If you have your Saturday evening disrupted by climate protesters outside the Washington Hilton, blame Margaret Klein Salamon. Climate Emergency Fund, the nonprofit she helms, is funding a group that's planning to blockade the White House Correspondents' Dinner over the Biden administration's support for fossil fuels. CEF also funds the groups that demonstrated outside Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) houseboat leading up to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, shut down I-495, threw soup at van Gogh's "Sunflowers" and recently disrupted a snooker tournament. Their tactics have inspired a rich vein of research and debate over their effectiveness — but the fact people are talking about them is half the battle. Salamon counts oil heir Aileen Getty and director Adam McKay as benefactors and Succession's Jeremy Strong as an acolyte. The second edition of her 2020 book, “Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth,” comes out at the end of May. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What's going to happen around the White House Correspondents Dinner? In the big picture, this is part of the spring uprising that's happening globally. Extinction Rebellion's having a major demonstration in Westminster. Groups in mainly Europe — Germany and the United Kingdom — but also here in the U.S. and in some other countries are stepping up their disruptive tactics. This new campaign in Washington, D.C., called Climate Defiance, is a youth-led campaign, heavily utilizing disruptive tactics to end fossil fuels in the United States. That is their goal. Climate Defiance is brand new. But they've already had a couple of successful disruptions of Biden's national climate adviser, his speeches. This will be their biggest demonstration. History and social science show that social movements, and particularly disruptive social movements, are the fastest way to create transformative change. And social movements are never popular, right? Because it's a small group of people telling a much larger group of people that they need to change. When you look back at history, it's like, which tactics of the suffragettes and the civil rights movement and ACT UP, the AIDS movement, which of those tactics were too drastic, right? The Inflation Reduction Act came out of Build Back Better, which came out of the Green New Deal. How do you take credit while also saying it's not going far enough? A grantee of ours, Insulate Britain, was doing disruptive protests, particularly road-blocking, for months, and then the United Kingdom passed a £1 billion investment in insulating public housing, which is exactly what they were calling for. In these instances, they never say, "Oh, we're going to do this because of the activists." The Inflation Reduction Act could not have happened without the climate movement. There's all this work that went into creating a situation where the Inflation Reduction Act could pass and bringing climate to the top of the priority list. At the end, Climate Emergency Fund funded quite a bit of pushing for the IRA specifically: A hunger strike in front of the White House, and then activists who bird-dogged [Sen. Joe] Manchin at his car, houseboat and coal plant that enriches him in West Virginia, not giving him any peace. And he somewhat surprisingly switched his vote. You can never say exactly what causes what, but it seems it can be very impactful, these activists. On one hand, it's surprising, all these policy victories that they're getting, but on the other hand, it's like, it really works. The main airport in Amsterdam said they're not going to have private planes anymore, after multiple months of disruptive protests on the tarmac. So movements work, building power works, disruption works. And we're not even close to where we need to be. To do this work is definitely to live in the kind of contradiction that you're pointing to. It's great. Things are going so well. There's so much exciting stuff going on in the movement. And, on the other hand, we should have been doing this, like, 30 years ago.
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