We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.… By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools [ed: web-based social technologies] have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication and scope of unsupervised effort.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

In the first half of 2008, the fossil-fuels industry spent $427 million to influence public opinion and public policy. Over the whole of last year, one industry group -- ACCCE, the clean-coal flacks -- spent $45 million on advertising alone.

Just a few years ago gargantuan numbers like these would have sent me -- a veteran foot soldier in the communications wars between environmentalists and the fossil fuels industry -- to the edge of despair. Fighting a public-opinion battle in which your opponent can spend hundreds or even thousands of times more than you can be like trying to stop the tide from coming in.

I suspect that coal-company execs, in feeding such huge sums into the industry’s PR machine, had every confidence they would have their way with the political process. Global warming be damned -- coal reserves far exceed oil and gas, and so coal would, inexorably, enjoy a renaissance. With the Bush administration doing everything it could to grease the skids for a new “coal rush,” a wave of proposals for new coal-fired power plants were drawn up. Concerns about carbon emissions could be allayed by simply making the phrase “clean coal” ubiquitous; the industry would rebrand itself, using a torrent of money to sandblast away opposition. Resistance is futile.

But a funny thing happened on the way to milking the cash cow. Big Coal has run into some unexpectedly hard going:

• Most of the 151 plants proposed in the early years of President Bush’s first term have been tabled.
• The industry’s favored way of getting coal out of the ground -- mountaintop removal mining -- has drawn a growing chorus of negative attention.
• Don Blankenship -- CEO of Massey Energy, one of the largest Appalachian coal companies -- became something of an inadvertent YouTube star after videos of an embarrassingly benighted, anti-science speech he'd given to a friendly audience was posted to the site.
• Ploys to improve coal’s image have, in recent months, thoroughly backfired. In December, a lavishly produced but utterly tin-eared attempt at a viral video campaign, the “clean coal carolers,” was in a matter of days literally ridiculed off the web by bloggers. And then there is ACCCE’s work on Twitter, the rapidly growing "social messaging" service. I'd guess the internal memo proposing a Twitter presence for ACCCE probably said something like, "Twitter will allow us to engage in real-time conversation with the public about clean coal"; the reality is that the account has been little more than a lightning rod drawing a constant stream of harshly critical comments from other twitter users.
• Last but emphatically not least, there is the ongoing outcry over the massive coal-ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Kingston, Tennessee. Underreported at first, the story has grown a marathoner’s legs, spawning congressional hearings and numerous mainstream-media investigations into the shadowy, poorly regulated waste-disposal practices of the coal industry. This story may just snowball into a broad public consensus that coal is just too dirty to be a major part of the nation's 21st-century energy portfolio.

All of these events share a common denominator: in each case, anti-coal activists have used web-enabled social tools -- blogs, photo- and video-sharing sites, social networks, wikis, and so on -- to quickly find each other, organize, fundraise, publicize their campaigns, and otherwise take action as a group, as a "wired public." And to remarkable effect. To some degree at least, these tools have leveled the playing field -- in the right circumstances, they enable thousands of Davids to assemble almost instantly, and turn their slingshots on Goliath together.

The rise of these technologies -- and the promise they've shown in facilitating a more participatory, engaged national (and global) politics -- is my chief source of hope that we can turn the corner on daunting global problems like climate change, overfished oceans, overpopulation and so on. Together we can take on great power, wealth, unmanageable bureaucracy and achieve great things -- and social technologies allow individuals to see with much greater ease that they are not isolated, alone, and powerless to affect current events unless they choose to be. I wouldn't say that I'm full of sunny optimism, but I'll take a wary hopefulness over despair any day.

Next up: a closer look at the role social technologies have played in blowing up and sustaining the coal-ash disaster in Tennessee.