An Open Letter to Rob Shirkey, Our Horizon, from James Brooks

I would like to take a moment to address a former mentor, friend, and collaborator, Rob Shirkey of Canada, who has disparaged me and, by default, Think Beyond the Pump online. I would very much like Rob to remove this post about me because it damages the reputation of my otherwise well-respected nonprofit, which represents other committed individuals who have nothing to do with the claims he makes about me. It is important to rebut these online attacks on one’s integrity, where someone is overly reliant on an agenda of inaccurate assertions and motivated by petty revenge. These sorts of online fights in the climate activism world only serve the interests of the fossil fuel industry. 

Many of us who do advocacy work know these relationships can occasionally devolve into power disputes. This represents such a case. Mr. Shirkey and I have argued over “ownership” of a legislative victory in Cambridge, MA, culminating in his attack that accuses me of leveraging my relationship with his group and misrepresenting myself as an “employee” of his organization. Rob’s attack casts aspersions onto my work in climate action and harms Think Beyond the Pump and its broader aim to force oil companies to disclose to consumers the unseen risks (climate change and health outcomes) of their main product. Rob believes, rather egocentricially, that I used him to gain a victory in Cambridge, Mass.

The nature of collaborative relationships is a little give-and-take. Campaigners must receive the unabridged credit they deserve for their long hours of uncompensated work when they accomplish their primary objectives.  An advocate deserves credit not necessarily for an original idea but when their labor connects with people and produces actual legislation. Volunteers primarily derive rewards for their dedication and persistence in the face of great uncertainty in this way.

Rob has a similar advocacy organization to mine in Canada, and it was understood that we supported each other publicly in our respective countries but remained separate efforts, partly due to differences in national laws. This allowed for each to gain validation for our perspective campaigns when the other found success in their country.

Crucially, advocacy work depends on success for its legitimacy and survival. For example, when Rob delivered the world’s first climate change warning label on a gas pump in North Vancouver, BC, he deserved full credit and the legitimacy he garnered to continue spreading his idea across Canada. Further, Rob’s personal triumphs in Canada brought legitimacy to my work in the U.S. because the proposition (climate warning labels on gas pumps) was identical in Canada and the U.S., which leads me to the next point.

A significant factor for campaign success was civic duplication: When Cambridge councilperson Jan Devereux saw the actions taken in the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco, she wanted to emulate the “warming labels” program in her city. This is a typical method for municipalities in legislating, that of adopting laws from other reputable city organizations. More concisely, our multi-year advocacy efforts were already well underway in California, and thus, we became advocates for cities like Devereaux’s. Rob portrays himself in the post as a pivotal influence in the City of Berkeley while ignoring the extensive work Berkeley-based activists undertook attending many City of Berkeley commission meetings. In the run-up to a City vote on warming labels, Jack and I spent a year in frequent meetings where we acquired valuable advocacy experience and developed our effective talking points that culminated in a City of Santa Monica, CA debate on warming labels. Alas, that was as far as the bill got there. 

Switching back to Cambridge, Rob attempts to show evidence that he wrote a letter to the Cambridge City Council in 2016. This creates a false impression of his actual involvement. The evidence Mr. Shirkey offers about his involvement with the Cambridge Council does not indicate whether his outreach was incorporated into council meeting minutes, communication between lawmakers, or any ongoing contact with Mr. Shirkey.

This is only part of the problem of Rob’s assertion that he played a significant role in the city of Cambridge’s 2020 warming label law. Cambridge sponsor Vice-Mayor Devereux, watching the warming label actions on the West coast as cause célèbre for her city, specifically states in an interview here that it is my advocacy efforts that inspired the Cambridge legislation (beginning in 2018, it took two years for Cambridge to pass the law). To be clear, while I love being recognized as such, the work done by many others besides myself in Berkeley led to the Cambridge law. That is…

The people who contributed to California's warming labels campaign and the run-up to Cambridge came up with the idea of climate labels on a gas pump independent of Mr. Shirkey. In Rob’s post, he portrays our success in California as merely a result of “duplicating” him. In reality, the Berkeley campaign was an idea generated by traffic engineer Jack Fleck of 350 Bay Area that would only later form into a collaboration with Our Horizon.

The notion of consumer warning labels is not novel; numerous historical examples exist, from cigarettes to food products. After reading the book Tropic of Chaos, Jack Fleck became inspired by the idea of a climate warning on a gas pump. Soon after, along with Rand Robel, Kelly Malinowski, a young environmental lawyer, Camille Stough, who did the initial constitutional analysis of the labels, and I joined Jack and his nascent labeling effort vis the activist organization 350-Bay Area. Jack and Rand's connections to the Berkeley City Council, notably Kriss Worthington as the first U.S. political sponsor of warming labels, gained us a foothold with the Berkeley City Council. It was only after these events that Camille discovered Rob’s campaign in Canada. We credit Rob for helping us refine our message and add a theoretical backbone to the concept of fossil fuel warning labels. 

Rob unfairly accuses me of misrepresenting myself for personal advancement and riding his coattails. He does this by pointing to an article I published in Huffington Post Canada, where I called myself a "campaign manager" for Canada-based Our Horizon. This article was for a Canadian news organization and primarily discussed Our Horizon’s Canadian advocacy efforts, so it made sense that I would affiliate with Rob’s organization to promote the work of his nonprofit.

However, I could have been more cautious in representing my affiliations to journalists while I attempted to gain traction for my climate activism. On the other hand, according to TBtP board member and executive director of the Wing Luke Museum Joel Tan: “ascribing titles to ourselves in this kind of work has currency as it is key in immersing ourselves with our audience.” Without thinking of it this way at the time, I represented myself as a campaign manager within the context of grassroots organizing to champion the idea of gas pump warming labels in Canada and, hopefully, reach key stakeholders. Tan says that “self-labeling, especially in grassroots efforts and in its early development stages where the mission and roles of a nonprofit are being established,” is “common practice.” He noted that “advocates often play multiple roles in establishing the mission and in introducing themselves to the world the change you are trying to advocate for.” 

The larger ethical issue in giving myself titles in these early stages of the campaign is intent and whether my actions were harmful. The Huff/Po article served up, I’m proud to say, a serious critique of climate obfuscation by Doug Ford, the then Premier of Ontario and a massive oil industry tool. If you read closely, the above article dissects Ford’s climate obfuscation on behalf of Our Horizon’s campaign for warming labels in Canada, which reflects our collaboration at the time. Continuing with this notion of volunteers playing multiple roles in grassroots organizing, I indeed called myself a “communication director” in another instance in which Rob portrays me here and here as falsely representing Our Horizon. Again, we were friends and collaborators then, but in these cases, I represented myself as Think Beyond the Pump. This was because by then, I was using Rob’s website as a landing page for my own campaign work, and it was because of this landing page I believe Rob falsely, and rather oddly, claimed I wanted to be his employee. As I have already explained, with a campaign of my own and in a different country, no less, to be his employee made no sense. If you read the email he presents as evidence of this here, it describes more our then-functioning collaboration, which, as I already stated, culminated into a mutually agreed upon decision to share a page on the Our Horizon website. 

Rob gladly provided a landing page on his Our Horizon website because of my limited resources and the fact that a nonprofit dedicated to climate change warning labels in the United States risked uniquely daunting constitutional obstacles. There were too many obstacles to forming a nonprofit at the time. With no web presence of my own and Rob a willing partner, a Think Beyond the Pump landing page created by Rob himself appeared on his website.

Rob claims I desired to be a paid employee of his Canadian nonprofit. This is a preposterous claim, as my hands were full with a day job and a successful campaign in California. 

When the new Cambridge law coalesced, and Chris Gloninger of NBC News wanted to cover the story, he naturally made contact through the Our Horizon website. To be fair, Rob did notify me about the interview request, but again, with my romanticized understanding of the rules of our perspective campaigns, I thought Rob would have then graciously deferred the win to me and, honorably, would have ceded full control of the interview to me. He instead chose to participate in the interview even though, as I have pointed out, there is little evidence he had anything to do with the win. That he assumed it was OK for him to participate in the interview or didn’t ask me permission if it was OK was deeply insulting.

Rob’s mentorship partially benefited my growth and development as a climate activist. However, I have had many influential mentors during my growth as an activist. As noted above, this occurred in multiple stages in the 11-year history of this campaign. But more to the point, successful campaign work is about many relationships, which is also the nature of collaborations. For instance, in 2021, I published a peer-reviewed journal article on climate-health warning labels, partly because of my strong relationship with University of Washington public health professor Kristie Ebi. But many other people besides Rob and myself are producing good ideas about labeling consumer markets for fossil fuel. Among many notable public health experts, Dr. Ebi independently coauthored an article published in the British Medical Journal arguing for health warning labels “on all points of fossil purchase.” This is a good thing. I might add that the BMJ article gained currency and was published because it could refer to the successful national campaign for “eco-labels” on gas pumps in Sweden.

Swedish climate activists created climate change labels on gas pumps on their own, too. My nonprofit has had a working relationship with the Swedish Green Motorist Group since the Fall of 2018. Per Östborn, the campaign manager (yes, he calls himself that) of the Green Motorists says here; his nonprofit has benefitted from the 5-year collaboration with Think Beyond the Pump. Currently, we are working on a joint U.S.-Sweden project that will (hopefully) help spread the idea of regulating international consumer markets for gasoline and diesel. I hope we get the grant!