Wen Stephenson | The Nation

Courtesy of msnbc.com

Dear Chris,

First off, since we’ve never met, I want to say how much I appreciate your work, and in particular what you’re doing with All In. You’re holding down some vital turf in the media landscape, and doing it with distinction—and I know how challenging that can be.

And I especially want to offer big, sincere thanks for The Politics of Power—it’s no small thing to air an hour of prime-time television like what we saw on Friday night. Your commitment to elevating climate, and climate politics, as a regular part of the show’s coverage is hugely encouraging. And I’m glad, speaking as someone who’s deeply engaged in the climate fight, that you don’t shy from suggesting the severity and urgency of the climate crisis—or at least, that you begin to suggest it. Which is far more than can be said of most of our media.

It’s precisely because I respect what you’re trying to do that I feel moved to write here with what I hope is constructive feedback. I don’t expect you to respond to this. I mean, if you have time, great. If not, I completely understand. (I used to produce a two-hour daily talk show on NPR, so I know the kind of pace at which you work.)

I felt there were three pretty important things missing from The Politics of Power.

The first is what I’d call a full dose of climate reality. I would’ve liked to see you explain to viewers the real carbon math, and the true magnitude of the challenge we face—as spelled out so starkly and effectively by folks like Bill McKibben, Joe Romm, David Roberts, The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard and others, not to mention the IEA, World Bank, even PwC and HSBC—and to explain what it means for the kind of planet our children, yours and mine, will inherit this century if we don’t radically change course. I’m referring to the fact that something to the tune of 80 percent of existing fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, over the next four decades, if we’re going to have a shot at a livable climate. Not only that, but the IPCC reported in 2007 (in its most recent assessment report) that global emissions need to be cut some 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 in order to have a reasonable chance of making the required 80 percent reductions (or more) by 2050. The IPCC’s new assessment report, due out this year and next, may paint an even more urgent picture.

So, given all that, the second thing I found missing was a full dose of political reality: the fact that even the most ambitious policies currently on the table in Washington—or even imaginable in Washington, such as an economy-wide price on carbon—don’t come close to addressing that fundamental carbon math. You rightly point to congressional obstruction, bought and paid for by the fossil-fuel lobby, forcing Obama to act unilaterally. But even if Obama’s climate plan is wildly successful (in Washington terms) and he manages to fulfill his Copenhagen pledge of 17 percent reductions (below 2005 levels) by 2020, do your viewers understand how far that is from what science tells us is necessary? And do they understand the full implications of this gap between the politically “possible” and the scientifically necessary? In other words, do they understand the kind of profound political change needed in order for us to begin addressing the climate crisis in a serious way? It’s not just about getting the climate-science denying obstructionists out of the way, it’s about forcing even our strongest climate champions, at all levels of government, to confront the actual scale and urgency of the crisis.

I felt the program could have been stronger if it had acknowledged those two stark realities, the scientific and the political, head on. But the thing that really struck me more than anything was this third omission: there was no mention of the climate movement, despite the fact that you interviewed both Bill McKibben and May Boeve of 350.org. Bill may in fact be “our most important environmentalist,” but the reason he belonged there on your show is that he and his colleagues at 350 have done far more than create just another environmental organization, in any conventional sense—it’s that they, together with many partners and allies, have spearheaded a global, grassroots, people-powered climate-justice movement that is as much about human rights as “environmentalism.” And this movement, while still relatively new and small, is gaining unmistakable momentum as it takes on the entrenched power of the fossil fuel interests. Just look at what they’ve accomplished in the Keystone fight.

That’s the real story. The movement. [UPDATE: McKibben has just posted a new essay on this very subject, which I managed to miss, and it's pretty essential reading.] Of course, there’s plenty of room for debate about what kind of movement it should be, and how to build it. But I was deeply puzzled by the lack of any acknowledgment that this movement even exists.

In the end, you exhorted viewers to vote politicians out of office if they won’t take action—which is commendable! And yet, conventional electoral politics only scratches the surface of the sort of political engagement we need if we’re going to build a movement that can retake our democracy and fundamentally transform our politics to address this crisis in a meaningful way.

Is it hard to imagine that sort of deep transformation? Yes, it’s very hard. Damn near impossible. But it’s our only hope.

I don’t want to presume anything about what’s going through your mind, but I worry that you may be trying not to sound “politically naïve,” or “unreasonable,” or “unserious”—or for that matter, that you’re trying not to bum people out too much by letting on that the current situation is hopeless.

But, Chris, under any currently imaginable political scenario—that is, under anything resembling politics as usual—the situation is hopeless.

And unless you’re willing to look your viewers in the eye and tell them as much, you’re not truly leveling with them about what it will take to make a real difference in the climate crisis.

I don’t know whether it’s too late for us to avert full-blown climate catastrophe, or what “too late” would even mean. But I know this: it’s too late for us to worry about sounding “reasonable” by Washington or mainstream media standards. The situation we face is utterly insane—and any serious response to it is going to sound completely radical and crazy (as I wrote in a Boston Phoenix cover story that was quoted at length in a Nation editorial on Keystone last February), or at the very least hopelessly naïve. So be it. The question is, are we going to tell the truth—or not?

We heard just a hint of this sort of unvarnished truth-telling in Bill’s voice when he told you that there is no solution other than to stop burning coal, oil and gas—and fast. How are we going to do that? I’m afraid your viewers were left with the impression that an eventual price on carbon, combined with some EPA regulations and some entrepreneurial pluck, will somehow be enough—as opposed to the kind of society-wide, WWII-scale mobilization that many believe it will take.

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And if we’re not willing to call for that kind of full-scale solution, then we need to be honest about our willingness to accept the consequences. Which are pretty grim.

Sometimes I think the only people in this country who are really willing to face up to the situation we’re in, and to act accordingly, are the folks I know, most of them young, who’ve engaged in nonviolent direct action—spending days and nights eighty feet up in a tree, or locked-down to construction equipment, or barricaded inside a section of pipeline to stop planet-destroying fossil-fuel infrastructure like the Keystone XL from being built. Or putting themselves in the way of a coal shipment. Or chaining themselves to a mining truck on a West Virginia mountaintop.

At this late date, engaging in the climate fight in a serious way requires some serious courage and commitment and risk-taking—and not necessarily of the physical kind (only a comparatively few people can be expected to have that kind of courage), but certainly of the moral and political kind. And the journalistic kind. I believe the burden falls as much on us as journalists as on anyone else. Maybe more so.

We need you out there, Chris, telling the truth.

With respect and gratitude,

Wen

Chris Hayes responds:

I don't really disagree with your point, Wen, which is that we didn't emphasize the full scope and depth of the problem and scope and depth of the solution. We let people off too easy, we painted too encouraging and rosy a picture. But that was a choice, and one I still stand behind. There are different aspects of the climate story one can choose to emphasize and different tones to strike, partly depending on the audience or the specific set of facts involved or, as in this case, one's own judgment about how to best penetrate the reflexive shell of indifference and hopelessness that even the most conscientious people have erected between themselves and the problem. 

Some think that doubling down on the severity of the crisis—its world-historical size and importance—will break through, but I know that I find myself retreating even further from that kind of storytelling. It is very, very easy to look at the facts as they stand now and conclude that we are screwed. And, perversely, the right has begun to very ably use this in their own rhetoric. Albert Hirschman once divided reactionary arguments into three categories: perversity, futility and jeopardy. We are now seeing the right pivot from arguments that emphasized perversity and jeopardy to sheer futility. I hear it all time: "OK, even if we act, isn't it too late? Won't China and India just keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere?" Etc. 

So I strongly believe that it is extremely important to convince people that the problem is, in fact, solvable. Our record of environmental regulation of pollution, in fact, shows that very often the eventual cost is far, far less than was originally estimated. Human ingenuity is an incredible thing! So if you picked up a certain upbeat undercurrent in the show, you weren't wrong. I happen to think the problem, as big and terrifying as it is, really is solvable and really will be solved. And I think it's doubly important to let people know that so as to engender the level of investment and action we need to make sure that hopeful future is ours.

Earth is changing, and Bill McKibben outlines the movement we need to confront that change.

Bryan Parras, far left, with his father, second from right, at the Healthy Manchester Festival on July 19, 2013. (Courtesy of Flickr.)

In the current issue of The Nation, I profile two climate activists who engaged in a high-stakes direct action back in May, anchoring a lobster boat in the path of a coal freighter at the Brayton Point power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, blocking the delivery of 40,000 tons of coal for a day. The piece, you could say, is about the challenge of coming to terms with the sort of truly stark choices humanity faces if we take the urgency and scale of the climate crisis—and the idea of climate justice—at all seriously. Choices like shutting down coal plants.

But last week, while on a reporting trip to Houston and East Texas for the magazine, I had a chance to sit down with Houston native and environmental-justice advocate Bryan Parras, co-founder (with his father, Juan Parras) of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, or TEJAS, and he offered a crucial counterpoint to my piece in the current issue. Not that the stark choices I wrote about there can simply be wished away. They can’t. It’s just that they look a bit different, and even more complicated, depending on where you stand and where you’re coming from—something climate activists, all of us, would do well to acknowledge.

One of the communities where Parras engages as an organizer is Houston’s Manchester neighborhood. Located just east of the 610 Loop along the Houston Shipping Channel, it’s literally hemmed in by oil refineries owned by Valero, Texas PetroChemical and LyondellBassel, as well as other heavily polluting industrial facilities including a chemical plant, a tire plant, a car-crushing facility, a train yard and a sewage treatment plant, not to mention two major highways. The residents of Manchester, poor and working-class and overwhelmingly Latino, already breathe some of the country’s most toxic air, including a number of known human carcinogens, as an eye-opening 2005 investigation by the Houston Chronicle revealed. And they have the health statistics to show for it. Not only rates of asthma and other respiratory problems, but as Kristin Moe noted in a strong article for Yes! magazine last April, a recent investigation by researchers at the University of Texas School of Public Health found that “for children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, chances of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia are 56 percent higher than for children only ten miles away.”

The Ship Channel, and those refineries, are also the destination for the vast majority of the tar sands crude, or diluted bitumen (a k a dilbit), that will flow from Alberta to the Gulf via the Keystone XL pipeline if it’s approved, only increasing the toxic emissions in the neighborhood. In the past year, Tar Sands Blockade, the group that has engaged in high-stakes direct action along the construction route of the pipeline’s southern leg, has begun to make Manchester a focal point of the Keystone fight.

I met up with Parras last Thursday at a coffee house on Westheimer Road in the Montrose neighborhood, worlds away from Manchester (though with construction going on across the street and diesel fumes wafting over the outdoor tables where we sat, the air wasn’t exactly pristine). The next day, Friday, I joined him and other local organizers in Manchester for the Healthy Manchester Festival, in the neighborhood’s Hartmann Park across the street from the massive Valero refinery. Sponsored by TEJAS and Better Future Project’s Ride For the Future, and staffed by volunteers from Tar Sands Blockade, it was a meeting of climate and environmental-justice organizers on terrain you could call “ground zero” of fossil-fuel impacts. And yet talking with Parras, I was reminded that the climate-justice movement has its work cut out if it wants to be relevant to the day-to-day lives of people in places like Houston’s east side.

The following excerpt from my conversation with Bryan Parras has been lightly edited for both length and clarity.

Wen Stephenson: Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

Bryan Parras: I let folks call me that, and I’ll use that term if it’s the only way of describing myself to someone that makes sense. And that’s the problem: we need more words. We need more words.

What do you think about the words, or term, “climate justice”? What does that actually mean?

Nothing.

So tell me about that. Why do you say that?

I know what people have told me it means. For me, and for others, it’s about the disparities in who is impacted by climate change—the Global South, people of color, poor folks, fishing communities, subsistence farmers.

And it’s about future generations, too?

Yeah. So as you begin to hash that out, those are all indigenous concepts. Your duty to protect future generations, that’s an indigenous concept, and I think a very human concept, too. It’s a religious concept. All this stuff is, again, inherent in us.

So, why do you say climate justice doesn’t mean anything—where you live, and in the work that you’re doing?

It’s too big. No one has done a good job of painting a picture of what it could look like. Or should look like. And the human mind doesn’t operate that way. It’s sort of an ideology that has to be instilled in you. That’s why I think there are very, very big cultural differences in how we look at something like [climate justice].

And the sad thing is, there’s a button in a large percentage of the American population that we just need to activate. We just need to push it and activate it. And part of the problem is, you know, we’re so dependent on jobs—I have to work, I have to a have a job, I just need to make a living, I have to put food on the table. I have kids, you know, they need clothes. Until we can really answer that for people, there’s no reason to care about what’s impending on us all, the climate disaster.

On a human level, on a justice level, or if we want to talk about building a more unified progressive movement that addresses both climate and environmental justice at the local level, it makes sense to say that we should be paying a lot more attention to what you’re trying to do in Manchester, and East Houston and many other places—

Many other Manchesters.

Right. Manchester is a pretty tiny community, but it makes for a kind of jaw-dropping symbol—and not just a symbol, but a very powerful example of how this industry affects people’s lives. So, how do you see the work of climate activists, organizers like Tar Sands Blockade, intersecting with what you’re doing with TEJAS?

With any organizers who come in with an interest in working in an environmental justice community, it’s important to understand that it’s a dynamic situation, for the people there. And a lot of the injustices are not only environmental-related, in the sense that most people think of the environment. So, chemicals, yes. But police brutality? No. Drugs—you know, other kinds of chemicals? No. Lack of education opportunities? No, people don’t think of those things. So it’s a dynamic situation that allows these communities to exist in the first place, and then on top of that you have these environmental, toxic exposures that make it even more difficult to get out.

You could take away the toxics and you’d still have those other problems. You’ll just have cleaner air?

Yeah.

So, ideally, how can climate activists help you do your work with TEJAS?

Honestly, I think it’s more important for us to help them. That’s how I see my role. We all need to help each other. And if we’re going to be in that mindset of living in a world that is not destroying itself, we need to start with the individual. We have to start with the self.

The reason these communities like Manchester exist is because there are deficits in other communities that are not paying attention to these neighborhoods and these people. And so I’ve always felt like we’re doing more work to change other people, and to help other people, than they are to help us.

A lot of people, myself included, argue that the Keystone pipeline fight is a good focus for the climate movement on multiple levels—for climate reasons, and because it’s going to pollute local environments and increase toxic emissions in places like Manchester.

But what happens if you stop it?

Well, you have less toxic pollution in these communities. But, of course, just stopping the pipeline will bring only a marginal improvement in people’s lives in Manchester.

And I would say, from experience, I see a lot of folks in environmental justice communities, people of color, saying, “OK, we can stop KXL, but they’ll build PXL, or TXL…” If they want to do it, it’s going to happen.

Do you feel a tension between the urgency of climate action—that we only have so much time to make an actual, meaningful difference—and the slower, more patient, committed work of community organizing, on the ground, whether it’s in Manchester or anywhere else?

We all come to that with different baggage and different histories. Just looking at people of color, their experience has not been that the system works for them. Even when it does, they know, “I was lucky.” There are a lot of other folks, many more, who worked their ass off and are still on the margins.

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I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that often, when you have these larger, global concepts [like climate action], they tend to work to favor certain communities over others. While everyone benefits, that’s true, they do tend to leave the same folks, that are already in bad situations, in bad situations. And so there’s no incentive for them to get involved. It’s like, why would I work my ass off, put myself on the line, for this very small, incremental change in what my life will look like afterwards? For a certain population, who have experienced that the system doesn’t work, they’re not going to go out of their way to put themselves on the line, when the results and the benefits are going to favor one community over everyone.

If there were an honest concern about something as big as climate change, where the whole world will be impacted, then we would be having discussions about more than just how much carbon particulates are in the atmosphere. That’s the sort of paradigm that has to change.

So we’d be talking about economic justice more broadly?

A lot of the old-school environmental justice folks say there is no environmental justice if there is no economic justice.

The Teamsters are starting to organize the port trucking industry, but how do you organize a group of workers who aren’t officially employees of anyone?