Todd Zimmer of RAN introduced the panel by noting that the audience included community members from Charlotte as well as student leaders of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement from Western Washington, Brown, Harvard, and Davidson. Todd remarked that although Bank of America has stated its intention to be a leader on climate and clean energy, its track record as the number one funder of the coal industry is in direct conflict with this ambition. The bank’s lending and financing decisions involving the coal industry that are made at the bank’s headquarters in Uptown Charlotte impose immense costs for communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The first guest speaker, Ashish Fernandes of Greenpeace spoke about the dangers of India’s coal industry to rural communities, the environment, and to investors exposed to risky energy infrastructure in the country. Contrary to the myth that a coal boom in India is inevitable due to the country’s energy needs, most new coal plants and mines face huge community opposition across India. In the last three years alone, courts have sent back at least four different power plants to drawing board. India produces 65 percent of its electricity from coal, and produces 90% of its coal from open pit mines, which endanger over a million hectares of forest, and threaten the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in the country’s coal belt. Fortunately, wind is now cheaper than new coal plants in India and solar will reach grid parity with coal in under four years. However, the enduring influence of India’s coal lobby risks locking the country into coal dependence.

Next, Barbara Gottlieb, the director of health and advocacy for Physicians for Social Responsibility spoke to the global impacts of climate change on health. She began by highlighting that climate change is no longer a theoretical problem: It is happening now, and it is happening to us. Furthermore, she emphasized that climate change is not just an environmental issue. The British medical journal The Lancet called climate change “the health challenge of the 21^st Century.” Barbara noted that climate change is associated with more frequent and more intense storms, extreme heat waves, and drought, all of which pose acute risks to human health. She concluded by stressing that there is a way forward for Bank of America and the financial sector: Shifting their financing to clean, renewable energy.

Next, Bonnie McKinley from Portland, Oregon spoke to her experiences working with Power Past Coal and Rising Tide North America to fight plans to export coal from Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin through ports on the Pacific Northwest. Currently, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, Kinder Morgan, and other companies have introduced plans to build export infrastructure to ship Powder River Basin coal to be burned in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia. These proposed coal export terminals would bring up to 70 coal trains per day (each up to a mile-and-a-half long) through residential neighborhoods, leaving a trail of heavy metal-laden coal dust and putting communities at risk for derailments. Bonnie concluded on a hopeful note, remarking that a proposed railway for coal exports would never be built because, in the words of activist Vanessa Braided Hair, “Arch Coal understands money. What Arch Coal doesn’t understand is community. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand the Cheyenne people whose ancestors fought and died for the land that they are proposing to destroy. They don’t understand the fierceness with which the people, both Indian and non-Indian, in southeastern Montana love the land.” Bonnie also had a message for her baby boomer peers, urging them to take action to protect their communities and the climate: “Please get out and work for our special planet.”

Finally, Kathy Selvage from Wise County, West Virgina spoke about her decade-long experience fighting the impacts of mountaintop removal mining in her community and throughout Appalachia. She began by calling for the bank to “return to the integrity I knew decades ago” as an employee of a predecessor bank, Wise County National. Kathy spoke of her mother, who “would go outside and read the bible on front porch, then raise eyes to ponder what she had just read. When she raised her eyes, she saw a beautiful mountain across from her.” But after Glen Morgan Properties destroyed the mountain as part of one of their mountaintop removal mines, when her mother raised her eyes, “she saw the devastation of god’s creation.” The devastation wrought by the coal company that destroyed her community inspired Kathy to become active in the fight against mountaintop removal.

Kathy concluded by urging the audience to think about the interconnections between climate change, mountaintop removal, and other environmental issues. Faced with growing evidence of environmental threats hurting our communities and the environment, she reminded us that “we can no longer afford to stand still like we’re not a part of this planet.”

This Wednesday evening, The Yes Men will be honored with the Art of Activism Award at Rainforest Action Network’s annual gala REVEL. I interviewed Andy and Mike before the big night to hear the latest on their hijinx, arrests, lawsuits and revolution… As well as the true identity of one Mr. Alessio Rastani.

During a recent interview with BBC, the self-proclaimed “stock market trader and trainer” Alessio Rastani revealed sentiments which few traders were previously willing to admit, like dreaming about recessions to capitalize off of and his now infamous quote: “The governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

The Internet went wild with theories that Alessio Rastani was part of The Yes Men, and Huffington Post UK even published wild speculations that Alessio was indeed Andy Bichlbaum. What do you have to say about all this?

It’s flattering to be associated with a rare moment of televised honesty coming from a trader. Unlike most of the bigger fish who play the financial markets, Rastani did something decent by warning the 99 percent of us who are not filthy rich about the slow collapse of the markets. That’s a hell of a lot more decent than the likes of Goldman Sachs, who have a well-documented history of lies and obstruction which are all designed to fleece more people at the bottom of their pyramid schemes.

You’ve pulled off dozens of hoaxes — posing as Dow Chemical apologizing for Bhopal, derailing Chevron’s “We Agree” ad campaign, and even distributing a fake edition of the New York Times announcing the end of the war in Iraq. Which prank has personally been the most fun? Which do you feel has been the most impactful in the world?

Fun and impact don’t always go hand in hand.

They are separate questions.

Our action with RAN and Amazon Watch against Chevron’s absurd “We Agree” greenwashing campaign was definitely among the most successful. It was successful at torpedoing the launch of Chevron’s campaign, but it was also very fun to watch so many folks join in on the action. Each time more hilarious remixed ads got sent into the site, we had another good laugh at Chevron’s expense. As for the most impact: We don’t really know… but even if we had the money I don’t think we’d hire a giant multinational company to find out!

You’ve made it this far with few arrests (one due to an unpaid ticket for cycling through Washington Square Park) and even fewer lawsuits, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit back in ’09 in response to your announcement at the National Press Club that the Chamber had reversed its stance on climate change. What’s the latest update? Are they still just as pissed?

The Chamber lawsuit against us is sitting on a judge’s desk in Washington, where it’s been for the last two years. It could in theory move ahead at any moment. The Chamber are still, of course, horrid!

The Yes Men Fix the World was indeed the most laugh-out-loud documentary I’ve ever seen. Rumor has it you’ve got another one coming. Tell us about The Yes Men Are Revolting: A Feature Length Call to Arms.

For years we’ve been doing our thing as the Yes Men, and now we’re making our methods available to more folks than ever through the Yes Lab. But our methods are good for tactical interventions – and if we want to see big changes, which we need right now to save us from ourselves, we need to move into strategy. We need mass action, and some places in the world have been getting it. So we’re jumping on board – trying to join the non-violent revolutionary movements that intend to displace the system we’ve got with something sustainable.

So few people know this, but the two of you actually have “real” paying jobs on top of all the work you do devising elaborate hoaxes. What are you up to exactly?

We teach. Andy is at NYU, and Mike is at RPI. Luckily, that lets us do our thing… and we have lots of great students who come work with us to join in on some Yes Lab action.

Your focus seems to be moving from professional pranksterism to fostering revolution. What’s the bridge between the two and how are you crossing it?

Revolution requires creativity and a sense of humor! Every non-violent revolution needs creative communication, to build the ranks of the movement, to give it an identity and to speak to people who are not already in the streets. Whether you look at Women’s Suffrage, the Indian Independence Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, or even the recent revolutions of the “Arab Spring” you can find lots of examples of creative acts that were deployed tactically to contribute to the movement and to the success of revolution. That’s what we’re trying to work on, in whatever way that we can.

Naomi and Rebecca were recently together at the Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C., which inspired the following dialogue…

Naomi Klein Photo by Ed Kashi & Rebecca Tarbotton

RAN is now in its 26th year, and we’ve been thinking a lot about our corporate campaigning model. As someone with expertise in analyzing corporate power, what have you seen as successful models for shifting the behavior of these multinational giants? Where is their weak underbelly?

The terrain is a hell of a lot more complicated than when I published No Logo 11 years ago and targets need to be chosen much more carefully. It sometimes works better not to go after the oil or coal company directly, but to go after the banks that lend them money, or the large corporations that buy their dirty energy (I’m thinking of the Bank of America, Facebook and Royal Bank of Canada campaigns here.) This can be more effective because the banks and corporate customers are less invested in the dirty business model themselves, so they have more flexibility to change course, whereas an oil company or a coal company isn’t going to see the light and stop being an oil or a coal company. It can also work to use national values to our advantage – Scandinavian investors are particularly receptive to ethical concerns. But the truth is that I’ve never believed that we can change the world one corporation at a time. What we can do is use corporate campaigns to make things so uncomfortable for a few big corporate players that this builds leverage for across-the-board regulation, which should always be the goal.

You were recently arrested in Washington, DC, along with 1,252 others, during a two-week sit-in at the White House demanding President Obama deny the permit for a 1700-mile tar sands pipeline. Do you think we are witnessing a historic moment for the climate movement in this country?

I think we’ve never really had a climate movement, at least not a mass movement. We had climate campaigns, which raised awareness, but that’s different. What is changing is that a new generation of young activists fully understands that change isn’t going to come until a mass movement exists, one capable of exerting real political, social and economic pressure from outside the halls of power. The mass civil disobedience against Keystone XL was a huge step in that direction and it was thrilling to be a part of it.

What are the key issues you think environmentalists should be focusing on?

Expanding the movement beyond traditional environmentalists, and tapping into the broader public outrage at corporate greed and economic recklessness. If you are targeting Bank of America because it’s lending money to coal companies, you need to be in coalition with all the other groups out there that are pissed at Bank of America for other reasons, first and foremost home foreclosures. The same logic that has trashed the economy is trashing the planet and we need to make those connections incessantly, because that’s how you build a truly mass movement. In some ways, the task is less to get self-described environmentalists to focus on economic justice than it is to find ways to make environmental issues more relevant to those pre-occupied with economic justice.

I also think we need to keep focusing on the geographic choke points where we can keep coal and unconventional oil in the ground. Once again, it doesn’t always make sense to go after the central target (the coal mine or oil well). The arteries are more vulnerable because the communities they pass through are less economically invested in a dirty business model. I think the Tar Sands has the potential to help build a massive continent-wide climate movement, precisely because it has so many arteries (multiple new pipelines in the works, machinery that needs to be transported, refinery expansions, export ports, tanker routes, etc…)

What advice would you give to young activists who may be daunted by the problems we face and the work it would take to fix them?

The failures of our current economic model are now so obvious to the vast majority of people on the planet that there is political space to think big. This is the kind of moment in which deep transformation is possible. So of course it’s daunting, but it’s also exciting.

I picked up a RAN pamphlet while attending an animal rights conference in Oregon, and was very much taken with their bite-back approach in challenging large corporations. I was inspired by the work RAN was doing to support Indigenous rights and communities. Nothing is more valuable, sacred, and vulnerable than our environment and the species that we share with it. I feel RAN does an amazing job through direct action, my personal favorite, and get corporations to adopt better business practices.

Environmentalism with Teeth

RAN has caught my eye with their commanding and tenacious energy to their campaigns. Not only is RAN able to find ways in which to take action on the issues facing our precious planet, but they turn that action into something exciting and compelling. RAN will get the job done!

About Kitty

In middle school I was exposed to a side of the food industry that I had never seen before through the video “Meet Your Meat.” This video opened my eyes to the animal abuse in the production of industrial foods and changed my life. I went from an apathetic and jaded teenager to an inspired and unstoppable activist for animals and the environment.

Since then, volunteering has become my favorite thing to do. I have recently started cleaning people’s houses in my free time in my efforts to support groups that work to protect the environment, the rights of animals and humans alike. So far I’ve raised over $700.

When not volunteering I simply delight in protesting, meeting new people, jogging, and cooking up a vegan storm in the kitchen!

Perhaps my favorite answer of the bunch so far is from Karen in Portland, OR. She says: “I’d buy land and 30 yurts and live off the land and be an example of green living.”

I gotta say, Karen, you certainly are thrifty. I think, after those two purchases you’d probably have about $10.905 billion left over.

Some folks were more conservative in their desires like Isaac from Amherst, MA who would “get hybrid vehicles for every state government in the country.” Others put forth more expansive plans like Ken in Los Angeles: “Solar roof tops for poor people and offer to develop solar power in Iran.” Wow. That might negate the whole nuclear need, eh?

Its great watching the ideas stream in. Keep it coming and forward the link on to your friends so we can get more ideas and people up there. If you haven’t seen it yourself yet, take a look:

http://dirtymoney.org/txu/join_us_feb_21st/