Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Night of
the Living Dead, Climate Change-Style
How to stop the fossil fuel industry from
wrecking our world
'This business of driving stakes through the
heart of one project after another is exhausting,' writes McKibben. (Photo: via
Earth Island Journal)
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 U.S. 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’dapproved 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.
© 2016 Bill McKibben
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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