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Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society (BiGS) invited Dyanna Jaye, a climate activist who co-founded the Sunrise Movement in 2017, to discuss her experience organizing young people to address climate change and creating millions of good jobs in the process. Barbara DeLollis, head of communications at BiGS, caught up with Jaye to discuss changes in U.S. industrial policy and her advice to corporate leaders. The transcript has been edited for length, clarity, and style.
Thanks for sitting down with us to talk about your experience as a climate activist. What started you down this path?
For me, the journey to movement-building and organizing started in 2010, my first year as an undergrad at the University of Virginia, when I met Larry Gibson [co-founder of the environmental group Keeper of the Mountains, which opposes mountaintop-removal coal mining]. He came to the university and invited students to visit his hometown, and so we got into a minivan and drove out to West Virginia. I remember standing at the edge of his property, looking out over a sea of dynamited mountaintops, and just feeling this intensity. I wanted to do what I saw Larry doing.
How did you come to co-found the Sunrise Movement?
For years, I campaigned to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure, so I joined the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline and campaigned to stop natural gas pipelines in my home state of Virginia. We were winning some of those campaigns, but we were also losing on so many fronts. We had to say to ourselves, ‘I don't think we can win this way, one piece of infrastructure at a time.’ We need a much bigger strategy.
We realized we need the full power of the federal government behind the climate transition, the spending powers and the direction-setting powers, and the coordination powers. That's the only thing capable of coordinating a societal transition to address the climate crisis. That was the question we asked at Sunrise: How do we get there?
You’ve suggested that World War II provided inspiration. How so?
We were studying history, studying the New Deal, and the economic and industrial mobilization in this country around World War II. That was the last time our country focused on a federal strategy that was shaping markets and shaping the economy in the direction we needed to go. We asked, ‘What were the tools people were using at that time to do that, and can we use some of those lessons and those tools to have a fully funded, fully coordinated response to the climate crisis?’ That became the foundation of the vision of the Green New Deal.
What were your biggest goals at the Sunrise Movement?
When we started Sunrise, we had the mission to end the corrupting influence of the fossil fuel industry on our political system. We also wanted to elect a new generation of leaders who would fight for us. We had a lot of focus on the political system and how to have a government that was capable of addressing the climate crisis. We teamed up with newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-NY], labor unions and the environmental justice movement, and Senator Ed Markey [D-MA] to build the legislative and political agenda that became the Green New Deal.
What kind of impact did the movement have?
We launched the Green New Deal six days after the 2018 midterm elections, through a sit-in at the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We wanted to ask the Democratic Party: What is your plan around climate change? We went there with about 200 people, and then three weeks later we were back in Congress with 1,500 people. By the end of that year, we had 500 chapters in all 50 states. The growth was explosive. It showed me just how eager people were to see themselves in a vision that was aggressively ambitious on what it's going to take to address the climate crisis.
Where do you think we are today? Are you optimistic?
The Inflation Reduction Act, along with the CHIPS and Science Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, really mark the biggest turn toward industrial policy in this country that we've seen in a long time. The federal government is taking a decisive, focused, coordinated role in shaping the direction of the economy.
In terms of the IRA, that means new manufacturing and new industries that help us in the climate transition. So that's manufacturing batteries. It's building wind farms. It's new clean energy.
What excites me about the design of the IRA, which was so fundamental to us in building the vision of the Green New Deal, was to see economic policy and climate policy as united, and see the climate crisis as an opportunity to build millions of good jobs in this country. Policy is designed to incentivize. If you are good on labor and good on locating your plants in places where there's the most need for economic transition, then you get more federal investment.
You’ve said the IRA is good for business. How do you see that, as an activist?
This federal policy agenda is very good for business and very good for new industries to develop. There was a moment after the IRA passed that it dawned on me that so much of my organizing work probably has created a new generation of millionaires, a new generation of businesses, and new profits from industries that are going to have the opportunity to thrive in this climate transition economy.
Obviously, there's a history of antagonism between social movements and businesses and a history of a lack of accountability between businesses and profits and the extraction of community resources. It makes sense, I think, that there’s some bad blood between the two parties. But business is not a monolith.
What is your advice to business leaders?
What I want business leaders to see is the critical role of an engaged citizenry, an engaged movement involved in shaping the direction of our country, and to see themselves as part of that. I'm proud of the tireless fight of the youth climate movement that raised the urgency of this issue. And I think that if we are truly to decarbonize the economy, which is an agenda that so many businesses share, there's a need to work together to reach every person in this transition. There's so much room for the movement and for businesses involved in the climate transition to be talking to each other, seeing the work that we both have to do, and finding the time for those conversations.
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