Can shaming the world’s worst ‘climate criminals’ save the planet?

This story is part of the Grist arts and culture series “Moral Hazards,” a weeklong exploration of the complex — sometimes contradictory — factors that drive our ethical decision-making in the age of global warming. An unfailingly friendly 30-year-old with tousled black hair and a slight, willowy frame, Michael Greenberg almost never loses his beatific smile — not even when a black SUV is plowing straight toward him. This apparent serenity makes it nearly impossible to imagine Greenberg uttering the following words, which he posted to X in May: “We are bold and brash. We get in your face and get in your space. We do not grovel. We do not make requests like Oliver Twist asking for gruel. We make life miserable for people in power. And we do not apologize. Respect us or expect us.” As the founder of the activist group Climate Defiance, Greenberg has proven that he means what he tweets. Since the group’s founding last year, Climate Defiance activists have stormed dozens of formal events with the goal of, in their words, “ending the careers and decimating the reputations of those who disagree with us.” They’ve called Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, a “murderer” to her face, told Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia that he’s a “sick f***,” and demanded that Exxon Mobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, “eat shit.” In the last month alone, they’ve berated Occidental Petroleum’s CEO, Vicki Hollub, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and — for the sixth and almost certainly not final time — retiring Senator Manchin. On the strength of this chaos, the group raised well over $100,000 in just one week in September. The group’s public shaming efforts have also sometimes targeted policymakers who have committed their entire political careers to fighting climate change. In the span of a few days in New York City last year, the group heckled President Joe Biden’s climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, four different times. “We confronted the National Climate Advisor with so much zeal that he fled his keynote and took refuge in a basement boiler room,” the group bragged in a recent fundraising email. Michael Greenberg, right, with the attorney and activist Steven Donziger at a protest outside a fundraiser for President Joe Biden in 2023. Courtesy of Climate Defiance Greenberg takes climate change seriously in his private life as well. He doesn’t own a car, doesn’t eat animal products (thus cutting his dietary carbon emissions by roughly 75 percent), and minimizes air travel that isn’t necessary for his work. For Greenberg and his allies, however, personal choices about how to live in harmony with climate science are beside the point. The way they see it, the rich and powerful have thrown their lot in with those who have a vested interest in continued fossil fuel use, and this cabal is the main thing standing in the way of a fossil fuel-free future — rather than the carbon-intensive proclivities of millions and millions of people like me, who don’t quite have it in them to give up cheese, let alone road trips. If plutocrats are the problem, then, it makes sense that upsetting the comfort and prestige enjoyed by these corrupted elites might be the best and perhaps only hope for getting them to change course. As Greenberg put it on a phone call with me, “We’re face to face with the people torching our planet.” His volunteers have been arrested, choked, tackled, and shoved to the ground for their trouble. “They are going after villains,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, co-founder of the Climate Emergency Fund, a philanthropic venture that is Climate Defiance’s first major funder. “They’re quite savvy on social media. And they’re pissed. They have been betrayed by the elected representatives that are supposed to be representing them.” The group represents something of a synthesis of trends that have developed in climate activism over the past decade: It combines anti-pipeline activists’ emphasis on disruptive direct action, the Sunrise Movement’s focus on expanding the terms of U.S. politics (think the Green New Deal), and Extinction Rebellion’s pursuit of virality and spectacle. The novel element that Climate Defiance adds to the mix (besides a penchant for profanity) is a reliance on public shaming, illustrated by its signature tactic of derailing formal speaking gigs. “Sunrise wasn’t shutting down speeches until we started doing it,” Greenberg told me. Climate Defiance activists blockade the 2023 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. Courtesy of Climate Defiance In the lead-up to a Climate Defiance action in May, another leader of the organization told his assembled compatriots that one of his favorite activities was shaming people in front of their family and friends. “Of course, only if they’re the worst scum of the earth,” he clarified. Climate Defiance activists are adamant that they’re not trying to change the minds of targets like Manchin, let alone those attending the events they disrupt, who are likely to respond to their stunts with awkward silence and a few jeers. Instead, the group’s public shaming is intended to galvanize the broader public to join them in righteous fury. Though Greenberg is aware of the polling that shows climate change to be a low electoral priority for Americans — a major goal of the organization is to make climate a “top three issue in American politics,” he told me — he also believes that Climate Defiance can tap into the public’s dormant anger and build a mass movement. When touting the group’s success, Greenberg is fond of pointing to social media metrics: He told me that he thinks Climate Defiance has gotten more online engagement than all other green groups combined. “Our effect is almost 100 percent through social media,” one action leader said on a recent prep call. Translating all this social media engagement into the mass mobilization that Climate Defiance envisions, however, is very much a work in progress. Turnout for individual actions has, at best, numbered in the dozens, and the rank-and-file participants I met over the past few months were typically seasoned veterans of groups like Extinction Rebellion in the New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C., metro areas. It’s no surprise that a group this young would begin by building on a core of committed activists; what’s surprising is how much they appear to have already influenced the very elites that they harangue on a daily basis, even before it’s clear whether something as amorphous as “the public” is on their side. In December, Greenberg and another Climate Defiance campaigner were invited to the White House to discuss policy with the Biden administration’s senior climate adviser, John Podesta, who they had chased off a stage eight months earlier. “I appreciate their passion,” Podesta said diplomatically over their heckling at the time, though he later confided to Greenberg that he found the organization to be a “pain in the ass.” Climate activists chant onstage after interrupting a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell at the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C., in November 2023. Celal Gunes / Anadolu via Getty Images At the meeting, Greenberg expressed concern about a massive new natural gas export terminal in Louisiana that was up for federal approval; a month later, the administration pulled the plug on the project. Despite the lack of a clear causal connection between the two events, some observers, like Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, have credited Climate Defiance with the administration’s subsequent decision to slow-walk federal approval of all new natural gas export facilities. Though that policy change was nullified by a federal judge in July, it’s still listed as the top achievement on Climate Defiance’s website. Even so, Greenberg still sees Climate Defiance as a band of outsiders. “I don’t have 50 senators’ numbers saved in my phone,” he told me, though he allowed that he might have saved a few numbers from the so-called Squad of left-wing Democratic representatives. Even that likely undersells his access: Khanna and Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington have both shown up at Climate Defiance fundraisers, and a short list of funders includes heirs of the Disney and Getty oil fortunes, as well as Hollywood celebrities like Adam McKay and Jeremy Strong. When I met up with Greenberg after his foiled attempt to blockade the Biden campaign headquarters in July — Climate Defiance…