM achieving change. Just because they demand that Democratic politicians do something, and the Democratic politicians do that something, with TSM claiming that they were responsible for making the Democratic politicians do that something, doesn’t mean TSM actually was responsible for making the politicians change. If a Democratic politician does major climate stuff in office after being criticized by TSM during their election campaign for something symbolic like not bringing up the Green New Deal, that’s only very weak evidence that TSM actually changed the politician’s behavior; it is better evidence for the claim that Democratic politicians are generally both serious on climate policy and savvy at election messaging and TSM was just making unfounded criticisms all along.
Here it is worth distinguishing two theories of how the Democratic Party works. Some people (like TSM and others on the progressive left) think the elites of the Democratic Party are centrist corporatists who don’t really want to implement leftist policies but will do it if their base pressures them hard enough. Other people think that Democratic Party elites are actually very ideologically liberal and would intrinsically like to implement ambitious reforms on the environment and other issues, but are stymied by right-wing and centrist political forces. AFAICT the second theory is much more accurate, and David Shor (the leftist data whiz) seems to agree.
I hope this does not come across too negative, since I am glad Giving Green exists and I just think this recommendation is a mistake.
There are more problems with The Sunrise Movement (TSM) which don’t seem to have been raised yet in this discussion.
I think they have an underappreciated propensity to actively oppose progress in environmental policy. Others have brought up their opposition to a carbon tax in Washington, as well as their hostility to nuclear power, but here one Sunrise local group is opposing cap-and-trade in Oregon, and here Sunrise is opposing carbon capture on fossil fuel emissions. Also, the same environmentalist-NIMBY problem we have seen with nuclear power is likely to repeat with geothermal energy: certain kinds of geothermal power are a bit controversial because they use technology which is similar to fracking, and as geothermal technology and industry mature this will likely become a bigger battleground where Sunrise may work for the wrong side. I also have reservations about how Sunrise-type activists react to natural gas and waste-to-energy technologies, two things which are legitimately controversial but still might be net positive. I can’t find a source for whether Sunrise has actually opposed waste-to-energy but it seems probable (others like them have). They also gave Biden an F for his climate plan; personally, I thought Biden deserved 2.2 points on air pollution on a −3 to +3 scale. Giving an F to someone with a pretty good environmental plan is a big red flag.
Second, TSM is not very focused on climate change; they perform activism and lobbying for a wider range of political issues. Insofar as TSM spends time and energy on other stuff besides climate change, this probably reduces their effectiveness on climate issues relative to more focused groups. Some of those specific political activities are discussed below.
Third, TSM’s non-climate-change impacts are plausibly harmful.
Housing policy—TSM has engaged in NIMBY opposition to upzoning, and here is Sunrise Honolulu commenting that all housing investment should be banned. I’ve heard that they have a bigger pattern of this. Such behavior is certainly bad for both economic and environmental reasons; see my writeup on residential zoning. At the same time they have promoted new housing in other contexts, it’s not clear if the good outweighs the bad.
Police reform—TSM has promoted Defund the Police. As I describe here, defunding police departments is a bad policy idea, in fact hiring more police officers is probably a good idea. That said, Sunrise has also promoted Black Lives Matter and perhaps some more reasonable forms of police reform, and this is more likely to be a good thing.
Deliberate electoral politics—TSM has endorsed political campaigns with farther-reaching impacts beyond climate policy, generally because they are a progressive left-wing group who wants to achieve a variety of progressive left-wing political goals. Some notable ones which stick out to me are:
They supported an unsuccessful primary campaign against Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which was probably good because Feinstein is a pretty bad senator, tho defeating her probably would have achieved nothing good for climate policy. In fact, Feinstein has sponsored a carbon tax bill.
They supported a successful primary campaign against Rep. Eliot Engel, who had been a strong congressional proponent of effective foreign aid programs including PEPFAR. Removing Engel has no discernible impact on the climate. He has since been replaced in his position as the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee with Rep. Gregory Meeks who has no such record on foreign aid, altho hopefully he will become more active with his new position.
They supported Sen. Ed Markey against a primary challenge. Again this had no discernible impact on the climate, nor on most other policy issues frankly. I am happy that Markey won, but it is not a big deal.
They supported Bernie Sanders in his 2020 presidential primary campaign. On the merits, Sanders was pretty comparable to other Democratic candidates including Biden. But in terms of electability, he was inferior (see this essay where I use his campaign as a case study of electability). So this was a bad decision.
Inadvertent electoral politics—as other commentators have touched upon, some of Sunrise’s advocacy can inadvertently harm the Democratic Party. This is especially a consequence of calls to defund the police. As I argue here, the Democratic Party is generally superior to the Republican Party, so preventing the Democratic Party from winning elections constitutes harm.
Deprioritization of other issues—if TSM’s mechanism of change is to make Democratic politicians expend more political capital on climate change, that implies that the politicians will expend less political capital on other issues. It’s one thing to say that we need more action on climate change, but quite another to say that Democratic politicians should focus on climate policy before or instead of other things like healthcare, immigration and tax policy. I do lean towards saying that air pollution should indeed get more priority on the margin, but the downside for other issues still chips away at the expected value. Additionally, insofar as TSM pressures Democratic politicians to place more priority on other issues like criminal justice and public housing, that similarly detracts from alternative priorities, and here I’d be still less optimistic about the impact.
Certainly there is a difference between everything that TSM does, and the marginal impact of GG’s recommendation for their education fund. And certainly it is possible that the good parts of TSM’s environmental activism outweigh these downsides. And you might disagree with me on some of these political issues. But we must see strong arguments along these lines before prioritizing TSM for donations. And while I haven’t taken a close or systematic look at TSM’s activities, given all the red flags I tentatively expect that the Sunrise Movement does more harm than good.
Other commenters here have framed this stuff as a tension between the left and conservatives/moderates, but there are plenty of Democrats who criticize TSM too. Here’s Matt Yglesias saying “The problem with funding Sunrise is not that there is an objective scarcity of funds and other people need the money more, it’s that Sunrise is bad and should get $0.” And such views about TSM are pretty common at least on left-leaning Twitter. Recommending TSM without having awareness and counterarguments to these criticisms does not imply a need to listen more to conservatives or moderates (tho I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of listening more to conservatives or moderates), it suggests a more general need to keep closer tabs on the current political discourse. The synthesis of “EA should generally strive to be apolitical” and “some good causes are inherently political” should not be for us to naively support interventions because of the way that they attack one political problem while we ignore the risky impacts of those interventions on other parts of the political system.
Finally, I am less confident about this point, but I suspect that GG is being too credulous about TSM achieving change. Just because they demand that Democratic politicians do something, and the Democratic politicians do that something, with TSM claiming that they were responsible for making the Democratic politicians do that something, doesn’t mean TSM actually was responsible for making the politicians change. If a Democratic politician does major climate stuff in office after being criticized by TSM during their election campaign for something symbolic like not bringing up the Green New Deal, that’s only very weak evidence that TSM actually changed the politician’s behavior; it is better evidence for the claim that Democratic politicians are generally both serious on climate policy and savvy at election messaging and TSM was just making unfounded criticisms all along.
Here it is worth distinguishing two theories of how the Democratic Party works. Some people (like TSM and others on the progressive left) think the elites of the Democratic Party are centrist corporatists who don’t really want to implement leftist policies but will do it if their base pressures them hard enough. Other people think that Democratic Party elites are actually very ideologically liberal and would intrinsically like to implement ambitious reforms on the environment and other issues, but are stymied by right-wing and centrist political forces. AFAICT the second theory is much more accurate, and David Shor (the leftist data whiz) seems to agree.
I hope this does not come across too negative, since I am glad Giving Green exists and I just think this recommendation is a mistake.