Willow Pjt

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...“We do not do petitions, we do direct action,” the group states on its website. And in drawing eyes and ears to their demands, Climate Defiance’s tactics have yielded undeniable success: in less than a year of existence, the group has had one-on-one discussions with Zaidi, deputy secretary of energy David Turk and then-senior advisor on clean energy, now senior advisor to the president for international climate policy, John Podesta. The meeting with Podesta occurred in the White House, where he discussed the controversial CP2 liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal with members of the activist group.

Climate Defiance confronted Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau five times in one day after he signed off on the controversial Willow project oil drilling project in Alaska. He stepped down from his position with the Department of the Interior two weeks later.

Less than a month after the group crashed a fundraiser in San Francisco to give Harvard Law professor Jody Freeman a “Big Oil Bestie,” award for being a board member of ConocoPhillips, the company responsible for the Willow project, Freeman subsequently resigned from her position on the board. And just a month after Climate Defiance’s meeting with Podesta, the Biden administration made the landmark decision to halt all new LNG export projects.

The timelines don’t prove that Climate Defiance caused Beaudreau, Freeman and Podesta’s actions, and it wasn’t alone in pressuring these figures or criticizing the projects they were associated with. The group frequently collaborates with a broad range of environmental organizations in movement-wide fights. The LNG decision, for instance, came after a multi-year campaign from a national network of organizers and groups that began organizing long before Climate Defiance came into existence. Many of them come from frontline communities along the Gulf Coast, where many LNG terminals have been proposed.

“It was definitely a team effort,” Greenberg said of the LNG decision.

Still, he thinks his group had a strong impact.

“We made it really, really clear that that was kind of a red line for us and I think the administration noticed,” he said.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said the group had an impact, and the White House quoted Climate Defiance’s post calling the decision “monumental” among the host of praise for the LNG decision that it featured on its official website.