Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Single Most Dangerous Expansion of Fossil Fuel in the Worldhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/the-single-most-dangerous-expansion-of-fossil-fuel-in-the-world/Bill McKibbenNov 15, 2023

America’s growing exports of liquefied natural gas pose a grave climate danger.

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Environment / November 15, 2023

The Single Most Dangerous Expansion of Fossil Fuel in the World

America’s growing exports of liquefied natural gas pose a grave climate danger.

Bill McKibben
liquified natural gas ship climate crisis louisiana
A large liquified natural gas transport ship sits docked in the Calcasieu River on June 7, 2023, near Cameron, La. (Jon Shapley / Getty)

The climate crisis is going to be hard enough to solve if everyone acts in good faith; right now, a crucial arm of the federal government is deliberately using bad data to bolster the single most dangerous expansion of fossil fuel in the world.

Here’s the story. Last Tuesday, a bevy of elected officials, led by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, joined environmental activists like me for a press conference calling for a halt to LNG exports based in part on new research findings on methane. That may sound like a topic too arcane to interest politicians, but in fact it couldn’t be more crucial. Robert Howarth, a Cornell professor and the dean of methane science, last month released a new paper showing that America’s growing exports of liquefied natural gas represent a grave climate danger. Between the carbon released when the LNG is burned, the methane that leaks along the way, and the energy that it takes to ship it, he found that exported LNG is much worse for the climate even than burning coal—in many cases, twice as bad. This is huge news—and it builds on the superb work that frontline groups have been doing along the Gulf, from Port Arthur to Lake Charles, documenting the damage that these enormous export terminals are doing.

You’d think that would interest the Department of Energy, which is in charge of granting export licenses for LNG plants—indeed it’s licensed seven that are already up and running, certifying that they were in “the public interest” and in the process making America the largest natural gas exporter on Earth. But industry has proposed 20 more of these giant terminals; if it gets its way, in a few years America’s exports of natural gas will produce about as much greenhouse gas as everything that happens in Europe—every car and house and factory. This LNG expansion is the largest fossil fuel growth plan on planet earth. It matters more than any single other thing to our climate future.

But instead of immediately halting new approvals for export facilities, or even asking Howarth for more details, the DOE issued a statement saying, “Both [a] 2014 and 2019 analysis concluded that that the use of US LNG exports for electricity generation in European and Asian markets will not increase GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from a life cycle perspective, when compared to regional coal extraction and consumption for electricity generation.”

To translate: Don’t bother us with new facts; we like the old ones.

But here’s what’s happened since 2014 (when even the old analysis showed that this LNG was little better than coal).

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1. We’ve got a far more precise handle on methane leakage, which is Howarth’s specialty. There are now hundreds of studies showing that the gas seeps out of the process at every turn, and when it does it traps heat with extraordinary efficiency; his newest twist is examining the giant ships carrying this dangerous cargo.

2. We’ve watched the price of renewable energy plunge by 90 percent. It no longer makes sense to compare gas with coal anyway: The proper comparison is with sun and wind and batteries, which now provide the cheapest power for most of the world.

3. We’ve watched the temperature of the earth soar. It’s almost unbelievable that the DOE is sticking to its ancient science in 2023, a year when we’ve seen the highest temperatures in 125,000 years on this plant, with all the attendant destruction.

It’s especially depressing to watch DOE take this fingers-in-ears stand because, in other parts of its D.C. headquarters, officials are presiding over truly revolutionary change. They’re figuring out how to take the hundreds of billions the Inflation Reduction Act provides for clean energy, and use it to jump-start revolutions in everything from transportation to home heating. Renewables scientists and engineers are on the bleeding edge of the technology.

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But on the other side of the DOE building, its staff is busy protecting the status quo, which happens to be highly profitable for the gas industry. Exxon, for instance, just purchased the biggest fracking company in the country; it’s clearly doubling down on gas production, and counting on the federal government to go on helping them.

This dereliction of duty isn’t yet President Biden’s fault; he can’t be expected to micromanage every civil servant. But it soon will be, because environmentalists across the country are finally joining with those long-standing Gulf Coast advocates to focus on this LNG export issue, launching a massive campaign that will run from social media to the streets. We know, for instance, that the next proposed plant—a mammoth export terminal called CP2 planned for the Louisiana coast—would be associated with greenhouse gas emissions 20 times larger than the Willow oil complex the president approved earlier this year. That Willow approval cost the president huge amounts of credibility with young people; a TikTok campaign had collected millions of petition signatures, which he ignored.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can’t let the president walk into another political trap—especially since exporting LNG is not just a climate disaster but also a potent source of inflation. As even utilities have made clear, keeping that gas at home would reduce the price for Americans still dependent on it; polling makes clear that people don’t want to see America fracked only to send the gas abroad.

In fact, Granholm could set the president up for a massive political win. Thanks to the IRA, he already can take credit for doing more to advance the clean energy revolution than any president before him. If he halts new approvals for LNG export licenses, then he will be able to credibly say he has also done more to halt dirty energy than any occupant of the White House. Imagine the press conference where he’s joined by the Louisiana and Texas advocates who have been fighting these projects for years. Biden rode into office on the back of young people eager for action on climate and environmental justice; the footprint of this proposed LNG buildout is so enormous that if he stands up to it, he can deliver those backers an enormous victory. He can literally cut the fuse to the biggest climate bomb currently ticking on planet earth.

Or he can pretend we’re back in the old days of 2014 or 2019. But nostalgia is a bad look for this president in particular, at least when it comes to this most cutting-edge of issues. There’s still time to seize the future instead.



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Maine Is in an Epic Battle Over Its Futurehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/maine-public-power-referendum/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenSep 18, 2023

Voters could turn two private utilities into public goods. The corporations are fighting it tooth and nail.

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Comment / September 18, 2023

Maine Is in an Epic Battle Over Its Future

Voters could turn two private utilities into public goods. The corporations are fighting it tooth and nail.

Bill McKibben
Pine Tree Power supporters at a march on July 4.
Bringing the energy: Pine Tree Power supporters at a march on July 4. (Courtesy of Our Power)

There’s a moment in the ocean twice daily when it’s hard to read the flow of the water, and you can’t quite tell whether the current is going in or out. Mariners call this “slack tide.” While the name implies idleness, that’s not what’s really happening. There are big, opposing forces at work beneath the surface, and they are going to send the tide in one direction or the other very soon.

Politics in Maine has felt like a slack tide recently, especially around issues of climate and energy. Opposing forces of progress and regression are churning away at each other. The main fight centers on a November ballot measure that would turn the state’s private utilities public. If that happens, it would be a huge step toward dealing with the climate crisis, and a model for other states.

It’s easy for outsiders to forget about Maine, off by itself in the corner of the map. But it’s one of our most politically interesting states. Beyond its idiosyncratic electoral decisions—this is the state that once had the racist Republican former governor Paul LePage, the supposedly “moderate” Republican Senator Susan Collins, and the independent, Democratic-aligned Senator Angus King serving at the same time, though thankfully Mainers seem to have tired of LePage’s antics for good—it has a first-in-the-nation public financing scheme for candidates that lets a wide variety of people into the political pool, and a ranked-choice voting system for federal office that keeps third parties from being spoilers.

All those forces will be at play in November’s referendum, when voters must decide whether they want to turn the state’s two big private electric companies—Central Maine Power and Versant—into Pine Tree Power, a nonprofit, publicly run utility.

The two corporations sent $187 million in profits out of Maine last year—much of it to shareholders in such far-flung places as Qatar, Norway, and Canada. That’s serious money—and if it weren’t being sucked out of the state, the advocates of Pine Tree Power argue, Maine could lower rates by an average of $367 per household per year, which would mean shutting off fewer customers (nearly 10 percent of the state’s residential customers got disconnect notices last spring).

Moreover, with cheaper borrowing costs than the 10 or 12 percent return on equity that private companies demand, a public utility would be better prepared to build out the larger electric system that Maine will require as its residents give up oil furnaces and gas cars in the ongoing green transition. (The incumbent utilities are so ambivalent about renewables that Central Maine Power had to pay a $700,000 settlement for slow-walking the solar transition.) “We believe [utilities are] a direct way of targeting the fossil fuel industry,” Candice Fortin, the US campaigns manager for the climate group 350.org (which I helped found), explained recently. “Returning power to the people and looking for big fights is where we can best show solutions and also resist the fossil fuel infrastructure.”

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Mainers care about climate change. The Gulf of Maine—the heart of the state’s fishing industry, and also much of its identity—is warming faster than almost any body of water on the planet. But that concern could be drowned in the nor’easter of commercials and mailings that the utilities are producing. As of this writing, they’re outspending public power advocates 32 to 1 and have dropped $27 million into the kitty—an extraordinary sum in a state with less than 1.5 million residents. (Though considering the aforementioned millions in profits they extracted from the state, confusing Maine voters is worth a good deal of money to them.) They’ve hired the Obama veterans who run Left Hook Strategy, as well as the Global Strategy Group, which last year tried to help Amazon crush a union drive at a Staten Island warehouse. The utilities have also created front groups like Maine Affordable Energy, whose executive director, Willy Ritch, said he didn’t think Mainers wanted “out-of-state politicians” telling them what to do; reporters pointed out that his group had taken $18 million in out-of-state money to oppose the referendum.

Bernie Sanders has been helping the Pine Tree campaign. “Power belongs in the hands of the people, not greedy corporations,” he declared.

The endless onslaught of anti-public-power TV ads may carry the day, but there’s not much else on the ballot, so turnout may be low, and there’s no question that the Pine Tree Power advocates are committed, disciplined, and creative.

There are also signs that the tide may have begun to turn decisively on climate issues in Maine. In July, the Legislature passed a law that should ease the way for a large-scale build-out of offshore wind power in the state’s Atlantic waters. Maine has enough wind to supply far more than its own needs; if it ends up selling power to other East Coast states, “the workers who are constructing these could be building a turbine or two every month for the next 30, 40, 50 years,” said Jack Shapiro, the climate and clean energy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

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But passing the law was no sure thing; offshore wind power has been stymied in the state in the past, largely because of opposition from fisheries interests worried that the turbines might interfere with fish stocks. And since the Maine Lobstering Union is affiliated with the state AFL-CIO, that was enough to keep organized labor on the sidelines.

Beginning in January, though, members of Maine’s labor community began meeting with fisheries groups, arguing that the gusher of money in the Inflation Reduction Act made it in the best interests of everyone to strike a deal. Fishermen wanted the wind turbines pushed farther offshore and the number of power cables minimized; with some of those elements in place, and with union wages guaranteed, the state AFL-CIO agreed to sign off on the plan.

Unions representing the building trades have often been foes of environmentalists, but that dynamic may be changing elsewhere, too. In states such as Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas, climate activists and unions have begun negotiating over similar kinds of pacts.

Still, the status quo bias of labor unions sometimes can’t be overcome: The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—and hence the Maine AFL—is siding with the bosses in opposing Pine Tree Power on the grounds that if workers were classed as public employees, they might lose the right to strike. Advocates for the public utility insist they’ve included language in the proposal that requires the elected board to contract out to a private operator, allowing the union to maintain that right.

As I said, slack tide. But slack tide never lasts more than a moment. Soon it’s flowing hard one way or the other. And Maine has the highest tides in the Lower 48.



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“Handshake Activism” Won’t Defuse the Climate Emergencyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/naidoo-neubauer-climate-activism/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJun 17, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation strengthening coverage of the climate story.

f a historian were charting the climate movement, she’d probably set its high-water mark so far at September of 2019, when something like 7 million people, most of them young, took to the streets of thousands of cities around the world. To read the accounts that flooded in from around the world is poignant and in some cases heartbreaking (Dom Phillips was providing updates for The Guardian from Brazil, where Indigenous groups were rallying; this week a suspect admitted to killing Phillips while he was reporting in the Amazon). I was watching from the wings of a stage set up on New York’s Battery, where Greta Thunberg—whose school strike had helped spur this massive wave of climate action—summed up the situation for a quarter million people flooding the streets of lower Manhattan: “If you belong to that small group of people who feel threatened by us, we have some very bad news for you, because this is only the beginning. Change is coming whether they like it or not.”

That groundswell yielded many commitments: One company after another vowed to go “net zero,” for instance. But the intervening 30 months have been tough. First, the pandemic chased organizers off the streets and on to Zoom, which put a brake on movement momentum: By the time nations reached Glasgow last autumn, Thunberg was accurately describing their offerings as “blah, blah, blah.” And now the Ukraine war, and with it spiking gas prices, has diverted attention and set up a complicated (though by no means entirely bad) dynamic for clean energy campaigners.

It seemed a good moment, then, to sit down with two of the world’s most dynamic climate activists: the 26-year-old German Luisa Neubauer, who organized her nation as part of the Greta-inspired Fridays for Future movement, and the veteran South African leader Kumi Naidoo, 57, who from his earliest days as an anti-apartheid campaigner to his tenure running Greenpeace International has always been engaged. (This interview was conducted by The Nation and Deutsche Welle on behalf of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now.)

“At the beginning of the war,” said Neubauer, “lots of people thought, ‘Well, now it’s all on the table. We will ramp up for renewables. We will ramp up fossil-free energy, because it’s clear that to like renewables you don’t have to be a climate activist or eco-nerd. It’s enough to kind of mildly dislike Putin and mildly like democracies and freedom and safety.” But as the conflict has continued, “I think now we’re seeing almost a fossil fuel backlash in places like Germany,” Neubauer said. “The fossil expansion [is] really happening. There’s new drilling happening in the North Sea coast.”

The ability of the fossil fuel industry to constantly regroup, says Naidoo, is a reminder that “the system is performing exactly how the system was designed to perform. It was to benefit a handful of people at the top: Give the people at the middle a little bit more so that they will feel that they have a vested interest to defend that system.” For years, he added, “we used to say things like, the economic system is broken; the energy system is broken; the agricultural system is spoken. But, quite frankly, after more than four decades of activism, I must humbly say that I read it wrong, that actually the system was not broken at all.”

So how do we instead work that system to get change on the scale science demands and justice requires? As Naidoo put it, this “has to be a time of extreme honesty, extreme courage, extreme boldness. If activism is saying, ‘It cannot be business as usual, it cannot be government as usual,’ then surely we must be saying to ourselves, ‘It cannot be activism as usual.’”

Both, in fact, were quite candid about the campaigning that doesn’t work. At the start, said Neubauer, “I was doing something which I would now retrospectively call ‘handshake activism.’ It is this kind of activism that looks very, very good on your CV. It is something that you might be very dedicated to, but you’re also very keen to meet an important minister, to shake their hand and take a photo and prove that you’ve actually done something.”

“The mistake my generation of activists made was that we mistook access for influence,” said Naidoo. “We got access [that] allowed some government official or minister or CEO of a big company to tick off a box saying ‘civil society consulted.’ And, quite honestly, it also meant that, for many of us who were engaging in those interactions…[we could] claim easy victories.”

Neither Naidoo nor Neubauer, obviously, claimed to have a foolproof formula for going forward, but both had ideas. Too many governments, they pointed out, have grown authoritarian, limiting the space for protest. “We are seeing that there is deliberate strategy into not just repressing but oppressing,” said Neubauer. It ranges from the heavy-handed (the Indian government jailing her youth climate colleague Disha Ravi for activism) to more subtle: Germany’s new (and theoretically small-g green) premier, Olof Scholz, apparently comparing climate protesters to Nazis. In the face of such political backsliding, they each reminded campaigners to also focus some of their firepower on the financial system.

“There are very few accelerated change strategies that are available to us,” said Naidoo. “Really very few. One of them is going extremely hard, extremely purposefully, exceedingly strategically against all forms of finance.” The fossil fuel divestment movement—now at $40 trillion committed by pension funds and university endowments—is “going great,” he said, but it “can be turbocharged and do much better.” The ability of banks and financial institutions to resist public opinion may be “fragile,” said Neubauer, citing recent successes in scaring banks and insurers away from the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline project. Potential insurance carriers for the pipeline “pulled out after five tweets. Many, many banks pulled out. And I think what made a big difference with a project, that’s half a gigaton [of carbon].”

As campaigners take on individual financial institutions, said Naidoo, they also need to go after central banks: “I think,” he said, “we can convince the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and all the regulatory banks, that it is not only in the climate interest, but in the economic interest of the investors that they shouldn’t be leading them down a road of investing in stranded carbon assets.”

Both activists also insisted that thinking about the environment “through a justice lens” was mandatory. “We need to turbocharge intersectionality,” Naidoo said. Years ago, when he was new on the job at Greenpeace, “I said ‘as far as I’m concerned, the struggle to end poverty and inequality and the struggle to address climate change can, must, and should be seen as two sides of the same coin.’” But it took work to get that message across even within the organization he ran. “It’s something that, I think, needs a mentality shift on the [part] of activists.”

According to Neubauer, that expanded environmentalism needs to include people sometimes thought of as adversaries. Often, she said, she’ll be asked if it’s fair to cost coal miners their jobs to preserve a livable climate. “And I say, ‘Is it fair for a car [worker at] VW or a constructor of pipelines, or someone working in a coal mine…to work all day, every day, to pay the bill at the end of the month, knowing that means working against the security of the future, of the children. Is it fair to put people [in] that place?”

A potent weapon, she added, could be older people increasingly joining the movement through groups like Third Act. “Open the space for people who are looking back on their lives and wonder what I’m leaving to my children, my grandchildren—I think there’s so much to gain from that.” People “need to talk to the children and their grandchildren,” she added. “Because we need to stop this tendency for each generation to lose each other. You know, children move out, and they forget what their parents taught them, and they start their own life.” Intergenerational conversations could be a “superpower,” she said.

“We have to create multiple ways that people can participate,” said Naidoo, not just “how those of us, sitting in full-time civil society jobs, imagine it to be. We have to be thinking about where people are and how people can be enabled to participate and enter [the movement]. Only when we have sufficient numbers, substantially larger than we are able to mobilize at this moment, will our political and business leaders eventually be pushed to the urgency that the situation calls for.”

Art and music—even gaming platforms—are one way in, he said. “One of the things that is most missing at the moment is…imagination. We’ve got to get people to imagine that it is within our grasp to turn this thing around,” said Naidoo. “True, the window of opportunity is small and it’s closing fast, but let’s be very clear: This moment of history that we find ourselves in is one where we have to say that pessimism is a luxury that we simply cannot afford, and that whatever the pessimism of our analysis might be at different moments, we can overcome that pessimism best by the optimism of our creativity, of our energy, and of our actions that seek to make change—even if we don’t win the struggle immediately the next day.”

Speed is the crucial question, since unlike most political questions climate change comes with a time limit. “It’s very clear the transitions are happening,” says Neubauer. “We will decarbonize. We will get out of fossil fuels. The question is just when? I mean, fast enough? And will it be just enough? These are the things we have to turn around—now.”



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Why What Happens In Vermont Shouldn’t Stay In Vermonthttps://www.thenation.com/article/politics/vermont-congress-election/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJun 3, 2022

American politics—especially now—is not noted for its graciousness. But last week something happened in Vermont that deserves notice, if only because the example it sets could help other progressives in other places consolidate power.

It came about a week ago, the final filing deadline for this year’s statewide elections. Because the state’s senior senator, Pat Leahy, is retiring after this term, its single representative—Peter Welch—is campaigning for his seat. And so in turn several candidates, all of them women, were jousting in the Democratic primary for Welch’s old chair. (In Vermont, the Democratic primary has lately been decisive for federal offices.)

Two of the women—Kesha Ram Hinsdale and Becca Balint—are staunch progressives; the third, Molly Gray, would be more liberal than most Democrats in Congress, but she’s more centrist than her competitors, and has attracted mainstream money for her campaign. So on Friday, at the last possible moment, Ram Hinsdale withdrew from the race and endorsed Balint. “During our time together in the Vermont Senate, Becca and I have always shared the same vision for the future of Vermont,” Ram Hinsdale wrote in a letter to her supporters (a group that included me). “One that champions the needs of working families, bucks the status quo, and fights for everyone in Vermont to have a seat at the decision-making table. I feel lighter knowing that I can support a woman of deep character who has worked so hard and is going to serve Vermonters so well in Washington.”

It wasn’t an easy call—Ram Hinsdale is an ambitious politician, the youngest state legislator in the country when she first ran in 2008 and the youngest Indian American ever elected to state office. And she would have been not just the first woman but the first person of color Vermont ever sent to D.C.

And it wasn’t entirely selfless: She was trailing slightly in the race according to the only poll, and this way she can retain her state Senate seat (perhaps with an inside edge to become the chamber’s leader) and live to fight again another day for federal office. (Bernie Sanders’s seat could come open if he chooses not to run again in two years.)

But her decision did illustrate several things I wish other progressive candidates would keep in mind. For one, it will probably insure that Balint goes to Washington, where she will be a formidable force (and the state’s first gay federal officeholder). I can remember hoping, when Sanders and Warren were together taking almost two-thirds of the vote in 2020 polling, that some such accommodation might be reached; the point is that there aren’t enough of us that we can split votes.

There’s also something to be said for the proposition that winning an elective office is not the only, or even necessarily the best, way to accomplish important things. There are times when we take elections too seriously as purity tests—if you’re 3 percent better than your opponent, well, that’s good, but it probably doesn’t matter that much (I’d be willing to bet that all three of the Vermont House candidates would vote the same way on 99 percent of legislation). Some people are good at legislating (one of Balint’s strengths over her remaining challenger is a far longer record of figuring out the give-and-take of any legislative body); it’s fine to cede them that job and get on with all the other tasks of organizing.

And finally it reminds us that—though ego is part of what drives anyone willing to take on the somewhat crazy job of politics in the 21st century—there’s something a little lovely when people overcome that ego some. “I had a few sleepless nights thinking about my path to victory, bringing down another woman in this race that I deeply respect and that has earned a broad coalition of support from Vermonters,” Ram Hinsdale told one local reporter, referring to Balint. “That is not the person I am or what Vermont needs.” Balint returned the compliment, calling Ram Hinsdale “brave.” She told VTDigger, the state’s online news source, “[It] feels really, really good to me that you can be super strong in your values and you can stand up for policy that you know is right for working families, and you can also do it in a way that brings people into coalition with you.”

It’s not lost on me that these are women making a smart set of decisions—living in the age of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Elise Stefanik can make one discount the importance of gender in changing politics, but there’s something there. And of course they are from Vermont, where politics is generally played in somewhat calmer fashion: All-out aggression doesn’t get you as far here as it seems to in some places. But, truthfully, this kind of calculation shouldn’t be beyond anyone anywhere. The point of progressive politics is not, ultimately, to get a particular person elected; it’s to make change. Which can happen in lots of ways.



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Autocracies and Fossil Fuels Go Hand in Handhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/mckibben-democracy-climate-change/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 11, 2022

Covering Climate NowThis story originated in The Guardian and is part of “Climate & Democracy,” a series from the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

t first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had:

  • A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”)
  • Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few backrooms
  • Earnest protesters with excellent signs (“The wrong Amazon is burning”)

But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, it struck me again and again that a good deal had changed since the last big climate confab in Paris in 2015—and not just because carbon levels and the temperature had risen ever higher.

The biggest shift was in the political climate. Over those few years the world seemed to have swerved sharply away from democracy and toward autocracy—and in the process dramatically limited our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had grabbed power and were using it to uphold the status quo; there was a Potemkin quality to the whole gathering, as if everyone was reciting a script that no longer reflected the actual politics of the planet.

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief—but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.

Brazil, in 2015 at Paris, had been led by Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ Party, which had for the most part worked to limit deforestation in the Amazon. In some ways the country could claim to have done more than any other on climate damage, simply by slowing the cutting. But in 2021 Jair Bolsonaro was in charge, at the head of a government that empowered every big-time cattle rancher and mahogany poacher in the country. If people cared about the climate, he said, they could eat less and “poop every other day.” And if they cared about democracy, they could… go to jail. “Only God can take me from the presidency,” he explained ahead of this year’s elections.

Or India, which may turn out to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in its energy use—and which had refused its equivalent of Greta Thunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in jail.)

Or Russia (about which more in a minute) or China—a decade ago we could still, albeit with some hazard and some care, hold climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing. Don’t try that now.

Or, of course, the United States, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary pledges, not a binding global agreement, is that the world finally figured out there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty.

Joe Biden had expected to arrive at the talks with the Build Back Better bill in his back pocket, slap it down on the table, and start a bidding war with the Chinese—but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest single recipient of fossil fuel cash in D.C., made sure that didn’t happen. Instead, Biden showed up empty-handed and the talks fizzled.

And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Program conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet—they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, 64 percent of them described climate change as a “global emergency,” and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play.” As UNDP Director Achim Steiner summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level.”

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere, they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path—we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason—strongmen capable of acting instantly on climate change are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please—Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now, it’s busy telling Xi Jinping that economic growth depends on more coal.

And beyond that, autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that it is concentrated in a few spots around the world, and hence the people who live on top of or otherwise control those spots end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power.

Boris Johnson was just off in Saudi Arabia trying to round up some hydrocarbons—the day after the king beheaded 81 folks he didn’t like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if they did not possess oil? No. Nor would the Koch brothers have been able to dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas. When David Koch ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 he got almost no votes. So he and his brother Charles decided to use their winnings as America’s largest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history.

The most striking example of this phenomenon, it hardly need be said, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power rests almost entirely on the production of stuff that you can burn. If I wandered through my house, it would be no problem to find electronics from China, textiles from India, all manner of goods from the EU—but there’s nothing anywhere that would say “made in Russia.” Sixty percent of the export earnings that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political clout that has cowed western Europe for decades came from his fingers on the gas spigot. He and his hideous war are the product of fossil fuel, and his fossil fuel interests have done much to corrupt the rest of the world.

It’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wears the badge of the Order of Friendship, personally pinned on his lapel by Putin in thanks for the vast investments Tillerson’s firm (that would be Exxon) had made in the Arctic—a region opened to their exploitation by the fact that it had, um, melted. And these guys stick together: It’s entirely unsurprising that when Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks, and Amazon quit Russia last month, Koch Industries announced that it was staying put. The family business began, after all, by building refineries for Stalin.

Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by their nature tend toward the support of despotism—they’re highly dense in energy and hence very valuable; geography and geology means they can be controlled with relative ease. There’s one pipeline, one oil terminal.

Whereas sun and wind are, in these terms, much closer to being democratic: They’re available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can’t have an oil well in my backyard because, as with almost all backyards, there is no oil there. Even if there were an oil well, I would have to sell what I pumped to some refiner, and since I’m American, that would likely be a Koch enterprise. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof; my wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, insulated from the market forces the Putins and the Kochs can unleash and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not risen this year, and it will not rise next year.

As a general rule of thumb, those territories with the healthiest, least-captive-to-vested-interest democracies are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world at Iceland or Costa Rica, around Europe at Finland or Spain, around the US at California or New York. So part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology, and personal fiefdoms.

But given the time constraints that physics impose—the need for rapid action everywhere—that can’t be the whole strategy. In fact, activists have arguably been a little too focused on politics as a source of change, and paid not quite enough attention to the other power center in our civilization: money.

If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would yield quick progress as well. Maybe quicker, since speed is more a hallmark of stock exchanges than parliaments.

And here the news is a little better. Take my country as an example. Political power has come to rest in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. The senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated Western states are able to tie up our political life, and those senators are almost all on the payroll of Big Oil. But money has collected in the blue parts of the country—Biden-voting counties account for 70 percent of the country’s economy.

That’s one reason some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like fossil fuel divestment—we won big victories with New York’s pension funds and California’s vast university system, and so were able to put real pressure on Big Oil. Now we’re doing the same with the huge banks that are the industry’s financial lifeline. We’re well aware that we may never win over Montana or Mississippi, so we better have some solutions that don’t depend on doing so.

The same thing’s true globally. We may not be able to advocate in Beijing or Moscow or, increasingly, in Delhi. So, at least for these purposes, it’s useful that the biggest pots of money remain in Manhattan, in London, in Frankfurt, in Tokyo. These are places we still can make some noise.

And they are places where there’s some real chance of that noise being heard. Governments tend to favor people who’ve already made their fortune, industries that are already ascendant: That’s who comes with blocs of employees who vote, and that’s who can afford the bribes. But investors are all about who’s going to make money next. That’s why Tesla is worth far more than General Motors in the stock market, if not in the halls of Congress.

Moreover, if we can persuade the world of money to act, it’s capable of doing so quickly. Should, say, Chase Bank, currently the biggest lender on Earth to fossil fuel, announce this year that it was rapidly phasing out that support, the news would ripple out across stock markets in a matter of hours. That’s why some of us have felt it worthwhile to mount increasingly larger campaigns against these financial institutions, and to head off to jail from their lobbies.

The world of money is at least as unbalanced and unfair as the world of political power—but in ways that may make it a little easier for climate advocates to make progress.

Putin’s grotesque war might be where some of these strands come together. It highlights the ways that fossil fuel builds autocracy, and the power that control of scarce supplies gives to autocrats. It’s also shown us the power of financial systems to put pressure on the most recalcitrant political leaders: Russia is being systematically and effectively punished by bankers and corporations, though as my Ukrainian colleague Svitlana Romanko and I pointed out recently, they could be doing far more. The shock of the war may also be strengthening the resolve and unity of the world’s remaining democracies and perhaps—one can hope—diminishing the attraction of would-be despots like Donald Trump.

But we’ve got years, not decades, to get the climate crisis under some kind of control. We won’t get more moments like this. The brave people of Ukraine may be fighting for more than they can know.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/mckibben-democracy-climate-change/
Youth and Age Unite to Demand That Banks Stop Lending to Big Oilhttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/banks-lending-big-oil/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya MuthupillaiOct 22, 2021

We couldn’t be much more different: One of us lives in greater Houston, the hydrocarbon capital of the planet, the other all the way across the country in the Green Mountains of Vermont. More to the point, we span the even wider continent of age: One of us collected his diploma in the 1970s, while the other just graduated high school amid this pandemic in the Class of 2021. Still, in the face of climate change, we’ve transcended our differences to form a powerful alliance between the ends of the generational spectrum—the perfect combination to take on this most crucial of issues.

Later this month, in fact, we’re helping mobilize our respective peers in the largest intergenerational climate push to date: taking on big banks like Chase and Citi to cut off the financial lifeline that Big Oil depends on. Together, we are inviting Americans of all ages to stand alongside us. Youth are amassing under the Future Coalition and “more-experienced” Americans are gathering at Third Act. While some of us have decades before us—and others decades behind us—our messages overlap seamlessly at this moment in history.

For young people, climate change is about the present and future. In Houston, we’ve seen back-to-back “500-year floods” that turned Houston’s streets into rivers; every American rainfall record was shattered by Hurricane Harvey, which dropped five feet of rain in some areas. Last winter’s polar vortex that left millions to freeze when it crippled the Texas power grid seems less like a freak disaster than a harbinger of what we’ll be living with all our lives: a new normal in which a reliance on fossil fuels will likely fail us. A new study pointed out last month that we will experience “three times as many droughts, river floods and crop failures as people born 60 years ago.” Do young people not deserve the livable planet that was guaranteed to those born a mere six decades ago?

And from the other end of the telescope, some things look surprisingly similar. Older Americans face particular risks from the unfolding climate catastrophe—the new weather is hard on bodies growing more frail, a risk that as usual is magnified in the poorest and most vulnerable communities. But we also know that the biggest risk is to our legacy: We’re about to be the first generations to leave the world a markedly worse place than we found it, with rising temperatures, rising seas, and shrinking possibilities for our kids and grandkids.

Our descent into climate chaos was no accident, and we share our anger at its enablers: in this case, the banks funding our destruction. Since the Paris climate accords were signed in 2015 (six years ago, when one of us was still in junior high), the biggest financial institutions have lent more than $3 trillion to the fossil fuel industry—even though the International Energy Agency has made it painfully clear that we need to stop that industry’s expansion right now. Chase and Citi have each sent more than a quarter trillion dollars off to this industry. Of course we’re glad that they’re making noise about their renewable energy investments and 2050 climate targets. But unless they also stop financing Big Oil right now, that’s exactly what it will remain: noise.

But if we can get enough people engaged in the months ahead, we think the banks may listen to us… though for different reasons.

For a banker, young people are their future customers: If they open an account or take out a credit card with a bank, they’re likely to stick with it for decades. Gen Z has already begun boycotting fossil fuel banks en masse—why bother when they’re already selling us out? And that goes double for working at these banks, which rely on a flood of fresh young talent each year. When youth fights and wins battles like forcing Harvard to divest from fossil fuels, they’re not going to just turn around on graduation day and report for work.

Older people have leverage of their own. Fair or not, they’ve ended up with most of the country’s money in their retirement accounts and pension funds—boomers and the silent generation have about 70 percent of America’s assets, compared with about 5 percent for millennials (and far less for those in Gen Z). If bankers see that the people with money in their vaults have begun to rebel, that will matter too.

We both understand that this fight will take a while—after all we’re going up against the biggest banks on earth. Some of us have a lifetime ahead, and we know that we’ll spend much of it battling—even as we go to college, find our first jobs, raise our families. Others of us have free time right now, because we’ve begun to retire—inspired by all the many young activists that have emerged around the planet, we’re ready to follow. And if the youth and the boomers move at slightly different speeds—well, that’s OK. What matters is that we move together.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/banks-lending-big-oil/
Why Do We Eat Bad Food?https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mark-bittman-animal-vegetable-junk/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibbenMay 18, 2021

Mark Bittman writes the way he cooks: The ingredients are wholesome, the preparation elegantly simple, the results nourishing in the best sense of the word. He never strains; there’s no effort to impress, but you come away full, satisfied, invigorated.

From his magnum opus, How to Cook Everything, and its many cookbook companions, to his recipes for The New York Times, to his essays on food policy, Bittman has developed a breeziness that masks the weight of the politics and economics that surround the making and consuming of food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his latest book, he offers us his most thoroughgoing attack on the corporate forces that govern our food, tracking the evolution of cultivation and consumption from primordial to modern times and developing what is arguably his most radical and forthright argument yet about how to address our contemporary food cultures’ many ills. But it still goes down easy; the broccoli tastes good enough that you’ll happily go for seconds.

ittman starts Animal, Vegetable, Junk with the early hominins. As these human ancestors learned to walk upright, they began to forage across larger areas and hunt with comparative ease. Bittman notes that they also started to develop more flexible diets: “a variety of fruits, leaves, nuts, and animals, including insects, birds, mollusks, crustaceans, turtles, small animals…rabbits, and fish.” Eventually, with the nutritional boost of this new diet, they soon learned how to track faster prey (which was easier to do in groups and thus produced more social behavior) and to cook over fire.

With more nutrients and more advanced methods of gathering and cooking food, the early hominins’ “already sizeable brains grew bigger.” Hardwired to eat “what we can, when we can,” they had diets that differed from place to place: “Some humans had diets high in fat and protein, and some had diets in which carbohydrates dominated.” But despite these differences, the emerging food cultures and diets had one thing in common. The epoch of hunting and gathering produced “a period of greater longevity and general health than in almost any other time before or since.” Eventually it also produced a new trick: how to stay in one place and grow crops whose surplus could be stored.

That transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was welcome in many ways, but it came at a price, Bittman writes. Yes, it supported larger populations, but diets became monotonous and less nutritious, life spans declined, and work hours increased. Bittman is not the first to make this argument. Jared Diamond memorably called farming the biggest mistake in human history, and so Bittman doesn’t belabor the point, accepting that we now live on a planet where food is something we raise, not something we hunt or gather.

For Bittman, the central drama of this story begins in the course of the last century, as agriculture and food processing became mass industries, and as we moved from having two types of food (plants and animals) to being overwhelmed by a new third type—one that was “more akin to poison.” These “engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as products of the earth, are commonly called ‘junk.’ ”

This junk food has created, Bittman argues, a “public health crisis that diminishes the lives of perhaps half of all humans.” Through its dependence on an agriculture that “concentrates on maximizing the yield of the most profitable crops,” it has done “more damage to the earth than strip mining, urbanization, even fossil fuel extraction.”

Any number of data points illustrate this new reality, but let’s choose a couple that show what happened to farming. In the decades since World War II, chicken production has increased by more than 1,400 percent—while the number of farms producing those birds has fallen by 98 percent. This kind of industrialization is obviously unkind to animals and to those who once raised them—the former live in tiny cages, and the latter, depending on where in the world they reside, often move to shantytowns on the edges of capital cities. And the damage to the natural world is every bit as great. In Iowa, for instance, stock living in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, produce as much waste as 168 million people, or 53 times the state’s population. This manure is housed in giant lagoons that sometimes flood; it is perhaps not surprising that the largest municipal water treatment plant in the world is required to allow the people of Des Moines to drink the tap water.

The ability to produce massive quantities of a few commodities—wheat, corn, and corn syrup—has enriched not farmers but a few giant middlemen (companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland and Cargill) and implement dealers (John Deere makes four times as much money providing credit to struggling farmers as it does selling tractors). And it has created a new problem: what to do with the massive amount of calories that this commodity-focused agriculture produces. “The system,” Bittman explains, now “delivers a nearly uninterruptible stream of food, regardless of season,” and in the process it has created junk: the processed food that now dominates the Western diet and, increasingly, many other diets around the world. “Junk made it possible to encourage people to—really, [made] it difficult for them not to—eat too much non-nourishing food over a prolonged period.”

As Bittman notes, the calories have to go somewhere, and—thanks in no small part to the advertising industry, which attached itself to the food industry like a remora to a shark—they went inside us; we look the way we do because of the need for the Krafts and Heinzes of the world to keep their profit margins growing by finding new ways to get us to consume their limited line of basic commodities. “Global sugar consumption has nearly tripled in the past half-century,” he writes, and so has obesity; the number of people worldwide living with diabetes has quadrupled since 1980. “Two thirds of the world’s population,” Bittman tells us, “lives in countries where more people die from diseases linked to being overweight than ones linked to being underweight.”

It’s not just our bodies that suffer from this commodity agriculture; it does huge damage to communities as well. Bittman discusses how small Black farmers, especially in the South, have been systematically sidelined by federal policy and how a fairly stable system of peasant agriculture in Mexico was destroyed by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which dismantled the economic protections that allowed it to persist and flooded the country with cheap American grain. Since it took 17.8 labor days to produce a ton of corn in Mexico, and 1.2 hours to do it on industrialized farms in the American Midwest, the result was never in doubt. Now the United States supplies Mexico with 42 percent of its food, which should give you some idea of why so many people needed to come north. Adds Bittman: “NAFTA also brought junk food to Mexico. Imports of high-fructose corn syrup increased by almost 900 times, and soda consumption nearly doubled,” making Mexico the world’s fourth largest per capita consumer of soda. It also now “leads the world’s populous nations in obesity, and diabetes—almost always caused by a modern Western diet—is among the country’s leading killers.” This amounts to a “domination” more subtle than the Opium Wars or the overthrow of Central American governments—but not by much.

hen something this big has gone wrong for this long, it becomes hard to imagine alternatives, or at least to imagine how those alternatives might possibly overcome the power of the ruling system. In the United States, for instance, there are 15 or 20 states whose senators largely represent corn; that’s why the Farm Bill, each time it’s renewed, is a gift to the industrial combines that control those states.

Bittman does discuss some interesting initiatives that are taking hold in different parts of the world and beginning to have a larger impact. Countries from Uruguay and France to South Korea and Taiwan have passed laws limiting junk-food advertising to kids, and they seem to work. Quebec, which banned such ads 40 years ago, has fewer overweight children than other parts of North America. In 2012, Chile—where half of 6-year-olds were overweight or obese—passed the world’s strongest food labeling and advertising laws. Any processed food high in calories, sodium, sugar, or saturated fat carries a “stop-sign-shaped ‘black label’” and can’t be advertised to kids under 14 or sold in schools; “almost instantly Chilean children went from seeing 8,500 junk food advertisements a year to seeing next to none.”

Mexico has also fought back as best it can; a tax on soda has driven consumption down 12 percent. Bittman cites more notable successes on the local level. Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest metropolitan area, has bankrolled “People’s Restaurants” that sell high-quality lunches at affordable prices and cooked-from-scratch school meals emphasizing more vegetables and fewer processed foods; the government also subsidized farmers’ markets that sell staples at reduced prices and funded urban gardening programs. As a result, hunger in the city has been “nearly eliminated…while fruit and vegetable consumption and farmer income have risen.”

Even in the United States—the belly of the beast, as it were—Bittman finds some interesting developments. He describes the Good Food Purchasing Program, which began in Los Angeles in 2012 and sets standards for nutrition, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and treatment of the labor force. When LA schools signed on, their main distributor started reaching out to wheat farms that could meet the new standards, which led to 65 new full-time, living-wage jobs. Cities from Boston to Oakland have signed on to the GFPP, and New York is about to join.

But more dramatic change will only come with initiatives like the Green New Deal, which “with carbon neutrality as a starting goal…would necessarily support…sustainable agriculture.” In fact, by the end of the book, Bittman uses the food crisis much as Naomi Klein did the climate crisis in her landmark This Changes Everything: as a lever for thoroughgoing change. “Instituting fairness in race and gender means in part undoing land theft, racial and gender-based violence, and centuries of wealth accumulation by most European and European American males, wealth accumulation that is still being compounded. This means land reform, this means affordable nutritious food regardless of the ability to pay…. This means wholesale change.” Indeed it does. “What’s for dinner?” has always been among the most basic of human questions. Now, asked honestly, it’s among the most unsettling and the most explosive.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mark-bittman-animal-vegetable-junk/
Vote as if the Climate and the Future of Humanity Depend on It—Because They Dohttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-vote-trump/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenSep 22, 2020

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

o understand the planetary importance of this autumn’s presidential election, check the calendar. Voting ends on November 3—and by a fluke of timing, on the morning of November 4 the United States is scheduled to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

President Trump announced that we would abrogate our Paris commitments during a Rose Garden speech in 2017. But under the terms of the accords, it takes three years to formalize the withdrawal. So on Election Day it won’t be just Americans watching: The people of the world will see whether the country that has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other over the course of history will become the only country that refuses to cooperate in the one international effort to do something about the climate crisis.

Trump’s withdrawal benefited oil executives, who have donated millions of dollars to his reelection campaign, and the small, strange fringe of climate deniers who continue to insist that the planet is cooling. But most people living in the rational world were appalled. Polling showed widespread opposition, and by some measures, Trump is more out of line with the American populace on environmental issues than any other. In his withdrawal announcement he said he’d been elected “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”; before the day was out, Pittsburgh’s mayor had pledged that his city would follow the guidelines set in the French capital. Young people, above all, have despised the president’s climate moves: Poll after poll shows that climate change is a top-tier issue with them and often the most important one—mostly, I think, because they’ve come to understand how tightly linked it is not just to their future but to questions of justice, equity, and race.

Here’s the truth: At this late date, meeting the promises set in Paris will be nowhere near enough. If you add up the various pledges that nations made at that conference, they plan on moving so timidly that the planet’s temperature will still rise more than 3 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels. So far, we’ve raised the mercury 1 degree Celsius, and that’s been enough to melt millions of square miles of ice in the Arctic, extend fire seasons for months, and dramatically alter the planet’s rainfall patterns. Settling for 3 degrees is kind of like writing a global suicide note.

Happily, we could go much faster if we wanted. The price of solar and wind power has fallen so fast and so far in the last few years that they are now the cheapest power on earth. There are plenty of calculations to show it will soon be cheaper to build solar and wind farms than to operate the fossil fuel power stations we’ve already built. Climate-smart investments are also better for workers and economic equality. “We need to have climate justice, which means to invest in green energy, [which] creates three times more jobs than to invest in fossil fuel energy,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now in September. If we wanted to make it happen, in other words, an energy revolution is entirely possible. The best new study shows that the United States could cut its current power sector emissions 80 percent by 2035 and create 20 million jobs along the way.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris haven’t pledged to move that quickly, but their climate plan is the farthest-reaching of any presidential ticket in history. More to the point, we can pressure them to go farther and faster. Already, seeing the polling on the wall, they’ve adopted many of the proposals of climate stalwarts like Washington Governor Jay Inslee. A team of Biden and Bernie Sanders representatives worked out a pragmatic but powerful compromise in talks before the Democratic National Convention; the Biden-Harris ticket seems primed to use a transition to green energy as a crucial part of a push to rebuild the pandemic-devastated economy.

Perhaps most important, they’ve pledged to try to lead the rest of the world in the climate fight. The United States has never really done this. Our role as the single biggest producer of hydrocarbons has meant that our response to global warming has always been crippled by the political power of Big Oil. But that power has begun to slip. Once the biggest economic force on the planet, the oil industry is a shadow of its former self. (You could buy all the oil companies in America for less than the cost of Apple; Tesla is worth more than any other auto company on earth.) And so it’s possible that the hammerlock on policy exercised by this reckless industry will loosen if Trump is beaten.

But only if he’s beaten. Four more years will be enough to cement in place his anti-environmental policies and to make sure it’s too late to really change course. The world’s climate scientists declared in 2018 that if we had any chance of meeting sane climate targets, we had to cut emissions almost in half by 2030. That’s less than 10 years away. We’re at the last possible moment to turn the wheel of the supertanker that is our government. Captain Trump wants to steer us straight onto the rocks, mumbling all the while about hoaxes. If we let him do it, history won’t forgive us. Nor will the rest of the world.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-vote-trump/
This Earth Day, Stop the Money Pipelinehttps://www.thenation.com/article/environment/earth-day-live-mckibben/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 21, 2020

Covering Climate NowThis story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

ineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.)

Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of Albany: “one great septic tank that has been rendered nearly useless for water supply, for swimming, or to support the rich fish life that once abounded there.” Everything that people say about the air and water in China and India right now was said of America’s cities then.

It’s no wonder that people mobilized: 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970—10 percent of America’s population at the time, perhaps the single greatest day of political protest in the country’s history. And it worked. Worked politically because Congress quickly passed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and scientifically because those laws had the desired effect. In essence, they stuck enough filters on smokestacks, car exhausts, and factory effluent pipes that, before long, the air and water were unmistakably cleaner. The nascent Environmental Protection Agency commissioned a series of photos that showed just how filthy things were. Even for those of us who were alive then, it’s hard to imagine that we tolerated this.

But we should believe it, because now we face even greater challenges that we’re doing next to nothing about. And one reason is you can’t see them.

The carbon dioxide molecule is invisible; at today’s levels you can’t see it or smell it, and it doesn’t do anything to you. Carbon with one oxygen molecule? That’s what kills you in a closed garage if you leave the car running. But two oxygen molecules? All that does is trap heat in the atmosphere. Melt ice caps. Raise seas. Change weather patterns. But slowly enough that most of the time, we don’t quite see it.

And it’s a more complex moment for another reason. You can filter carbon monoxide easily. It’s a trace gas, a tiny percentage of what comes from a power plant. But carbon dioxide is the exact opposite. It’s most of what comes pouring out when you burn coal or gas or oil. There’s no catalytic converter for CO2, which means you have to take down the fossil fuel industry.

That in turn means you have to take on not just the oil companies but also the banks, asset managers, and insurance companies that invest in them (and may even own them, in the wake of the current economic crash). You have to take on, that is, the heart of global capital.

And so we are. Stop the Money Pipeline, a coalition of environmental and climate justice groups running from the small and specialized to the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, formed last fall to try to tackle the biggest money on earth. Banks like Chase—the planet’s largest by market capitalization—which has funneled a quarter-trillion dollars to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris Agreement of 2015. Insurers like Liberty Mutual, still insuring tar sands projects even as pipeline builders endanger Native communities by trying to build the Keystone XL during a pandemic.

This campaign sounds quixotic, but it seemed to be getting traction until the coronavirus pandemic hit. In January, BlackRock announced that it was going to put climate at the heart of its investment analyses. Liberty Mutual, under similar pressure from activists, began to edge away from coal. And Chase—well, Earth Day would have seen activists engaging in civil disobedience in several thousand bank lobbies across America, sort of like the protest in January that helped launch the campaign (and sent me, among others, off in handcuffs). But we called that off; there’s no way we were going to risk carrying the microbe into jails, where the people already locked inside have little chance of social distancing.

Still, the pandemic may be causing as much trouble for the fossil fuel industry as our campaign hoped to. With the demand for oil cratering, it’s clear that these companies have no future. The divestment campaign that, over a decade, has enlisted $14 trillion in endowments and portfolios in the climate fight has a new head of steam.

Our job—a more complex one than faced our Earth Day predecessors 50 years ago—is to force the spring. We need to speed the transition to the solar panels and wind turbines that engineers have worked so mightily to improve and are now the cheapest way to generate power. The only thing standing in the way is the political power of the fossil fuel companies, on clear display as President Trump does everything in his power to preserve their dominance. That’s hard to overcome. Hard but simple. Just as in 1970, it demands unrelenting pressure from citizens. That pressure is coming. Indigenous nations, frontline communities, faith groups, climate scientists, and savvy investors are joining together, and their voices are getting louder. Seven million of us were in the streets last September. That’s not 20 million, but it’s on the way.

We can’t be on the streets right now. So we’ll do what we can on the boulevards of the Internet. Join us for Earth Day Live, three days of digital activism beginning April 22. We’re in a race, and we’re gaining fast.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/earth-day-live-mckibben/
What if Australia Were Its Own Planet?https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/australia-fire-climate-change/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 9, 2020

This piece is published in The Nation as part of Covering Climate Now, a journalistic collaboration of 400 news outlets around the world to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

ne way to think about the devastating fires in Australia—and perhaps to grasp more clearly how climate change plays out across the globe—is to imagine that the southern continent was, in fact, a planet all its own.

In a small sense that’s how it actually feels, since you can’t get to Australia from much of the world without a long journey. And Australians are self-sufficient in many ways, growing plenty of food in a nation well-endowed with soil, sun, and water, though that’s becoming more difficult now because of climate change–fueled, gripping drought. Australia also has its own complement of flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth—not just koalas and kangaroos but also quolls and wombats and sugar gliders.

For a long time, its isolation served Australia well—the “lucky country,” it styled itself. It was even a little sheltered by its isolation from fears of nuclear war, as those old enough to remember the classic movie On the Beach will recall.

But now Australia is suffering, harshly, the early effects of climate change. It turns out that its unique physical features are remarkably susceptible to the global warming that’s now in its early stages. The Great Barrier Reef has been damaged by several bouts of severe bleaching from hot ocean water. The enormous kelp forests that ringed Australia’s southern coasts have been all but wiped out. And now fire has come in a way it never has before.

As the earth gets hotter, droughts grow deeper and more prolonged. We’ve seen this in California (whose climate is close enough to Australia’s that millions of highly flammable eucalyptus trees thrive in the Golden State as well), and now we see it in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, where record temperatures and record aridity have set the stage for firestorms so intense that they generate their own weather. Last weekend the suburb west of Sydney was the hottest spot on earth, with the mercury near 120 degrees Fahrenheit and a relative humidity in the single digits. This is a precise recipe for an inferno, one that will be repeated across the globe in similar terrain.

Australia is also a microcosm in its economy and attitudes. Most of the early victims of climate change—low-lying Pacific islands or far northern indigenous communities—had done little, if anything, to cause the problem. But Australia is different. Its citizens vie with Canadians and Americans to emit the most carbon per capita in the world. And far more damagingly, Australia exports more coal than any nation on earth. Yet the majority of Australians have chosen not to do much about that. In their last national election, they gave power to one Scott Morrison, who made his bones as a political figure when, in 2017, he carried a lump of coal into Parliament to pass around to his mates. “Don’t be scared of it,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

In other words, if Australia really were a planet it would be quickly, all by itself, destroying its climate. It can’t blame the destruction on others; in any moral calculation, Australia has done this to itself. Which is not to say individual Australians themselves are to blame. As elsewhere, the fossil fuel industry has done all it can to manipulate political systems: The election that brought Morrison to power saw one coal baron spend more money on campaign ads than the country’s major political parties combined. (The same coal baron, Clive Palmer, is also building a full-size working replica of the Titanic, if you like metaphor overload.) And of course, the Australian political discussion is poisoned by its native son Rupert Murdoch, who owns most of the country’s newspapers and uses them to—well, you’ve seen Fox News.

Fortunately, everyday Australians are rising up to say enough is enough. Young people are protesting at record levels, volunteer firefighters are showing immense heroism, and impacted communities are demonstrating incredible altruism in the face of disaster. Citizens in fire-ravaged towns refused to shake hands with Morrison when he, just back from a Hawaiian vacation, had the gumption to belatedly tour the ashes.

But the test of true change will be what Australia’s politicians do about the massive new fossil fuel proposals before them, such as the massive Adani coal mine (one of the biggest new coal mines on earth), the potential opening of the Great Australian Bight to offshore oil drilling, and the calls to frack enormous amounts of gas in the Northern Territory. So far, the omens are not good—Morrison has said he’s thinking instead of legislation that will make it illegal for activists to pressure banks to stop lending to fossil fuel development.

Australia is a microcosm of the world in another way too. Having savagely repressed its indigenous population, its government steadfastly ignores those people’s expertise in managing fire on the landscape. Whether that indigenous knowledge can cope with a climate that is changing as abrupt as ours remains an open question, but undertaking a real dialogue with the only people who’ve managed long-term occupation of the continent seems like a sound idea.

The idea of Australia as a planet of its own only goes so far, of course—even if it stopped exporting coal tomorrow and resolved to power its own economy with abundant wind and sun, Australia’s temperature would continue to rise. The country cannot, by itself, solve global warming. But if the shock of these hideous firestorms is what’s required to decisively change Australia’s politics, technology, and relations with the continent’s original inhabitants, that example would demonstrate to the rest of the world that real change is not impossible. Imagine an Australia that stopped building new coal mines and started installing more giant solar farms and batteries; imagine an Australia where people retreated enough to give the natural world the margin it clearly requires.

What we’re going to see, over the next year or two, is whether modern societies are capable of responding to this kind of horror with the speed and courage that science demands. Planet Australia may be the best experiment we ever get.



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23 Reasons to Climate Strike Todayhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-strike-mckibben/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenSep 19, 2019

Covering Climate NowThis story was published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story, co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review.


year ago, inspired by Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, young people around the world began climate striking—walking out of school for a few hours on Fridays to demand action against the global warming that darkens their future. In May, when 1.4 million kids around the world walked out of school, they asked for adults to join them next time. That next time is September 20 (in a few countries September 27), and it is shaping up to be the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history. Everyone from big trade unions to a thousand workers at the Amazon headquarters, and from college kids to senior citizens, are setting the day aside to rally in their cities and towns for faster action from our governments and industries. You can find out what’s happening in your community at globalclimatestrike.net.

But it will only be a success on the scale we need if lots of people who aren’t the regular suspects join in. Many people, of course, can’t do without a day’s pay or work for bosses who would fire them if they missed work. So, it really matters that those of us with the freedom to rally do so. Since I published the first book for a general audience on climate change 30 years ago this month, I’ve had lots of time to think about the various ways to move people to action. Let me offer a few:

§ Strike, because the people who did the least to cause this crisis suffer first and worst—the people losing their farms to deserts and watching their islands sink beneath the waves aren’t the ones who burned the coal and gas and oil.

§ Strike, because coral reefs are so gloriously beautiful and complex—and so vulnerable.

§ Strike, because sun and wind are now the cheapest way to generate power around the world—if we could match the political power of the fossil fuel industry we could make fast progress.

§ Strike, because we’ve already lost half the animals on the planet since 1970—the earth is a lonelier place.

§ Strike, because our governments move with such painful slowness, treating climate change as, at worst, one problem on a long list.

§ Strike, because this could be a great opportunity—and maybe the last opportunity—to transform our society towards justice and towards joy. Green New Deals have been proposed around the world; they are a way forward.

§ Strike, because forests now seem like fires waiting to happen.

§ Strike, because young people have asked us to. In a well-ordered society, when kids make a reasonable request their elders should say yes—in this case with real pride and hope that the next generations are standing up for what matters.

§ Strike, because every generation faces some great crisis, and this is ours.

§ Strike, because half the children in New Delhi have irreversible lung damage simply from breathing the air.

§ Strike, because Exxon and the rest knew all about global warming in the 1980s, and then lied so they could keep cashing in.

§ Strike, because what we do this decade will matter for hundreds of thousands of years.

§ Strike, because the temperature has hit 129 degrees F (or 54 degrees Celsius) in big cities in recent summers. The human body can survive that, but only for a few hours.

§ Strike, because do we want to be the first generations to leave the planet in worse shape?

§ Strike, because batteries are ever cheaper—we can now store sunshine at night, and wind for a calm day.

§ Strike, because the UN estimates unchecked climate change could create a billion refugees this century.

§ Strike, because the big banks continue to lend hundreds of billions to the fossil fuel industry—people are literally trying to get rich off the destruction of the planet.

§ Strike, because what animal fouls its own nest?

§ Strike, because indigenous people around the world are trying to protect their rightful land from the coal and oil companies—and in the process protect all of us.

§ Strike, because every time they cut down a patch of rain forest to grow some more cows, the climate math gets harder.

§ Strike, because science is real, because physics exists, because chemistry matters.

§ Strike, so you can look your grandchild—or anyone else’s—in the eye.

§ Strike, because the world we were given is still so sweet.



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Trump Leaks the Blueprints for the Climate Death Starhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fossil-fuel-divestment-climate/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 15, 2019

The fight against climate change is such a vast undertaking—crossing continents and decades—that it’s hard sometimes to know when you’re striking an effective blow. But last Wednesday Donald Trump helped clear the smoke of battle for a moment, issuing a pair of executive orders that let many of us know precisely where we’d done damage, and precisely where we should push even harder in the months and years ahead.

The White House issued the two executive orders to help ram through pipelines and other fossil-fuel infrastructure, even when the cities and states through which they pass oppose them, and to slow down the rush of pension funds now divesting their holdings from the fossil-fuel industry. These steps of course make a mockery of conservative claims to federalism and local decision-making—they are either one more sop to the most powerful industry on earth, or a nihilist effort to speed up climate change. Or both.

And while they will make the fight more difficult, they are also a backhanded tribute to the dogged effectiveness of millions of activists, who by trial and error have figured out some of the flaws in the fossil-fuel death star.

The battle over fossil-fuel infrastructure, for instance, kicked into a higher gear with the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2011 climate activists joined indigenous groups and Midwest ranchers who had launched the battle, in an attempt to nationalize the fight. I wrote the letter asking people to come to Washington and get arrested; at the time it seemed folly to many, since the oil industry had never been blocked from building something it wanted. When the National Journal polled its DC “energy insiders,” more than 90 percent said TransCanada Corp would soon have its permit.

But then more people ended up in handcuffs than at any protest about anything in years—and soon KXL was a national cause. It’s still not built, which means 800,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest oil on earth has stayed safely in the ground. But more to the point, the protest showed that Big Energy was not bulletproof—now every single pipeline, frack well, coal mine, and LNG port gets fought and fought hard. Often we win—plans for five big coal ports in the Pacific Northwest were defeated one after another by brilliant activists, meaning that there’s no easy way to take the massive deposits of the Powder River Basin off to Asia.

But even when we lose—the Dakota Access pipeline, for instance, which Trump okayed after the oil industry sicced German shepherds on nonviolent indigenous protesters—activists take a toll. Don’t believe me. Listen instead to Marty Durbin, who as head of the American Natural Gas Alliance told an industry conference in 2016: “We’ve seen a change in the debate. I hesitate to put it this way, but call it the Keystone-ization of every pipeline project that’s out there, that if you can stop one permit, you can stop the development of fossil fuels.”

And so that fight goes on: Right now, as Trump tries once more to push KXL, indigenous groups and others are organizing a Promise to Protect tour, New Yorkers are battling the Williams pipeline, and the Sunrise Movement is out rallying the country behind a Green New Deal that would end the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Divestment is a similar story. In the fall of 2012, some of us organized a tour around the country to launch campaigns asking universities, churches, cities, and states to sell their holdings in coal, oil and gas companies. It took off beyond our wildest imaginings, crossing the planet to become arguably the largest anti-corporate campaign in history: At this juncture, portfolios and endowments worth $8 trillion have now divested in part or in whole. It’s been made easier by the fact that those who divested are making bank, as fossil-fuel stocks fall in the face of ascendant renewables. A poster at last Friday’s surging school strikes for climate read: “You’re Burning Our Future.” And in the process, the money of investors.

You understand why the Trump administration wants to fight back against divestment, because it too is taking a deep and real toll: Shell Oil last year described divestment as a material risk to its business. Reporters at the annual energy conference in Houston this year quoted one coal executive after another alarmed that their financing was drying up. “It’s made [it] more difficult to get funding for power stations, or it’s more difficult to get funding for mines, or it’s more difficult to get insurance, or there are investment funds that because of a certain set of objectives just want to withdraw from companies that have any or a certain part of fossil fuels from their portfolio,” said Howard Gatiss, CEO of CMC Coal Marketing, a joint venture of coal producers BHP, Anglo American, and Glencore to sell Colombian coal.

The same spirit that takes on investors is also going after banks: In Seattle last week protesters disrupted every one of Chase’s 44 branches to commemorate the fact that they were the biggest fossil-fuel lenders in the country. Now attention is turning to the vast insurance industry as well—not only do insurance companies invest piles of capital in fossil fuel, they do it while recording the ever-greater toll of climate disaster on people’s homes, businesses, and lives. And organizers inside Amazon convinced thousands of employees to sign a letter to the boss telling him to stop helping the oil industry find new deposits. If you’re trying to profit off the end of the world, people are going to fight back.

None of this means we’re winning that fight, of course—the fossil-fuel industry still has enough political juice to fend off the mortal threat of ever-cheaper renewables. But we are clearly slowing them down, complicating their lives, altering the balance of power.

I’m proud of the fact that I wrote the first book about climate change, way back in 1989, and I still think books are important—my 30-year update will be published next week. But I’m not proud that I wasted the 15 years after that first volume thinking we were in an argument that would be won with more reason and more data. We weren’t—we were in a fight about money and power that can only be won by standing up to this most destructive of industries. That fight has spread around the world, and it accelerates every day.

And for the first time in his presidency I’m grateful to Mr. Trump—with his executive orders he’s buoyed our spirits about the damage we’ve done in the last 10 years and given us our marching orders for the decade ahead.



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The Making of Our Polluted Agehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-energy-business-book-review-bill-mckibben/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenFeb 6, 2019

From the moment that a light gets turned on in the morning, every action of a Western life uses energy. Its easy availability—thanks largely to the so-called fossil fuels—gave us modernity, and now the endless combustion of all that coal and gas and oil has triggered the end of the Holocene and is calling into question the very survival of our civilization. Some of the richest companies on earth have been in the energy business, and geopolitics has long followed the oil derrick. Even our domestic politics is dominated by this industry more than any other; it is, after all, where the Koch brothers made their mint.

So the wonder is how little attention we actually pay to the subject. In the Western world, we have taken abundant energy so much for granted that it might as well be air or water—only its absence, during a blackout or an oil embargo, really attracts our notice. I only viscerally grasped the meaning of energy when in rural Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where newly cheap solar panels were providing the first reliable flow of electrons to villages that had never known artificial light or the breeze of an electric fan. Seeing the pure, undistilled pleasure that this small miracle provided was like traveling back in time—or, given the high-tech and sustainable source of this newfound power, traveling forward.

Richard Rhodes’s Energy: A Human History, Matthieu Auzanneau’s Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History, and Kate Ervine’s Carbon all time-travel in both directions, offering us visions of a much cleaner future and tracing the origins of our ominously polluted present. Since this is the great existential crisis of our time, it’s a good sign that a robust literature is emerging, of which these volumes are solid examples. But though much of their discussion is about history, the crucial questions turn on what comes next. As the excitement over the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (among others) makes clear, that future is very much up for grabs.

n Energy, Richard Rhodes goes furthest back, starting with a London powered mostly by wood. But by the 16th century or so, the demand for energy began to outstrip the supply, and so households turned to coal. From the beginning, coal provided cheap heat, but it also caused trouble. Soon, hundreds of boys were employed as chimney sweeps, and doctors noted an epidemic of “soot wart” among them—squamous-cell carcinoma of the scrotum, where “the sweeps’ sooty sweat collected as they broomed their way up London’s chimneys.” If you fast-forward to Delhi in the present day, estimates are that half of its 4.4 million children have irreversible lung damage from breathing the smoke that chokes their city. The dangers of fossil-fuel use have, from the start, been concentrated among the poorest and most vulnerable.

Burning coal in a fireplace simply substituted for using wood; it didn’t really change the direction of our economic life. That awaited the invention of the steam engine, when the potential energy embedded in each lump of coal could be put to work doing the kind of labor that previously required people or draft animals. Thomas Newcomen invented the first such workable beast early in the 18th century; fittingly, its task was to drain water from coal shafts to make mining easier. (Trains—and hence the transportation revolution—also began in the mines, where the first rails were laid to make it easier to haul up ore out of the earth and to nearby smelters.) But it was with James Watt’s greatly improved steam engine in the second half of the century that the Industrial Revolution in all its smoky glory began to take shape, as Rhodes, writing with the magisterial high-altitude view of the popular historian, makes clear: “The year 1800, the turn of a new century, hinged in Britain between the old organic economy and the new economy of industry powered by fossil fuel.” England, he tells us, was “eruptive with steam”—powering barges and locomotives; “turning drive belts and working looms” in Blake’s satanic mills.

And so it began, this new world of abundant energy. Rhodes chronicles all the important steps that came with the industrial age: the development of electricity, the rise of oil and then cars, the construction of gas pipelines that girdle the world, the splitting of the atom. He is a master of the brief sketch, and so we can go in a few pages from Thomas Midgley, who helped invent the brain-poisoning lead additives in gasoline, to Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founding member of the royal house that now distinguishes itself by dismembering journalists.

Doubtless because he has devoted so many previous books to atomic power and atomic bombs, Rhodes spends a great deal of this volume on nuclear energy (considerably more than its share of the world’s power production would warrant). Adm. Hyman Rickover, who persuaded the Navy to power its submarines with reactors and headed up the Atomic Energy Commission, is a hero; and Rhodes ends with a couple of chapters that are essentially special pleading for a nuclear-power renaissance, on the grounds that it will be a necessary feature of any post-fossil-fuel age.

Rhodes’s argument would be more persuasive if he didn’t pass over renewable energy so lightly. Oddly, sun and wind, though now the fastest-growing sources of energy on the planet, get just a few pages, some of which are devoted to arguing that part of the problem with both is that the energy they produce can’t easily be stored. But just as history hinged in 1800, something similar may be happening today: The price of solar energy has fallen 88 percent in the last decade, and now the storage batteries developed by Tesla and others seem to be following their own plummeting cost curve. Given the dire nature of the global-warming emergency, these should be seen as breakthroughs that can be seized on by governments wanting to move quickly. Nuclear power, by contrast, keeps getting more expensive.

That said, Rhodes argues persuasively that the risks of atomic energy have been overstated, at least when compared with the dangers of carbon. Because the events at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were so dramatic, he argues, we have a harder time properly evaluating these threats. If something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, it can cause immediate havoc on a huge scale. But a power plant burning coal or gas—and running exactly according to plan—will ultimately help to destroy the climate that sustains human life on this planet.

Carbon is therefore a far greater threat, Rhodes insists—indeed, the most serious pollutant we face—and so it likely makes sense to maintain the nuclear plants we’ve already paid for and built, so long as they can be kept reasonably safe. In my home state of Vermont, I argued for closing the state’s plant, Vermont Yankee, which was shut down at the end of 2014. It was badly maintained, and its owners had lied repeatedly to authorities about things like whether an underground network of pipes carried radioactive waste. However, in the wake of its closing, Vermonters also placed a de facto moratorium on large-scale wind power, not wishing to see or hear turbines spinning on the horizon. But power needs to come from somewhere.

If Rhodes tends toward the cheerful (“Far from threatening civilization, science, technology, and the prosperity they create will sustain us as well in the centuries to come,” he concludes), then Matthieu Auzanneau’s Oil, Power, and War offers precisely the opposite view. Auzanneau is a former reporter for Le Monde, and his “dark history” provides a relentless account of how the oil industry has polluted every moment of the 20th century, including discussions of oil’s central role in both world wars; accounts of scandals, now mostly forgotten, from Teapot Dome to BCCI; and even a reconsideration of 9/11.

This long tour is conducted in somewhat bludgeoning prose. Chapter titles include “Washington Gives Absolute Power to American Petroleum” and “Grandeur and Decadence: The Explosion of Opulence, Misery, and the Human Footprint.” A better editor or translator might have made it more readable (at the ninth time the author refers to oil as “black gold,” one begins to wince); at the very least, someone should have made it shorter, since at more than 500 pages, it is going to overwhelm all but the most committed reader. (Thank heaven he stuck with oil; had he, like Rhodes, also considered coal and gas, we would have run out of paper.)

Auzanneau’s endless attack on the Rockefellers occasionally crosses the line into conspiracy-mongering (in fact, there is a little too much conspiratorial thinking on occasion—like the assertion, with scant evidence, that the cost of “filling gas tanks” in 2008 “broke the budgets of many modest, indebted American households,” triggering foreclosures and causing the global financial crisis). If you want a truly devastating book on Exxon and its history, Steve Coll’s Private Empire remains the touchstone.

But with that said, thanks are owed to Auzanneau for getting all this down in print, and to Chelsea Green for undertaking its publication in English. It reminds us, as Rhodes’s account really doesn’t, of an essential fact that we should never forget: The immense wealth generated by the fossil-fuel industry has translated into unassailable political power. An exasperated Franklin Roosevelt remarks at one point in the book, “The trouble with this country is that you can’t win an election without the oil bloc, and you can’t govern with it.” As Auzanneau notes, in a sentence as accurate as it is ineptly translated, “The need to cozy up to the heirs of the industrial and financial powers of oil never ceased to forcefully exercise its constraints on American politics.”

Auzanneau devotes little of his book’s vast acreage to climate change. He’s more worried about “peak oil”—the idea that dwindling reservoirs may lead to a permanent oil shock, with civilization-rending consequences. This fear is likely misplaced: The consequences of global warming seem to be coming ever faster, and the fracking boom has suspended a reckoning with oil scarcity. But in any event, the crucial point is that Big Oil’s political power has delayed—perhaps fatally—the chance for meaningful change in our energy system. We now understand, due to the intrepid reporting of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists at InsideClimate News, that Exxon and the other major oil companies knew everything that we needed to know about climate change by the 1980s. They used that knowledge to make their own plans for the future (for instance, drilling campaigns in an Arctic they knew would soon melt), but concealed it from the rest of us behind a vast and expensive bulwark of denial and disinformation. In so doing, they managed to prevent action for at least a quarter-century past the moment when science had reached a strong consensus on the subject—and that quarter-century may well have been the crucial period for addressing climate change. If this is the case, the brief oil era will be inscribed in a geological history that will be easily readable by geologists millions of years into the future—assuming, of course, that we have a future.

ate Ervine, a professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, offers a much slimmer and in many ways more useful volume. Carbon begins with a sturdy chronicle of the growth in fossil-fuel use—and precisely because of its brevity, the key points stand out, chief among them the tight links between energy use and increased economic growth, and between economic growth, inequality, and injustice.

No better example exists than global warming, and Ervine’s account of the climate crisis will help readers understand why “climate justice” has become a rallying cry. This is true globally, and it is true domestically as well. Poor and vulnerable communities, usually composed of people of color, bear the brunt of the side effects of our fossil-fuel use, and Ervine is acute in her descriptions of what makes the tentative and voluntary Paris accords so different from, say, the robust rules governing the World Trade Organization. “Unlike trade agreements that seek to extend the current global political economic system,” she writes, “addressing climate change requires that we confront that system and the fossil capital so deeply embedded within it. At its core, the issue of carbon is an issue of power all the way down.”

This understanding prepares Ervine well for evaluating the various options before us to attempt to stanch the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Her thorough account of carbon-trading schemes underlines their essential flaws: “Uncertainty, low prices, overinflated baselines, gaming the market, substandard auditing, unrealistic assumptions.” If we’re going to put a price on carbon use, she argues, a straightforward tax makes more sense, “at levels sufficient to generate meaningful revenue…to fund aggressively zero-carbon transitions that might benefit society as a whole while paying climate debts.” As it happens, such a proposal was on the ballot in Washington State in the recent midterm elections, and it was initially popular enough to scare the oil industry into breaking the state’s record for campaign spending. In the end, the industry’s scare ads were enough to sink the proposal and delay the day of reckoning a little further. (The Yellow Vest protests across France are another reminder that trying to balance the carbon books on the backs of ordinary people will prove a difficult haul.)

Ervine is also rightly dismissive of ”solar radiation management,” the vast geoengineering scheme that would pump huge quantities of sulfur into the atmosphere to blot out some of the incoming sunlight. This approach could, among other things, alter the world’s weather patterns enough to cause droughts and even famines across precisely the places already most harmed by climate shifts. Ervine is equally dismissive of using natural gas as a bridge fuel and of the value of green consumerism. (You will not think about your reusable grocery bags with the same pride once you’ve read her carbon numbers.)

Which leaves us with movement building. “Dealing with climate change is fundamentally political,” Ervine writes, “with political mobilization and collective action promising a much greater impact than going it alone.” And “when we mobilize politically to demand…system changes, the greater reach of these changes, while good for the climate, also promises greater social and ecological justice.” Ervine does an excellent job of explaining one such virtuous cycle: a law passed in Germany that supports community control of the big renewable-energy projects funded by a feed-in tariff. Absent such a robust community stake, similar efforts elsewhere—including in Ervine’s home province of Nova Scotia—have proved less politically durable. When your community is the one making the money, the sight of a windmill on the horizon is less objectionable. In fact, it might even seem like a beacon of the future.

Though the 2018 midterm elections were fought largely on the issues of health care and the need to check President Trump’s abuses of power, the great unresolved issue of the 20th century for Americans is the onset of climate chaos, which guarantees that energy will be front and center in our politics for years to come. That’s why these lessons are so important: This is the biggest challenge that humans have ever faced, and after waiting so long to do something about it, we have no margin of safety left for taking routes that turn out to go nowhere.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-energy-business-book-review-bill-mckibben/
Too Hot to Handlehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/too-hot-to-handle/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenNov 10, 1997



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Jerry Brown’s Climate Legacy Is Still Being Decidedhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jerry-browns-climate-legacy-is-still-being-decided/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenAug 29, 2018

Let’s agree: Jerry Brown deserves real praise for his role as a first-generation climate leader. As California’s governor, he helped shepherd the state to a place near the top of the green league standings, by reducing the demand for energy and producing more of that energy with renewables.

But let’s add: Global warming is a timed test, one that now demands stronger responses. And the governor is flunking that test. Rare are the politicians who manage to stay ahead of an issue—usually they stick with the strategies and talking points that served them well initially. Yes, it seems unfair to rag on Brown for losing track of the plot—but boy, would it be nice if he proved the exception to the rule and used the final months of his governorship to help the world move to the next stage of the climate fight.

Brown worked hard to cut energy use and to increase the use of solar panels. But at least since the start of the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline about a decade ago, environmentalists have added a new key strategy: To have any hope of meeting global targets, we also need to keep coal, oil, and gas in the ground. That’s why every new mine, well, pipeline, and terminal gets fought. Since California is a major oil-producing state, activists asked Brown to play a part, by beginning to phase out the routine granting of permits for new wells. (Thus far in his tenure, Brown’s administration has approved about 20,000 of them. Offshore, where he has refused to close down existing leases, Sacramento has permitted four times more wells than the federal government has allowed in the deeper waters it controls.)

This is not a particularly radical idea anymore. Barack Obama, when he vetoed the Keystone project in 2015, noted: “If we’re gonna prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re gonna have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” French President Emmanuel Macron announced in 2017 that there would be no new oil or gas exploration in his country’s territories. Earlier this year, Jacinda Ardern, the bold new prime minister of New Zealand, banned all off- shore oil and gas exploration around the island nation: “Transitions have to start somewhere,” she said.

But not, apparently, in California, where the governor is roughly one generation older than Obama, and two ahead of Macron and Arden. In fact, every time the subject has come up, Brown has sounded testy, off his game—not even able to keep up with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who banned fracking across the Empire State. A year ago, when an activist dared interrupt his speech to shout “Keep it in the ground!,” Brown’s reply was caught on video: “Let’s put you in the ground,” he said.

Now, in an interview with The Nation (see Mark Hertsgaard’s article in this issue), Brown relies on a combination of sophistry and slur. He somehow transforms the request for a gradual, managed phase-out of new oil-drilling permits into a demand that he “snap my fingers and eliminate all gasoline in all California gasoline stations.” And if he did that, he continues, “what would happen? Revolution? Killings? Shootings?” The absurdity of this straw-man scenario only proves his unwillingness to lift a finger against the oil companies that have poured millions into his campaigns.

Brown also adopts a favorite talking point of the Canadian tar-sands industry: Stop the flow of our filthy oil and we’ll just end up buying it elsewhere. But the most thorough study of phasing out California’s oil fields found that, even if it slightly raised the demand for foreign oil, the net result would be to cut total world emissions—in fact, at a rate on par with all of California’s other energy innovations.

Economic modeling aside, it’s pretty clear who the greatest beneficiary of halting new oil production in California would be: Californians of color, who overwhelmingly inhabit the neighborhoods where Brown permits oil wells. That’s why so many environmental-justice groups have come together to demand action: more than 800 signed on to a letter this summer asking him to take action, and they’ll be leading a massive march through San Francisco on September 8 to demand he take action.

If environmental racism won’t spur him to action, the plagues that have visited California during the Brown years certainly should: the epic drought, followed by the record wildfires, followed by the record rains, followed by the killer mudslides, followed by—well, this summer, California’s Death Valley set the world record for the hottest month ever measured on our planet. That same month, California saw an essentially unprecedented “fire tornado” that spun for an hour and a half and reached tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere. Exactly how many signs is a hard-working God supposed to send?

Those horrors add up to a compelling truth: The steps that first-generation leaders like Brown have taken are too small to meet the demands of the moment. Yes, Brown is standing up to President Trump, and yes, he’s done more than other governors have. But when it comes to climate change, it’s physics that we must measure ourselves against—and by that standard, we’re losing.

Brown insists that he can’t do more: “We’ve got a lot of elements in the political landscape that in a free society we have to deal with.” But in this case, that’s not true: He could simply stop issuing new permits. If he did, the fossil-fuel industry would kick and fuss, but it does that all the time anyway—at the moment, for instance, they’re trying to cut the state’s gas tax. They need to be fought, not feared.

And if he chooses, Brown could fight them with more power than any other politician on the planet. He’s got a state filled with engineers who are pointing the way toward the future, and with citizens who support real action. (Hispanic Americans show up in every poll as caring more about climate change than anyone else. Leaders like the state senate president emeritus Kevin de Leon, currently fighting for a 100 percent renewable-energy bill without any help from Brown, make that statistic very real.) And Brown is 80 years old, never running for office again, and in no further need of oil money.

One would hope this would free him to act—even a limited announcement that he would phase out drilling within 2,500 feet of schools, hospitals, and homes would be a real start, one that would win him deserved acclaim. But given the defensiveness that his interview reveals, perhaps we should be prepared to honor him as a pioneer in the early stages of this fight—not as a leader in its current and future battles.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jerry-browns-climate-legacy-is-still-being-decided/
Climate Change Is Our Most Critical National-Security Challengehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-critical-national-security-challenge/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJun 20, 2018

Progressive American politicians must embrace the necessity of dramatic action on climate change as a touchstone. So far, Senator Bernie Sanders has done it the most persuasively, campaigning on addressing climate change, health care, racial justice, and economic inequality as his unvaried quartet of issues, invoked in every speech and backed up with serious legislation that shows a willingness to move with real speed. Other party leaders will back him on one bill or another, and scientists and engineers are now running for office. Seriousness on climate change needs to be a qualification, not an afterthought, for anyone who wants to run for president. Because it’s not an environmental issue; it’s the most crucial security question that humans have ever faced.

“Security” in the most basic sense: There is a nontrivial chance that the area where you live, your particular home, is going to face a wildfire or flood or extreme storm or killer heat wave in the years ahead. The insurance industry, the part of our economy that we ask to analyze risk, has been clear about this. But at this point, the real experts are the people who survived last fall’s California firestorms, or Hurricane Maria’s assault on Puerto Rico.

When we talk about “security” in magazines, we usually mean something to do with armies and guns and foreign policy. The Pentagon has actually been the one arm of traditional conservative power in America willing to at least lay out the facts of our climate peril, and ranking officers have become ever more outspoken: In 2013, the head of US forces in the Pacific, Adm. Samuel Locklear III, told a reporter that, although he was in charge of dealing with the threats from North Korea and China, the thing his planners feared most was global warming. It was “probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.” Though President Trump has forced even the military to remove most overt references to climate change from its reports, one imagines that military planners aren’t fooled, if for no other reason than that rising sea levels and extreme weather threaten half of US bases and ports, according to one study. But it goes far deeper than that: Instability and chaos are the great enemies of peace, and the invariable outriders of climate change.

Failure looks like Syria, where a deep drought—the worst in the Levant in nearly a millennium—forced a million farmers off their land and into the already unstable cities a decade ago. One study after another now shows that this played a crucial role in helping trigger the conflict there, which in turn helped to fuel the hateful new politics in our own country and Europe. Now multiply that by 100, as rising seas and spreading deserts push more and more people into frightened motion. One of the ironies is that the West fears migration resulting from its own fossil-fuel burning; no one on the Marshall Islands is responsible for, or can stop, the rising sea. It will take our work here to actually ensure that people elsewhere enjoy the right to stay in their own homes.

Success, at this point, looks like… well, not stopping global warming—it’s far too late for that—but rather curbing it short of civilizational destruction. This may or may not be possible—but if we are to have a chance at all, it will require unflagging leadership on at least three fronts.

First, we really could move to run the world on renewables in a matter of decades; indeed, academic studies show that the existing technology could get us 80 percent of the way there at affordable prices by 2030. Engineers and manufacturers in California, Germany, and China have done the planet a great service by decreasing the price of solar panels and wind turbines at a prodigious pace; now they’re becoming the cheapest way to produce power on most of the planet. And that electricity could be used to run our transportation systems too, since the electric drivetrain seems finally to have come of age.

But a natural progression won’t happen fast enough; hence the need for government policy aimed at setting targets and then meeting them, with a mix of subsidies, a price on carbon, government procurement, and all of the other tools at a government’s disposal. Germany has shown part of the path forward, and China and California, too—all are making change at rates that matter, and all are showing the results, in terms of both jobs and savings for consumers. California’s recent declaration that all new homes built in the state must come with solar panels is a perfect piece of practical symbolism: It will save the average homebuyer $40 a month, because sunlight doesn’t actually cost anything.

But the state’s governor, Jerry Brown, is also a reminder that even the most progressive Democrats have so far failed on the second test for real action on climate change: the pressing need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. So far, he’s been unwilling to slow down California’s oil industry, the third-biggest in the nation, even though scientific assessments show that 80 percent or more of current fossil-fuel reserves need to stay beneath the soil to avoid catastrophic warming. That’s why the environmental movement has worked so hard to block new pipelines, new fracking wells, new offshore drilling. But it’s much harder than it should be. Seven years of constant campaigning finally convinced Barack Obama that we could do without the Keystone XL pipeline, but his years in office saw the build-out of enough other fossil-fuel infrastructure that the United States passed Russia and Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil and gas producer on earth. The Keep It in the Ground Act, introduced by Sanders, Senator Jeff Merkley, and others, is the kind of key step that all presidential contenders should line up behind.

The third step is to stem the flow of money to the fossil-fuel industry—and here, campaigners have been able to accomplish a fair amount even without federal help. The vast divestment movement, though, has been buoyed by state and local leaders; when the City of New York announced that it was selling its fossil-fuel stocks from pension funds, it sent a nice jolt into the centers of market power, reminding them that the death spiral for oil and gas is under way. Washington needs to end the subsidies that have long enriched the hydrocarbon industry, and one good way to achieve that is for more candidates to join the more than 500 who have already pledged not to accept a penny from oil, gas, or coal companies. (The Democratic National Committee has vowed to do likewise.)

One problem in this distracted age is that, while climate change is the most important thing happening on our planet, there’s almost never a day when it’s the most dramatic story. So a commitment to climate justice needs to be a central and unvarying part of our message, just like racial or gender justice. (They are, of course, deeply allied—looking at Hurricane Maria’s aftermath, it’s not hard to figure out who bears the brunt of catastrophic storms.)

Another problem is that the whole world needs to be moving on climate change. Of all the actions that Trump has taken during his reckless and infantile months in the White House, none will do longer-lasting damage than his abandonment of the Paris climate accord. It’s not that his decision means the conversion to renewable energy won’t continue—“free” is a hard argument to beat, and solar and wind power will eventually spread around the globe. But the momentum that had begun to build at Paris has been hobbled, and the chances of them spreading fast enough to matter are much reduced. We will power the world of the future with renewable energy, but unless we act with great swiftness, it will be a broken world that we power.

So if and when the United States emerges from the Trump era, and if and when progressive politicians really embrace climate change as a core issue in tandem with race, gender, immigration, and inequality, we will have a chance for something new: an activist government whose task, alongside those of China and Europe, will be to help lead in a very different direction the planet that we’ve done the most to pollute. If there’s any reason for a superpower, it’s got everything to do with… power.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-critical-national-security-challenge/
Trump Wants to Expand Oil Drilling to 90 Percent of Our Seas. We’re Marching on June 9 to Stop Him.https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-wants-to-expand-oil-drilling-to-90-percent-of-our-seas-were-marching-on-june-9-to-stop-him/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibbenMay 14, 2018

Summer beckons—and with it, the season’s first trip to the beach, which remains the number-one outdoor recreational activity for Americans of all classes and ideologies. It may be one of the last truly nonpartisan activities we do together. But thousands will come out of the water on June 9 for the first ever March for the Ocean—and that should be nonpartisan too. 

True, the Trump administration has proposed expanding offshore oil drilling to more than 90 percent of our public seas while at the same time eliminating many of the safety measures on oil-rig blowout preventers and offshore operations that were put into effect after the BP/Deepwater Horizon disaster of eight years ago, which killed 11 oil workers and became one of our most protracted environmental nightmares.  

But this proposed drilling has sparked widespread opposition from citizens and elected officials across the political spectrum—beach-state governors are almost unanimous in their opposition, whether they’re burned red by the sun or chilled blue by the early-season water. Equally unpopular is the Trump proposal to shrink marine sanctuaries and national marine monuments if they limit access to oil, even though these sites act as both great wilderness parks in the sea and biological reserves for the future in a changing ocean. 

The opposition comes because everyone knows that oil spills follow offshore drilling as surely as seagulls follow ferries. And more and more are figuring out that even when the oil makes it safely onshore, the carbon from its combustion spills into the atmosphere, acidifying the ocean, warming it, and raising it to the point where barrier islands and beaches are beginning to disappear. That’s why the March for the Ocean is promoting a rapid transition from test-blasting, drilling, and spilling to clean, job-generating renewable energy.   

June will also mark the beginning of the 2018 hurricane season, which could be as active as 2017, which brought us the serial storms Harvey, Irma, and Maria, with their terrible loss of life and property. The estimated price tag now tops $260 billion. Harvey, with its unprecedented rainfall, was the second most costly US storm ever, after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Now the Hawaiian island of Kauai just got hit by 50 inches of rain in 24 hours, another unprecedented disaster that has become our new normal.

In past decades we were always given the caveat by scientists that no single weather event could be attributed to human-caused climate change, although the trend line was clear. However, two studies were recently able to attribute 15 to 38 percent of the “rain bomb” and flooding during Harvey to fossil-fuel-fired climate change. It’s clear that we need to leave the oil safely under the seabed.

The key fossil fuels, coal and oil, were admittedly innovative energy systems for, respectively, the 16th and 19th centuries. Offshore energy meant whale oil until the first offshore oil wells were drilled atop wooden piers in Summerland, California (in Santa Barbara County), in 1896. “The whole face of the townsite is aslime with oil leakages,” reported the San Jose Mercury News five years later.

The history of offshore drilling is one of exploring new frontier waters and then polluting them. The modern environmental movement can be traced to two emblematic events—the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, with its images of oil-covered shorebirds, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire in Cleveland that same year. Of course, in 1969 the offshore-oil debate was still framed as marine pollution versus energy. Today it’s also become a product-liability issue—this product, used as directed, overheats your planet, supercharges hurricanes with pools of abnormally warm ocean water, inundates your low-lying cities, and acidifies your seas.

In visiting offshore deep-water platforms and meeting the roughnecks and roustabouts working the drill decks, you can’t help but be impressed by the work they do—as challenging as any carried out by American whalers, who risked their lives killing the leviathans, whose oil we used as the lubricant of the machine age. But as we eventually did with the whalers, it’s time to honor the offshore oil workers’ contribution to our maritime heritage and move on—maybe to new and equally challenging jobs, such as offshore wind-turbine technician.   

The ocean and the climate system are intimately linked. The ocean is the driver of climate and weather. It generates half our oxygen and all the rain that feeds our crops and slakes thirst, and it absorbs 90 percent of the heat and a third of the carbon dioxide generated from our burning of fossil fuels—but at a terrible price.

We know what the solutions are to sustain ourselves and our blue marble planet; all we lack is the political will to implement those solutions faster than the problems that confront us. A basic organizing principle, of course, is that you must protect what you love. That’s why this June, we’ll be going to the beach, getting wet and salty in the sea, and then drying off long enough to march for the ocean.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-wants-to-expand-oil-drilling-to-90-percent-of-our-seas-were-marching-on-june-9-to-stop-him/
Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters in the ’60shttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/always-connect/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenMay 9, 2018

ince I was born during the short window between John F. Kennedy’s election and inauguration, I can claim with technical accuracy to be a child of the ’60s. True, my main accomplishment over the next 10 years was learning to ride a bike, but the iconography of the decade is so inescapable that I’ve always felt as if I actually knew what it was all about: raised fists, civil-rights and antiwar marches, hippies, the Beatles, the hair—an epoch of resistance.

Andrea Barnet’s new biography of four women who helped shape that era rewrote that definition a little for me—or at least broadened it. One thing that unites Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters is, of course, gender. But (perhaps in part because of that fact) what really makes them fit subjects for joint consideration is the idea they shared, which was in many ways quite new when they broached it in the ’60s: that the world, both natural and human, is not a series of mechanistic interactions but rather a web. “Into a blustery, all-male world of patriarchs and company men, technocrats and cold warriors,” Barnet writes, “walked four women who saw things differently and were unafraid to say so.”

Carson, Jacobs, Goodall, and Waters weren’t friends; they weren’t all of the same generation, and they worked in different fields. But where the men who had made the world of the 1950s saw “strict hierarchies and separations, they saw entities and connections, the world as a holistic system…they saw movement and flow, evolution and process.” Indeed, Barnet tells us, all four “intuitively grasped the overarching idea of ‘connection,’ which is the basis of what we now call ‘web’ or ‘systems’ thinking. If these insights seem self-evident today, it is only because of how thoroughly we have internalized their essence.” Their ideas “not only turned out to be prescient, but culture-changing—the catalyst to a radical shift in consciousness.” There were others—men and women both—who helped push us in the same direction, but these four help us better understand the nature, and the beauty, of that shift.

achel Carson was much older than the rest of this quartet, and she was prominent before the ’60s—indeed, her books about the oceans were among the best, and best-selling, of the 1950s. Carson had aspired to a career as a biologist, but her father’s illness left her the sole supporter of her family, and as a result she had to forgo getting a PhD. In 1935, Carson took a civil-service job with the Bureau of Fisheries, which later became a part of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, where she was given the task of writing radio scripts and brochures about marine life. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, described seabirds and fish in language both technically accurate and lyrical. Yet despite the fine reviews, its impact was effectively scuttled by the outbreak of World War II.

Before she started writing about pesticides, however, Carson returned to the sea, producing another manuscript about the oceans. This time, it caught the eye of Edith Oliver, a shrewd longtime presence at The New Yorker, who persuaded managing editor William Shawn to excerpt most of it. The check from the magazine, for $5,200, equaled Carson’s government salary for a year, and so she quit to become a full-time writer.

That second book, The Sea Around Us, made her: It spent 86 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, at one point selling more than 4,000 copies a day, and earned her the National Book Award. Its sequel, The Edge of the Sea, was another considerable success. Had Carson’s work stopped there, she would have left an imprint: She had helped open up 70 percent of the planet for humans to contemplate, understand, and enjoy. What Jacques Cousteau would later do with a camera, Carson did first with just a typewriter.

But she didn’t stop there. The stories about the harmful effects of the powerful insecticide DDT, which she’d known about at least since the war, had always nagged at her. First she tried to persuade E.B. White to take on the issue (he had written on the question of nuclear fallout before), but when he demurred, Carson continued to investigate the dangers of the ubiquitous pesticide on her own. (Among other things, DDT was sprayed from the air over football stadiums before big games to keep the mosquitoes down; pocket-size dispensers were also sold for carrying in golf bags.) As she worked on the book that would become Silent Spring, Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer, beginning a race against time. In the summer of 1962, The New Yorker began to serialize the book, and Silent Spring was published that fall to a cascade of plaudits—as well as a full-blown assault by the chemical industry, which tried to discredit Carson as an “anti-business” subversive who lacked professional scientific credentials. The kind of public-relations campaign that the tobacco and oil industries later perfected had its crude birth in the response to Silent Spring.

The chemical industry was right to be alarmed. The book, Barnet writes, was “more than a polemic about the perils of synthetic pesticides; it was a critique of the values of the 1950s: its love affair with technology, its deference to big business, its scientific elitism, its mania for national security, its increasing disconnection from nature.” When Carson testified before the Senate, her composure and gravitas left a strong impression on committee chairman Abraham Ribicoff. She made an equally important appearance on CBS Reports, where, as Barnet notes, nearly 15 million Americans saw her “answering every question with calm deliberation, never sounding anything but thoughtful throughout.” Though she’d been careful and detailed in her critique of pesticides, Carson concluded the program on a more philosophical note. “We still talk in terms of conquest,” she said. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Now I truly believe that in this generation we must come to terms with nature.”

t’s hard to imagine what a thoroughly bizarre operation urban planning had become in the 1950s and ’60s. If the chemical industry thought that wiping out a broad array of pests would produce a happy society, many of the world’s architects thought that standardizing our surroundings could achieve that end as well. Oscar Niemeyer, for instance, was designing Brasília from scratch, with separate zones for work, pleasure, and habitation. The low-density, car-dependent suburb had also become a favored form of the era, and giant public-housing towers were seen as an antiseptic answer to slums.

Barnet opens her section on Jane Jacobs with an account of Jacobs’s visit to Philadelphia to meet Edmund Bacon, the local version of New York master planner Robert Moses. Jacobs recalled Bacon greeting her at the city’s grand train station. Then he took her to an area

where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it…and he said, well, this is the next street we’re getting rid of. That was the “before” street. Then he showed me the “after” street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter.

“Where are the people?” Jacobs asked. “They don’t appreciate these things,” Bacon replied.

Excitedly he explained the need for order in the crowded and unruly downtown, the importance of providing a “view corridor.”

Bacon’s vision of an orderly and uncluttered city was more than just dogma found in many academic journals; it wrecked neighborhoods across the nation and around the world. Jacobs—then a young editor at Architectural Forum, but not a part of the profession’s establishment—was one of the few who resisted this view of the city; indeed, she spent the next couple of decades pointing out that the kind of cities imagined by Bacon and Moses had no street life. She asked how these places felt to those who lived and worked in them, and she asked that question impertinently and persistently.

Jacobs’s breakthrough piece came in 1958, with an article called “Downtown Is for People” that appeared in Fortune, which outlined her emperor’s-new-clothes take on urban renewal. “Letters of praise poured into Fortune in unprecedented numbers,” Barnet tells us. Careful readers will note a pattern here. As with Carson, an overlooked and under-credentialed observer used the wonderfully edited general-interest magazines of the era, then at their height of popularity, to advance her ideas at length and with enough reach to reconfigure a national debate. But unlike Carson, Jacobs had plenty of time and strength left to see her ideas through. She published her blockbuster, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, by which point she was already engaged in a series of fights with Moses over the shape of Lower Manhattan, where she lived. First there was the epic battle to keep Washington Square Park from being cut in two by an extension of Fifth Avenue. “There is nobody against this,” Moses had insisted to the city’s Board of Estimate. “Nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch…of mothers.” Led by Jacobs, who organized children’s pickets, “reverse ribbon-cutting” ceremonies, and dozens of other media-savvy stunts, the mothers prevailed. Much the same thing happened a few years later, when Moses’s successors tried to designate the West Village a slum and clear it for urban renewal, and again when Soho was threatened with a highway.

It’s impossible to imagine New York now if Jacobs hadn’t thought, and fought; hundreds of other cities also bear her mark. Her triumph was intellectual as well as political. Jacobs offered us a view of cities as “complex organisms that made themselves up as they went along.” In Death and Life she insisted, as Barnet puts it, that “vibrant cities were continuously adapting over time, in response to the external environment, just like other natural systems.” In fact, her insight proved so spot-on, and the cities it produced so attractive, that this very attractiveness has become the problem we call gentrification. But that’s a dilemma for a different decade. Barnet has done well to place Jacobs alongside Carson as a powerful challenger of the entrenched orthodoxy of a proud but blinded power structure.

arnet’s third subject, Jane Goodall, fits this template too, though she was a generation younger. Goodall loved nature and didn’t care for school; in search of adventure, she started looking for secretarial work overseas, and nearly by accident ended up working for Louis Leakey, the maverick anthropologist then on the cusp of his great discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge. Leakey had long wanted to know more about the lives of the great apes, which had scarcely been studied in the wild—the few exceptions were a series of expeditions that looked more like military operations and traumatized the chimps under study, causing them to flee into the forest. (Those that didn’t escape were often slaughtered so their stomach contents could be inspected.)

Goodall, of course, pioneered an entirely different way of working. She went to Gombe, at one end of Lake Tanganyika, and after long and arduous months—much of that time spent simply sitting so that the chimps would learn to tolerate her—she began to identify and then to understand the individual animals. They constituted “a society connected by a web of relations and interdependencies,” as Barnet puts it, adding: “it was an approach akin to that of Jacobs, who argued that generalizations about cities got one nowhere. It was only by observing the unique and particular features of individual blocks…that one could possibly get a sense of how the city as a whole worked.”

Goodall also observed something truly remarkable: chimps making rudimentary tools to get at termites in their mounds. When she told Leakey, he was stunned: “in his wildest musings he hadn’t imagined a breakthrough of this caliber or import,” an observation that knocked humankind off one of its imagined pedestals. Though somewhat on the fringes of academe himself, Leakey knew that, to be taken seriously, his young assistant would need credentials, so Goodall was dispatched back to Cambridge to get her doctorate. At the first conferences she attended to present her findings, the primatologists—male great apes themselves—ignored or condescended to her. Among the charges lodged against her: Goodall was an amateur; she had given her subjects names; she proceeded by anecdote. But Goodall had the same weapon as Carson and Jacobs: the general-interest magazine—in her case, National Geographic. When “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees” was published in 1963—two years after Death and Life and a year after Silent Spring—replete with pictures of the ponytailed Goodall and the toolmaking chimps, readers were predictably “enchanted. Within days,” Barnet writes, “Jane was buried in messages from friends, letters from readers from around the globe, solicitations from publishers and journalists.” It’s a fame that has never really abated and that she has put to remarkable use as a perennially effective spokesperson for conservation.

arnet might have done well to end her volume there, because Alice Waters, her fourth subject, doesn’t quite fit, temporally or intellectually. Barnet has tried to shoehorn her in, arguing that Waters reached some of the insights that would eventually revolutionize American cooking during an undergraduate trip to France in 1965, but that’s a stretch: Mainly she learned what she liked to eat. Nor did Waters really break through until the 1970s. She opened Chez Panisse in 1971, and it was some years later that her insistence on local sourcing opened the eyes of many people in America. For that reason, I’d suggest that readers skip this section of Barnet’s book and instead head straight for Waters’s own account, published last year.

Coming to My Senses is as compelling a book about the 1960s as I’ve ever read. If the decade had a geography, Berkeley was one of its capitals, and Waters knew everyone and everything. She worked for the underground papers; she was on Sproul Plaza when Mario Savio launched the free-speech movement; she went to the art-house movies; she volunteered for an antiwar congressional candidate; she took lovers who were themselves central players in the era. There’s nothing sentimental in Waters’s account, nor is there anything lurid—it’s the lived experience of a fascinating moment in time, told by someone whose expertise is simplicity ladled over with nuance.

“Even though I shared a lot of counterculture values,” Waters writes,

I never connected with the hippie culture…. I didn’t want anything to do with the hippies’ style of health food cooking: a jumble of chopped vegetables tossed together with pasta—throw in a few bamboo shoots and call it a Chinese meal. To me, that world was all about stale, dry brown bread and an indiscriminate way of eating cross-legged on couches or on the ground with none of the formality of the table.

What Waters wanted looked at first more like France—a carefully built menu of the day, a comfortably elegant place to enjoy it—and then like Northern California, which, in turn, took on the shape of her particular tastes. She was running a “counterculture restaurant,” as she calls it, but she also succeeded in reshaping the culture—and in that respect, she is certainly the equal of Carson, Jacobs, and Goodall. And Waters, too, became an activist: Her Edible Schoolyard project continues to change the way that children eat at schools across America, and it’s hard to imagine the slow-food movement becoming as big as it has without her backing.

Barnet, of course, is interested in showing that gender had a good deal to do with the similar philosophies these women produced. She reminds us how rare it was for women to be taken seriously in the 1950s, which meant that they didn’t need to take the prevailing ideologies seriously—they weren’t members of the ruling cults. Rather, “each displayed a profound respect for intuition and the wisdom of direct engagement”; they were comfortable with disorder and messiness. “Instead of the false neutrality of the design theorist or the traffic engineer, the agricultural technician or the academic zoologist, each of these women used the felt and observed as the template upon which to build her ideas.”

It seems reasonable to agree with this basic point, even though there are plenty of counterexamples on both sides. (As Barnet notes in passing, the conservationist Aldo Leopold prefigured much of Carson’s work on the world’s inescapable interrelatedness. Meanwhile, the most influential female writer of the period may well have been Ayn Rand, and whatever else one says about her, the organic web of life was not her jam.) It’s also true that this is a very white book, one that ignores the most important explosion of the 1960s: the civil-rights movement. Barnet could have drawn from its cadre to demonstrate that the view of interrelatedness was central to the political activism of the era—in particular, the struggle for racial equality. An obvious choice would have been Ella Baker, a “web” thinker in her own right, who recognized that broad social movements did not depend on the charisma of a few great leaders, but instead required communities mobilized around their collective interests and organized in broad-based and nonhierarchical structures.

In any event, Barnet’s thesis seems correct. These four gave their moment—and ours—a unique and compelling way to perceive the interconnections within a society, as well as its relationship to its surroundings. We will always need the perspective of outsiders, of unsocialized, uncredentialed nonexperts, in order to see what plainly needs to be seen. Carson, Jacobs, Goodall, and Waters were and are geniuses, extraordinary spirits, remarkable souls—just the kind of people rarely produced by the normal order of things.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/always-connect/
3 Strategies to Get to a Fossil-Free Americahttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/3-strategies-to-get-to-a-fossil-free-america/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 25, 2018None of them rely on Washington to do anything useful.]]>

When the next phase of the US climate movement launches with a nationally streamed rally at the end of the month, the wound-licking will be over. Yes, the Trump administration has upset any hope of a smooth and orderly transition to a new energy world. Yes, it’s pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. Yes, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have made a mockery of hurricane victims and fire victims and flood victims, from San Juan to Montecito to Houston.

But the fossil-fuel industry doesn’t hold all the high cards. We’ll start playing our own aces for a Fossil-Free United States on January 31, when Bernie Sanders and an all-star lineup brought together by 350.org that includes everyone from indigenous activist Dallas Goldtooth to NAACP organizer Jacqui Patterson to star youth climate organizer Varshini Prakash lay out a coordinated plan for the year ahead.

The basic outlines are pretty simple. None of the strategies rely on Washington’s doing anything useful. In fact, because DC has emerged as the fossil-fuel industry’s impregnable fortress, our strategies look everywhere else for progress. In every case, real momentum has emerged, even in the last few weeks.

Job 1: Push for a fast and just transition to renewable energy in cities and states. The Trump administration has done what it can to slow down sun and wind power, even recently raising tariffs on imported solar panels, but it has not been able to change the basic underlying math. With each passing month, the technology that powers renewable energy gets cheaper and cheaper. It’s already generating massive quantities of electrons at prices cheaper than any other technology has ever managed in the past. A recent report by the International Renewable Energy Agency reports that renewables will be consistently cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020. That’s why mayors and governors have felt free to make ambitious pledges about the future. So far, 51 cities have joined a campaign led by the Sierra Club promising to convert to 100 percent renewable energy; five are already there.

Of course, that leaves tens of thousands of cities and towns that can make a similar pledge—and activists will be fanning out to their councils and selectboards and mayors in the months ahead. They’ll do it knowing this is a movement with real breadth: It’s not just the San Franciscos and Madisons that are on board, but the San Diegos, the Atlantas, the Fayettevilles. I mean, Salt Lake City is signed up. You know those blue dots on the election-night maps, the ones that contain most of the country’s innovation? They’re making the commitment, and those commitments will push the engineers to keep innovating.

During the Bush years, when Dick Cheney effectively ran energy policy, Washington was similarly closed to real progress. So state governments adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards, which went on to spur much of the spread of sun and wind power. The same thing is happening now, except at an even faster pace.

Job 2: Stop new fossil-fuel projects. The welter of pipelines and fracking wells and coal terminals that the industry is attempting to build will, if completed, lock us into decades more of spewing of carbon and methane. But many of these are vulnerable to citizen action.

Take, for instance, the Keystone Pipeline, where the infrastructure fights really began more than half a decade ago. Donald Trump doubtless believes that it’s been built. In a treacly paean titled “This Thanksgiving, Thank Donald J. Trump” the right-wing National Review announced that “after languishing under Obama,” Keystone XL was “under construction.” In fact, great organizers in Nebraska and Dakota have the thing tied up in endless knots; they’ve even installed fields of solar panels in the proposed path. The Cornhusker State approved a route for Keystone XL in November, but it’s not the path that pipeline developers TransCanada Corporation preferred. Now the surveyors—and the lawyers—have seasons of work ahead before a shovel will hit the ground. Even if TransCanada decides to push ahead, 20,000 people have pledged to travel to the upper Midwest to protest. The lessons of Standing Rock have not been forgotten.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the thin green line against massive fossil-fuel projects has continued to hold. Five years ago it seemed almost certain that a massive terminal for oil trains from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale would be built along the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. Six giant ports had also been proposed along the coast for shipping coal from the Powder River basin of Montana and Wyoming off to China. There was no way to stop the drilling or mining back in the interior, since the fossil-fuel industry holds sway in those states. But the carbon had to pass through Washington and Oregon, and savvy organizers there—led in several cases by environmental-justice and indigenous groups, like the Lummi Indians near Bellingham—have managed to beat every single plan. In Portland, these activists even passed a law banning any new fossil-fuel infrastructure, period, end of story.

Many of these heroes also took to the water a couple of years ago—they were the kayaktivists who did such harm to Shell’s brand that the company backed away from drilling in the Arctic. A variant of that same strategy may help blunt Trump’s ugly plan for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or off the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. Yes, this land is now open for leasing—but any oil company that steps through that door is going to be the target of an endless onslaught. You really want to be known as the company that digs up wildlife refuges? Okay, go for it.

Job 3: Cut off the flow of money to the fossil-fuel industry. Sometimes that means one bank customer at a time. One remarkable spinoff of the Standing Rock movement has been the Mazaska Talks campaign, led by indigenous organizers who have persuaded cities, towns, and individuals to pull their cash from banks that won’t stop lending the money that fuels climate destruction. On a memorable October morning, activists protested outside dozens of Bank of America branches in Seattle, shutting down several. The city government had already sworn off Wells Fargo because the bank couldn’t break its pipeline habit.

Pressure keeps building on investors as well. The fossil-fuel-divestment movement, for instance, has become the biggest corporate campaign of its kind in history, with endowments and portfolios worth a combined $6 trillion having sworn off coal and gas and oil in part or in whole. In the fall, a pair of studies summed up its success. One demonstrated that the campaign had catalyzed the rest of the climate movement, driving the debate towards grappling with the harsh reality that we had far more carbon than we could ever burn. The other pinpointed the falls in share values that divestment had caused, helping dry up the capital needed for more exploration and drilling.

But the divestment movement’s greatest successes actually came a bit later, around the holidays. First, the managers of Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund—the largest pool of investment capital on planet earth—recommended divesting from oil and gas. Since Norway made its money in North Sea crude, the pledge was especially profound. Clearly, the country’s economic leaders have decided that the future lies in renewables, and so they’re getting out while the getting is good. Shortly after, the World Bank announced it would no longer fund oil and gas exploration—that’s another striking signal for the world’s financial industry.

But the biggest win of all came just after the new year, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced two things. First, the city would be divesting its massive pension funds—nearly $200 billion dollars, one of the 20 largest pension funds on earth—from fossil fuels. And second, the city would be suing ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP for the damages caused by climate change. Their legal theory, he said, was simple: “They tried very intently to cover up the information about climate change and to project a propaganda campaign suggesting that climate change wasn’t real and go ahead and keep using your fossil fuels.” In other words, ExxonMobil=Philip Morris. Everyone remembers how that one ended.

Following years of relentless work from local activists, perhaps the most important part of de Blasio’s divestment announcement was the flat rejection of the idea that “engaging” with the fossil-fuel companies was a viable strategy. Many timid politicians have taken that approach, arguing that it was fine to keep investing in these companies as long as “dialogue” was underway. ExxonMobil, for instance, responded to pressure last year by promising “climate risk disclosure” about new projects. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty close to nothing—especially since, at the same time, the companies were busy in Washington making sure they opened up the US coastline to new drilling. New Yorkers aren’t chumps, de Blasio pointed out. “Today, we are saying ‘No more.’”

All this financial pressure is made easier by the fact that the fossil-fuel industry is no longer minting money. It’s been underperforming the rest of the economy—and no wonder. Sun and wind are ultimately free, and that puts remarkable price pressure on the stuff you have to dig up and burn. Every single day, the electric car moves further along the path from novelty to normal. That means every single day Chevron’s position erodes a little further. The question now is not whether big oil is going down; the question is how fast—and how we make sure the transition is a just one. The answer to that question will determine exactly how far down the road to climate ruin we actually travel.

The political saliency of the climate issue grows stronger too, especially as it becomes clear that it’s not some niche concern of affluent suburbanites with a weekend home in the country. Polling makes clear that African Americans and Latinos are the two groups most concerned about climate change, which makes sense since they’ve borne the brunt of the effects so far. (All it takes is a record rainstorm to find out who lives at the bottom of the hill.) These are also the groups taking the lead in climate organizing, giving it a new and vital energy. Vice, the CNN of the young, reported this month that “the next millennial trend is suing big oil for destructive climate change,” apparently replacing avocado toast.

None of which means that the fight is won. Big Oil has had a big year, and they hold most of the levers in Washington. But they’re beginning to lose in a lot of other places—including in people’s hearts and minds. Destruction like that wrought by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and Maria; tragedy like that wrought by California’s fires and mudslides—it takes a toll. No lie lives forever, and 2018 may be the year that the most dangerous deceit in the planet’s history finally unravels for good.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/3-strategies-to-get-to-a-fossil-free-america/
The Resistance to Trump Will Be Localhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-resistance-to-trump-will-be-local/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 9, 2018

Whenever progress is blocked in Washington, the pressure for progress always finds other outlets. During the George W. Bush administration, for instance, environmentalists looked to state and local governments for action on climate change, and the result was a slew of commitments that helped build the renewable-energy industry. The same thing is happening now—even more so. With the utter hostility to science on display in Washington, we’re all working hard to persuade cities and states to uphold the Paris climate accord by committing to 100 percent renewable energy. Pioneered by the Sierra Club and joined by groups like 350.org, this drive has had notable success: It’s not just the Berkeleys and the Madisons that have made the promise, but Salt Lake City and San Diego and Atlanta. The day Trump shamed the nation by withdrawing from the climate accord—proclaiming that he’d been elected to govern “Pittsburgh, not Paris”—the mayor of Pittsburgh announced that his city would go 100 percent renewable. That remains one of the high points of the year’s broad resistance.

But this move toward the local may turn out to be more than the usual tactical swing. The bizarreness of the president—the ugliness of his politics and the poison of his personality—may prompt many of us to start thinking about the problem of scale in our political life.

I live in Vermont. It’s one of the most rural states in the Union, and it’s as white as typing paper. So it should have been, statistically, a fairly Trumpish place: Indeed, New Hampshire just to the east and upstate New York just to the west tilted somewhat in that direction. But Vermont did not, and I think it has at least a little to do with the peculiar institution at the heart of our political life: the town meeting. On the first Tuesday in March, everyone in each town gets together in the church hall or the school gym, and there they jointly make the decisions necessary to govern the town for the year to come. Does the school roof have another 12 months left in it? How much should we set aside for plowing the roads next winter? (Occasionally, we also address national and global issues: The nuclear-freeze movement was largely born in Vermont town meetings).

One result of this remnant of Athenian democracy is that it’s hard to get away with being an absolute jerk. Were someone to appear at our town meeting using the language that our president uses daily in his tweets, he’d be listened to briefly and then ignored. Obviously, you can’t make a town work with that kind of bellicosity. In fact, I doubt there are many cities that would elect Trump as mayor, because vandalism is less funny when you have to look at the wall every day. But on a vast national scale, it’s perhaps easier for us to be irresponsible, to vote for “shaking things up” or for the sheer entertainment value of watching someone give it to our enemies.

And this is one reason why it’s so important to root the resistance in local places, to have City Council members as well as congresspeople and senators. We obviously can’t neglect Washington—global warming, above all, is a reminder that there are plenty of problems that need to be solved at as high a level as possible. But the canker in our political life, the ugly toxins that threaten to wreck us as a nation, may be more easily fought at the local level, where Twitter doesn’t mean much. A strong community is a useful bulwark against hate and stupidity. It’s not a guarantee that ugliness won’t flourish (look at Joe Arpaio in Arizona, a proto-Trump if ever there was one), but even when it does, the damage can be contained. If we’re going to reverse our dire situation, I imagine much of the impetus will come from gritty and real places.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-resistance-to-trump-will-be-local/
On April 29, We March for the Futurehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/on-april-29-we-march-for-the-future/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 19, 2017

It is hard to avoid hyperbole when you talk about global warming. It is, after all, the biggest 
thing humans have ever done, and by a very large margin. In the past year, we’ve decimated the Great Barrier Reef, which is the largest living structure on Earth. In the drought-stricken territories around the Sahara, we’ve helped kick off what The New York Times called “one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II.” We’ve melted ice at the poles at a record pace, because our emissions trap extra heat from the sun that’s equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima-size explosions a day. Which is why, just maybe, you should come to Washington, DC, on April 29 for a series of big climate protests that will mark the 100th day of Trumptime. Maybe the biggest thing ever is worth a day.

Here’s the truth about these protests: People started planning them more than a year ago, when the pollsters confidently predicted that Hillary Clinton would occupy the White House. Trump still seemed an outlier. Men like Scott Pruitt and Rex Tillerson were still safely back in Oklahoma and Texas instead of heading the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department. The Bureau of Land Management hadn’t yet changed its home-page picture from a photo of a family camping to an 80-foot seam of coal. No one was talking about shutting down our climate satellites.

And yet we still knew we would need to march. Because global warming isn’t really Trump’s fault. Yes, he’s a uniquely disgusting person, and yes, he was elected at the worst possible moment, just as humanity was starting to build a tiny bit of momentum in the fight against climate change. And yes, he’s mounting an all-out defense of the archaic fossil-fuel industry. There’s no question he’s the enemy right now.

But the carbon that melted the ice caps? That’s from the Eisenhower years and the Carter administration and the Reagan era—not to mention the Deng Xiaoping regime and the Brezhnev Politburo. The Great Barrier Reef would have died in a Bernie Sanders administration. Barack Obama was president during the three hottest years in history, and during his administration, the United States passed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest producer of hydrocarbons on earth. So these marches and protests—though fully a part of the emerging resistance—aren’t just about Trump.

They’re also about the machine that has been driving the planet in a dangerous direction for decades, a machine that spans parties, ideologies, and continents. And they’re about the hope for what could come next, a vision that’s emerging piece by piece around the world. This week of rallying is the logical extension of the climate-justice movement that emerged in the last decade, led by frontline communities and climate scientists, by indigenous people and farmers and ranchers. All the battles currently under way will be on full display as we march: against the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines and now a dozen others; against fracking wells and mountaintop-removal coal mines; for solar panels, solar panels, and more solar panels. (Not to mention bikes, buses, and electric cars.) This march embraces, finally, large segments of the labor movement. Workers and citizens dying in the heat and floods will march next to scientists pale from too many hours in front of the computer. It is a march for the future.

ut reaching the future depends on dealing 
with the present, and the present is uniquely bleak. Governments have been oblivious before, but it’s hard to remember one as actively, determinedly stupid. It was revelatory to watch, earlier this month, as even Fox’s Chris Wallace filleted Scott Pruitt, the head of Trump’s EPA. “What if you’re wrong?” he finally asked the flustered Pruitt, who couldn’t quite recall even climate denialism’s standard talking points. Pruitt, of course, is wrong, since his entire job is to represent the industry that has spent a quarter-century lying through its teeth about climate change. But he’s aggressively wrong—he hadn’t even started his new job before the transition team was leaking news that the administration was ready to defund the satellites we use to keep track of the climate. Think about that for a moment. We’re not just going to ignore the mounting evidence; we’re going to stop collecting it.

Which helps explain, I think, the mounting anger of the scientific community. They’ll march first, on April 22, to the National Mall, and in hundreds of satellite marches around the world. Expect lines of people in lab coats, pushing equation-laden blackboards down the streets of Washington. Scientists have been, for the most part, resolutely apolitical: Their job has been to provide the data, offer the analysis, and then stand back and let “policy-makers” take over. In a rational world, that would make sense. There’s no particular reason why someone who knows the best way to compute the melt rate of Greenland’s glaciers (no easy task, by the way) would also know the best way to move us off fossil fuel.

But as scientists have finally begun to realize, there’s nothing rational about the world we currently inhabit. We’re not having an argument about climate change, to be swayed by more studies and journal articles and symposia. That argument is long since won, but the fight is mostly lost—the fight about the money and power that’s kept us from taking action and that is now being used to shut down large parts of the scientific enterprise. As Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney said in March, “We’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.” In a case this extreme, scientists have little choice but to be citizens as well. And given their credibility, it will matter: 76 percent of Americans trust scientists to act in the public interest, compared with 27 percent who think the same thing about elected officials.

While the scientists march, many of the rest of us will be catching up on the research. There will be teach-ins across the country—I’ve just finished helping film a video to use at those gatherings (available for free download), and it was a good reminder that even many progressives don’t know the scientific depth and breadth of our understanding. As James Hansen explains in the video, at least since the great Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in the waning days of the 19th century, we’ve understood what was coming. And as Mustafa Ali, longtime head of the environmental-justice program at the pre-Pruitt EPA, explains, if you know poor and vulnerable communities around the world, then you can already see the effects of climate change every single day. (For many communities, from Port Arthur, Texas, to Delhi and Beijing, global warming is the least of the problems with fossil fuel—chronic asthma takes precedence.) None of this is too hard to understand. It’s satellite science, not rocket science. At least until Trump powers down the feed, we can watch in real time as our emissions wreck our home.

But the news isn’t all grim. In fact, what makes the current Trumpish backsliding so absurd is that it comes just as we’ve figured out at least some of what we need to do about climate change. The price of a solar panel has dropped 80 percent in the last decade and continues to plummet. In much of the world, wind power is now the cheapest way to generate electricity. That means that if we wanted to, we could take giant steps—fast. A few nations have shown the way: Denmark produced nearly half its power from wind in 2015, and Costa Rica ran its electricity system almost exclusively off renewables. The price of batteries is dropping just as fast now, and their capacity grows with each new iteration. It’s not just Elon Musk; the Chinese are starting to drive this revolution as they install vast quantities of renewable power.

Which is a good reminder that markets alone are not going to make this transition happen—at least, they’re not going to make it happen fast enough to catch up with the physics of global warming. For that we’ll need concerted government action, like the Senate bill that Bernie San­ders and Jeff Merkley will introduce in late April calling for 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. It won’t pass, obviously—but it will serve as the new standard for sensible people to rally around. And it will be popular—every poll shows that Americans of every ideology love solar power (close to 90 percent in some surveys). Not only that, but they’d love the jobs that come with the transition to solar: by first estimate, about 4 million. That job growth should put Trump’s endless posturing about coal miners in stark relief—thanks mostly to automation, there are barely 76,000 of them left; twice as many Americans work in car washes.

All these streams will converge on the National Mall on April 29, chosen because that weekend marks Trump’s first 100 days in office. This Peoples Climate Mobilization (#ClimateMarch) will be the big one, the sequel to the massive protest that filled the streets of New York in September of 2014. Expect—well, expect lots of people determined to show that they’re fed up with Trump’s nonsense and aware that there’s another future available. We’ll be marching from the Capitol, up Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’ll completely surround the White House—a kind of citizens’ arrest of the nincompoop inside. There will be a moment of silence and then tremendous noise, loud enough to shake the occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to their senses if they had them. We’ll end with a closing event at the Washington Monument, where people will be able to gather in “circles of resistance” and talk about the road ahead. (There will also be candidate training the next day for climate activists who want to run for office.)

Everyone will have a grand time, and everyone will be asking themselves: Do these marches really matter?

n this case, at least, the answer is yes. Not 
because they’ll push Trump to change in any meaningful way—he holds all the levers of power right now, and there’s no way the fossil-fuel industry will let him do anything significant, no matter how many meetings Ivanka takes with Al Gore.

But yes anyway. Marches matter because the fight is really over who defines what “normal” looks like going forward. I said earlier that global warming isn’t really Trump’s fault. But, helpfully, it is now tied around his neck. By making the all-in wager that physics is a hoax, by turning off the satellites, and by trying to power up the coal mines, he’s become personally identified with climate change in a way all of his predecessors managed to avoid. He hasn’t followed the script, which is to express alarm but take small steps, a script that has slow-walked us to the edge of hell (or at least a place with a similar temperature).

And in that way, Trump may end up doing the world a perverse favor: If he goes down politically, we need him to take that half-heartedness down with him. When we come together in Washington at the end of April, it won’t be to demand slightly nicer rhetoric on climate change or some undefined “action.” We no longer care that you “believe in” climate change, because we know that not believing in it means you’re an idiot. Instead, we’re going to demand action actually commensurate with the problem, which is to say the kinds of things in the Merkley-Sanders bill: an end to new fossil-fuel infrastructure. A World War II–scale mobilization for clean energy. Jobs by the millions so that we repair the social fabric even as we’re patching up the planet. Justice for those communities hit first and hit hardest by global warming.

We need enough people in the streets, now and in the months ahead, to make sure that every politician who’s not a Trumpist understands where the center of gravity now lies. It’s not with the straddling politics of the past, where you could be for both solar and fracking, for new pipelines and new panels. Trump has pissed people off, and pissed-off people don’t ask for small and easy progress. They demand the shifts that reality requires. In this case, winning slowly is the same as losing, so we don’t want to substitute one for the other. We want to win, so that we have a planet left to live on.

Trump is either the end of the fight for a working planet Earth—or the moment when that fight turns truly serious. That choice is not up to him. It’s up to the rest of us. See you in DC.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misidentified the government agency that changed its home-page photo to a coal seam. It was the Bureau of Land Management, not its parent department, the Department of the Interior. The text has been corrected.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/on-april-29-we-march-for-the-future/
Indigenous Activists at Standing Rock Told a Deep, True Storyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/indigenous-activists-at-standing-rock-told-a-deep-true-story/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenDec 5, 2016

All organizing is story-telling, and the story that got told at Standing Rock was so powerful that ultimately the Obama White House had little choice but to go along.

The decision by the Army Corps of Engineers not to grant the permits necessary for sending the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath the Missouri River is a tribute to truly remarkable efforts by Indigenous organizers, from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe to groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth. It’s also a tribute to the incredible power of civil disobedience, a tool I tried to describe in last week’s print edition of The Nation.

But my analysis pales next to the actual story from the Oceti Sakowin encampment. There, the last few months have unfolded with almost eerie grace, and the textbook on nonviolent action has been revised and illustrated in the process. The highlights include:

  • Remarkable unity. The politics of Indian country is historically fractious, at least on occasion. But this time representatives of more than 200 tribes came together in common purpose on the banks of the Cannonball River. Their flags flew along the dirt road that bisected the camp, and that spirit of unity was palpable. It extended to Indigenous people around the world—yesterday morning, for instance, came word that the Sami people of Norway had helped force that country’s biggest bank to withdraw from financing the project.
  • Remarkable discipline. The Morton County sheriff’s department and other “public safety” agencies devoted themselves to the task of goading the water protectors into violence. They fired beanbag pellets and rubber bullets and concussion grenades, not to mention “sonic cannons” and water cannons and canisters of pepper spray. They were met with prayer, and with strict nonviolence. In the camp, elders made sure that no one went too far with their protests. All of that was essential, because any bad image would have been splashed across the nation’s press, breaking the spell that the activists were casting
  • Remarkable images. Instead, the battle of photos broke decisively the other way. Amy Goodman and her crew from Democracy Now! were on hand the late summer day when a security crew from Energy Transfer Partners unleashed German shepherds on unarmed Native Americans. The pictures were uncannily close to the images that emerged from, say, Birmingham in 1963 at the height of the civil-rights movement. Those pictures helped the world set this fight in context. And the beautiful art that was churned out at the camp workshop almost from day one helped too.
  • Remarkable solidarity. Though the camp at the Cannonball was big—sometimes one of the six or seven biggest cities in North Dakota—only a tiny fraction of the supporters of this cause ever made it there. Yesterday it was veterans flooding in, and the day before that clergy, all of which was crucial. But just as important was the involvement of people around the world, who started figuring out their own actions, closing out accounts in the banks that backed the pipeline or sitting in at Army Corps offices. No one outside the camp tried to lead; everyone did their best to follow. There was little overt choreography, and much spontaneous cooperation.

Taken together, all of that told an irresistible story, of the many and small and courageous against the militarized power of the state. (The local sheriff’s office was driving what were essentially tanks; they constantly bulked up in body armor and balaclavas.) And it played out against the larger story that all Americans know, the story of shame that is the treatment of this continent’s original inhabitants.

The question now is whether similar tactics will be of use against Donald Trump. The answer, in the short term, is maybe and maybe not. Obama did his best to tie the hands of his successor; had they merely rejected the pipeline outright, he would have had a fresh start, but instead there’s an environmental impact review underway now, and with that comes certain legal constraints. Still, it’s entirely possible that Trump will simply sweep all that aside.

If he does, he will take a hit to his popularity—a great many people, even among his ranks, understand that we owe a debt to Native Americans that can’t really be repaid. He will earn the unending enmity of every tribe in the country, and that will haunt his presidency in at least a small way. His racism will be proved. And he will seem the miniature marionette of the mighty oil industry, never a good look.

But if he does approve the pipeline, and the Keystone pipeline, and a dozen other bad things, it’s still not a sign to abandon the fight. Because the real target of activists is always the zeitgeist. Trump rode one zeitgeist wave to power, but the next one, if we can make it build, may wash him back to Mar-a-Lago. Those waves don’t come from “power”—power reckoned that way is almost always in the hands of the wealthy. They come instead from the power of story. No one has ever told a tale truer or deeper than the Standing Rock Sioux.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/indigenous-activists-at-standing-rock-told-a-deep-true-story/
How the Active Many Can Overcome the Ruthless Fewhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-active-many-can-overcome-the-ruthless-few/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenNov 30, 2016

I know what you want from me—what we all want—which is some small solace after the events of Election Day. My wife Sue Halpern and I have been talking nonstop for days, trying to cope with the emotions. I fear I may not be able to provide that balm, but I do offer these remarks in the spirit of resistance to that which we know is coming. We need to figure out how to keep the lights on, literally and figuratively, and all kinds of darkness at bay.

I am grateful to all those who asked me to deliver this inaugural Jonathan Schell Lecture—grateful most of all because it gave me an excuse for extended and happy recollection of one of the most generous friendships of my early adulthood. I arrived at The New Yorker at the age of 21, two weeks out of college, alone in New York City for the first time. The New Yorker was wonderfully quirky, of course, but one of its less wonderful quirks was that most people didn’t talk to each other very much, and especially to newcomers 50 years their junior. There were exceptions, of course, and the foremost exception was Jonathan. He loved to talk, and we had long colloquies nearly every day, mostly about politics.

Ideas—not abstract ideas, but ideas drawn from the world as it wound around him—fascinated him. He always wanted to dig a layer or two deeper; there was never anything superficial or trendy about his analysis. I understood better what he was up to when I came, at the age of 27, to write The End of Nature. It owes more than a small debt to The Fate of the Earth, which let me feel it was possible and permitted to write about the largest questions in the largest ways.

In the years that followed, having helped push action on his greatest cause—the danger of nuclear weapons—that issue began to seem a little less urgent. That perception, of course, is mistaken: Nuclear weapons remain a constant peril, perhaps more than ever in an increasingly multipolar world. But with the end of the Cold War and the build-down of US and Russian weapon stocks, the question compelled people less feverishly. New perils—climate change perhaps chief among them—emerged. Post-9/11, smaller-bore terrors informed our nightmares. We would have been wise, as the rise of a sinister Vladimir Putin and a sinister and clueless Donald Trump remind us, to pay much sharper attention to this existential issue, but the peace dividend turned out mostly to be a relaxing of emotional vigilance.

However, for the moment, we have not exploded nuclear weapons, notwithstanding Trump’s recent query about what good they are if we don’t use them. Our minds can compass the specter of a few mushroom clouds obliterating all that we know and love; those images have fueled a fitful but real effort to contain the problem, resulting most recently in the agreement with Iran. We have not been able to imagine that the billion tiny explosions of a billion pistons in a billion cylinders every second of every day could wreak the same damage, and hence we’ve done very little to ward off climate change.

We are destroying the earth every bit as thoroughly as Jonathan imagined in the famous first chapter of The Fate of the Earth, just a little more slowly. By burning coal and oil and gas and hence injecting carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, we have materially changed its heat-trapping properties; indeed, those man-made greenhouse gases trap the daily heat equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima-size explosions. That’s enough extra heat that, in the space of a few decades, we have melted most of the summer sea ice in the Arctic—millennia old, meters thick, across a continent-size stretch of ocean that now, in summer, is blue water. (Blue water that absorbs the sun’s incoming rays instead of bouncing them back to space like the white ice it replaced, thus exacerbating the problem even further.) That’s enough heat to warm the tropical oceans to the point where Sue and I watched with our colleagues in the South Pacific as a wave of record-breaking warm water swept across the region this past spring, killing in a matter of weeks vast swaths of coral that had been there since before the beginning of the human experiment. That’s enough heat to seriously disrupt the planet’s hydrological cycles: Since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, we’ve seen steady increases in drought in arid areas (and with it calamities like wildfire) and steady, even shocking, increases in downpour and flood in wet areas. It’s been enough to raise the levels of the ocean—and the extra carbon in the atmosphere has also changed the chemistry of that seawater, making it more acidic and beginning to threaten the base of the marine food chain. We are, it bears remembering, an ocean planet, and the world’s oceanographers warn that we are very rapidly turning the seven seas “hot, sour, and breathless.” To the “republic of insects and grass” that Jonathan imagined in the opening of The Fate of the Earth, we can add a new vision: a hypoxic undersea kingdom of jellyfish.

This is not what will happen if something goes wrong, if some maniac pushes the nuclear button, if some officer turns a key in a silo. This is what has already happened, because all of us normal people have turned the keys to our cars and the thermostat dials on our walls. And we’re still in the relatively early days of climate change, having increased the planet’s temperature not much more than 1 degree Celsius. We’re on a trajectory, even after the conclusion of the Paris climate talks last year, to raise Earth’s temperature by 3.5 degrees Celsius—or more, if the feedback loops we are triggering take full hold. If we do that, then we will not be able to maintain a civilization anything like the one we’ve inherited. Our great cities will be underwater; our fields will not produce the food our bodies require; those bodies will not be able to venture outside in many places to do the work of the world. Already, the World Health Organization estimates, increased heat and humidity have cut the labor a human can perform by 10 percent, a number that will approach 30 percent by midcentury. This July and August were the hottest months in the history of human civilization measured globally; in southern Iraq, very near where scholars situate the Garden of Eden, the mercury in cities like Basra hit 129 degrees—among the highest reliably recorded temperatures in history, temperatures so high that human survival becomes difficult.

Against this crisis, we see sporadic action at best. We know that we could be making huge strides. For instance, engineers have managed to cut the cost of solar panels by 80 percent in the last decade, to the point where they are now among the cheapest methods of generating electricity. A Stanford team headed by Mark Jacobson has shown precisely how all 50 states and virtually every foreign nation could make the switch to renewable energy at an affordable cost in the course of a couple of decades. A few nations have shown that he’s correct: Denmark, for instance, now generates almost half of its power from the wind.

In most places, however, the progress has been slow and fitful at best. In the United States, the Obama administration did more than its predecessors, but far less than physics requires. By reducing our use of coal-fired power, it cut carbon-dioxide emissions by perhaps 10 percent. But because it wouldn’t buck the rest of the fossil-fuel industry, the Obama administration basically substituted fracked natural gas for that coal. This was a mistake: The leakage of methane into the atmosphere means that America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions held relatively steady or perhaps even increased. This willingness to cater to the industry is bipartisan, though in the horror of this past election that was easy to overlook. Here’s President Obama four years ago, speaking to an industry group in Oklahoma: “Now, under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That’s important to know. Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some.” Hillary Clinton opened an entire new wing at the State Department charged with promoting fracking around the world. So much for the establishment, now repudiated.

Trump, of course, has famously insisted that global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese and has promised to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. His election win is more than just a speed bump in the road to the future—it’s a ditch, and quite likely a crevasse. Even as we gather tonight, international negotiators in Marrakech, stunned by our elections, are doing their best to salvage something of the Paris Agreement, signed just 11 months ago with much fanfare.

* * *

But the real contest here is not between Democrats and Republicans; it’s between human beings and physics. That’s a difficult negotiation, as physics is not prone to compromise. It also imposes a hard time limit on the bargaining; if we don’t move very, very quickly, then any progress will be pointless. And so the question for this lecture, and really the question for the geological future of the planet, becomes: How do we spur much faster and more decisive action from institutions that wish to go slowly, or perhaps don’t wish to act at all? One understands that politicians prize incremental action—but in this case, winning slowly is the same as losing. The planet is clearly outside its comfort zone; how do we get our political institutions out of theirs?

And it is here that I’d like to turn to one of Jonathan’s later books, one that got less attention than it deserved. The Unconquerable World was published in 2003. In it, Jonathan writes, in his distinctive aphoristic style: “Violence is the method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.” This brings us, I think, to the crux of our moment. Across a wide variety of topics, we see the power of the ruthless few. This is nowhere more evident than in the field of energy, where the ruthless few who lead the fossil-fuel industry have more money at their disposal than any humans in the past. They’ve been willing to deploy this advantage to maintain the status quo, even in the face of clear scientific warnings and now clear scientific proof. They are, for lack of a better word, radicals: If you continue to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere past the point where you’re melting the polar ice caps, then you are engaging in a radicalism unparalleled in human history.

And they’re not doing this unknowingly or out of confusion. Exxon has known all there is to know about climate change for four decades. Its product was carbon, and it had some of the best scientists on earth on its staff; they warned management, in clear and explicit terms, how much and how fast the earth would warm, and management believed them: That’s why, for instance, Exxon’s drilling rigs were built to accommodate the sea-level rise it knew was coming. But Exxon didn’t warn any of the rest of us. Just the opposite: It invested huge sums of money in helping to build an architecture of deceit, denial, and disinformation, which meant humankind wasted a quarter of a century in a ludicrous argument about whether global warming was “real,” a debate that Exxon’s leaders knew was already settled. The company continues to fund politicians who deny climate change and to fight any efforts to hold it accountable. At times, as Steve Coll makes clear in his remarkable book Private Empire, the oil industry has been willing to use explicit violence—those attack dogs in North Dakota have their even more brutal counterparts in distant parts of the planet. More often, the industry has been willing to use the concentrated force of its money. Our largest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers—two of the richest men on earth, and among the largest leaseholders on Canada’s tar sands—have promised to deploy three-quarters of a billion dollars in this year’s contest. As Jane Mayer put it in a telling phrase, they’ve been able to “weaponize” their money to achieve their ends. So the “ruthless few” are using violence—power in its many forms.

But the other half of that aphorism is hopeful: “Nonviolence is the means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.” When the history of the 20th century is written, I’m hopeful that historians will conclude that the most important technology developed during those bloody hundred years wasn’t the atom bomb, or the ability to manipulate genes, or even the Internet, but instead the technology of nonviolence. (I use the word “technology” advisedly here.) We had intimations of its power long before: In a sense, the most resounding moment in Western history, Jesus’s crucifixion, is a prototype of nonviolent action, one that launched the most successful movement in history. Nineteenth-century America saw Thoreau begin to think more systematically about civil disobedience as a technique. But it really fell to the 20th century, and Gandhi, to develop it as a coherent strategy, a process greatly furthered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates in this country, and by adherents around the world: Otpor in Eastern Europe, various participants in the Arab Spring, Buddhist monks in Burma, Wangari Maathai’s tree-planters, and so on.

We have done very little systematic study of these techniques. We have no West Point or Sandhurst for the teaching of nonviolence; indeed, it’s fair to say that the governments of the world have spent far more time figuring out how to stamp out such efforts than to promote them. (And given the level of threat they represent to governments, that is perhaps appropriate.) What we know is what we’ve learned by experience, by trial and error.

In my own case over the last decade, that’s meant helping to organize several large-scale campaigns or social movements. Some have used civil disobedience in particular—I circulated the call for arrestees at the start of the Keystone XL pipeline demonstrations in 2011, and observers said the resulting two weeks of nonviolent direct action resulted in more arrests than any such demonstration on any issue in many years. Others have focused on large-scale rallies—some in this audience attended the massive climate march in New York in the autumn of 2014, organized in part by 350.org, which was apparently the largest demonstration about anything in this country in a long time. Others have been scattered: The fossil-fuel divestment campaign we launched in 2012 has been active on every continent, incorporated a wide variety of tactics, and has become the largest anticorporate campaign of its kind in history, triggering the full or partial divestment of endowments and portfolios with nearly $5 trillion in assets. These actions have helped spur many more such actions: Keystone represented a heretofore very rare big loss for Big Oil, and its success helped prompt many others to follow suit; now every pipeline, fracking well, coal mine, liquid-natural-gas terminal, and oil train is being fought. As an executive at the American Petroleum Institute said recently—and ruefully—to his industry colleagues, they now face the “Keystone-ization” of all their efforts.

And we have by no means been the only, or even the main, actor in these efforts. For instance, indigenous activists have been at the forefront of the climate fight since its inception, here and around the world, and the current fight over the Dakota Access pipeline is no exception. They and the residents of what are often called “frontline” communities, where the effects of climate change and pollution are most intense, have punched far above their weight in these struggles; they have been the real leaders. These fights will go on. They’ll be much harder in the wake of Trump’s election, but they weren’t easy to begin with, and I confess I see little alternative—even under Obama, the chance of meaningful legislation was thin. So, using Jonathan’s template, I’ll try to offer a few lessons from my own experience over the last decade.

* * *

Lesson one: Unearned suffering is a potent tool. Volunteering for pain is an unlikely event in a pleasure-based society, and hence it gets noticed. Nonviolent direct action is just one tool in the activist tool kit, and it should be used sparingly—like any tool, it can easily get dull, both literally and figuratively. But when it is necessary to underline the moral urgency of a case, the willingness to go to jail can be very powerful, precisely because it goes against the bent of normal life.

It is also difficult for most participants. If you’ve been raised to be law-abiding, it’s hard to stay seated in front of, say, the White House when a cop tells you to move. Onlookers understand that difficulty. I remember Gus Speth being arrested at those initial Keystone demonstrations. He’d done everything possible within the system: co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, chaired the president’s Council on Environmental Quality, ran the entire UN Development Program, been a dean at Yale. But then he concluded that the systems he’d placed such faith in were not coming close to meeting the climate challenge—so, in his 70s, he joined that small initial demonstration. Because his son was a high-powered lawyer, Gus was the only one of us able to get a message out during our stay in jail. What he told the press stuck with me: “I’ve held many important positions in this town,” he said. “But none seem as important as the one I’m in today.” Indeed, his witness pulled many of the nation’s environmental groups off the sidelines; when we got out, he and I wrote a letter to the CEOs of all those powerful green groups, and in return they wrote a letter to the president saying, “There is not an inch of daylight between our position and those of the people protesting on your lawn.” Without Gus’s willingness to suffer the indignity and discomfort of jail, that wouldn’t have happened, and the subsequent history would have been different.

Because it falls so outside our normal search for comfort, security, and advancement, unearned suffering can be a powerful tool. Whether this will be useful against a crueler White House and a nastier and more empowered right wing remains to be seen, but it will be seen. I imagine that the first place it will see really widespread use is not on the environment, but in regard to immigration. If Trump is serious about his plans for mass deportation, he’ll be met with passive resistance of all kinds—or at least he should be. All of us have grown up with that Nazi-era bromide about “First they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew…” In this case, there’s no mystery: First they’re coming for the undocumented. It will be a real fight for the soul of our nation, as the people who abstractly backed the idea of a wall with Mexico are forced to look at the faces of the neighbors they intend to toss over it.

Lesson two: These tactics are useful to the degree that they attract large numbers of people to the fight. Those large numbers don’t need to engage in civil disobedience; they just need to engage in the broader battle. If you think about it, numbers are the currency of movements, just as actual cash is the currency of the status quo—at least until such time as the status quo needs to employ the currency of violence. The point of civil disobedience is rarely that it stops some evil by itself; instead, it attracts enough people and hence attention to reach the public at large.

When the Keystone demonstrations began, for instance, no one knew what the pipeline was, and it hadn’t occurred to people to think about climate change in terms of infrastructure. Instead, we thought about it in the terms preferred by politicians, i.e., by thinking about “emissions reductions” far in the future from policies like increased automobile efficiency, which are useful but obviously insufficient. In the early autumn of 2011, as we were beginning the Keystone protests, the National Journal polled its DC “energy insiders,” and 93 percent of them said TransCanada would soon have its permit for the pipeline. But those initial arrests attracted enough people to make it into a national issue. Soon, 15,000 people were surrounding the White House, and then 50,000 were rallying outside its gates, and before long it was on the front pages of newspapers. The information spread, and more importantly the analysis did too: Infrastructure became a recognized point of conflict in the climate fight, because enough people said it was. Politicians were forced to engage on a ground they would rather have avoided.

In much the same way, the divestment movement managed to go from its infancy in 2012 to the stage where, by 2015, the governor of the Bank of England was repeating its main bullet points to the world’s insurance industry in a conference at Lloyd’s of London: The fossil-fuel industry had more carbon in its reserves than we could ever hope to burn, and those reserves posed the financial risk of becoming “stranded assets.” Note that it doesn’t take a majority of people, or anywhere close, to have a significant—even decisive—impact: In an apathetic world, the active involvement of only a few percentage points of the citizenry is sufficient to make a difference. No more than 1 percent of Americans, for instance, ever participated in a civil-rights protest. But it does take a sufficient number to make an impression, whether in the climate movement or the Tea Party.

Lesson three: The real point of civil disobedience and the subsequent movements is less to pass specific legislation than it is to change the zeitgeist. The Occupy movement, for instance, is often faulted for not having produced a long list of actionable demands, but its great achievement was to make, by dint of recognition and repetition, the existing order illegitimate. Once the 99 percent and the 1 percent were seen as categories, our politics began to shift. Bernie Sanders, and to a lesser extent Donald Trump, fed on that energy. That Hillary Clinton was forced to say that she too opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal was testimony to the power of the shift in the zeitgeist around inequality. Or take LGBTQ rights: It’s worth remembering that only four years ago, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still opposed same-sex marriage. That’s difficult to recall now, since at this point you’d think they had jointly invented the concept. But it was skillful organizing for many years that changed less the laws of the land than the zeitgeist of the culture. Yes, some of those battles were fought over particular statutes; but the battles in Hollywood, and at high-school proms, and in a dozen other such venues were as important. Once movements shift the zeitgeist, then legislative victory becomes the mopping-up phase; this one Trump won’t even attempt to turn back.

This is not how political scientists tend to see it—or politicians, for that matter. Speaking to Black Lives Matter activists backstage in the course of the primary campaign, Hillary Clinton laid out her essential philosophy: “I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.” This is, I think, utterly backward, and it explains much of the intuitive sense among activists of all stripes that Clinton wouldn’t have been a leader. As Monica Reyes, one of the young immigration activists in the Dreamer movement—great organizers who did much to shift public opinion—put it: “You need to change the culture before you can change laws.” Or as that guy Abraham Lincoln once put it: “Public sentiment is everything.”

By forever straddling the middle, centrist politicians delay changes in public sentiment. The viewpoint of the establishment—an appellation that in this case includes everyone from oil companies to presidents—is always the same: We need to be “realistic”; change will come slowly if it comes at all; and so forth. In normal political debates, this is reasonable. Compromise on issues is the way we progress: You want less money in the budget for X, and I want more, and so we meet in the middle and live to fight another day. That’s politics, as distinct from movement politics, which is about changing basic feelings over the great issues of the day. And it’s particularly true in the case of climate change, where political reality, important as it is, comes in a distinct second to reality reality. Chemistry and physics, I repeat, do what they do regardless of our wishes. That’s the difference between political science and science science.

* * *

There are many other points that Jonathan gets at in his book, but there’s one more that bears directly on the current efforts to build a movement around climate change. It comes in his discussion of Hannah Arendt and Mohandas Gandhi. Despite widespread agreement on the sources of power and the possibilities for mobilization, he finds one large difference between the two: Whereas Gandhi saw “spiritual love as the source and inspiration of nonviolent action, Arendt was among those who argued strenuously against introducing such love into the political sphere.” Hers was not an argument against spiritual love, but rather a contention that it mostly belonged in the private sphere, and that “publicity, which is necessary for politics, will coarsen and corrupt it by turning it into a public display, a show.” I will not attempt to flesh out the illuminating arguments on both sides, but I will say that I have changed my mind somewhat over the years on this question, at least as it relates to climate change.

Gandhi, like Thoreau before him, was an ascetic, and people have tended to lump their political and spiritual force together—and, in certain ways, they were very closely linked. Gandhi’s spinning wheel was a powerful symbol, and a powerful reality, in a very poor nation. He emphasized individual action alongside political mobilization, because he believed that Indians needed to awaken a sense of their own agency and strength. This was a necessary step in that movement—but perhaps a trap in our current dilemma. By this I mean that many of the early efforts to fight climate change focused on a kind of personal piety or individual action, reducing one’s impact via lightbulbs or food choices or you name it. And these are useful steps. The house that Sue and I inhabit is covered with solar panels. I turn off lights so assiduously that our daughter, in her Harry Potter days, referred to me as “the Dark Lord.” Often in my early writing, I fixed on such solutions. But in fact, given the pace with which we now know climate change is advancing, they seem not irrelevant but utterly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Let’s imagine that truly inspired organizing might somehow get 10 percent of the population to become really engaged in this fight. That would be a monumental number: We think 10 percent of Americans participated in some fashion in the first Earth Day in 1970, and that was doubtless the high point of organizing on any topic in my lifetime. If the main contribution of this 10 percent was to reduce its own carbon footprint to zero— itself an impossible task—the total impact on America’s contribution to atmospheric carbon levels would be a 10 percent reduction. Which is helpful, but not very. But that same 10 percent—or even 2 or 3 percent—actually engaged in the work of politics might well be sufficient to produce structural change of the size that would set us on a new course: a price on carbon, a commitment to massive subsidies for renewable energy, a legislative commitment to keep carbon in the ground.

Some people are paralyzed by the piety they think is necessary for involvement. You cannot imagine the anguished and Talmudic discussions I’ve been asked to adjudicate on whether it’s permissible to burn gasoline to attend a climate rally. (In my estimation, it’s not just permissible, it’s very nearly mandatory—the best gas you will burn in the course of a year.) It has also become—and this is much more dangerous—the pet argument of every climate denier that, unless you’re willing to live life in a dark cave, you’re a hypocrite to stand for action on climate change. This attempt to short-circuit people’s desire to act must be rejected. We live in the world we wish to change; some hypocrisy is the price of admission to the fight. In this sense, and this sense only, Gandhi is an unhelpful example, and a bludgeon used to prevent good-hearted people from acting.

In fact, as we confront the blunt reality of a Trump presidency and a GOP Congress, it’s clearer than ever that asceticism is insufficient, and maybe even counterproductive. The only argument that might actually discover a receptive audience in the new Washington is one that says, “We need a rapid build-out of solar and wind power, as much for economic as environmental reasons.” If one wanted to find the mother lode of industrial jobs that Trump has promised, virtually the only possible source is the energy transformation of our society.

I will end by saying that movement-building—the mobilization of large numbers of people, and of deep passion, through the employment of all the tools at a nonviolent activist’s disposal—will continue, though it moves onto very uncertain ground with our new political reality. This work of nonviolent resistance is never easy, and it’s becoming harder. Jonathan’s optimism in The Unconquerable World notwithstanding, more and more countries are moving to prevent real opposition. China and Russia are brutally hard to operate in, and India is reconfiguring its laws to go in the same direction. Environmentalists are now routinely assassinated in Honduras, Brazil, the Philippines. Australia, where mining barons control the government, has passed draconian laws against protest; clearly Trump and his colleagues would like to do the same here, and will doubtless succeed to one extent or another. The savagery of the police response to Native Americans in North Dakota reminds us how close to a full-bore petro-state we are.

And yet the movement builds. I don’t know whether it builds fast enough. Unlike every other challenge we’ve faced, this one comes with a time limit. Martin Luther King would always say, quoting the great Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”—meaning that it may take a while, but we are going to win. By contrast, the arc of the physical universe is short and it bends toward heat. I will not venture to predict if we can, at this point, catch up with physics. Clearly, it has a lot of momentum. It’s a bad sign when your major physical features begin to disappear—that we no longer have the giant ice cap in the Arctic is disconcerting, to say the least. So there’s no guarantee of victory. But I can guarantee that we will fight, in every corner of the earth and with all the nonviolent tools at our disposal. And in so doing, we will discover if these tools are powerful enough to tackle the most disturbing crisis humans have ever faced. We will see if that new technology of the 20th century will serve to solve the greatest dilemma of our new millennium.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-the-active-many-can-overcome-the-ruthless-few/
The Climate Movement Has to Elect Hillary Clinton—and Then Give Her Hellhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-climate-movement-has-to-elect-hillary-clinton-and-then-give-her-hell/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenOct 18, 2016

It’s an odd feeling to be working for the election of someone you know dislikes you and your colleagues. I’ve spent a good chunk of this month trying to register voters on campuses in Pennsylvania and Ohio—registering them to vote against Donald Trump, which means pushing for the election of Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t how I wanted to spend the fall—I’d much rather have been campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

It didn’t get any easier when Wikileaks released a tape of Clinton talking to backers in the building-trades unions about the environmental work so many of us (including much of the rest of organized labor) have been engaged in for the last few years. “They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, ‘Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?’ No. I won’t promise that. Get a life, you know.”

I know the young people Clinton was talking about, and they weren’t demanding she somehow wave a wand and stop the fossil-fuel age overnight. They were asking her about the scientific studies showing that we can’t actually keep mining and drilling new supplies of coal, oil, and gas if we’re going to meet the temperature targets set with such fanfare in Paris last year. They were asking her to support the “Keep It In the Ground” Act introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and endorsed by a passel of other senators, from Barbara Boxer of California to Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. (Oh yeah, and that guy Bernie.) They were also asking her to take a stand against fracking, since new studies demonstrate quite clearly that the release of methane from the use of natural gas makes climate change worse. Publicly, she hemmed and hawed. When Bernie said in a debate that he was against fracking, period, Clinton said, “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” That was a pretty weak hedge to begin with, but we now know that privately she reassured the building trades unions: “My view is, I want to defend natural gas…. I want to defend fracking.”

Truth be told, these aren’t revelations. All of us working on climate issues have known this is how Clinton feels; she set up a whole wing of the State Department devoted to spreading fracking around the world. She’d favored the Keystone Pipeline from the start, and it was abundantly clear that only Sanders’s unexpected success in the primaries convinced her she’d have to change. (And it was only his refusal to endorse her until after the platform was agreed upon that made the platform into the fairly progressive document that it is, on climate and other issues). Still, it stings to see in black and white exactly how little regard she has for people fighting pipelines, frack wells, coal ports. Though truth be told, that was no huge surprise either: Politicians are forever saying they want people engaged in the political process, but most of them really just want people to vote and then go home.

So why are many of us out there working to beat Trump and elect her? Because Trump is truly a horror. He’s man who looks at fourth-grade girls and imagines that he’ll be dating them in ten years. He’s a racist. He knows next to nothing and lacks the intellectual curiosity to find out more. He’s a bully. He’s almost a cartoonish villain: If a writer invented a character this evil, no one would believe them. But he’s very nearly president.

Because environmentalists are not just concerned about the climate—we have allies and friends whom we support. And on some of those issues Clinton actually seems sincere: She clearly cares about women’s issues and understands that we are a nation of immigrants.

Because if Trump wins, we backslide on the small gains we’ve made. We’ve forced Clinton to say through gritted teeth that she opposes Keystone, for instance. She can’t, I think, go back on that. Trump has made it clear he’ll permit that and every other pipeline, just as soon as he’s done tearing up the Paris climate accord.

But none of that makes it easy to go out and support her. We’ve watched all fall as she’s maintained a studied silence about the most dramatic and important fossil-fuel fight of the moment, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Even the sight of attack dogs being used on peaceful Native American protesters didn’t move her to break ranks with her industry allies and that fraction of the labor movement that still wants to build pipelines. That’s craven on her part, pure and simple.

And so the good news is that when she wins, none of us will be under the slightest illusion about who she is. The honeymoon won’t last 10 minutes; on November 9 we’ll be organizing for science and human rights and against the timid incrementalism that marks her approach. It’s clear that we need to beat the creepy perv she’s running against. It’s also clear that we then need to press harder than ever for real progress on the biggest crisis the world has ever faced.

“Get a life”? We’ve got a planet, just one.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-climate-movement-has-to-elect-hillary-clinton-and-then-give-her-hell/
Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistryhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/global-warming-terrifying-new-chemistry/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenMar 23, 2016

Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.

In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere.

To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.

These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.

The Obama administration, to its credit, seems to be waking up to the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane calculations, and in early March, the United States reached an agreement with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks from all that new gas infrastructure. But none of this gets to the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is driving the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously.

* * *

To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was most visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where, by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening every week. The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing faster than ever, and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming.

So lots of people thought it was great news when natural-gas wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade. Fracking involves exploding the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought online new shale deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale, stretching from West Virginia up into Pennsylvania and New York. The quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast that they were measured in trillions of cubic feet and in centuries of supply.

The apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it releases half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as bad for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant yammering about climate change without having to run up the cost of electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair.

And it appeared even better than that. If you were President Obama and had inherited a dead-in-the-water economy, the fracking boom offered one of the few economic bright spots. Not only did it employ lots of people, but cheap natural gas had also begun to alter the country’s economic equation: Manufacturing jobs were actually returning from overseas, attracted by newly abundant energy. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his 2014 address, he announced that “businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,” and pledged to “cut red tape” to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he said in 2012, “helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

Obama had plenty of help selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to the “revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Meanwhile, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, “an excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted.” (That CEO, Aubrey McClendon, apparently killed himself earlier this month, crashing his car into a bridge embankment days after being indicted for bid-rigging.) Exxon was in apparent agreement as well: It purchased XTO Energy, becoming the biggest fracker in the world overnight and allowing the company to make the claim that it was helping to drive emissions down.

For a brief shining moment, you couldn’t have asked for more. As Obama told a joint session of Congress, “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

* * *

Unless, of course, you happened to live in the fracking zone, where nightmares were starting to unfold. In recent decades, most American oil and gas exploration had been concentrated in the western United States, often far from population centers. When there were problems, politicians and media in these states paid little attention.

The Marcellus Shale, though, underlies densely populated eastern states. It wasn’t long before stories about the pollution of farm fields and contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals began to make their way into the national media. In the Delaware Valley, after a fracking company tried to lease his family’s farm, a young filmmaker named Josh Fox produced one of the classic environmental documentaries of all time, Gasland, which became instantly famous for its shot of a man lighting on fire the methane flowing from his water faucet.

This reporting helped galvanize a movement—at first town by town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking: The Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. “The club needs to…advocate more fiercely to use as little gas as possible,” he said. “We’re not going to mute our voice on this.” As for Robert Kennnedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling natural gas a “catastrophe.”

In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these fracking operations?

Because here’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

To say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the “Ivory Tower’s latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration.” Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had just finished an industry-funded report that found “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable”; one of its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as “very weak.” One of its other authors, Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he lauded the “stunning increase” in natural gas as a “revolution” and pledged to increase its use domestically.

The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013, for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. “We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see,” said the study’s director. But such work was always piecemeal, one area at a time, while other studies—often conducted with industry-supplied data—came up with lower numbers.

* * *

That’s why last month’s Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong—on a massive scale. In fact, emissions “are substantially higher than we’ve understood,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in early March. The Harvard study wasn’t designed to show why US methane emissions were growing—in other parts of the world, as new research makes clear, cattle and wetlands seem to be causing emissions to accelerate. But the spike that the satellites recorded coincided almost perfectly with the era when fracking went big-time.

To make matters worse, during the same decade, experts had become steadily more worried about the effects of methane in any quantity on the atmosphere. Everyone agrees that, molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat than CO2—but exactly how much wasn’t clear. One reason the EPA estimates of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions showed such improvement was because the agency, following standard procedures, was assigning a low value to methane and measuring its impact over a 100-year period. But a methane molecule lasts only a couple of decades in the air, compared with centuries for CO2. That’s good news, in that methane’s effects are transient—and very bad news because that transient but intense effect happens right now, when we’re breaking the back of the planet’s climate. The EPA’s old chemistry and 100-year time frame assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure, says Howarth, is between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two.

If you combine Howarth’s estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

Since Howarth is an outspoken opponent of fracking, I ran the Harvard data past an impeccably moderate referee, the venerable climate-policy wonk Dan Lashof. A UC Berkeley PhD who has been in the inner circles of climate policy almost since it began, Lashof has helped write reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and craft the Obama administration’s plan to cut coal-plant pollution. The longtime head of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he is now the chief operations officer of billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate America.

“The Harvard paper is important,” Lashof said. “It’s the most convincing new data I have seen showing that the EPA’s estimates of the methane-leak rate are much too low. I think this paper shows that US greenhouse-gas emissions may have gone up over the last decade if you focus on the combined short-term-warming impact.”

Under the worst-case scenario—one that assumes that methane is extremely potent and extremely fast-acting—the United States has actually slightly increased its greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 to 2015. That’s the chart below: the blue line shows what we’ve been telling ourselves and the world about our emissions—that they are falling. The red line, the worst-case calculation from the new numbers, shows just the opposite.

Lashof argues for a more moderate reading of the numbers (calculating methane’s impact over 50 years, for instance). But even this estimate—one that attributes less of the methane release to fracking—wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming. This more modest reassessment is the yellow line in the chart below; it shows the country reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, but by nowhere near as much as we had thought.

The lines are doubtless not as smooth as the charts imply, and other studies will provide more detail and perhaps shift the calculations. But any reading of the new data offers a very different version of our recent history. Among other things, either case undercuts the statistics that America used to negotiate the Paris climate accord. It’s more upsetting than the discovery last year that China had underestimated its coal use, because China now appears to be cutting back aggressively on coal. If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.

* * *

One obvious conclusion from the new data is that we need to move very aggressively to plug as many methane leaks as possible. “The biggest unfinished business for the Obama administration is to establish tight rules on methane emissions from existing [wells and drill sites],” Lashof says. That’s the work that Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to tackle at their conclave in March—although given the time it takes for the EPA to draft new rules, it will likely be long after Obama’s departure before anything happens, and the fossil-fuel industry has vowed to fight new regulations.

Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.”

With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.

And if we didn’t frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

One of the nastiest side effects of the fracking boom, in fact, is that the expansion of natural gas has undercut the market for renewables, keeping us from putting up windmills and solar panels at the necessary pace. Joe Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else. Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

Of course, if you’re a cookie company, that’s not what you want to hear. And the Exxons have a little more political juice than the Keeblers. To give just one tiny example, during his first term, Obama’s then–deputy assistant for energy and climate change, Heather Zichal, headed up an interagency working group to promote the development of domestic natural gas. The working group had been formed after pressure from the American Petroleum Institute, the chief fossil-fuel lobbying group, and Zichal, in a talk to an API gathering, said: “It’s hard to overstate how natural gas—and our ability to access more of it than ever—has become a game changer, and that’s why it’s been a fixture of the president’s ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy.” Zichal left her White House job in 2013; one year later, she took a new post on the board of Cheniere Energy, a leading exporter of fracked gas. In the $180,000-a-year job, she joined former CIA head John Deutch, who once led an Energy Department review of fracking safety during the Obama years, and Vicky Bailey, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Bill Clinton. That’s how it works.

* * *

There was one oddly reassuring number in the Harvard satellite data: The massive new surge of methane from the United States constituted somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the global growth in methane emissions this past decade. In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet’s surface known as the United States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world. Another way of saying this is: We were the first to figure out how to frack. In this new century, we’re leading the world into the natural-gas age, just as we poured far more carbon into the 20th-century atmosphere than any other nation. So, thank God, now that we know there’s a problem, we could warn the rest of the planet before it goes down the same path.

Except we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn’t happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria’s leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people,” and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles—and today, the State Department provides “assistance” with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.

So if the United States has had a terrible time tracking down and fixing its methane leaks, ask yourself how it’s going to go in Bulgaria. If Canada finds that sealing leaks is an “unresolved engineering challenge,” ask yourself how Cambodia’s going to make out. If the State Department has its way, then in a few years Harvard’s satellites will be measuring gushers of methane from every direction.

* * *

Of course, we can—and perhaps we should— forgive all that past. The information about methane is relatively new; when Obama and Clinton and Zichal started backing fracking, they didn’t really know. They could have turned around much earlier, like Kennedy or the Sierra Club. But what they do now will be decisive.

There are a few promising signs. Clinton has at least tempered her enthusiasm for fracking some in recent debates, listing a series of preconditions she’d insist on before new projects were approved; Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

Indeed, just last month, Cheniere Energy shipped the first load of American gas overseas from its new export terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana. As the ship sailed, Cheniere’s vice president of marketing, Meg Gentle, told industry and government officials that natural gas should be rebranded as renewable energy. “I’d challenge everyone here to reframe the debate and make sure natural gas is part of the category of clean energy, not a fossil-fuel category, which is viewed as dirty and not part of the solution,” she said. A few days later, Exxon’s PR chief, writing in the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the company had been “instrumental in America’s shale gas revolution,” and that as a result, “America’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined to levels not seen since the 1990s.”

The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can’t just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/global-warming-terrifying-new-chemistry/
What Does Big Oil Really Think About Climate Science?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-does-big-oil-really-think-about-climate-science/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenFeb 18, 2016

Here’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth- and 16th-largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil-fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now—entirely legally—is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.

Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: We could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter-century of pointless climate debate.

As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer Prize–winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon-dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.

The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.” Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered…. Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.” But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”

So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that, but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about “raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.

But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followed the tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.

Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full-steam-ahead in developing a fossil-fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. “It is highly unlikely,” he said, “that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.” Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong—as wrong as a man could be.

Sins of Omission

In fact, Exxon’s deceit—its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years—may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse-gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the 21st century, “hottest year ever recorded” has become a tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: Had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work.

But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country.

The company’s sins—of omission and commission—may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to investigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer-fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated, and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that’s illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman’s got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and maybe—if activists continue to apply pressure—from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence.

Here’s the thing: All that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal—dangerous, stupid, and immoral, but legal.

On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years.

For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact.”

Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate, and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that. It’s an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”

Add to that gem of a comment this one: The real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math, and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”

Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States, when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah, and just before Hurricane Sandy.

He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”

In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right, and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend—somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton—wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.

But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon—which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.

Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax, and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.

The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, who made a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite, and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.

The Never-Ending Big Dig

Even that’s not the deepest problem.

The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12 percent in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25 percent in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” It is still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons—$4 million a day, every day.

As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola, and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.

But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet—an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil-fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burn about another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius, and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.

At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now.

That’s why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the earth as we can safely burn. We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying precisely the kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up, and—what do you know—an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn.

Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas—other than what Tillerson once called “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire”—is this: In recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil.

Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market, and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas.

In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5 percent of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17 percent. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices, and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors.

That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the 20th century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future, that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough, and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens.

Can Exxon Be Pressured?

Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem… well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell, and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6 percent of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through… oh, never mind.

What we need from Exxon is what it’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of its reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath.

But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too.

At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate News published some revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event—a reckoning for the crime of the millennium.

But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels—everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his State of the State address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions. “This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.”

The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-anymore Earth would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?



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The Fossil-Fuel Industry Is Like a Zombie That Won’t Diehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-fossil-fuel-industry-is-like-a-zombie-that-wont-die/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 19, 2016The fight against the Keystone XL pipeline was just the beginning of the battle to stop climate change.]]>

When I was a kid, I was creepily fascinated by the wrongheaded idea, current in my grade school, that your hair and your fingernails kept growing after you died. The lesson seemed to be that it was hard to kill something off—if it wanted to keep going.

Something similar is happening right now with the fossil-fuel industry. Even as the global warming crisis makes it clear that coal, natural gas, and oil are yesterday’s energy, the momentum of two centuries of fossil-fuel development means new projects keep emerging in a zombie-like fashion.

In fact, the climactic fight at the end of the fossil-fuel era is already underway, even if it’s happening almost in secret. That’s because so much of the action isn’t taking place in big, headline-grabbing climate change settings like the recent conference of 195 nations in Paris; it’s taking place in hearing rooms and farmers’ fields across this continent (and other continents, too). Local activists are making desperate stands to stop new fossil-fuel projects, while the giant energy companies are making equally desperate attempts to build while they still can. Though such conflicts and protests are mostly too small and local to attract national media attention, the outcome of these thousands of fights will do much to determine whether we emerge from this century with a habitable planet. In fact, far more than any set of paper promises by politicians, they really are the battle for the future.

Here’s how Diane Leopold, president of the giant fracking company Dominion Energy, put it at a conference earlier this year: “It may be the most challenging” period in fossil-fuel history, she said, because of “an increase in high-intensity opposition” to infrastructure projects that is becoming steadily “louder, better-funded, and more sophisticated.” Or, in the words of the head of the American Natural Gas Association, referring to the bitter struggle between activists and the Canadian tar sands industry over the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, “Call it the Keystone-ization of every project that’s out there.”

Pipelines, Pipelines, Everywhere

I hesitate to even start listing them all, because I’m going to miss dozens, but here are some of the prospective pipelines people are currently fighting across North America: the Alberta Clipper and the Sandpiper pipelines in the upper Midwest, Enbridge Line 3, the Dakota Access, the Line 9 and Energy East pipelines in Ontario and environs, the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipelines in British Columbia, the Piñon pipeline in Navajo Country, the Sabal Trail pipeline in Alabama and Georgia, the Appalachian Connector, the Vermont Gas pipeline down the western side of my own state, the Algonquin pipeline, the Constitution pipeline, the Spectra pipeline, and on and on.

And it’s not just pipelines, not by a long shot. I couldn’t begin to start tallying up the number of proposed liquid natural gas terminals, prospective coal export facilities and new oil ports, fracking wells, and mountaintop removal coal sites where people are already waging serious trench warfare. As I write these words, brave activists are on trial for trying to block oil trains in the Pacific Northwest. In the Finger Lakes not a week goes by without mass arrests of local activists attempting to stop the building of a giant underground gas storage cavern. In California, it’s frack wells in Kern County. As I said: endless.

And endlessly resourceful, too. Everywhere the opposition is forced by statute to make its stand not on climate change arguments, but on old grounds. This pipeline will hurt water quality. That coal port will increase local pollution. The dust that flies off those coal trains will cause asthma. All the arguments are perfectly correct and accurate and by themselves enough to justify stopping many of these plans, but a far more important argument always lurks in the background: each of these new infrastructure projects is a way to extend the life of the fossil-fuel era a few more disastrous decades.

Here’s the basic math: if you build a pipeline in 2016, the investment will be amortized for 40 years or more. It is designed to last—to carry coal slurry or gas or oil—well into the second half of the twenty-first century. It is, in other words, designed to do the very thing scientists insist we simply can’t keep doing, and do it long past the point when physics swears we must stop.
These projects are the result of several kinds of momentum. Because fossil-fuel companies have made huge sums of money for so long, they have the political clout to keep politicians saying yes. Just a week after the Paris accords were signed, for instance, the well-paid American employees of those companies, otherwise known as senators and representatives, overturned a 40-year-old ban on US oil exports, a gift that an ExxonMobil spokesman had asked for in the most explicit terms only a few weeks earlier. “The sooner this happens, the better for us,” he’d told The New York Times, at the very moment when other journalists were breaking the story of that company’s epic three-decade legacy of deceit, its attempt to suppress public knowledge of a globally warming planet that Exxon officials knew they were helping to create. That scandal didn’t matter. The habit of giving in to Big Oil was just too strong.

Driving a Stake Through a Fossil-Fueled World

The money, however, is only part of it. There’s also a sense in which the whole process is simply on autopilot. For many decades the economic health of the nation and access to fossil fuels were more or less synonymous. So it’s no wonder that the laws, statutes, and regulations favor business-as-usual. The advent of the environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s introduced a few new rules, but they were only designed to keep that business-as-usual from going disastrously, visibly wrong. You could drill and mine and pump, but you were supposed to prevent the really obvious pollution. No Deepwater Horizons. And so fossil-fuel projects still get approved almost automatically, because there’s no legal reason not to do so.

In Australia, for instance, a new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, replaced the climate-change-denying Tony Abbott. His minister for the environment, Greg Hunt, was a particular standout at the recent Paris talks, gassing on at great length about his “deeply personal” commitment to stopping climate change, calling the new pact the “most important environmental agreement ever.” A month earlier, though, he’d approved plans for the largest coal mine on Earth, demanding slight revisions to make sure that the habitat of the southern black-throated finch would not be destroyed. Campaigners had hung much of their argument against the mine on the bird’s possible extinction, since given the way Australia’s laws are written this was one of the few hooks they had. The fact that scientists have stated quite plainly that such coal must remain in the ground if the globe is to meet its temperature targets and prevent catastrophic environmental changes has no standing. It’s the most important argument in the world, but no one in authority can officially hear it.

It’s not just Australia, of course. As 2016 began in my own Vermont—as enlightened a patch of territory as you’re likely to find—the state’s Public Service Board approved a big new gas pipeline. Under long-standing regulations, they said, it would be “in the public interest,” even though science has recently made it clear that the methane leaking from the fracked gas the pipeline will carry is worse than the burning of coal. Their decision came two weeks after the temperature in the city of Burlington hit 68 on Christmas eve, breaking the old record by, oh, 17 degrees. But it didn’t matter.

This zombie-like process is guaranteed to go on for years, even decades, as at every turn the fossil-fuel industry fights the new laws and regulations that would be necessary, were agreements like the Paris accord to have any real teeth. The only way to short-circuit this process is to fight like hell, raising the political and economic price of new infrastructure to the point where politicians begin to balk. That’s what happened with Keystone—when enough voices were raised, the powers-that-be finally decided it wasn’t worth it. And it’s happening elsewhere, too. Other Canadian tar sands pipelines have also been blocked. Coal ports planned for the West Coast haven’t been built. That Australian coal mine may have official approval, but almost every big bank in the world has balked at providing it the billions it would require.

There’s much more of this fight coming—led, as usual, by indigenous groups, by farmers and ranchers, by people living on the front lines of both climate change and extractive industry. Increasingly they’re being joined by climate scientists, faith communities, and students in last-ditch efforts to lock in fossil fuels. This will undoubtedly be a key battleground for the climate justice movement. In May, for instance, a vast coalition across six continents will engage in mass civil disobedience to “keep it in the ground.”

And in a few places you can see more than just the opposition; you can see the next steps unfolding. Last fall, for instance, Portland, Oregon—the scene of a memorable “kayaktivist” blockade to keep Shell’s Arctic drilling rigs bottled up in port—passed a remarkable resolution. No new fossil-fuel infrastructure would be built in the city, its council and mayor declared. The law will almost certainly block a huge proposed propane export terminal, but far more important, it opens much wider the door to the future. If you can’t do fossil fuel, after all, you have to do something else—sun, wind, conservation. This has to be our response to the living-dead future that the fossil-fuel industry and its allied politicians imagine for our beleaguered world: no new fossil-fuel infrastructure. None. The climate math is just too obvious.

This business of driving stakes through the heart of one project after another is exhausting. So many petitions, so many demonstrations, so many meetings. But at least for now, there’s really no other way to kill a zombie.



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Exxon Knew Everything There Was to Know About Climate Change by the Mid-1980s—and Denied Ithttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exxon-knew-everything-there-was-to-know-about-climate-change-by-the-mid-1980s-and-denied-it/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenOct 20, 2015

A few weeks before the last great international climate conference—2009, in Copenhagen—the e-mail accounts of a few climate scientists were hacked and reviewed for incriminating evidence suggesting that global warming was a charade. Eight separate investigations later concluded that there was literally nothing to “Climategate,” save a few sentences taken completely out of context—but by that time, endless, breathless media accounts about the “scandal” had damaged the prospects for any progress at the conference.

Now, on the eve of the next global gathering in Paris this December, there’s a new scandal. But this one doesn’t come from an anonymous hacker taking a few sentences out of context. This one comes from months of careful reporting by two separate teams, one at the Pulitzer Prize–winning website Inside Climate News, and the other at the Los Angeles Times (with an assist from the Columbia Journalism School). Following separate lines of evidence and document trails, they’ve reached the same bombshell conclusion: ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.

This scandal—traveling under the hashtag #exxonknew—is just beginning to build. The Inside Climate News series of six pieces is set to conclude this week and be published as a book, but the LA Times apparently has far more reporting waiting to be released. Already members of Congress—Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier of California—and presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have called on the Department of Justice to investigate, comparing it to the predations of the tobacco industry.

Should the DOJ muster its courage to go after this most profitable and connected of companies, the roadmap is already well laid out by the two investigations.

ICN has demonstrated that as early as the late 1970s, Exxon scientists were briefing top executives that climate change was real, dangerous, and caused by their product. By the early 1980s, their own climate models were predicting—with great accuracy—the track the global temperature has taken ever since.

The LA Times reporting is at least as important. It demonstrated that Exxon clearly believed their own climate models and used them to guide their efforts in the newly melting Arctic, where as their senior researcher said “warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels.” (Indeed, he added, climate change “can only help lower exploration and development costs,” thus making their bids for Arctic lease rights more profitable).

But though we know now that behind the scenes Exxon understood precisely what was going on, in public they feigned ignorance or worse. CEO Lee Raymond described global warming as “projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, on sheer speculation,” and insisted—in a key presentation to China’s leading officials in 1997—that the globe was probably cooling.

This scandal will not go away easily. The insider Washington Monthly came out with language as strong as you’re likely to hear:

A fossil fuel company intentionally and knowingly obfuscating research into climate change constitutes criminal negligence and malicious intent at best, and a crime against humanity at worst. The Department of Justice has a moral obligation to prosecute Exxon and its co-conspirators accordingly.

And on Sunday the investigation truly came home, when the The Dallas Morning News—read across the oil patch and hometown paper for Exxon—put the ICN investigation on its front page. The whole business angered me so much that I sat down in front of a Mobil gas pump near my home, shutting it down for the few minutes before I was arrested in an effort to draw more attention to the story. (It’s possible that this is the first time anyone’s gone to jail to encourage newspaper readership.)

A few observers, especially on the professionally jaded left, have treated the story as old news—as something that even if we didn’t know, we knew. “Of course they lied,” someone told me. That cynicism, however, serves as the most effective kind of cover for Exxon (right alongside the tired argument that it’s “not the fault of the companies—they’re just meeting demand from all of us”). What’s beginning to sink in is the horrible impact of their lies: Exxon, had its leaders merely stated directly what they knew to be true, could have ended the pretend debate over climate change as early as the 1980s. When scientists like NASA’s Jim Hansen first raised public awareness of climate change, think of what would have happened if Exxon’s CEO had gone to Congress, too, and said that their internal scientific efforts show precisely the same thing. Instead, they funded every climate-denial outfit that asked for cash and worked with veterans of the tobacco wars to help raise the same kind of doubt about climate science.

When Hansen testified before a Congressional committee in 1988, the atmospheric level of CO2 was just passing 350 parts per million. Now we’ve gone beyond 400 ppm, we’ve seen the rapid melt of the Arctic, the acidification of the planet’s oceans, and the rapid rise in extreme weather events. (Just lately: “thousand-year-rainfalls” in South Carolina and Southern California so far this month, and now a typhoon dropping a meter or more of rain on the Philippines.) Thanks to Exxon’s willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess. We’ve finally begun to see the rise of a movement large enough to challenge the power of the oil companies, and that means that Paris will come out better than Copenhagen, but the quarter-century wasted will never be made up.

And count on the fossil-fuel industry to continue trying to delay progress and obfuscate reality. Exxon is clearly flustered (its PR guy called the LA Times story “complete bullshit”) but unrepentant. They continue to demand favors from government, most recently a lifting of the longstanding ban on exporting American crude (“The sooner this happens, the better for us,” said Kenneth P. Cohen, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for public and governmental affairs informed The New York Times.) It remains to be seen if the world’s media will overcome their tendency to truckle and give this true scandal anything like the oxygen it poured on those few hapless e-mails.

If they do, then more rapid progress on climate will be possible. The evidence of Exxon’s bad faith is so overpowering that this debacle will only deepen on further investigation; think about what a prosecutor with deposition power could accomplish. If the media and the authorities don’t shirk their jobs, then someday, when the world thinks back on this greatest of crises, those climate scientists whose e-mails were hacked will be remembered as heroes, and Exxon will be the great object lesson for the damage unfettered greed can do.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exxon-knew-everything-there-was-to-know-about-climate-change-by-the-mid-1980s-and-denied-it/
People Will Remember Shell Oil As a Symbol of Planet-Destroying Greedhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/people-will-remember-shell-oil-as-a-symbol-of-planet-destroying-greed/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJul 31, 2015

Shell Oil’s icebreaker Fennica is apparently on its way to the Arctic from the Pacific Northwest, ending a dramatic week-long siege that saw activists dangle from bridges and blockade the Portland harbor with kayaks, and a federal court threaten environmentalists with heavy fines.

Amidst the drama of the action, and the drama of the courtroom, and amidst the outpouring of thanks for activists from Greenpeace, Rising Tide, 350PDX, and others, one more thing is worth remembering: there is no more contemptible company on earth than Shell Oil.

Earlier this year, in a landmark paper in Nature, a team of scientists showed which coal, oil, and gas simply must stay in the ground if we have any chance of staying below a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius (a figure that, as premier climate scientist James Hansen reminded us this week, is itself much too high). Tarsands oil must stay in the ground. Vast coal deposits in the Powder River basin must stay below ground. And “there is no climate-friendly scenario” that involves drilling for gas and oil in the Arctic.

That’s as stark a statement as you will ever get. And yet Shell went ahead and applied for permits to drill there anyway. They said, in essence, we don’t give a damn that we’re breaking the planet, we can make some money. That’s as sick as anything any company anywhere has ever done; the earth will pay the price for their greed for geologic time. They watched the Arctic melt and then they decided that would make it easier for them to drill for more oil. People will remember Shell as a watchword for greed the way we remember, all these millennia later, Pharaoh as a watchword for cruelty.

To its everlasting shame, the Obama administration went along with Shell, providing the necessary permit earlier this month. And so now Shell is trying to drill. To meet the requirements of the law, they need an icebreaker near their rigs (despite their best efforts, some ice still remains in the Arctic). But the icebreaker, in need of repairs, had to go to drydock in Portland, where it was trapped by brave citizens, some in kayaks, and others dangling from the St. Johns Bridge. Keeping the icebreaker — the planet-breaker — at bay.

On a day when the Portland temperature reached nearly 100 degrees, and when a city in Iran recorded perhaps the highest heat index the world has ever seen at 154 degrees, a federal judge ruled that Greenpeace, which organized the bridge-dangling blockade, was in contempt of court and threatened fines of a quarter million dollars a day. Shell, which brought the charges, was clearly attempting to break the back of the climate movement, just as it is trying to break the back of the climate.

And who knows — they may succeed. They have immense resources. Against them the rest of us can muster only the currency of movements: passion, spirit, creativity. And sometimes we need to spend our bodies.

Those dangling activists on the bridge, those splendid kayaktivists in the water below: they were sticking up for the rest of us. They were doing their best to enforce the laws of nature, the laws of physics and chemistry. We all should pray that they’re a match for the army of lawyers that the sick and reprehensible corporation known as Shell Oil is summoning. And when we’re done praying we should chip in some money and some time.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/people-will-remember-shell-oil-as-a-symbol-of-planet-destroying-greed/
Why We’ll Be Marching in the Largest Climate Change Demonstration in Historyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-well-be-marching-largest-climate-change-demonstration-history/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibbenSep 15, 2014At the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, there’s a world to march for.

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On Sunday, September 21st, a huge crowd will march through the middle of Manhattan. It will almost certainly be the largest rally about climate change in human history, and one of the largest political protests in many years in New York. More than 1,000 groups are coordinating the march—environmental justice groups, faith groups, labor groups—which means there’s no one policy ask. Instead, it’s designed to serve as a loud and pointed reminder to our leaders, gathering that week at the United Nations to discuss global warming, that the next great movement of the planet’s citizens centers on our survival and their pathetic inaction.

As a few of the march’s organizers, though, we can give some sense of why we, at least, are marching, words we think represent many of those who will gather at Columbus Circle for the walk through midtown Manhattan.

We march because the world has left the Holocene behind: scientists tell us that we’ve already raised the planet’s temperature almost one degree Celsius, and are on track for four or five by century’s end. We march because Hurricane Sandy filled the New York City subway system with salt water, reminding us that even one of the most powerful cities in the world is already vulnerable to slowly rising ocean levels.

We march because we know that climate change affects everyone, but its impacts are not equally felt: those who have contributed the least to causing the crisis are hit hardest, here and around the world. Communities on the frontlines of global warming are already paying a heavy price, in some cases losing the very land on which they live. This isn’t just about polar bears any more.

But since polar bears can’t march, we march for them, too, and for the rest of creation now poised on the verge of what biologists say will be the planet’s sixth great extinction event, one unequalled since the last time a huge asteroidstruck the Earth 66 million years ago.

And we march for generations yet to come, our children, grandchildren and their children, whose lives will be systematically impoverished and degraded. It’s the first time one century has wrecked the prospects of the millennia to come, and it makes us mad enough to march.

We march with hope, too. We see a few great examples around the world of how quickly we could make the transition to renewable energy. We know that if there were days this summer when Germany generated nearly 75 percent of its power from renewable sources of energy, the rest of us could, too—especially in poorer nations around the equator that desperately need more energy. And we know that labor-intensive renewables would provide far more jobs than capital-intensive coal, gas, and oil.

And we march with some frustration: why haven’t our societies responded to twenty-five years of dire warnings from scientists? We’re not naïve; we know that the fossil fuel industry is the 1 percent of the 1 percent. But sometimes we think we shouldn’t have to march. If our system worked the way it should, the world would long ago have taken the obvious actions economists and policy gurus have recommended—from taxing carbon to reflect the damage it causes to funding a massive World War II–scale transition to clean energy.

Marching is not all, or even most, of what we do. We advocate; we work to install solar panels; we push for sustainable transit. We know, though, that history shows marching is usually required, that reason rarely prevails on its own. (And we know that sometimes even marching isn’t enough; we’ve beento jail and we’ll likely be back.)

We’re tired of winning the argument and losing the fight. And so we march. We march for the beaches and the barrios. We march for summers when the cool breeze still comes down in the evening. We march because Exxonspends $100 million every day looking for more hydrocarbons, even though scientists tell us we already have far more in our reserves than we can safely burn. We march for those too weak from dengue fever and malaria to make the journey. We march because California has lost 63 trillion gallons of groundwater to the fierce drought that won’t end, and because the glaciers at the roof of Asia are disappearing. We march because researchers told the world in April that the West Antarctic ice sheet has begun to melt“irrevocably”; Greenland’s ice shield may soon follow suit; and the waters from those, as rising seas, will sooner or later drown the world’s coastlines and many of its great cities.

We don’t march because there’s any guarantee it will work. If you were a betting person, perhaps you’d say we have only modest hope of beating the financial might of the oil and gas barons and the governments in their thrall. It’s obviously too late to stop global warming entirely, but not too late to slow it down—and it’s not too late, either, to simply pay witness to what we’re losing, a world of great beauty and complexity and stability that has nurtured humanity for thousands of years.

There’s a world to march for—and a future, too. The only real question is why anyone wouldn’t march.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-well-be-marching-largest-climate-change-demonstration-history/
Will Obama Block the Keystone Pipeline or Just Keep Bending?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/will-obama-block-keystone-pipeline-or-just-keep-bending/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenOct 28, 2013The dream of an environmental president seems to be fading away.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on—and it’s now well over two years old—it’s illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are sky-high, and not just for Obama. I’m writing these words from Pittsburgh, amid 7,000 enthusiastic and committed young people gathering to fight global warming, and my guess is that his choice will do much to determine how they see politics in this country.

Let us stipulate at the start that whether or not to build the pipeline is a decision with profound physical consequences. If he approves its construction, far more of the dirtiest oil on Earth will flow out of the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and reach the US Gulf Coast. Not just right away or for a brief period, but far into the future, since the Keystone XL guarantees a steady flow of profits to oil barons who have their hearts set on tripling production in the far north.

The history of oil spills and accidents offers a virtual guarantee that some of that oil will surely make its way into the fields and aquifers of the Great Plains as those tar sands flow south. The greater and more daunting assurance is this, however: everything that reaches the refineries on the Gulf Coast will, sooner or later, spill into the atmosphere in the form of carbon, driving climate change to new heights.

In June, President Obama said that the building of the full pipeline—on which he alone has the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down—would be approved only if “it doesn’t significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” By that standard, it’s as close to a no-brainer as you can get.

These days, however, as no one will be surprised to hear, brainless things happen in Washington more often than not, and there’s the usual parade of the usual suspects demanding that Keystone get built. In mid-October, a coalition that included Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell, not to mention the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the Business Roundtable, sent Obama a letter demandingthat he approve Keystone in order to “maintain investor confidence,” a phrase almost guaranteed to accompany bad ideas. A report last week showed that the Koch brothers stood to earn as much as $100 billion in profits if the pipeline gets built (which would come in handy in helping fund their endless assault on unions, poor people, and democracy).

But don’t think it’s just Republican bigwigs and oil execs rushing to lend the pipeline a hand. TransCanada, the pipeline’s prospective builder, is at work as well, and Obama’s former communications director Anita Dunn is now on the TransCanada dime, producing TV ads in support of the pipeline. It’s a classic example of the kind of influence peddling that knows no partisan bounds. As the activists at Credo put it: “It’s a betrayal of the commitments that so many of us worked so hard for, and that Dunn herself played a huge role in shaping as top strategist on the 2008 campaign and communications director in the White House.”

Credo’s Elijah Zarlin, who worked with Dunn back in 2008, wrote that attack on her. He was the guy who wrote all those emails that got so many of us coughing up money and volunteering time during Obama’s first run for the presidency, and he perfectly exemplifies those of us on the other side of this divide—the ones who actually believed Dunn in 2008, the ones who thought Obama was going to try to be a different kind of president.

On energy there’s been precious little sign of that. Yes, the Environmental Protection Agency has put in place some new power plant regulations, and cars are getting better mileage. But the president has also boasted again and again about his “all of the above” energy policy for “increasing domestic oil production and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.” It has, in fact, worked so well that the United States will overtake Russia this year as the biggest combined oil and natural gas producer on the planet and is expected to pass Saudi Arabia as the number one oil producer by 2017.

His administration has okayed oil drilling in the dangerous waters of the Arctic and has emerged as the biggest backer of fracking. Even though he boasts about marginal U.S. cuts in carbon emissions, his green light to fracking means that he’s probably given more of a boost to releases of methane—another dangerous greenhouse gas—than any man in history. And it’s not just the environment. At this point, given what we know about everything from drone warfare to NSA surveillance, the dream of a progressive Obama has, like so many dreams, faded away.

The president has a handy excuse, of course: a truly terrible Congress. And too often—with the noble exception of those who have been fighting for gay rights and immigration reform—he’s had little challenge from progressives. But in the case of Keystone, neither of those caveats apply: he gets to make the decision all by himself with no need to ask John Boehner for a thing, and people across the country have made a sustained din about it. Americans have sent record numbers of emails to senators and a record number of comments to the State Department officials who oversee a “review” of the pipeline’s environmental feasibility; more have gone to jail over this issue than any in decades. Yet month after month, there’s no presidential decision.

There are days, in fact, when it’s hard to muster much fire for the fight (though whenever I find my enthusiasm flagging, I think of the indigenous communities that have to live amid the Mordor that is now northern Alberta). The president, after all, has already allowed the construction of the southern half of the Keystone pipeline, letting TransCanada take land across Texas and Oklahoma for its project, and setting up the beleaguered communities of Port Arthur, Texas, for yet more fumes from refineries.

Stopping the northern half of that pipeline from being built certainly won’t halt global warming by itself. It will, however, slow the expansion of the extraction of tar sands, though the Koch brothers et al. are busy trying to find other pipeline routes and rail lines that would get the dirtiest of dirty energy out of Canada and into the U.S. via destinations from Michigan to Maine. These pipelines and rail corridors will need to be fought as well—indeed the fights are underway, though sometimes obscured by the focus on Keystone. And there are equally crucial battles over coal and gas from the Appalachians to the Pacific coast. You can argue that the president’s people have successfully diverted attention from their other environmental sins by keeping this argument alive long past the moment at which it should have been settled and a decision should have been made.

At this point, in fact, only the thought of those 900,000 extra barrels a day of especially nasty oil coming out of the ground and, via that pipeline, into refineries still makes the fight worthwhile. Oh, and the possibility that, in deciding to block Keystone, the president would finally signal a shift in policy that matters, finally acknowledge that we have to keep most of the carbon that’s still in the ground in that ground if we want our children and grandchildren to live on a planet worth inhabiting.

If the president were to become the first world leader to block a big energy project on the grounds of its effects on climate, it might help dramatically reset the international negotiations that he allowed to go aground at Copenhagen in 2009—the biggest foreign policy failure of his first term.

But that cascade of “ifs” depends on Obama showing that he can actually stand up to the oil industry. To an increasingly disillusioned environmental movement, Keystone looks like a last chance.

Zoë Carpenter on another environmental quagmire for Obama: coal.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/will-obama-block-keystone-pipeline-or-just-keep-bending/
A Movement for a New Planethttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/movement-new-planet/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenAug 19, 2013What to make of change on an overheating planet.

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Climate rally on February 17, 2013. (Courtesy of 350.org.)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality—it’s hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King Jr. I had a shadowy, child’s sense of him when he was still alive, and then a mythic one as his legend grew; after all, he had a national holiday. As a result, I think, I imagined that he set the template for how great movements worked. They had a leader, capital L.

As time went on, I learned enough about the civil rights movement to know it was much more than Dr. King. There were other great figures, from Ella Baker and Medgar Evers to Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, and there were tens of thousands more whom history doesn’t remember but who deserve great credit. And yet one’s early sense is hard to dislodge: the civil rights movement had his face on it; Gandhi carried the fight against empire; Susan B. Anthony, the battle for suffrage.

Which is why it’s a little disconcerting to look around and realize that most of the movements of the moment—even highly successful ones like the fight for gay marriage or immigrant’s rights—don’t really have easily discernible leaders. I know that there are highly capable people who have worked overtime for decades to make these movements succeed, and that they are well known to those within the struggle, but there aren’t particular people that the public at large identifies as the face of the fight. The world has changed in this way, and for the better.

It’s true, too, in the battle where I’ve spent most of my life: the fight to slow climate change and hence give the planet some margin for survival. We actually had a charismatic leader in Al Gore, but he was almost the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, a politician makes a problematic leader for a grassroots movement because boldness is hard when you still envision higher office; for another, even as he won the Nobel Prize for his remarkable work in spreading climate science, the other side used every trick and every dollar at their disposal to bring him down. He remains a vital figure in the rest of the world (partly because there he is perceived less as a politician than as a prophet), but at home his power to shape the fight has been diminished.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the movement is diminished. In fact, it’s never been stronger. In the last few years, it has blocked the construction of dozens of coal-fired power plants, fought the oil industry to a draw on the Keystone pipeline, convinced a wide swath of American institutions to divest themselves of their fossil fuel stocks and challenged practices like mountaintop-removal coal mining and fracking for natural gas. It may not be winning the way gay marriage has won, but the movement itself continues to grow quickly, and it’s starting to claim some victories.

That’s not despite its lack of clearly identifiable leaders, I think. It’s because of it.

A Movement for a New Planet

We live in a different world from that of the civil rights movement. Save perhaps for the spectacle of presidential elections, there’s no way for individual human beings to draw the same kind of focused and sustained attention they did back then. At the moment, you could make the three evening newscasts and the cover of Time (not Newsweek, alas) and still not connect with most people. Our focus is fragmented and segmented, which may be a boon or a problem, but mostly it’s just a fact. Our attention is dispersed.

When we started 350.org five years ago, we dimly recognized this new planetary architecture. Instead of trying to draw everyone to a central place—the Mall in Washington, D.C.—for a protest, we staged twenty-four hours of rallies around the planet: 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread of day of political action in the planet’s history.” And we’ve gone on to do more of the same—about 20,000 demonstrations in every country but North Korea.

Part of me, though, continued to imagine that a real movement looked like the ones I’d grown up watching—or maybe some part of me wanted the glory of being a leader. In any event, I’ve spent the last few years in constant motion around the country and the Earth. I’d come to think of myself as a “leader,” and indeed my forthcoming book, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reflects on that growing sense of identity.

However, in recent months—and it’s the curse of an author that sometimes you change your mind after your book is in type—I’ve come to like the idea of capital L leaders less and less. It seems to me to miss the particular promise of this moment: that we could conceive of, and pursue, movements in new ways.

For environmentalists, we have a useful analogy close at hand. We’re struggling to replace a brittle, top-heavy energy system, where a few huge power plants provide our electricity, with a dispersed and lightweight grid, where 10 million solar arrays on 10 million rooftops are linked together. The engineers call this “distributed generation,” and it comes with a myriad of benefits. It’s not as prone to catastrophic failure, for one. And it can make use of dispersed energy, instead of relying on a few pools of concentrated fuel. The same principle, it seems to me, applies to movements.

In the last few weeks, for instance, 350.org helped support a nationwide series of rallies called Summerheat. We didn’t organize them ourselves. We knew great environmental justice groups all over the country, and we knew we could highlight their work, while making links between, say, standing up to a toxic Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, and standing up to the challenge of climate change.

From the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, where a tar-sands pipeline is proposed, to the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, where a big oil port is planned, from Utah’s Colorado Plateau, where the first US tar-sands mine has been proposed, to the coal-fired power plant at Brayton Point on the Massachusetts coast and the fracking wells of rural Ohio—Summerheat demonstrated the local depth and global reach of this emerging fossil fuel resistance. I’ve had the pleasure of going to talk at all these places and more besides, but I wasn’t crucial to any of them. I was, at best, a pollinator, not a queen bee.

Or consider a slightly older fight. In 2012, The Boston Globe magazine put a picture of me on its cover under the headline: “The Man Who Crushed the Keystone Pipeline.” I’ve got an all-too-healthy ego, but even I knew that it was over the top. I’d played a role in the fight, writing the letter that asked people to come to Washington to resist the pipeline, but it was effective because I’d gotten a dozen friends to sign it with me. And I’d been one of 1,253 people who went to jail in what was the largest civil disobedience action in this country in years. It was their combined witness that got the ball rolling. And once it was rolling, the Keystone campaign became the exact model for the sort of loosely-linked well-distributed power system I’ve been describing.

The big environmental groups played key roles, supplying lots of data and information, while keeping track of straying members of Congress. Among them were the National Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters and the National Wildlife Federation, none spending time looking for credit, all pitching in. The Sierra Club played a crucial role in pulling together the biggest climate rally yet, last February’s convergence on the Mall in Washington.

Organizations and individuals on the ground were no less crucial: the indigenous groups in Alberta and elsewhere that started the fight against the pipeline which was to bring Canadian tar sands to the US Gulf Coast graciously welcomed the rest of us, without complaining about how late we were. Then there were the ranchers and farmers of Nebraska, who roused a whole stadium of football fans at a Cornhuskers game to boo a pipeline commercial; the scientists who wrote letters, the religious leaders who conducted prayer vigils. And don’t forget the bloggers who helped make sense of it all for us. One upstart website even won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the struggle.

Non-experts quickly educated themselves on the subject, becoming specialists in the corruption of the State Department process that was to okay the building of that pipeline or in the chemical composition of the bitumen that would flow through it. CREDO (half an activist organization, half a cell phone company), as well as Rainforest Action Network and The Other 98 percent, signed up 75,000 people pledged to civil disobedience if the pipeline were to get presidential approval.

And then there was the Hip Hop Caucus, whose head Lennox Yearwood has roused one big crowd after another, and the labor unions—nurses and transit workers, for instance—who have had the courage to stand up to the pipeline workers’ union which would benefit from the small number of jobs to be created if Keystone were built. Then there are groups of Kids Against KXL, and even a recent grandparents’ march from Camp David to the White House. Some of the most effective resistance has come from groups like Rising Tide and the Tarsands Blockade in Texas, which have organized epic tree-sitting protests to slow construction of the southern portion of the pipeline.

The Indigenous Environmental Network has been every bit as effective in demonstrating to banks the folly of investing in Albertan tar sands production. First Nations people and British Columbians have even blocked a proposed pipeline that would take those same tar sands to the Pacific Ocean for shipping to Asia, just as inspired activists have kept the particularly carbon-dirty oil out of the European Union.

We don’t know if we’ll win the northern half of the Keystone fight or not, although President Obama’s recent pledge to decide whether it should be built—his is the ultimate decision—based on how much carbon dioxide it could put into the atmosphere means that he has no good-faith way of approving it. However, it’s already clear that this kind of full-spectrum resistance has the ability to take on the huge bundles of cash that are the energy industry’s sole argument.

What the Elders Said

This sprawling campaign exemplifies the only kind of movement that will ever be able to stand up to the power of the energy giants, the richest industry the planet has ever known. In fact, any movement that hopes to head off the worst future depredations of climate change will have to get much, much larger, incorporating among other obvious allies those in the human rights and social justice arenas.

The cause couldn’t be more compelling. There’s never been a clearer threat to survival, or to justice, than the rapid rise in the planet’s temperature caused by and for the profit of a microscopic percentage of its citizens. Conversely, there can be no real answer to our climate woes that doesn’t address the insane inequalities and concentrations of power that are helping to drive us toward this disaster.

That’s why it’s such good news when people like Naomi Klein and Desmond Tutu join the climate struggle. When they take part, it becomes ever clearer that what’s underway is not, in the end, an environmental battle at all, but an all-encompassing fight over power, hunger and the future of humanity on this planet.

Expansion by geography is similarly a must for this movement. Recently, in Istanbul, 350.org and its allies trained 500 young people from 135 countries as climate-change organizers, and each of them is now organizing conferences and campaigns in their home countries.

This sort of planet-wide expansion suggests that the value of particular national leaders is going to be limited at best. That doesn’t mean, of course, that some people won’t have more purchase than others in such a movement. Sometimes such standing comes from living in the communities most immediately and directly affected by climate change or fossil fuel depredation. When, for instance, the big climate rally finally did happen on the Mall this winter, the 50,000 in attendance may have been most affected by the words of Crystal Lameman, a young member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation whose traditional territory has been poisoned by tar sands mining.

Sometimes it comes from charisma: Van Jones may be the most articulate and engaging environmental advocate ever. Sometimes it comes from getting things right for a long time: Jim Hansen, the greatest climate scientist, gets respect even from those who disagree with him about, say, nuclear power. Sometimes it comes from organizing ability: Jane Kleeb who did such work in the hard soil of Nebraska, or Clayton Thomas-Muller who has indefatigably (though no one is beyond fatigue) organized native North America. Sometimes it comes from sacrifice: Tim DeChristopher went to jail for two years for civil disobedience, and so most of us are going to listen to what he might have to say.

Sometimes it comes from dogged work on solutions: Wahleah Johns and Billy Parish figured out how to build solar farms on Navajo land and crowdfund solar panels on community centers. Sometimes truly unlikely figures emerge: investor Jeremy Grantham, or Tom Steyer, a Forbes 400 billionaire who quit his job running a giant hedge fund, sold his fossil fuel stocks and put his money and connections effectively to work fighting Keystone and bedeviling climate-denying politicians (even Democrats!). We have organizational leaders like Mike Brune of the Sierra Club or Frances Beinecke of NRDC, or folks like Kenny Bruno or Tzeporah Berman who have helped knit together large coalitions; religious leaders like Jim Antal, who led the drive to convince the United Church of Christ to divest from fossil fuels; regional leaders like Mike Tidwell in the Chesapeake or Cherri Foytlin in the Gulf or K.C. Golden in Puget Sound.

Yet figures like these aren’t exactly “leaders” in the way we’ve normally imagined. They are not charting the path for the movement to take. To use an analogy from the Internet age, it’s more as if they were well-regarded critics on Amazon.com review pages; or to use a more traditional image, as if they were elders, even if not in a strictly chronological sense. Elders don’t tell you what you must do, they say what they must say. A few of these elders are, like me, writers; many of them have a gift for condensing and crystallizing the complex. When Jim Hansen calls the Alberta tar sands the “biggest carbon bomb on the continent,” it resonates.

When you have that standing, you don’t end up leading a movement, but you do end up with people giving your ideas a special hearing, people who already assume that you’re not going to waste their energy on a pointless task. So when Naomi Klein and I hatched a plan for a fossil fuel divestment campaign last year, people paid serious attention, especially when Desmond Tutu lent his sonorous voice to the cause.

These elders-of-all-ages also play a sorting-out role in backing the ideas of others or downplaying those that seem less useful. There are days when I feel like the most useful work I’ve done is to spread a few good Kickstarter proposals via Twitter or write a blurb for a fine new book. Conversely, I was speaking in Washington recently to a group of grandparents who had just finished a seven-day climate march from Camp David. A young man demanded to know why I wasn’t backing sabotage of oil company equipment, which he insisted was the only way the industry could be damaged by our movement. I explained that I believed in nonviolent action, that we were doing genuine financial damage to the pipeline companies by slowing their construction schedules and inflating their carrying costs and that in my estimation wrecking bulldozers would play into their hands.

But maybe he was right. I don’t actually know, which is why it’s a good thing that no one, myself included, is the boss of the movement. Remember those solar panels: the power to change these days is remarkably well distributed, leaving plenty of room for serendipity and revitalization. In fact, many movements had breakthroughs when they decided their elders were simply wrong. Dr. King didn’t like the idea of the Freedom Summer campaign at first, and yet it proved powerfully decisive.

The Coming of the Leaderless Movement

We may not need capital-L Leaders, but we certainly need small-l leaders by the tens of thousands. You could say that, instead of a leaderless movement, we need a leader-full one. We see such leaders regularly at 350.org. When I wrote earlier that we “staged” 5,200 rallies around the globe, I wasn’t completely accurate. It was more like throwing a potluck dinner. We set the date and the theme, but everywhere other people figured out what dishes to bring.

The thousands of images that accumulated in the Flickr account of that day’s events were astonishing. Most of the people doing the work didn’t look like environmentalists were supposed to. They were largely poor, black, brown, Asian and young, because that’s what the world mostly is.

Often the best insights are going to come from below: from people, that is, whose life experience means they understand how power works not because they exercise it but because they are subjected to it. That’s why frontline communities in places where global warming’s devastation is already increasingly obvious often produce such powerful ideas and initiatives. We need to stop thinking of them as on the margins, since they are quite literally on the cutting edge.

We live in an age in which creative ideas can spring up just about anywhere and then, thanks to new forms of communication, spread remarkably quickly. This is in itself nothing new. In the civil rights era, for instance, largely spontaneous sit-in campaigns by southern college students in 1960 reshuffled the deck locally and nationally, spreading like wildfire in the course of days and opening up new opportunities.

More recently, in the immigration rights campaign, it was four “Dreamers” walking from Florida to Washington D.C. who helped reopen a stale, deadlocked debate. When Lieutenant Dan Choi chained himself to the White House fence, that helped usher the gay rights movement into a new phase.

But Dan Choi doesn’t have to be Dan Choi forever, and Tim DeChristopher doesn’t have to keep going to jail over government oil and gas leases. There are plenty of others who will arise in new moments, which is a good thing, since the physics of climate change means that the movement has to win some critical victories in the next few years but also last for generations. Think of each of these “leaders” as the equivalent of a pace line for a bike race: one moment someone is out front breaking the wind, only to peel away to the back of the line to rest for a while. In movement terms, when that happens you not only prevent burnout, you also get regular infusions of new ideas.

The ultimate in leaderlessness was, of course, the Occupy movement that swept the United States (and other areas of the world) in 2011-2012. It, in turn, took cues from the Arab Spring, which absorbed some of its tricks from the Serbian organizers at Otpor, who exported many of the features of their campaign against Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s around the planet.

Occupy was exciting, in part, because of its deep sense of democracy and democratic practice. Those of us who are used to New England town meetings recognized its Athenian flavor. But town meetings usually occur one day a year. Not that many people had the stomach for the endless discussions of the Occupy moment and, in many cases, the crowds began to dwindle even without police repression—only to surge back when there was a clear and present task (Occupy Sandy, say, in the months after that superstorm hit the East coast).

All around the Occupy movement, smart people have been grappling with the problem of democracy in action. As the occupations wore on, its many leaders were often engaged as facilitators, trying to create a space that was both radically democratic and dramatically effective. It proved a hard balancing act, even if a remarkably necessary one.

How to Save the Earth

Communities (and a movement is a community) will probably always have some kind of hierarchy, even if it’s an informal and shifting one. But the promise of this moment is a radically flattened version of hierarchy, with far more room for people to pop up and propose, encourage, support, drift for a while, then plunge back into the flow. That kind of trajectory catches what we’ll need in a time of increased climate stress—communities that place a premium on resiliency and adaptability, dramatically decentralized but deeply linked.

And it’s already happening. The Summerheat campaign ended in Richmond, California, where Chevron runs a refinery with casual disregard for the local residents. When a section of it exploded last year, authorities sent a text message essentially requesting that people not breathe. As a result, a coalition of local environmental justice activists has waged an increasingly spirited fight against the plant.

Like the other oil giants, Chevron shows the same casual disregard for people around the world. The company is, typically enough, suing journalists in an attempt to continue to cover up the horrors it’s responsible for in an oil patch of jungle in Ecuador. And of course, Chevron and the other big oil companies have shown a similar recklessness when it comes to our home planet. Their reserves of oil and gas are already so large that, by themselves, they could take us several percent of the way past the two-degree Celsius temperature rise that the world has pledged to prevent, which would bring on the worst depredations of global warming—and yet they are now on the hunt in a major way for the next round of “unconventional” fossil fuels to burn.

In addition, as the 2012 election campaign was winding down, Chevron gave the largest corporate campaign donation in the post-Citizens United era. It came two weeks before the last election, and was clearly meant to insure that the House of Representatives would stay in the hands of climate deniers, and that nothing would shake the status quo.

And so our movement—global, national and most of all local. Released from a paddy wagon after the Richmond protest, standing in a long line of handcuffees waiting to be booked, I saw lots of elders, doubtless focused on different parts of the Chevron equation. Among them were Gopal Dayaneni, of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, who dreams of frontline communities leading in the construction of a just new world, and Bay Area native activist Pennie Opal Plant, who has spent her whole life in Richmond and dreams, I suspect, of kids who can breathe more easily in far less polluted air.

I continue to hope for local, national and global action, and for things like a carbon tax-and-dividend scheme that would play a role in making just transitions easier. Such differing, overlapping dreams are anything but at odds. They all make up part of the same larger story, complementary and complimentary to it. These are people I trust and follow; we have visions that point in the same general direction; and we have exactly the same enemies who have no vision at all, save profiting from the suffering of the planet.

I’m sure much of this thinking is old news to people who have been building movements for years. I haven’t. I found myself, or maybe stuck myself, at the front of a movement almost by happenstance, and these thoughts reflect that experience.

What I do sense, however, is that it’s our job to rally a movement in the coming years big enough to stand up to all that money, to profits of a sort never before seen on this planet. Such a movement will need to stretch from California to Ecuador—to, in fact, every place with a thermometer; it will need to engage not just Chevron but every other fossil fuel company; it will need to prevent pipelines from being built and encourage windmills to be built in their place; it needs to remake the world in record time.

That won’t happen thanks to a paramount leader, or even dozens of them. It can only happen with a spread-out and yet thoroughly interconnected movement, a new kind of engaged citizenry. Rooftop by rooftop, we’re aiming for a different world, one that runs on the renewable power that people produce themselves in their communities in small but significant batches. The movement that will get us to such a new world must run on that kind of power too.

What was missing from Chris Hayes’s climate change documentary, The Politics of Power?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/movement-new-planet/
Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the ‘Stonewall’ of the Climate Movement?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/keystone-xl-pipeline-stonewall-climate-movement/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 8, 2013And if so, is that terrible news?

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A protest against the Keystone XL pipeline, August 22, 2011. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement. 

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline. And there’s good reason to put pressure on. After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

Still, let’s put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we’ll be rallying in scuba masks. (I’m not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown DC.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body. In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia figured out that they had “evolved” on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had “evolved,” once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

Why recite all this history? Because for me, the hardest part of the Keystone pipeline fight has been figuring out what in the world to do about the Democrats.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Let’s begin by stipulating that, taken as a whole, they’re better than the Republicans. About a year ago, in his initial campaign ad of the general election, Mitt Romney declared that his first act in office would be to approve Keystone and that, if necessary, he would “build it myself.” (A charming image, it must be said). Every Republican in the Senate voted on a nonbinding resolution to approve the pipeline—every single one. In other words, their unity in subservience to the fossil fuel industry is complete, and almost compelling. At the least, you know exactly what you’re getting from them.

With the Democrats, not so much. Seventeen of their Senate caucus—about a third—joined the GOP in voting to approve Keystone XL. As the Washington insider website Politico proclaimed in a headline the next day, “Obama’s Achilles Heel on Climate: Senate Democrats.”

Which actually may have been generous to the president. It’s not at all clear that he wants to stop the Keystone pipeline (though he has the power to do so himself, no matter what the Senate may want), or for that matter do anything else very difficult when it comes to climate change. His new Secretary of State, John Kerry, issued a preliminary environmental impact statement on the pipeline so fraught with errors that it took scientists and policy wonks about twenty minutes to shred its math.

Administration insiders keep insisting, ominously enough, that the president doesn’t think Keystone is a very big deal. Indeed, despite his amped-up post-election rhetoric on climate change, he continues to insist on an “all-of-the-above” energy policy which, as renowned climate scientist James Hansen pointed out in his valedictory shortly before retiring from NASA last week, simply can’t be squared with basic climate-change math.

All these men and women have excuses for their climate conservatism. To name just two: the oil industry has endless resources, and they’re scared about reelection losses. Such excuses are perfectly realistic and pragmatic, as far as they go: if you can’t get re-elected, you can’t do even marginal good and you certainly can’t block right-wing craziness. But they also hide a deep affection for oil industry money, which turns out to be an even better predictor of voting records than party affiliation.

Anyway, aren’t all those apologias wearing thin as Arctic sea ice melts with startling, planet-changing speed? It was bad enough to take four decades simply to warm up to the idea of gay rights. Innumerable lives were blighted in those in-between years, and given long-lasting official unconcern about AIDS, innumerable lives were lost. At least, however, inaction didn’t make the problem harder to solve: if the Supreme Court decides gay people should be able to marry, then they’ll be able to marry.

Unlike gay rights or similar issues of basic human justice and fairness, climate change comes with a time limit. Go past a certain point, and we may no longer be able to affect the outcome in ways that will prevent long-term global catastrophe. We’re clearly nearing that limit and so the essential cowardice of too many Democrats is becoming an ever more fundamental problem that needs to be faced. We lack the decades needed for their positions to “evolve” along with the polling numbers. What we need, desperately, is for them to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy.

Instead, at best they insist on fiddling around the edges, while the planet prepares to burn. The newly formed Organizing for Action, for instance—an effort to turn Barack Obama’s fundraising list into a kind of quasi-official MoveOn.org—has taken up climate change as one of its goals. Instead of joining with the actual movement around the Keystone pipeline or turning to other central organizing issues, however, it evidently plans to devote more energy to house parties to put solar panels on people’s roofs. That’s great, but there’s no way such a “movement” will profoundly alter the trajectory of climate math, a task that instead requires deep structural reform of exactly the kind that makes the administration and Congressional “moderates” nervous.

Energy Independence: Last Century’s Worry

So far, the Democrats are showing some willingness to face the issues that matter only when it comes to coal. After a decade of concentrated assault by activists led by the Sierra Club, the coal industry is now badly weakened: plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants have disappeared from anyone’s drawing board. So, post-election, the White House finally seems willing to take on the industry at least in modest ways, including possibly with new Environmental Protection Agency regulations that could start closing down existing coal-fired plants (though even that approach now seems delayed).

Recently, I had a long talk with an administration insider who kept telling me that, for the next decade, we should focus all our energies on “killing coal.” Why? Because it was politically feasible.

And indeed we should, but climate-change science makes it clear that we need to put the same sort of thought and creative energy into killing oil and natural gas, too. I mean, the Arctic—from Greenland to its seas—essentially melted last summer in a way never before seen. The frozen Arctic is like a large physical feature. It’s as if you woke up one morning and your left arm was missing. You’d panic.

There is, however, no panic in Washington. Instead, the administration and Democratic moderates are reveling in new oil finds in North Dakota and in the shale gas now flowing out of Appalachia, even though exploiting both of these energy supplies is likely to lock us into more decades of fossil fuel use. They’re pleased as punch that we’re getting nearer to “energy independence.” Unfortunately, energy independence was last century’s worry. It dates back to the crises set off by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in the early 1970s, not long after… Stonewall.

So what to do? The narrow window of opportunity that physics provides us makes me doubt that a third party will offer a fast enough answer to come to terms with our changing planet. The Green Party certainly offered the soundest platform in our last elections, and in Germany and Australia the Greens have been decisive in nudging coalition governments towards carbon commitments. But those are parliamentary systems. Here, so far, national third parties have been more likely to serve as spoilers than as wedges (though it’s been an enlightening pleasure to engage with New York’s Working Families Party, or the Progressives in Vermont). It’s not clear to me how that will effectively lead to changes during the few years we’ve got left to deal with carbon. Climate science enforces a certain brute realism. It makes it harder to follow one’s heart.

Along with some way to make a third party truly viable, we need a genuine movement for fundamental governmental reform—not just a change in the Senate’s filibuster rules, but publicly funded elections, an end to the idea that corporations are citizens and genuine constraints on revolving-door lobbyists. These are crucial matters, and it is wonderful to see broad new campaigns  underway around them. It’s entirely possible that there’s no way to do what needs doing about climate change in this country without them. But even their most optimistic proponents talk in terms of several election cycles, when the scientists tell us that we have no hope of holding the rise in the planetary temperature below two degrees unless global emissions peak by 2015.

Of course, climate-change activists can and should continue to work to make the Democrats better. At the moment, for instance, the 350.org action fund is organizing college students for the Massachusetts primary later this month. One senatorial candidate, Steven Lynch, voted to build the Keystone pipeline, and that’s not okay. Maybe electing his opponent, Ed Markey, will send at least a small signal. In fact, this strategy got considerably more promising in the last few days when California hedge fund manager and big-time Democratic donor Tom Steyer announced that he was not only going to go after Lynch, but any politician of any party who didn’t take climate change seriously. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people,” he said, demonstrating precisely the level of rhetoric (and spending) that might actually start to shake things up.

It will take a while, though. According to press reports, Obama explained to the environmentalists at a fundraiser Steyer hosted that “the politics of this are tough,” because “if your house is still underwater,” then global warming is “probably not rising to your number one concern.”

By underwater, he meant: worth less than the mortgage. At this rate, however, it won’t be long before presidents who use that phrase actually mean “underwater.” Obama closed his remarks by saying something that perfectly summed up the problem of our moment. Dealing with climate change, he said, is “going to take people in Washington who are willing to speak truth to power, are willing to take some risks politically, are willing to get a little bit out ahead of the curve—not two miles ahead of the curve, but just a little bit ahead of it.”

That pretty much defines the Democrats: just a little bit ahead, not as bad as Bush, doing what we can.

And so, as I turn this problem over and over in my head, I keep coming to the same conclusion: we probably need to think, most of the time, about how to change the country, not the Democrats. If we build a movement strong enough to transform the national mood, then perhaps the trembling leaders of the Democrats will eventually follow. I mean, “evolve.” At which point we’ll get an end to things like the Keystone pipeline, and maybe even a price on carbon. That seems to be the lesson of Stonewall and of Selma. The movement is what matters; the Democrats are, at best, the eventual vehicle for closing the deal.

The closest thing I’ve got to a guru on American politics is my senator, Bernie Sanders. He deals with the Democrat problem all the time. He’s an independent, but he caucuses with them, which means he’s locked in the same weird dance as the rest of us working for real change.

A few weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a global warming summit he convened in Vermont’s state capital, and afterwards I confessed to him my perplexity. “I can’t think of anything we can do except keep trying to build a big movement,” I said. “A movement vast enough to scare or hearten the weak-kneed.”

“There’s nothing else that’s ever going to do it,” he replied.

And so, down to work.

The reaction to now-former Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice's homophobic comments speaks progress for queer justice. Read Dave Zirin's take



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/keystone-xl-pipeline-stonewall-climate-movement/
John Kerry’s Fateful Decision on the Keystone Pipelinehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/john-kerrys-fateful-decision-keystone-pipeline/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 3, 2013Four decades ago, he spoke out bravely against the Vietnam War. Will he show the same courage today, in helping to end the fossil-fuel era?
 

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US Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at a news conference at the State Department in Washington, on Tuesday, April 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Secretary of State John Kerry has been arrested one time in his life, and as it happens, I was there—at least until my mom took me home to bed.

It was the spring of 1971, and Kerry was in his relatively brief stretch as the face of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The group announced plans to camp on the Battle Green in Lexington, the Boston suburb where I was then attending sixth grade. When town officials denied them permission, hundreds of residents showed up in support, and in the early morning hours the police took them all to the Public Works garage; they were fined $5 and released. My father, a mild-mannered business reporter, was among the arrestees, and that’s mostly what I remember—but also the clean-cut and well-spoken Kerry, in his fatigues.

The world has a way of turning, and some combination of ambition, talent and devotion has over time made Kerry into a Washington power: long a senator, nearly a president, now
secretary of state. And he is confronting one of the largest protest movements in this country since those turbulent times.

Sometime in the next couple of months, the State Department will issue a final environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline, followed by a determination on whether it is “in the national interest.” President Obama will have the final say, of course, but the other man who could stop it is John Kerry, which is why environmental groups, including 350.org, have mobilized to send him a million public comments.

So far, the signs aren’t good. A month after he took over at State, it issued a preliminary environmental ruling giving the project a clean bill of health. It didn’t take scientists more than a few hours of study to point out the many flaws and basic math errors in the ruling; perhaps stung by the embarrassment, the State Department announced that the “public comments” we’re now submitting will, in fact, be kept secret. (They may also have been stung by the pictures of tar-sands oil from a much smaller pipeline fouling an Arkansas suburb after a leak in late March.)

Other omens aren’t much better. Unnamed White House sources have said several times in recent weeks that the administration doesn’t think Keystone is a very big deal; seventeen Democratic senators, under intense pressure from the fossil-fuel industry, cast a symbolic vote in favor of the pipeline in March. One of the industry’s chief lobbyists wrote in an e-mail to his clients, “I just think it is funny how many of the true believers are seriously clueless about Keystone, politics, elections.”

But then, people who want fundamental change are always willfully clueless about political reality, or else they wouldn’t fight in the first place. Here’s John Kerry, weeks before that night on the Lexington Battle Green all those years ago, testifying before Congress: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

The war had raged on for a decade. By then, almost everyone in Washington knew it was a mistake, but very few were willing to stand up and try to stop it; it was politically convenient to let the war rattle hopelessly on. It took an impassioned movement to change that, a movement Kerry helped lead.

The fossil-fuel era has raged on for many decades. By now, most people who think about it know it has to come to an end—the Arctic melted faster and farther than we’ve ever seen last summer, and the New York City subway system filled with water last fall. Cheap oil, once a boon, is now a bane. And yet the wealth of the industry makes it all but impossible to bring it to heel. By almost any definition, building a big new pipeline—
designed to last decades—to the dirtiest oil on earth is a mistake. We know, that is, that the time has come to put the fossil-fuel era behind us. Here’s Kerry speaking in March: “The science is screaming at us, literally, demanding that people in positions of public responsibility at least exercise the so-called ‘precautionary principle’ to balance the equities and, not knowing completely the outcomes, at least understand what is happening and take steps to prevent potential disaster.”

That sounds like the John Kerry of the early ’70s. If he actually believed those words, there’s no possible way he could support Keystone. Instead, he’d become one of the first global leaders to stop a project cold because of its impact on the
climate, earning himself some chips to lay down in negotiations with other countries.

We’ll find out how Kerry has aged when he rules on the pipeline. We’ll find out who he is now, and how he rises to the same kind of challenge he laid down in his youth. “We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country?” he said when he testified that day in Congress forty-two years ago. “Where is the leadership? We’re here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatrick and so many others?”

In the climate fight—a battle even more momentous than the one over Vietnam—the names are Obama and Kerry. Of those earlier leaders, a young Kerry said, “They’ve left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun.” Much sooner than four decades from now, and under an ever hotter sun, we’ll know if John Kerry did likewise.

Michael T. Klare wrote about the Keystone pipeline earlier this year, and about protests in Washington by those opposed to it, including Bill McKibben and 350.org.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/john-kerrys-fateful-decision-keystone-pipeline/
Obama Versus Physicshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-versus-physics/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 7, 2013Why climate change won’t wait for the president.

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Demonstrators march with a replica of a pipeline during a protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline outside the White House on Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Take, for instance, “the problem of our schools.” Don’t worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat clearing, the Carnegie Commission published "A Nation at Risk," insisting that a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened our schools. The nation’s biggest foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We’ve had Race to the Top, and Teach for America, and charters, and vouchers, and… we’re still in the midst of “fixing” education, many generations of students later.

Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. There’s certainly an argument to be made that moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of age.

Which is not to say that there weren’t millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out the conflicts between people.

And that’s always been the difficulty with climate change — the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. It’s not a fight, like education reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It couldn’t be more different at a fundamental level.

We’re talking about a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less profitable.

Physics doesn’t understand that rapid action on climate change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry. It’s implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you soon have a nightmare on your hands.

We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the cost would be terrible — all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years. But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by physics, there’s not much reason to act at all.

Unless you understand these distinctions you don’t understand climate change — and it’s not at all clear that President Obama understands them.

That’s why his administration is sometimes peeved when they don’t get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will slowly go into effect over the next decade.

It’s precisely the kind of gradual transformation that people — and politicians — like. We should have adopted it long ago (and would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here’s the terrible thing: it’s no longer a measure that impresses physics. After all, physics isn’t kidding around or negotiating. While we were discussing whether climate change was even a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If we’re to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year to make a real difference.

It’s not Obama’s fault that that’s not happening. He can’t force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.

There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America. Indeed, some of them were the same institutions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.

So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment, he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.

For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority — new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, for example; and of course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, something that requires no permission from John Boehner or the rest of Congress.

So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal miners. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save.

If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy. He’d also be looking for that Pearl Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government’s premier climate scientist declared it a “planetary emergency.”

In fact, he didn’t even appear to notice those phenomena, campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012, he kept declaring his love for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, where apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.

Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it — his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second term. That’s a start, I suppose, but it’s a long way from telling the car companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.

And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election press conference, he announced that climate change was “real,” thus marking his agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to “future generations,” he also agreed that we should “do more.” But addressing climate change, he added, would involve “tough political choices.” Indeed, too tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:

“I think the American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth, that if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody is going to go for that. I won’t go for that.”

It’s as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had declared, “I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it.”

The president must be pressed to do all he can — and more. That’s why thousands of us will descend on Washington D.C. on President’s Day weekend, in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there’s another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he’s simply not up to this task, and that we’re going to have to do it for him, as best we can.

If he won’t take on the fossil fuel industry, we will. That’s why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.

If he won’t use our position as a superpower to drive international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we’ll try. That’s why young people from 190 nations are gathering in Istanbul in June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won’t listen to scientists — like the 20 top climatologists who toldhim that the Keystone pipeline was a mistake — then top scientists are increasingly clear that they’ll need to get arrested to make their point.

Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient president will get caught up in the draft. But we’re not waiting for him. We can’t.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-versus-physics/
The Planet Wreckershttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/planet-wreckers/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJun 4, 2012Climate-change deniers are on the ropes—but so is the planet.

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It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead, it drew attention to the fact that these guys had overreached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich—after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards—but also a little pathetic. A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them—and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That—have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with. Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp. That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot. Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children—still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people… may even be more efficient while killing—and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you—because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the US Congress.

Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age—he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry—plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance. Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore. In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again. His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.” Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in fifty years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue. This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming. Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.

It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years. He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stone earlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue. Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the President clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated. In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years. The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block—at least temporarily—the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast. In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything—if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history—one that will last for geological epochs.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/planet-wreckers/
Too Hot Not to Notice?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/too-hot-not-notice/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenMay 3, 2012A planet connected by wild weather.

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The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical—the ever more turbulent, erratic and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure—and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil fuel–guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multibillion-dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They’ll hold, in essence, a giant dot—and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they’ll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a “dry creek regatta” to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers—some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years—will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December’s epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea, students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains and the damage caused to South Korea’s rice crop in recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate change–induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and coastal communities around the world that are feeling the impact of climate change. In newly freed Libya, students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has shifted in their lifetimes. There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and in the highlands of Peru where drought has wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey, Mexico, they’ll recall last year’s floods that did nearly $2 billion in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward, activists in Halifax, Canada, will “swim for survival” across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while high school students in Nashville, Tennessee, will gather on a football field inundated by 2011’s historic killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March’s record rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full uniform will remember last year’s record forest fires and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station. In Miami, Manhattan and Maui, citizens will line streets that scientists say will eventually be underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant banner with just two words, a quote from that classic of Western children’s literature, The Wizard of Oz. “I’m Melting” it will say, in letters three-stories high.

This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But—as with the tobacco industry before them—the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it’s not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it’s your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand US temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn’t likely to be much help in spreading the news is… the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don’t expect representatives from Saturday’s Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday’s talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted ninety-eight minutes total to the planet’s biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change—and here’s a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here’s a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we’re mounting across the world, Face the Nation and Meet the Press won’t be connecting the dots. They’ll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich’s retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney’s coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we’re going to tell this story—and it’s the most important story of our time—we’re going to have to tell it ourselves.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/too-hot-not-notice/
Payola for the Most Profitable Corporations in Historyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/payola-most-profitable-corporations-history/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenApr 5, 2012How we subsidize energy giants to wreck the planet, and what we can do about it.

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Along with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.” It was, in truth, nothing to write home about—a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz—even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).

Whether or not the bill passes, those subsidies are worth focusing on. After all, we’re talking at least $10 billion in freebies and, depending on what you count, possibly as much as $40 billion annually in freebie cash for an energy industry already making historic profits. If attacking them is a convenient way for the White House to deflect public anger over rising gas prices, it is also a perfect fit for the new worldview the Occupy movement has been teaching Americans. (Not to mention, if you think about it, the Tea Party focus on deficits.) So count on one thing: we’ll be hearing a lot more about them this year.

But there’s a problem: the very word “subsidies” makes American eyes glaze over. It sounds so boring, like something that has everything to do with finance and taxes and accounting, and nothing to do with you. Which is just the reaction that the energy giants are relying on: that it’s a subject profitable enough for them and dull enough for us that no one will really bother to challenge their perks, many of which date back decades.

By some estimates, getting rid of all the planet’s fossil-fuel subsidies could get us halfway to ending the threat of climate change. Many of those subsidies, however, take the form of cheap, subsidized gas in petro-states, often with impoverished populations—as in Nigeria, where popular protests forced the government to back down on a decision to cut such subsidies earlier this year. In the United States, though, they’re simply straightforward presents to rich companies, gifts from the 99 percent to the 1 percent.

If due attention is to be paid, we have to figure out a language in which to talk about them that will make it clear just how loony our policy is.

Start this way: you subsidize something you want to encourage, something that might not happen if you didn’t support it financially. Think of something we heavily subsidize—education. We build schools, and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we’ve raised. The theory is: young people don’t know enough yet. We need to give them a hand when it comes to further learning, so they’ll be a help to society in the future. From that analogy, here are five rules of the road that should be applied to the fossil-fuel industry.

1. Don’t subsidize those who already have plenty of cash on hand. No one would propose a government program of low-interest loans to send the richest kids in the country to college. (It’s true that schools may let them in more easily on the theory that their dads will build gymnasiums, but that’s a different story.) We assume that the wealthy will pay full freight. Similarly, we should assume that the fossil-fuel business, the most profitable industry on Earth, should pay its way, too. What possible reason is there for giving Exxon the odd billion in extra breaks? Year after year the company sets record for money-making—last year it managed to rake in a mere $41 billion in profit, just failing to break its own 2008 all-time mark of $45 billion.

2. Don’t subsidize people forever. If students need government loans to help them get bachelor’s degrees, that’s sound policy. But if they want loans to get their 11th BA, they should pay themselves. We learned how to burn coal 300 years ago. A subsidized fossil-fuel industry is the equivalent of a 19-year-old repeating third grade yet again.

3. Sometimes you’ll subsidize something for a sensible reason and it won’t work out. The government gave some of our money to a solar power company called Solyndra. Though it was small potatoes compared to what we hand over to the fossil-fuel industry, it still stung when they lost it. But since we’re in the process of figuring out how to perfect solar power and drive down its cost, it makes sense to subsidize it. Think of it as the equivalent of giving a high-school senior a scholarship to go to college. Most of the time that works out. But since I live in a college town, I can tell you that 20 percent of kids spend four years drinking: they’re human Solyndras. It’s not exactly a satisfying thing to see happen, but we don’t shut down the college as a result.

4. Don’t subsidize something you want less of. At this point, the greatest human challenge is to get off of fossil fuels. If we don’t do it soon, the climatologists tell us, our prospects as a civilization are grim indeed. So lending a significant helping hand to companies intent on driving us towards disaster is perverse. It’s like giving a fellowship to a graduate student who wants to pursue a thesis on “Strategies for Stimulating Donut Consumption Among Diabetics.”

5. Don’t give subsidies to people who have given you cash. Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies. In essence, they’ve been given small gifts by outfits to whom they then return large presents, using our money, not theirs. It’s a good strategy, if you’re an energy company—or maybe even a congressional representative eager to fund a reelection campaign. Oil Change International estimates that fossil-fuel companies get $59 back for every dollar they spend on donations and lobbying, a return on investment that makes Bernie Madoff look shabby. It’s no different from sending a college financial aid officer a hundred-dollar bill in the expectation that he’ll give your daughter a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars. Bribery is what it is. And there’s no chance it will yield the best energy policy or the best student body.

These five rules seem simple and straightforward to me, even if they don’t get at the biggest subsidy we give the fossil-fuel business: the right—alone among industries—to pour their waste into the atmosphere for free. And then there’s the small matter of the money we sink into the military might we must employ to guard the various places they suck oil from. 

Simply getting rid of these direct payoffs would, however, be a start, a blow struck for, if nothing else, the idea that we’re not just being played for suckers and saps. This is the richest industry on Earth, a planet they’re helping wreck, and we’re paying them a bonus to do it.

In most schools outside of K Street, that’s an answer that would get a failing grade and we’d start calling subsidies by another name. Handouts, maybe. Freebies. Baksheesh. Payola. Or to use the president’s formulation, "all of the above."



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/payola-most-profitable-corporations-history/
90 Degrees in Winter: This Is What Climate Change Looks Likehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/90-degrees-winter-what-climate-change-looks/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenMar 20, 2012The last days of winter and the first days of spring have seen hundreds of record-breaking high temperatures. Worry.

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A view of the Runge reservoir in the town of Runge, some thirty-seven miles north of Santiago on February 3, 2012. Reuters/Ivan Alvarado

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”

It’s hard to overstate how impossible this weather is—when you have nearly a century and a half of records, they should be hard to break, much less smash. But this is like Barry Bonds on steroids if his steroids were on steroids, an early season outbreak of heat completely without precedent in its scale and spread. I live in Vermont, where we should be starting to slowly thaw out—but as the heat moved steadily east, ski areas shut down and golf courses opened.

And truth be told, it felt pretty good. Most people caught in the torrid zones probably reacted pretty much like President Obama: “It gets you a little nervous about what is happening to global temperatures,” he told the audience assembled at a fundraiser at Tyler Perry’s Atlanta mansion (records were falling in Georgia too). “On the other hand I have really enjoyed the nice weather.”

Anyone thinking about the seasons ahead was at least as ambivalent, and most were scared. Here are a few of the things that could happen with staggering warmth like this early in the year:

The plants that have budded out prematurely (there’s fruit budding across the nation’s Apple Belt) can be easily killed by the freezes that will come if temperatures revert to anything like normal. (Frost is common here, for instance, late into May).

The soils left exposed by the early retreat of snow will dry out much earlier in the growing season, raising dramatically the risk of drought.

Forests dry out too. In recent years three-quarters of the big fires across the West have come in years when snow melted well ahead of schedule. Across the East the next six or eight weeks, before trees are fully leafed out, will be scary for forest rangers unless we get heavy rains.

One could go on: mild winters and early springs allow ticks to spread into new places, carrying disease. Reservoirs can start evaporating early. We see wickedly strong storms along the frontal boundaries of these record-setting zones. But the real fears are the things we can’t anticipate, simply because we are moving into uncharted territory. We know that we can make a normal seasonal cycle, with variations within a typical range, work—we know, because we’ve done it as long as we’ve been here. But we’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing this week.

Except, of course, in the models that the climatologists have been printing out on their supercomputers for the last two decades. This is what climate change looks like, just like last year’s new record for multibillion-dollar weather disasters is what climate change looks like. As Masters put it in a recent blog post, notable for its understatement, “it is very unlikely that the intensity of the heat would have been so great unless we were in a warming climate.”

One could make some sad jokes about the coincidence of Chicago’s record heat with the Illinois primary, or with the president’s tour this week of drilling rigs to convince Americans that he’s a great champion of fossil fuel (with a visit to a solar production facility thrown in for good measure). But the power of our politics seems puny this week compared to the power of the carbon we’ve unleashed for a century.

Still, one’s compelled to make a witness and put up a fight. On May 5, all around the world, 350.org is organizing a day for people to testify to the impacts of climate change. There will be Pakistanis forced from their homes in the worst flooding the country’s ever seen, and Somalians dealing with a drought horrible even by the standards of the Horn of Africa. Thais, who watched floods do damage last fall equal to 18 percent of the country’s GDP, and El Salvadorans who watched fifteen years’ worth of development wash away in a week of record rains. Lots of Americans were already planning to join in—Texans who watched drought kill half a billion trees there last year, Vermonters who saw the state dam near wash away in the wake of Irene. But now they’ll have more company.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/90-degrees-winter-what-climate-change-looks/
The Great Carbon Bubblehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-carbon-bubble/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenFeb 7, 2012Why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet—as we shall see—it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in forty years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The US and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western United States is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded US history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history—56 percent  of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered fourteen weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data—statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet—you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40 percent over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the sixteen authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons—five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything—including fund an endless campaigns of lies—to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the US Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil—believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain—pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself—not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt—and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-carbon-bubble/
Buying Congress in 2012https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/buying-congress-2012/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJan 5, 2012Time to stop being cynical about corporate money in politics and start being angry.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. Click here to listen to the author discuss how the rest of us can compete with a system in which money talks. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve. I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail  in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We  won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.

A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.  Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline.  Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.

That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot. Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit.  After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”

As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.

Buying Congress

I know that cynics — call them realists, if you prefer — will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.

We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.

They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs.  Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.

If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?

And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten$1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in  $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.

If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue.  Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get.  Which is fine — I am an employee.

But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.

If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer. But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism.  That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.

Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks. This really matters.  The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers.  That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.

It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.

Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.

Whose Money?  Whose Washington?

I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.

Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted.  Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.

To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before. This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.

Still, there’s a chance.  The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.

It’s fertile ground for action.  After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.

To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”

We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/buying-congress-2012/
Is Global Warming an Election Issue After All?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/global-warming-election-issue-after-all/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenNov 15, 2011Climate change might be more important to voters than most politicians think.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in—and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.

The pipeline decision was a true upset.  Everyone—and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work—seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders”—that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

Transcanada Pipeline, the company that was going to build the 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar-sands fields of Alberta, Canada, through a sensitive Midwestern aquifer to the Gulf of Mexico, certainly agreed.  After all, they’d already mowed the strip and prepositioned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pipe, just waiting for the permit they thought they’d bought with millions in lobbying gifts and other maneuvers. Happily, activists across the country weren’t smart enough to know they’d been beaten, and so they staged the largest civil disobedience action in 35 years, not to mention ringing the White House with people, invading Obama campaign offices, and generally proving that they were willing to fight.

No permanent victory was won. Indeed, just yesterday Transcanada agreed to reroute the pipeline in Nebraska in an effort to speed up the review, though that appears not to change the schedule.  Still, we’re waiting for the White House to clarify that they will continue to fully take climate change into account in their evaluation.  But even that won’t be final.  Obama could just wait for an election victory and then approve the pipeline—as any Republican victor certainly would.  Chances are, nonetheless, that the process has now gotten so messy that Transcanada’s pipeline will die of its own weight, in turn starving the tar-sands oil industry and giving a boost to the global environment.  Of course, killing the pipeline will hardly solve the problem of global warming (though heavily exploiting those tar sands would, in NASA scientist James Hansen’s words, mean “game over for the climate.”) 

In this line of work, where victories of any kind are few and far between, this was a real win.  It began with indigenous activists, spread to Nebraska ranchers, and eventually turned into the biggest environmental flashpoint in many years.  And it owed no small debt to the Occupy Wall Street protesters shamefully evicted from Zuccotti Park last night, who helped everyone understand the power of corporate money in our daily lives.  That these forces prevailed shocked most pundits precisely because it’s common wisdom that they’re not the sort of voters who count, certainly not in a year of economic trouble. 

In fact, the biggest reason the realists had no doubts the pipeline would get its permit, via a State Department review and a presidential thumbs-up of that border-crossing pipeline, was because of the well-known political potency of the jobs argument in bad economic times. Despite endless lazy reporting on the theme of jobs versus the environment, there were actually no net jobs to be had from the pipeline. It was always a weak argument, since the whole point of a pipeline is that, once it’s built, no one needs to work there.  In addition, as the one study not paid for by Transcanada made clear, the project would kill as many jobs as it would create. 

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson finally demonstrated this late in the game with a fine report taking apart Transcanada’s job estimates. (The 20,000 jobs endlessly taken for granted assumed, among other stretches, that modern dance troupes would move to Nebraska, where part of the pipeline would be built, to entertain pipeline workers.)  Still, the jobs trope remained, and you can be sure that the Chamber of Commerce will run 1,000 ads during the 2012 presidential campaign trying to hammer it home. And you can be sure the White House knew that, which was why it was such a tough call for them—and why the pressure of a movement among people whose support matters to them made a difference.

Let’s assume the obvious then: that one part of their recent calculations that led to the postponement decision might just be the suspicion that they will actually win votes thanks to the global-warming question in the next election. 

For one thing, global warming denial has seen its apogee. The concerted effort by the fossil-fuel industry to underwrite scientific revision met its match last month when a team headed by Berkeley skeptic and prominent physicist Richard Muller– with funding from the Koch Brothers, of all people—actually found that, what do you know, all the other teams of climate-change scientists were, um, right. The planet was indeed warming just as fast as they, and the insurance companies, and the melting ice had been insisting.

Still, scientific studies only reach a certain audience.  Weird weather is a far more powerful messenger. It’s been hard to miss the record flooding along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and across the Northeast; the record drought and fires across the Southwest; the record multi-billion dollar weather disasters across the country this year; the record pretty-much everything-you-don’t-want across the nation. Obama certainly noticed.  He’s responsible for finding the cash every time some other state submerges.

As a result, after years of decline, the number of Americans who understand that the planet is indeed warming and that we’re to blame appears to be on the rise again. And ironically enough, one reason may be the spectacle of all the tea-partying GOP candidates for the presidency being forced to swear fealty to the notion that global warming is a hoax. Normal people find this odd: it’s one thing to promise Grover Norquist that you’ll never ever raise taxes; it’s another to promise that you’ll defeat chemistry and physics with the mighty power of the market.

Along these lines, Mitt Romney made an important unforced error last month. Earlier in the primaries, he and Jon Huntsman had been alone in the Republican field in being open to the idea that global warming might actually be real. Neither wanted to do anything about it, of course, but that stance itself was enough to mark them as realists.  It was also a sign that Romney was thinking ahead to the election itself, and didn’t want to be pinned against this particular wall.

In late October, however, he evidently felt he had no choice but to pin himself to exactly that wall and so stated conclusively: “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.” In other words, he not only flip-flopped to the side of climate denial, but did so less than six months after he had said no less definitively: “I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course, but I believe the world’s getting warmer… And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”  Note as well that he did so, while all the evidence, even some recently funded by the deniers, pointed the other way.

If he becomes the Republican presidential candidate as expected, this may be the most powerful weathervane ad the White House will have in its arsenal.  Even for people who don’t care about climate change, it makes him look like the spinally challenged fellow he seems to be. But it’s an ad that couldn’t be run if the president had okayed that pipeline. 

Now that Obama has at least temporarily blocked Keystone XL, now that his team has promised to consider climate change as a factor in any final decision on the pipeline’s eventual fate, he can campaign on the issue. And in many ways, it may prove a surprise winner.

After all, only people who would never vote for him anyway deny global warming.  It’s a redoubt for talk-show rightists. College kids, on the other hand, consistently rank it among the most important issues. And college kids, as Gerald Seib pointed out in the Wall Street Journal last week, are a key constituency for the president, who is expected to need something close to the two-thirds margin he won on campus in 2008 to win again in 2012.

Sure, those kids care about student loans, which threaten to take them under, and jobs, which are increasingly hard to come by, but the nature of young people is also to care about the world.  In addition, independent voters, suburban moms—these are the kinds of people who worry about the environment.  Count on it: they’ll be key targets for Obama’s presidential campaign.

Given the economy, that campaign will have to make Mitt Romney look like something other than a middle-of-the-road businessman.  If he’s a centrist, he probably wins. If he’s a flip-flopper with kooky tendencies, they’ve got a shot. And the kookiest thing he’s done yet is to deny climate science.

If I’m right, expect the White House to approve strong greenhouse gas regulations in the months ahead, and then talk explicitly about the threat of a warming world. In some ways it will still be a stretch.  To put the matter politely, they’ve been far from perfect on the issue: the president didn’t bother to waste any of his vaunted “political capital” on a climate bill, and he’s opened huge swaths of territory to coal mining and offshore drilling.

But blocking the pipeline finally gave him some credibility here—and it gave a lot more of the same to citizens’ movements to change our world. Since a lot of folks suspect that the only way forward economically has something to do with a clean energy future, I’m guessing that the pipeline decision won’t be the only surprise. I bet Barack Obama talks on occasion about global warming next year, and I bet it helps him.

But don’t count on that, or on Keystone XL disappearing, and go home.  If the pipeline story (so far) has one lesson, it’s this: you can’t expect anything to change if you don’t go out and change it yourself.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/global-warming-election-issue-after-all/
Obama’s Failing E-mails: Where Did the President’s Mojo Go?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/barack-obama-tar-sands-pipeline/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenOct 11, 2011Do the president's campaign e-mails and leadership style in general betray the heavy hand of big oil on his administration?

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

For connoisseurs, Barack Obama’s fundraising e-mails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn—slightly limp reminders of the last time ’round.

Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular flow of e-mail from the Obama campaign. The missives were actually exciting to get, because they seemed less like appeals for money than a chance to join a movement.

Sometimes they came with inspirational videos from Camp Obama, especially the volunteer training sessions staged by organizing guru Marshall Ganz. Here’s a favorite of mine, where a woman invokes Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez and says that, as the weekend went on, she “felt her heart softening,” her cynicism “melting,” her determination building. I remember that feeling, and I remember clicking time and again to send another $50 off to fund that people-powered mission. (And I recall knocking on a lot of New Hampshire doors, too, with my 14-year-old daughter.)

It’s no wonder, then, that I’m still on the e-mail list. But I haven’t been clicking through this time. Not even when Barack Obama himself asked me to “donate $75 or more today to be automatically entered for a chance to join me for dinner.” Not even when campaign manager Jim Messina pointed out that, though “the president has very little time to spend on anything related to the campaign…this is how he chooses to spend it—having real, substantive conversations with people like you” over the dinner you might just win. (And if you do win, you’ll be put on a plane to “Washington, or Chicago, or wherever he might be that day.”)

Not even when deputy campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon offered to let me “take ownership of this campaign” by donating to it and, as an “added bonus,” possibly find myself “across the table from the president.” Not even when Michelle lowered the entry price from $75 to $25 and offered this bit of reassurance: “Just relax. Barack wants this dinner to be fun, and he really loves getting to know supporters like you.” Not even when, hours before an end-of-September fundraising “deadline,” Barack himself dropped the asking price to three dollars. God, have a little self-respect man! Three dollars?

Here’s the thing I’m starting to think Obama never understood: yes, for most of us the 2008 campaign was partly about him, but it was more about the campaign itself—about the sudden feeling of power that gripped a web-enabled populace, who felt themselves able to really, truly hope. Hope that maybe they’d found a candidate who would escape the tried-and-true money corruption of Washington.

None of us gave $50 hoping for a favor. Quite the opposite. You gave $50 hoping that, for the first time in a long while in American politics, no one would get a favor. And the candidate, it must be said, led us on. His rhetorical flights were dazzling—to environmentalists like me, he promised to “free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all,” and pledged that his administration would mark the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Once in office, it was inevitable that he’d disappoint us to some degree. In fact, we knew the disappointment would come and braced ourselves for it. After all, our movement was up against the staggering power of vested corporate and financial interests. It’s hard to beat Big Money. Still, we didn’t mind thinking: Yes, we can. We’ll work hard. We’ve got your back. Let’s go!

What we completely missed was that Obama didn’t want us at his back—that the minute the campaign was over he would cut us adrift, jettison the movement that had brought him to power. Instead of using all those millions of people to force through ambitious healthcare proposals or serious climate legislation or (fill in the blank yourself here), he governed as the opposite of a movement candidate.

He clearly had not the slightest interest in keeping that network activated and engaged. Though we had brought him to the party, it was as if he didn’t really want to dance with us. Instead—however painful the image may be—he wanted to dance with Larry Summers. (Fundraising idea: I’d pay $75 to be assured I never had to have dinner with Summers.)

As the months of his administration rolled into years, he only seemed to grow less interested in movements of any sort. Before long, people like Tom Donahue, president and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, were topping the list of the most frequent visitors to the White House. And that was before this winter when—after they’d been the biggest contributors to GOP Congressional candidates—Obama went on bended knee to the chamber’s headquarters, apologizing that he hadn’t brought a fruitcake along as a gift. (What is it with this guy and food? At any rate, he soon gave them a far better present, hiring former chamber insider Bill Daley as his chief of staff.)

Now, his popularity tanking, Obama and his advisors talk about “tacking left” for the election. A nice thought, but maybe just a little late.

Increasingly, it seems to me, those of us who were ready to move with him four years ago are deciding to leave normal channels and find new forms of action. Here’s an example: by year’s end the president has said he will make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. The nation’s top climate scientists sent the administration a letter indicating that such a development would be disastrous for the climate. NASA’s James Hansen, the government’s top climate researcher, said heavily tapping tar-sands oil, a particularly “dirty” form of fossil fuel, would mean “game over for the climate.” Ten of the president’s fellow recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates pointed out in a letter that blocking the prospective pipeline would offer him a real leadership moment, a “tremendous opportunity to begin transition away from our dependence on oil, coal, and gas.”

But every indication from this administration suggests that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for a project that has the enthusiastic backing of the Chamber of Commerce, and in which the Koch Brothers have a “direct and substantial interest.” And not just backing. To use the words of a recent New York Times story, they are willing to “flout the intent of federal law” to get it done. Check this out as well: the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review. That company already considered itself a “major client” of TransCanada. This is simply corrupt, potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years. And here’s the thing: it’s a crime still in progress. Watching the president do nothing to stop it is endlessly depressing.

For many of us, it’s been an overdue wake-up call, a sharp reminder of just whom the president was really listening to. In mid-summer, several leaders of the environmental movement, myself included, put out a call for nonviolent civil disobedience at the White House over the upcoming Keystone pipeline decision. And more people—1,253 in total—showed up to be arrested than at anytime in the last forty years. (One reason Obama’s e-mails stink this time around: the guy who used to write many of them, Elijah Zarlin, not only isn’t working for the campaign any more but got hauled off in a paddy wagon.)

Bare months have past and already that arrest record is being threatened, thank heavens, by the forces of #OccupyWallStreet, a movement that includes plenty more of the kind of people who rallied so enthusiastically behind Obama back in 2008.

Obama had mojo when he knew it wasn’t about him, that it was about change. But when you promise change, you have to deliver. His last best opportunity may come with that Keystone Pipeline decision, which he can make entirely by himself, without our inane Congress being able to get in the way. So on November 6, exactly one year before the election, we’re planning to circle the White House with people. And the signs we’ll be carrying will simply be quotes from his last campaign—all that stuff about the tyranny of big oil and the healing of the planet.

Our message will be simple: if you didn’t mean it, you shouldn’t have said it. If you did, here’s the chance to prove it. Nix the pipeline.

We don’t want dinner. We want action.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/barack-obama-tar-sands-pipeline/
Lessons From Central Cell Blockhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lessons-central-cell-block/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenAug 29, 2011Dan Choi got arrested for protesting Keystone XL, even though climate change isn't "his" issue. This is what solidarity looks like.

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I’m a wuss.

I figured that out on August 20, when a guard was leading me down the cellblock in manacles and leg irons, and I looked through the bars of one cage, and there was Dan Choi, the former Army lieutenant turned gay rights activist.

I knew he’d been arrested with us that morning outside the White House, protesting a climate-killing pipeline called Keystone XL, planned to run from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. But it was only now, in the DC jail’s Central Cell Block, that it really struck me what his participation meant. He’d been down this road before—arrested three times outside the White House, galvanizing the successful effort to end “don’t ask, don’t tell”—so unlike the rest of us, he had a pretty good sense of how his day would end. He did it anyway.

He did it even though climate change isn’t his issue. I didn’t come forward to do time for gay marriage, or immigration reform or any of the other things I believe in; I’m an environmentalist. So looking at Dan made me understand what solidarity looks like—how those of us on the fringe should be uniting to provide common pressure on an administration and a Congress that rarely feels enough heat to veer from the corporate status quo.

Mostly, though, I felt like a wuss—and not just because I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to come back to prison (two nights in Central Cell Block is exactly as much fun as it sounds like). I felt like a wuss because this kind of tough politics scares me. It’s hard for me to take on a president I worked to elect, hard to say the plain truth: that on environmental issues he’s been content to make small changes around the edge but unwilling to use the power of his office to make real change.

Take this pipeline, for example; it should be the easiest of calls. It will be the main outlet for oil from what is the second-largest pool of carbon on the planet, after only Saudi Arabia. But when we struck oil in Saudi Arabia we didn’t know about global warming. Now we do—enough to know that if we fully develop this field, in the words of NASA scientist James Hansen, it’s “essentially game over for the climate.” Any president who heard those words from his most renowned federal atmospheric scientist would, you think, stop the project dead. Especially a president who, on the night of his nomination, promised that during his presidency the “rise of the oceans will begin to slow, and the planet begin to heal.”

And yet the administration has done nothing of the sort. The State Department gave the project a green light in its environmental impact statement, dismissing the threat of sharp increases in carbon emissions. The usual Washington chicanery has been fully in evidence: the pipeline company hired Hillary Clinton’s former deputy campaign manager as its chief lobbyist, and Wikileaks documents showed American envoys working with the Canadian oil barons to produce “favorable media coverage.” President Obama, by all insider accounts, is likely to sign the “certificate of national interest” the project requires. Faced with a choice between the base that elected him and Big Oil, everyone assumes the president will go with Exxon.

What makes it so egregious is that the president, for once, can’t blame Congress. The House and Senate have no role in this process.

Which is why we’ve been out here in front of the White House going on two weeks, with a new wave of fifty to 100 people showing up every morning to get arrested. It’s mostly old people—I’m 50, and I was on the younger edge of people in my cellblock. We’re wearing suits and ties. We’re being as polite as can be—even to the president. Instead of saying, “We won’t vote for you if you do the wrong thing,” we’re saying, “Think how charged-up your supporters will be if you do the right thing.” That’s a good political argument, I think—one look at the 2010 elections demonstrates the problem of a demoralized base—but maybe it’s too wussy for our political moment. Maybe we need to say: you promised certain things, and you aren’t delivering. Why should we follow you any more?

There’s at least some sign the protests are making a difference. Within the normally fractious environmental movement, the leaders of every major group came together on the fifth day of the protests to issue a stronger letter to the president than I’ve ever seen them make. From the corporate-friendly Environmental Defense Fund to anti-corporate Greenpeace, one message: there’s not “an inch of daylight” between our positions on the pipeline and those of the people being arrested outside your house. Your decision will be “the biggest climate test between now and the election,” and you simply must block it. “We expect nothing less.”

The question, I suppose, will come if he allows the pipeline to proceed. Does the threat of a global-warming denier in the White House cause us to kiss and make up? I don’t know—like I said, I’m a wuss. But there’s clearly something in the air—progressive groups across a wide variety of issues are beginning to sense that they need Obama to keep his promises now, precisely so they can go to work for him with a clear heart. And we’re beginning to see that he’ll need us; in a New York Times article about the pipeline protests, Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political analyst said, “I think a year ago President Obama felt he could do things that might alienate his base and organizations important to the Democratic Party and get away with it because in the end most Democrats wouldn’t go for a Republican…. Now he might pay a price for it.”

It’s not a threat—it’s more just like reality. Physics and chemistry dictate that we can’t put more carbon into the atmosphere; political science dictates you can’t ignore your friends’ top priorities.

I don’t know how it all comes out; I don’t really know what to do. But I do know this: if my hands hadn’t been cuffed behind my back, I would have saluted Dan Choi when I went by his cell. He’s who I want to be when I grow up. 



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/lessons-central-cell-block/
Jailed Over Big Oil’s Attempt to Wreck a Planethttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jailed-over-big-oils-attempt-wreck-planet/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenAug 25, 2011Ongoing nonviolent protests in front of the White House are urging President Obama to stop a prospective 1,700-mile-long tar-sands pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days.

As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.

But frankly, I wasn’t up to it. The police, surprised by how many people turned out on the first day of two weeks of protests at the White House, decided to teach us a lesson. As they told our legal team, they wanted to deter anyone else from coming — and so with our first crew they were… kind of harsh.

We spent three days in D.C.’s Central Cell Block, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it might be. You lie on a metal rack with no mattress or bedding and sweat in the high heat; the din is incessant; there’s one baloney sandwich with a cup of water every 12 hours.

I didn’t have a pencil — they wouldn’t even let me keep my wedding ring — but more important, I didn’t have the peace of mind to write something. It’s only now, out 12 hours and with a good night’s sleep under my belt, that I’m able to think straight. And so, as I said, I’ll go to this weekend’s big celebrations for the opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall with even more respect for his calm power.

Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest:

First, it made Keystone XL — the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico — into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organizing against it. (And with good reason: tar sands mining has already wrecked huge swaths of native land in Alberta, and endangers farms, wild areas, and aquifers all along its prospective route.)

Now, however, people are coming to understand — as we hoped our demonstrations would highlight — that it poses a danger to the whole planet as well.  After all, it’s the Earth’s second largest pool of carbon, and hence the second-largest potential source of global warming gases after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. We’ve already plumbed those Saudi deserts.  Now the question is: Will we do the same to the boreal forests of Canada. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has made all too clear, if we do so it’s “essentially game over for the climate.” That message is getting through.  Witness the incredibly strong New York Times editorial opposing the building of the pipeline that I was handed on our release from jail.

Second, being arrested in front of the White House helped make it clearer that President Obama should be the focus of anti-pipeline activism. For once Congress isn’t in the picture.  The situation couldn’t be simpler: the president, and the president alone, has the power either to sign the permit that would take the pipeline through the Midwest and down to Texas (with the usual set of disastrous oil spills to come) or block it.

Barack Obama has the power to stop it and no one in Congress or elsewhere can prevent him from doing so.  That means — and again, it couldn’t be simpler — that the Keystone XL decision is the biggest environmental test for him between now and the next election. If he decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008.

That’s why many of us were wearing our old campaign buttons when we went into the paddy wagon.  We’d like to remember — and like the White House to remember, too — just why we knocked on all those doors.

But as Dr. King might have predicted, the message went deeper. As people gather in Washington for this weekend’s dedication of his monument, most will be talking about him as a great orator, a great moral leader. And of course he was that, but it’s easily forgotten what a great strategist he was as well, because he understood just how powerful a weapon nonviolence can be.

The police, who trust the logic of force, never quite seem to get this. When they arrested our group of 70 or so on the first day of our demonstrations, they decided to teach us a lesson by keeping us locked up extra long — strong treatment for a group of people peacefully standing on a sidewalk.

No surprise, it didn’t work.  The next day an even bigger crowd showed up — and now, there are throngs of people who have signed up to be arrested every day until the protests end on September 3rd.  Not only that, a judge threw out the charges against our first group, and so the police have backed off.  For the moment, anyway, they’re not actually sending more protesters to jail, just booking and fining them.

And so the busload of ranchers coming from Nebraska, and the bio-fueled RV with the giant logo heading in from East Texas, and the flight of grandmothers arriving from Montana, and the tribal chiefs, and union leaders, and everyone else will keep pouring into D.C. We’ll all, I imagine, stop and pay tribute to Dr. King before or after we get arrested; it’s his lead, after all, that we’re following.

Our part in the weekend’s celebration is to act as a kind of living tribute. While people are up on the mall at the monument, we’ll be in the front of the White House, wearing handcuffs, making clear that civil disobedience is not just history in America.

We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day — the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/jailed-over-big-oils-attempt-wreck-planet/
Will North America Be the New Middle East?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/will-north-america-be-new-middle-east/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJul 14, 2011It's yes or no for a climate-killing oil pipeline slated to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico—and Obama gets to make the call.

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The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last eighteen months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”

There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutions to the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010. These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations. They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.

Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so—for the moment anyway—the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!

Two weeks ago, for instance, a few veteran environmentalists, myself included, issued a call for protest against Canada’s plans to massively expand oil imports from the tar sands regions of Alberta. We set up a new website, tarsandsaction.org, and judging from the early response, it could result in the largest civil disobedience actions in the climate-change movement’s history on this continent, as hundreds, possibly thousands, of concerned activists converge on the White House in August. They’ll risk arrest to demand something simple and concrete from President Obama: that he refuse to grant a license for Keystone XL, a new pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico that would vastly increase the flow of tar sands oil through the United States, ensuring that the exploitation of Alberta’s tar sands will only increase.

Forget the abstract and consider the down-and-dirty instead. You can undoubtedly guess some of the reasons for opposition to such a pipeline. It’s wrecking native lands in Canada, and potential spills from that pipeline could pollute some of the most important ranchlands and aquifers in America. (Last week’s Yellowstone River spill was seen by many as a sign of what to expect.)

There’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb. Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.

If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature. It won’t happen overnight, thank God, but according to the planet’s most important climatologist, James Hansen, burning even a substantial portion of that oil would mean it was “essentially game over” for the climate of this planet.

Halting that pipeline wouldn’t solve all tar sands problems. The Canadians will keep trying to get it out to market, but it would definitely ensure that more of that oil will stay in the ground longer and that, at least, would be a start. Even better, the politics of it are simple. For once, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives can’t get in the way. The president alone decides if the pipeline is “in the national interest.” There are, however, already worrisome signs within the Obama administration. Just this week, based on a State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, Neela Banerjee of the Los Angeles Times reported that, in 2009, the State Department’s "energy envoy" was already instructing Alberta’s fossil-fuel barons in how to improve their "oil sands messaging," including "increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories." This is the government version of Murdochian-style enviro-hacking, and it leads many to think that the new pipeline is already a done deal.

Still, the president can say no. If he does, then no pipeline—and in the words of Alberta’s oil minister, his province will be “landlocked in bitumen” (the basic substance from which tar-sands oil is extracted). Even energy-hungry China, eager as it is for new sources of fossil fuels, may not be able to save him, since native tribes are doing a remarkable job of blocking another proposed pipeline to the Canadian Pacific. Oil, oil everywhere, and nary a drop to sell. (Unfortunately that’s not quite true, but at least there won’t be a big new straw in this milkshake.)

An Obama thumbs-down on the pipeline could change the economics of the tar sands in striking ways. “Unless we get increased [market] access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary.

Faced with that prospect, Canada’s oilmen are growing desperate. Earlier this month, in a classic sleight of hand, they announced plans for a giant “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme at the tar sands. That’s because when it comes to global warming, tar sands oil is even worse than, say, Saudi oil because it’s a tarry muck, not a liquid, and so you have to burn a lot of natural gas to make it flow in the first place.

Now, the oil industry is proposing to capture some of the extra carbon from that cooking process and store it underground. This is an untested method, and the accounting scheme Alberta has adopted for it may actually increase the province’s emmissions. Even if it turns out to work perfectly and captures the carbon from that natural gas that would have escaped into the atmosphere, the oil they’re proposing to ship south for use in our gas tanks would still be exactly as bad for the atmosphere as Saudi crude. In other words, in the long run it would still be “essentially game over” for the climate.

The Saudis, of course, built their oil empire long before we knew that there was anything wrong with burning oil. The Canadians—with American help, if Obama obliges the oil lobby—are building theirs in the teeth of the greatest threat the world has ever faced. We can’t unbuild those Saudi Arabian fields, though happily their supplies are starting to slowly dwindle. What we can still do, though, is prevent North America from becoming the next Middle East.

So there will be a battle, and there will be nothing complicated or abstract about it. It will be based on one question: Does that carbon stay in the earth, or does it pour into the atmosphere? Given the trillions of dollars at stake it will be a hard fight, and there’s no guarantee of victory. But at least there’s no fog here, no maze of technicalities.

The last climate bill, the one the Senate punted on, was thousands of pages long. This time there’s a single sheet of paper, which Obama signs… or not.



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Three Strikes and You’re Hot: Time for Obama to Say No to the Fossil Fuel Wish Listhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/three-strikes-and-youre-hot-time-obama-say-no-fossil-fuel-wish-list/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenJun 2, 2011If we value the planet, we are going to have to get cruel and blunt about defending its beautiful geography from the fossil fuel industry. 

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades—those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.

But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal—and so all that future carbon dioxide—needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Doing so, however, would cost someone some money. At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining. It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we’re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet.

As Eric de Place of the Sightline Institute put it, “That’s more carbon pollution than all the energy—from planes, factories, cars, power plants, etc.—used in an entire year by all 44 nations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean combined.” Not what you’d expect from a president who came to office promising that his policies would cause the oceans to slow their rise.

But if Obama has admittedly opened the mine gate, it’s geography to the rescue. You still have to get that coal to market, and “market” in this case means Asia, where the demand for coal is growing fastest. The easiest and cheapest way to do that—maybe the only way at current prices—is to take it west to the Pacific where, at the moment, there’s no port capable of handling the huge increase in traffic it would represent.

And so a mighty struggle is beginning, with regional groups rising to the occasion. Climate Solutions and other environmentalists of the northwest are moving to block port-expansion plans in Longview and Bellingham, Washington, as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since there are only so many possible harbors that could accommodate the giant freighters needed to move the coal, this might prove a winnable battle, though the power of money that moves the White House is now being brought to bear on county commissions and state houses. Count on this: it will be a titanic fight.

Strike two against the Obama administration was the permission it granted early in the president’s term to build a pipeline into Minnesota and Wisconsin to handle oil pouring out of the tar sands of Alberta. (It came on the heels of a Bush administration decision to permit an earlier pipeline from those tar sands deposits through North Dakota to Oklahoma). The vast region of boreal Canada where the tar sands are found is an even bigger carbon bomb than the Powder River coal. By some calculations, the tar sands contain the equivalent of about 200 parts per million CO2—or roughly half the current atmospheric concentration. Put another way, if we burn it, there’s no way we can control climate change.

Fortunately, that sludge is stuck so far in the northern wilds of Canada that getting it to a refinery is no easy task. It’s not even easy to get the equipment needed to do the mining to the extraction zone, a fact that noble activists in the northern Rockies are exploiting with a campaign to block the trucks hauling the giant gear north. (Exxon has been cutting trees along wild and scenic corridors just to widen the roads in the region, that’s how big their “megaloads” are.)

Unfortunately, the administration’s decision to permit that Minnesota pipeline has made the job of sending the tar sand sludge south considerably easier. And now the administration is getting ready to double down, with a strike three that would ensure forever Obama’s legacy as a full-on Carbon President.

The huge oil interests that control the tar sands aren’t content with a landlocked pipeline to the Midwest. They want another, dubbed Keystone XL, that stretches from Canada straight to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It would take the bitumen from the tar sands and pipe it across the heart of America. Imagine a video game where your goal is to do the most environmental damage possible: to the Cree and their ancestral lands in Canada, to Nebraska farmers trying to guard the Ogallala aquifer that irrigates their land, and of course to the atmosphere.

But the process is apparently politically wired and in a beautifully bipartisan Washington way. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must approve the plan for Keystone XL because it crosses our borders. Last year, before she’d even looked at the relevant data, she said she was “inclined” to do so. And why not? I mean, the company spearheading the Keystone project, TransCanada, has helpfully hired her former deputy national campaign director as its principal lobbyist.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, those oil barons the Koch Brothers and that fossil fuel front group the US Chamber of Commerce are pushing for early approval. Michigan Republican Congressman Fred Upton, chair of the House Energy Committee, is already demanding that the project be fast-tracked, with a final approval decision by November, on the grounds that it would create jobs. This despite the fact that even the project’s sponsors concede it won’t reduce gas prices. In fact, as Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation pointed out in testimony to Congress last month, their own documents show that the pipeline will probably cause the price at the pump to rise across the Midwest.

When the smaller pipeline was approved in 2009, we got a taste of the arguments that the administration will use this time around, all masterpieces of legal obfuscation. Don’t delay the pipeline over mere carbon worries will be the essence of it.

Global warming concerns, said Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg then, would be “best addressed in the context of the overall set of domestic policies that Canada and the United States will take to address their respective greenhouse gas emissions.” In other words, let’s confine the environmental argument over the pipeline to questions like: How much oil will leak? In the meantime, we’ll pretend to deal with climate change somewhere else.

It’s the kind of thinking that warms the hearts of establishments everywhere. Michael Levi, author of a Council on Foreign Relations study of the Canadian oil sands, told the Washington Post that, with the decision, “the Obama administration made clear that it’s not going to go about its climate policy in a crude, blunt way.” No, it’s going about it in a smooth and… oily way.

If we value the one planet we’ve got, it’s going to be up to the rest of us to be crude and blunt. And happily that planet is pitching in. The geography of this beautiful North American continent is on our side: it’s crude and blunt, full of mountains and canyons. Its weather runs to extremes. It’s no easy thing to build a pipeline across it, or to figure out how to run an endless parade of train cars to the Pacific.

Tough terrain aids the insurgent; it slows the powerful. Though we’re fighting a political campaign and not a military one, we need to take full advantage.



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How the Chamber of Commerce Darkens the Skieshttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-chamber-commerce-darkens-skies/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenFeb 22, 2011Call it money pollution. The torrents of cash now pouring unchecked into our political system cloud judgment and obscure science.

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The article originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

In Beijing, they celebrate when they have a “blue sky day,” when, that is, the haze clears long enough so that you can actually see the sun. Many days, you can’t even make out the next block.

Washington, by contrast, looks pretty clean: white marble monuments, broad, tree-lined avenues, the beautiful, green spread of the mall. But its inhabitants—at least those who vote in Congress—can’t see any more clearly than the smoke-shrouded residents of Beijing.

Their view, however, is obscured by a different kind of smog. Call it money pollution. The torrents of cash now pouring unchecked into our political system cloud judgment and obscure science. Money pollution matters as much as or more than the other kind of dirt. That money is the single biggest reason that, as the planet swelters through the warmest years in the history of civilization, we have yet to take any real action as a nation on global warming.

And if you had to pick a single “power plant” whose stack was spewing out the most smoke? No question about it, that would be the US Chamber of Commerce, whose headquarters are conveniently located directly across the street from the White House. On its webpage, the chamber brags that it’s the biggest lobby in Washington, “consistently leading the pack in lobbying expenditures.”

The group spent as much as $33 million trying to influence the midterm 2010 elections, and has announced that it will beat that in 2012. That, of course, is its right, especially now that the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, opened the floodgates for corporate speech (as in “money talks”).

But the chamber does what it does with a twist. It claims to represent “three million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” The organization, that is, seems to speak for a country full of barbers and florists, car dealers, restaurant owners, and insurance salesmen, not to mention the small entrepreneurs who make up local and state chambers of commerce across the country.

At least when it comes to energy and climate, though, that claim is, politely put, a fib. The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t have to say where it gets its money, but last year a group called U.S. ChamberWatch used one of the last disclosure laws still in existence to uncover a single pertinent fact. They went to the headquarters of the chamber and asked to see its IRS 990 form. It showed that 55 percent of its funding came from just sixteen companies, each of which gave more than a million dollars. It doesn’t have to say which companies, but by their deeds shall you know them.

The chamber has long opposed environmental standards. In the 1980s, it fought a ban on the dumping of hazardous waste. In the 1990s, it fought smog and soot standards. On climate change, though, it’s gone pretty near berserk.

In 2009, for instance, one of its officials even demanded a “twenty-first-century Scopes monkey trial” for global warming: “It would be the science of climate change on trial,” the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology, and regulatory affairs explained.

That didn’t go over so well. Several high-profile companies quit the chamber. Apple Computer, the very exemplar of the universe of cutting-edge technology, explained: “We would prefer that the chamber take a more progressive stance on this critical issue and play a constructive role in addressing the climate crisis.”

Other businesses complained that they hadn’t been consulted. Some, like Nike, quit the organization’s board. “We just weren’t clear in how decisions on climate and energy were being made,” said a Nike spokesman.

One thing was for sure: they weren’t being made by 3 million small businesses—because many local chambers of commerce started quitting the chamber as well. From Florida and South Carolina to Missouri and Kansas, from Colorado and Pennsylvania to New Hampshire and Washington, dozens of local chambers have announced that the US Chamber doesn’t speak for them on these issues. In Largo, Florida, for instance, the head of the local chamber explained that the US Chamber was composed, “for the most part, of political action committees and business lobbyists. They hold little resemblance to the local chambers of commerce that have been the cornerstone of their communities for generations.”

Faced with that kind of incipient rebellion, the chamber backtracked just a little, issuing a statement saying that they didn’t really want a global warming version of a monkey trial after all, and that climate change was an “important issue.” (The same statement went on to call for transforming the United States into the “Saudi Arabia of clean coal.”)

The happy talk in public, however, has done nothing to change the agenda the chamber pushes so powerfully in private. The same year as that statement, for instance, the organization petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to take no action on global warming on the grounds that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.”

Now, read that again. No suggestion here that sixteen dinosaur companies adapt their business model to a reality that now includes melting ice caps, desertification and massive flooding, ever fiercer storms and acidifying oceans. Instead, they would prefer that every human being (and every other species) be so kind as to adapt their behavior and physiology to the needs of this tiny coterie of massive contributors. Forever.

What’s become clear is that the US Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1912, more than a century after the first local chamber came into being, is anything but a benign umbrella for American small businesses. Quite the opposite: it’s a hard-edged ideological shop. It was Glenn Beck, after all, who said of the chamber that “they are us,” and urged his viewers to send them money. (Beck personally contributed $10,000 of the $32 million he earned in 2009.) The chamber’s chief lobbyist even called in to offer his personal thanks. It shouldn’t have come as a great surprise: Beck’s Fox News parent, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had given its own million-dollar donation to the chamber.

Thanks to the Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, there’s no way to keep the chamber and others from running their shadowy election-time campaigns. As long as monster companies are pumping money into their coffers, it’s “free speech” all the way and they’ll simply keep on with their dodgy operations.

Still, the rest of us can stand up and be counted. We can tell the Congressional representatives taking their money that they don’t speak for us. We can urge more big companies to act like Apple and Microsoft, which publicly denounced the chamber. (It’s good to hear Levi Strauss, General Electric, and Best Buy making similar noises.) We need to hear from more dissenting chambers of commerce. It cheered me to find that the CEO of the Greater New York Chamber said, “They don’t represent me,” or to discover that just a few weeks ago the Seattle chamber cut its ties.

But it’s even more important to hear from small businesspeople, the very contingent the US Chamber of Commerce draws on for its credibility. Across America in the coming months, volunteers from the climate change organization I helped to found, 350.org, will be fanning out to canvass local businesses—all those bakeries and beauty salons, colleges and chiropractors, pharmacies and fitness centers that belong to local chambers of commerce.

The volunteers will be asking for signatures on a statement announcing that “the US Chamber doesn’t speak for me,” and offering businesspeople the chance to post videos expressing just how differently they do think when it comes to global warming, energy and the environment. It’s a chance to emphasize that American business should be about nimbleness, creativity and adaptation—that it’s prepared to cope with changing circumstances, instead of using political cash to ensure that yesterday’s technologies remain on artificial life support.

It’s easy to guess how the US Chamber of Commerce will respond to this campaign. Last week, a series of leaks showed that their law firm had been carrying out extended negotiations with at least one “security firm” to collect intelligence on the chamber’s adversaries, including the group that uncovered the tax data showing where their money came from. Once the leak was made public, the chamber’s law firm cut off the negotiations, but not before they received “samples” of the kind of intelligence they presumably wanted—pictures of their opponents’ children, for instance, or the news that one foe attended a “Jewish church” near Washington.

For the record: I don’t like the chamber’s deceptions. I belong to the Methodist church in my hometown. Keep away from my daughter.

With my colleagues at 350.org, I’ll do what I can to help undermine the chamber’s claim to represent American business. I don’t know if we can win this fight against money pollution, but we’re going to do what we can to clear the air.



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Why Obama and Cancún Miss the Pointhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-obama-and-cancun-miss-point/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenDec 16, 2010You can't bargain about global warming with chemistry and physics. 

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This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch.

The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. "The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as "the best we could achieve at this point in a long process."           

The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?

On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún.

And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even talking about climate.

Barack Obama was in Washington, holding a press conference to discuss the liberal insurgency against his taxation agreement with the Republicans. He said he’d fought hard for a deal and resented the criticism. He harked back to the health-care fight when what his press secretary had called the “professional left” (and Rahm Emanuel had called “retards”) scorned him for not winning a “public option.” They were worse than wrong, he said; they were contemptible, people who wanted to “be able to feel good about ourselves, and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.” Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he continued: when he started Social Security it only covered widows and orphans. Medicare, at its start, only helped a relative few. Sanctimonious purists would have considered them “betrayals of some abstract ideal.” And yet they grew.

It was powerful and interesting stuff, especially coming from a man who ran on abstract ideals. (I have t-shirts on which are printed nothing but his name and abstract ideals.) I don’t know enough about health-care policy or tax policy to be sure whether he’s making a good call or not, though after listening to much of Bernie Sanders’s nearly nine-hour near-filibuster I have my doubts.

I do know the one place where the president’s reasonable compromises simply won’t work—a place where we have absolutely no choice but to steer by abstract ideals.  That place is the climate.

The terms of the climate change conundrum aren’t set by contending ideologies, whose adherents can argue till the end of time about whether tax cuts create jobs or kill them. In the case of global warming, chemistry rules, which means there are lines, hard and fast. Those of you who remember your periodic table will recall how neat that can be.  There’s no shading between one element and the next. It’s either gallium or it’s zinc. There’s no zallium, no ginc. You might say that the elements are, in that sense, abstract ideals.

So are the molecules those elements combine to form. Take carbon dioxide (CO2), the most politically charged molecule on Earth. As the encyclopedia says: “At standard pressure and temperature the density of carbon dioxide is around 1.98 kg/m3, about 1.5 times that of air. The carbon dioxide molecule (O=C=O) contains two double bonds and has a linear shape.”  Oh, and that particular molecular structure traps heat near the planet that would otherwise radiate back out into space, giving rise to what we call the greenhouse effect.

As of January 2008, our best climatologists gave us a number for how much carbon in the atmosphere is too much. At concentrations above 350 parts per million (ppm), a NASA team insisted, we can’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” We’re already past that; we’re at 390 ppm. Which is why 2010 will be the warmest year on record, almost a degree Celsius above the planet’s natural average, according to federal researchers. Which is why the Arctic melted again this summer, and Russia caught fire, and Pakistan drowned.

So here’s the thing:  Just as in Copenhagen, Obama’s delegation in Cancún has been arguing for an agreement that would limit atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to 450 parts per million, and the cuts they’ve been proposing might actually produce a world of about 550 parts per million.

Why have they been defying the science? The answer isn’t complicated: because it’s politically difficult. As chief negotiator Todd Stern said last year in Copenhagen, “We’re very, very mindful of the importance of our domestic legislation. That’s a core principle for me and everyone else working on this. You can’t jeopardize that.”

In other words, if we push too hard the Senate will say no, and the oil companies will be really, really pissed. So we’ll take the easy way. We’ll negotiate with nature, and with the rest of the world, the same way we negotiate with the Republicans.

It’s completely understandable; in fact, it’s even more understandable now that the GOP has increased its muscle in Congress. In that context, even the tepid text drafted in Cancún goes too far. Four Republican Senators sent Obama a letter earlier this month telling him to stop using any foreign aid funds to tackle climate change.  If I were Obama I’d want to make some kind of deal, and consider any deal as the start down a path to better things.

The problem, again, is the chemistry and the physics. They don’t give us much time, and they’re bad at haggling. If we let this planet warm much longer, scientists tell us that we’ll lose forever the chance of getting back to 350.  That means we’ll lose forever the basic architecture of our planet with its frozen poles. Already the ocean is turning steadily more acidic; already the atmosphere is growing steadily wetter, which means desertifying evaporation in arid areas and downpour and deluge elsewhere.

Political reality is hard to change, harder than ever since the Supreme Court delivered its Citizens United decision and loosed floods of more money into our political world. But physics and chemistry are downright impossible to shift.  Physics and chemistry don’t bargain. So the president, and all the rest of us, had really better try a little harder.  The movement we’ve launched at 350.org has spread around the world, but it needs to get much stronger. Because this one time, in the usually messy conduct of human affairs, reaching an abstract ideal is our only hope.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-obama-and-cancun-miss-point/
Is Obama Afraid of Solar Power?https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-afraid-solar-power/Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Vidya Muthupillai,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,David Helvarg,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Eddie Bautista,LaTonya Crisp-Sauray,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibben,Bill McKibbenSep 16, 2010If the administration is serious about renewable energy, why won't it put solar panels on the roof of the White House?

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This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch.
 
I got to see the now-famous enthusiasm gap up close and personal last week, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

The backstory: I help run a global warming campaign called 350.org. In midsummer, we decided to organize an effort to ask world leaders to put solar panels on the roofs of their residences. It was to be part of the lead-up to a gigantic Global Work Party on October 10 (10-10-10), and a way to give prime ministers and politburos something easy to do in the hope of getting the fight against global warming slowly back on track. One of those crucial leaders is, of course, Barack Obama, who stood by with his arms folded this summer while the Senate punted on climate-change legislation. We thought this might be a good way for him to signal that he was still committed to change, even though he hadn’t managed to pass new laws.

And so we tracked down the solar panels that once had graced the White House roof, way back in the 1970s under Jimmy Carter. After Ronald Reagan took them down, they’d spent the last few decades on the cafeteria roof at Unity College in rural Maine. That college’s president, Mitch Thomashow, immediately offered us a panel to take back to the White House. Better still, he encouraged three of his students to accompany the panel, not to mention allowing the college’s sustainability coordinators to help manage the trip.

And so, on the day after Labor Day, we set off in a biodiesel college van. Solar road trip! Guitars, iPods, excellent snack food and, for company, the rock star of solar panels, all 6 x 3 feet and 140 pounds of her. We pulled into Boston that first night for a rally at Old South Church, where a raucous crowd lined up for the chance to sign the front of the panel, which quickly turned into a giant glass petition. The same thing the next night in New York, and then DC, with an evening at one of the city’s oldest churches headlined by the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, head of the Hip-Hop Caucus.

It couldn’t have been more fun. Wherever we could, we’d fire up the panel, pour a gallon of water in the top, point it toward the sun, and eight or nine minutes later you’d have steaming hot water coming out the bottom. Thirty-one years old and it worked like a charm—a vexing reminder that we’ve known how to do this stuff for decades. We just haven’t done it.

That’s what we kept telling reporters as they turned out along the route: if the Obamas will put solar panels back on the White House roof, or on the lawn, or anywhere else where people can see them, it will help get the message across—the same way that seed sales climbed 30 percent across the country in the year after Michelle planted her garden.

There was just one nagging concern as we headed south. We still hadn’t heard anything conclusive from the White House. We’d asked them—for two months—if they’d accept the old panel as a historical relic returned home, and if they’d commit to installing new ones soon. We’d even found a company, Sungevity, that was eager to provide them free. Indeed, as word of our trip spread, other solar companies kept making the same offer. Still, the White House never really responded, not until Thursday evening around 6 pm, when they suddenly agreed to a meeting at nine the next morning.

As you might imagine, we were waiting at the "Southwest Appointment Gate" at 8:45, and eventually someone from the Office of Public Engagement emerged to escort us inside the Executive Office Building. He seated us in what he called "the War Room," an ornate and massive chamber with a polished table in the middle.

Every window blind was closed. It was a mahogany cave in which we could just make out two environmental bureaucrats sitting at the far end of the table. I won’t mention their names, on the theory that what followed wasn’t really their idea, but orders they were following from someone else. Because what followed was… uncool.

First, they spent a lot of time bragging about all the things the federal government had accomplished environmentally, with special emphasis on the great work they were doing on other federal buildings. One of them returned on several occasions to the topic of a government building in downtown Portland, Oregon, that would soon be fitted with a "green curtain," by which I think she meant the "extensive vertical garden" on the eighteen-story Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building with its massive "vegetated fins," the single largest use of stimulus money in the entire state.

And actually, it’s kind of great. Still, I doubt many people are going to build their own vegetated fins, and anyway I was beginning to despair that nothing could stop the flow of self-praise until one of the three seniors from Unity raised her hand and politely interrupted.

Now, let me say that I already knew Jean Altomare, Amanda Nelson and Jamie Nemecek were special, but my guess is the bureaucrats hadn’t figured that out. Unity is out in the woods, and these kids were majoring in things like wildlife conservation. They’d never had an encounter like this. It stood to reason that they’d be cowed. But they weren’t.

One after another, respectfully but firmly, they asked a series of tough questions, and refused to be filibustered by yet another stream of administration-enhancing data. Here’s what they wanted to know: if the administration was serious about spreading the word on renewable energy, why wouldn’t it do the obvious thing and put solar panels on the White House? When the administrators proudly proffered a clipping from some interior page of the Washington Post about their "greening the government initiative," Amanda calmly pointed out that none of her neighbors read the Post and that, by contrast, the solar panels had made it onto David Letterman.

To their queries, the bureaucrats refused to provide any answer. At all. One kept smiling in an odd way and saying, "If reporters call and ask us, we will provide our rationale," but whatever it was, they wouldn’t provide it to us.

It was all a little odd, to say the least. They refused to accept the Carter panel as a historic relic, or even to pose for a picture with the students and the petition they’d brought with them. Asked to do something easy and symbolic to rekindle a little of the joy that had turned out so many of us as volunteers for Obama in 2008, they point-blank said no. In a less than overwhelming gesture, they did, however, pass out Xeroxed copies of a 2009 memorandum from Vice President Biden about federal energy policy.

I can tell you exactly what it felt like, because those three students were brave and walked out graciously, heads high, and kept their tears back until we got to the sidewalk. And then they didn’t keep them back, because it’s a tough thing to learn for the first time how politics can work.

If you want to know about the much-discussed enthusiasm gap between Democratic and Republican bases, in other words, this was it in action. As Jean Altomare told the New York Times, "We went in without any doubt about the importance of this. They handed us a pamphlet." And Amanda Nelson added, "I didn’t expect I’d get to shake President Obama’s hand, but it was really shocking to me to find out that they really didn’t seem to care."

Did I say I was impressed with these young women? I was more than impressed. Nobody I went to Harvard with would have handled it as powerfully as they did (maybe because they weren’t looking for a job in the White House someday). A few hot tears were the right response, followed by getting on with the work.

Our next question, out there on the sidewalk, was how to handle the situation—which, indeed, we had to do right away, because in today’s blog-speed world, you’re supposed to Put Out a Statement to reporters, not to mention Tweet. So how to play it?

The normal way is to claim some kind of victory: we could have said we had an excellent exchange of views, and that the administration had taken seriously our plea. But that would have been lying, and at 350.org, we long ago decided not to do that. The whole premise of our operation, beginning with the number at its core, is that we had better always tell the truth about our actual predicament.

Alternatively, we could have rounded on the administration, and taken our best shot. In fact, it would have been easy enough right then and there for me to chain myself to the White House fence with the panel next to me. It would have gotten some serious press (though not as much as if I’d burned a Koran). And in fact, some of our supporters were counseling that I head for the fence immediately.

We got an e-mail, for instance, from a veteran campaigner I deeply respect who said: "Show Obama you can’t be taken for granted, and I predict you will be amazed at the good things that come your way. This is a watershed moment: if they think they can get away with this with you, they’ll judge they can get away with more in the future. If you show them they can’t get away with it (at the very least without embarrassment), they will come your way more in the future. It’s power politics, pure and simple. This is how the game is played. Get their respect!"

And I think he was probably right. As he pointed out, Obama was even then on the phone with the mustachioed Florida geezer, the stack of Korans and the following of fifty or less. But I couldn’t do it, not then and there. Because… well, because at some level I’m a political wuss.

I couldn’t stand to make that enthusiasm gap any wider, not seven weeks before an election. True, it’s the moment when you have some leverage, but no less true: the other side was running candidate after candidate who literally couldn’t wait to boast about how they didn’t believe in climate change. (Check out R.L. Miller’s highly useful list of "climate zombies.") That’s why we’re deeply engaged in fights this fall like the battle to defeat California’s Prop 23 and save the state’s landmark climate law. As a group we can’t endorse candidates, but I came home and spent part of the weekend mailing small checks to Senate candidates I admire, men like Paul Hodes from New Hampshire, who have fought hard for serious climate legislation.

And a confession. We’d walked past Obama’s official portrait on the way out and, despite the meeting we’d just had, I couldn’t help but smile at the thought that he was president. I could remember my own enthusiasm from two years ago that had me knocking on doors across New Hampshire. I admired his character and his smarts, and if I admire them a little less now, the residue’s still there.

And so I couldn’t help thinking—part of me at least—like this: the White House political team has decided that if they put solar panels up on the roof, Fox News will use that as one more line of attack; that they somehow believe the association with Jimmy Carter is the electoral equivalent of cooties; and that, in the junior high school lunchroom that now comprises our political life, they didn’t want to catch any.

If that’s their thinking, I doubt they’re on the mark. As far as I can tell, the right has a far better understanding of the power of symbols. Witness the furor they’ve kicked up over "the Mosque at Ground Zero." My feeling is: we should use the symbols we’ve got, and few are better than a solar panel. Still, with the current craziness in mind, I was willing to give them a pass. So we just put out a press release saying that we’d failed in our mission and walked away.

At least for now, but not forever, and really not for much longer.

On October 10, we’re having our great global work party, and ever since Obama stiffed us, registrations for its events have been soaring. Last week, with the heads of Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network, I issued a call for ideas about how to mount a campaign of civil disobedience around climate. Not a series of stunts, but a real campaign. At coal plants, and drilling sites—and at the places where our politicians do their work.

Actually, I’ll be surprised if the White House doesn’t put up solar panels within a year. But even if they do, that would just be the barest of beginnings. We’ve run out of spare decades to deal with climate change—the summer’s events in the Arctic, in Russia, in Pakistan proved that with great clarity. I may be a wuss, but I’m also scientifically literate. We know what we need to do, and we will do it. Enthusiastically.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/obama-afraid-solar-power/