A former Facebook executive has launched a climate change advocacy group designed to pressure corporations into taking strong stances on climate policy. The new arm-twisting tactic? Mobilizing regular employees to agitate against management from within company walls.
As part of its aggressive strategy, the group said companies that remain silent on climate change issues will be placed on “notice” and told that they will be expected to speak up in the future.
“We will be watching them,” the organization said, adding that it will use social media to publicly call out companies that choose not to get onboard.
Bill Weihl, who led Facebook’s sustainability team before stepping down from the social media company in 2018, kicked off ClimateVoice last week at the ClimateCAP conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
His organization intends to motivate employees to apply internal pressure to their employers to get involved in climate change activism on the federal, state, and local levels. “Our mission is to mobilize the voice of the workforce to urge companies to go ‘all in’ on climate, both in business practices and policy advocacy,” the group says on its official site.
ClimateVoice creates online petitions and sends those documents to companies. Employees can opt to sign petitions anonymously if they fear for their jobs.
“We will send the petitions to companies calling on them to support the initiatives,” ClimateVoice says on its site.
“When the initiative passes or fails, we will send the letter, thanking the companies that spoke up, and putting the companies that stayed silent on notice that we expect them to speak up in the future, and that we will be watching them.”
ClimateVoice also said it will use traditional media and social media “to let everyone know which companies are speaking up and which are silent, and make sure that companies know that silence is no longer acceptable.”
The tactic is a larger-scale version of the one recently used by Amazon and Microsoft employees to persuade management to take action on carbon emissions. Amazon reportedly threatened to fire at least two employees who criticized the e-commerce giant’s record on the environment, telling them that they violated the company’s external communications rules.
ClimateVoice is also targeting college students who are looking for jobs, in the hopes that a groundswell of climate change sentiment from prospective hires will also put pressure on companies that want to appear like desirable places to work.
The organization is betting that pressure from the private sector will create the extra momentum needed to pass certain pieces of legislation.
“Unleashing the muscle of the corporate sector will be a climate game changer, tipping the balance on policy battles that are now stacked in favor of polluting industries,” Weihl said in a statement on the site.
Weihl previously served as Google’s “Green Energy Czar” and was a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For its opening act, ClimateVoice is targeting climate battles in two states — the Virginia Clean Economy Act and the Illinois Energy Jobs Act. It is also pushing for the Transportation and Climate Initiative, an effort affecting 12 northeast and mid-Atlantic states, including Washington, D.C., to reduce carbon emissions in the transportation sector.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.