The new groups and their disruptive, anti-establishment approach have created lots of buzz. | M.Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Rowdy greens take charge

An estimated crowd of nearly 400,000 climate activists flooded New York City’s streets on Sunday in a coming-out party for a new breed of environmentalism – one that’s louder and rowdier than the old-school greens who dominated the movement when Barack Obama entered the White House.

These upstarts like 350.org are brushing aside the staid Washington lobbying strategies of groups that failed to pass a climate bill in 2010. Instead they’re getting arrested outside the White House gates, staging costumed protests around the president’s travels and planning to clog Wall Street on Monday. They’ve already chalked up one big win: turning the Keystone XL pipeline decision into a political nightmare for Obama.


Like the tea party, the new groups and their disruptive, anti-establishment approach have created lots of buzz, something they aimed to amplify with the huger-than-expected turnout for Sunday’s celebrity-studded protest march through midtown Manhattan. But their movement still hasn’t proven it can succeed consistently on policy-making — which requires an inside game to bring victories like a meaningful global climate pact or strong regulations to throttle greenhouse gases.

( PHOTOS: People's Climate March)

“We can’t dismiss the importance of legislating, and we don’t mean to,” said Jamie Henn, the strategy director who co-founded 350.org seven years ago, fresh out of college, alongside writer-turned-activist Bill McKibben. “What we’re trying to show is that there’s a way to wield political influence through different avenues.”

Organizers hope Sunday’s march, which came two days before a scheduled United Nations climate summit, will show governments at home and abroad that a potent, diverse constituency for cutting carbon emissions exists in America.

The march came four years after the nation’s most established environmental groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, tried and failed to use a mostly inside-the-Beltway lobbying strategy to get Congress to enact cap and trade. Now all are joining McKibben’s group in Sunday’s mass protest.

( Also on POLITICO: Climate activists 'flood' Wall Street)

While the march was timed to Obama’s appearance at the summit, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said a strong U.N. pact on global emissions cuts is not required for the event to succeed. “What we expect to see from this march is a continued surge in strategic climate activism,” Brune said before the event. “Our ability as a movement to be more aggressive, the ability to hold weak-kneed politicians accountable, has made us more effective.”

The new breed reigns supreme on social media: 350 has 201,000 Twitter followers, more than the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC or EDF. When McKibben launched a live climate tour in 2012, an estimated 24,000 people helped sell out 22 shows, and his group has volunteers in 188 countries. Its lobbying budget is tiny, though — because it tends to disdains all that.

Still, even though organizers said Sunday’s march drew far more than the 100,000 they had hoped for, activists face a steep challenge if they want to connect those supporters with the big political goal that several major green groups have set for November: keeping the Senate in Democratic hands. Climate activist billionaire Tom Steyer — who attended the march — and the League of Conservation Voters are each putting tens of millions of dollars into the midterm elections. Should Republicans retake the chamber, pressure to slow down EPA regulations and approve Keystone would mount quickly in 2015.

( Also on POLITICO: Climate push takes center stage)

“I just wish the energy you see going into New York, that gets put into the march, was spent marching through precincts in battleground congressional districts and in battleground states,” one veteran environmental consultant said, calling the march “a theater game.”

A Republican oil industry consultant responded similarly to the march’s ultra-liberal locale and A-list backers: “When Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Steyer fly to battleground states to hold public climate marches in the midst of campaign season with their preferred candidates, then we will know they are serious,” the consultant said.

The agendas on display Sunday ranged from local campaigns against Keystone and fracking to the priorities of minority and union groups that 350 wants to bring into the tent of a movement long identified with affluent whites. The rally aspired to be all things to all activists, asking marchers to line up by themed groups in a bid to show the world the largest possible constituency for tackling climate change.

Such a big-tent approach brings overlapping political goals. The labor group Blue Green Alliance, where some members back Keystone, appeared alongside activists who oppose the pipeline. (Blue Green Executive Director Kim Glas said the march is “about an agenda that actually unites us, not about Keystone.”)

Green groups involved in the march, including LCV and the Environmental Defense Fund – which have endorsed some pro-Keystone Republicans this year – line up to praise its all-hands-on-deck approach. They dismiss the notion that differences within their movement on the merits, whether of the Canada-to-U.S. oil pipeline or fracking, distract from their overall message.

“Are there people more skeptical of government action” involved in the march, asked David Goldston, director of government affairs for the NRDC. “Sure. But government will see that those people want action on climate change.”

Sierra and 350, which demonstrated its nascent Washington clout with statements of support for the march from 26 Senate and 23 House Democrats, are hardly the only contingent in the environmental movement looking beyond government to marshal support for climate policy. LCV used field work to corral 80,000 public comments backing EPA’s proposed climate rule, and EDF maintained its own grassroots organizing even during the backroom-dealing days of the now-defunct cap-and-trade climate bill, during Obama’s first term.

Yet the rabble-rousers at 350 have taken the strategy to new heights since their weeks of White House sit-ins against Keystone in 2011 led to the arrests of around 1,200 peaceful protesters. Even the century-plus-old Sierra Club ended its long-held ban on civil disobedience by early 2013, with Brune and other leaders going to jail in a Keystone protest at the White House gates.

McKibben’s organization and smaller groups have turned to the grassroots model time and again in the ensuing years, with resistance in the red state of Nebraska proving pivotal in pushing the administration last spring to delay a ruling on the pipeline.

Meanwhile, the pro-Keystone tide on the Hill is strong. The GOP-controlled House has voted more than seven times since 2010 to try to override Obama’s authority and approve Keystone, often with dozens of Democratic supporters. Pipeline boosters in the Democratic-held Senate now count 57 votes in their camp and expect to reach the key mark of 60 next year if Republicans take the majority, though a veto-proof margin for Keystone is out of reach.

If greens had just lobbied against Keystone using traditional Washington methods, “it would have been approved years ago,” Henn of 350 said. But he acknowledged it is “yet to be proved” whether the same congressional-workaround strategy can be effective at “not just blocking big projects, but pushing forward official action.”

NRDC’s Goldston argued that “you’re effective when you have both an outside and inside strategy — I think we’ve got both.” Media coverage tends to emphasis greens’ inside lobbying more than their outside activity, he said, which makes Sunday’s march even more important as a public show of support for environmentalism.

Since the 350-driven anti-Keystone movement began in 2011, mainstream environmentalists’ response has evolved through three broad phases, as outlined by another longtime green consultant not affiliated with any of the movement’s major groups.

Older activist groups such as EDF, NRDC and LCV started out distantly involved in mid-2011, this consultant said, then concluded that the anti-pipeline forces could inject new energy into their base. This year, many of the same well-funded environmental outlets entered a third stage and became full-throated supporters of the New York march.

But much depends on whether the international community views the rally as a credible show of U.S. support for climate action, the green consultant added. “If the model becomes 350 and Keystone, that’s not enough, because this isn’t simply about pipelines or EPA regulations. It’s also about addressing substantive economic and geopolitical concerns” – priorities that only some groups involved in the march are spending significant time on.

One of three congressional Democrats who were planning to march Sunday, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, advised younger activists to keep pushing from afar against anyone denying that climate change poses a threat.

“In the spring in New England, when there’s snow on your roof it stays on the roof, but when it comes down, it comes down all at once, with a big thump,” Whitehouse said. The march, he explained, “is accelerating the day when the denial apparatus just falls with a crash. You’re not necessarily going to get a warning that it’s about to crash.”