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Greenpeace US Executive Director Phil Radford
The Greenpeace USA executive director, Phil Radford. Photograph: Robert Meyers/Greenpeace
The Greenpeace USA executive director, Phil Radford. Photograph: Robert Meyers/Greenpeace

Greenpeace USA's Phil Radford: 'Obama could have been a hero'

This article is more than 14 years old
The new executive director of Greenpeace USA talks to Bibi van der Zee about his new role and why he sees little sign of change coming from the White House

When you ask Phil Radford, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA, whether he thinks that at 33 he's a little too young for the job, he laughs. "No! I think I should have had it at 25," he says. He is mostly joking, as his predecessor John Passacantando did a pretty good job for his eight years under the hostile eye of George W Bush. He got the organisation out of debt, massively expanded the membership, helped to get climate change into mainstream awareness, managed to beat a Bush attempt to shut them up through the courts, and even saw off an Exxon-funded smear campaign.

The job is famously hairy: it's the sort of position where the experience and political nous that come with age will certainly come in handy. From its very earliest days, Greenpeace has been famous – as you'd expect from a group of people agitating on their ethical beliefs – for arguments and fallings out, with one co-founder after another being ousted, or growing disenchanted. As Passacantando said : "I've been here twice as long as any of my predecessors, and I'm the only one leaving happy."

But Radford, who was arrested on his very first day in the job for climbing a crane and hanging a banner outside an Obama meeting which read "Too Big to Fail", has an air of assurance and certainty that manages to transmit itself, even over a transatlantic phone-line. He's organised activists since high school and through college, founded the influential clean-energy campaign Power Shift in 2001, and then gone on as Greenpeace grassroots director for the past six years to nearly double their budget and hugely expand the organisation's US membership. A colleague describes him as "already a veteran campaigner", even at the tender age of 33.

Is he excited about coming into his role just as Bush leaves and Obama takes up office? Radford doesn't hesitate to be critical of the new president. "What we haven't seen from Obama is a real leadership role in telling the US congress that he wants real action on global warming. He's essentially sat on the sidelines and hidden behind Congress while coal companies and the politicians that they fund have worked to weaken clean energy and global warming standards in the US."

On the issue of climate change, Radford feels that Obama has "not shown integrity. He's always had a moderate stance, but I think he has disappointed people who thought that he was a man of integrity who would do what's right even if it's hard. It's as if we're standing in New Orleans and the president is about to build a 50ft levee to hold off 100ft of floodwater." He says, in fairness: "There are good things happening. The energy information administration have begun to rapidly accelerate green energy delivery. But will President Obama take on oil, coal, and the special interests in congress and say 'No, we need it all to be clean, we're putting an end to dirty energy?'"

The same problem, he says, has occurred in Obama's dealings with American car industries. "Obama could really have been a hero," says Radford. "He could have said to the car companies, we will balance your books but in ten years time you will all be building hybrids. He missed a real opportunity to change the world."

For Radford, those special interests – coal, oil, the automobile industry – are the biggest part of the problem. As he points out, "the energy companies spent $80m (£50m) in the first quarter of this year lobbying in the US, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars going to political campaigns to make sure that they cave into their interests." The result of the power of these interests – especially under Bush, but also under Clinton – has been weakened clean water and air laws that have allowed practices such as the egregious mountaintop removal to just go ahead. Mountaintop removal, as Radford explains, means that coal companies have been permitted to "literally blow off the top of our mountains, just raze mountains and turn them into plateaus to get the coal. It's cheaper to do it that way and so there are hundreds of mountains throughout West Virginia and the Appalachians where the tops are just gone and all the chemicals and debris runs down into the streams. It's ruining communities and peoples' health and it is permanently scarring our land. It's outrageous and shows just how far we've gone away from our values in order to feed our fossil fuel addiction."

On this issue, like many others, he sees little indication of change from the White House. And that is why, for Radford, Greenpeace's most crucial function is as a voice for all those unrepresented by "special interests". "We've built this network up across the States and we're trying to make our voices heard, we're trying to explain why a handful of people have this megaphone that allows them to drown out everyone else's voice. All you need to do is spend a day on Capitol Hill, as I did recently, to realise the power of the coal companies over our politicians. Greenpeace has to be mobilising and inspiring action so that we can exert power from the outside".

But how will Radford follow in the footsteps of the "sea-going gang of ecological bikers" as Robert Hunter, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, described them? Will he carry on the direct action and headline-grabbing stunts (he prefers the word "stands") that made Greenpeace's name? Or will he stay on the softer end of the activist spectrum, with the danger that Greenpeace lives up to the epithet once flung at it, "the Avon ladies of the environmental movement"? After all, his own past, his studies in political science and nonprofit management, his expertise in lobbying and network-building, are not quite the equipment you need for standing between a large whaling boat and a large whale.

"We're making plans for the next three years right now, so I can't really tell you that," he says and then laughs. "Besides, I think I answered that my first day on the job, when I climbed a crane instead of coming into the office. Greenpeace, for me, is about telling people the truth based on science. It's about working with a whole different range of tactics, and sometimes that might be direct action and civil disobedience, and sometimes it might be mobilising our network and lobbying at a grassroots level."

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