The Fossil Fuel Resistance
As the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging - fiercely, loudly and right next door
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411#ixzz2QBjV8aqC
By Bill McKibben, April 11, 2013
It got so hot in Australia in January that
the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts.
A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the
CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80 percent of Arctic sea ice has disappeared.
We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50
years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis.
They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"
Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.
After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a
powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the
world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've
been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great
charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand
fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's
growing fast.
The Fossil Fuel Resistance: Meet the New Green Heroes
Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall
in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts
put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the
country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline,
which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of
Mexico, a fight that
Time magazine recently referred to as the
Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were
thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the
Appalachians and proposed Pacific coast deep-water ports that would send
coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight
for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the
battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia
and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby
there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few
days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House –
they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn't want a giant pipeline
across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn't want
more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy
Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with
civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out
how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original
Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of
the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and
cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop
Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who
recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch
counters in the Sixties.
It's a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by
its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on
Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious
victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing
ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice
Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the
Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from
expanding its refinery in Richmond, California. "Up to this point,
grassroots organizing has kept more industrial carbon out of the
atmosphere than state or federal policy," says Gopal Dayaneni of the
Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. It's an economic
resistance movement, too, one that's well aware renewable energy creates
three times as many jobs as coal and gas and oil. Good jobs that can't
be outsourced because the sun and the wind are close to home. It creates
a future, in other words.
These are serious people: You're not a member of the Resistance just
because you drive a Prius. You don't need to go to jail, but you do need
to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the
system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction
rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive
this century.
Soon
after the big D.C. rally, the state department issued a report
downplaying Keystone XL's environmental impact, thus advancing the
pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the
remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000
people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly,
if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment
commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his
New York Times
column to ask activists to "go crazy" with civil disobedience; 48 hours
later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a
pipeline-company office outside Boston. It's not a one-sided fight
anymore.
No movement this diverse is going to agree on a manifesto, but any
reckoning begins with the idea that fossil fuel is dirty at every stage,
and we need to put it behind us as fast as we can. For those of us in
affluent countries, small shifts in lifestyle won't be enough; we'll
also need to alter the policies that keep this industry fat and happy.
For the poor world, the much harder goal is to leapfrog the fossil-fuel
age and go straight to renewables – a task that those of us who
prospered by filling the atmosphere with carbon must help with, for
reasons both moral and practical. And for all of us, it means standing
with communities from the coal fields of Appalachia to the oil-soaked
Niger Delta as they fight for their homes. They've fought longest and
hardest and too often by themselves. Now that global warming is starting
to pour seawater into subways, the front lines are expanding and the
reinforcements are finally beginning to arrive.
Climate Change and the End of Australia
Right now, the fossil-fuel industry is mostly winning. In the past
few years, they've proved "peak-oil" theorists wrong – as the price rose
for hydrocarbons, companies found lots of new sources, though mostly by
scraping the bottom of the barrel, spending even more money to get
even-cruddier energy. They've learned to frack (in essence, explode a
pipe bomb a few thousand feet beneath the surface, fracturing the
surrounding rock). They've figured out how to take the sludgy tar sands
and heat them with natural gas till the oil flows. They've managed to
drill miles beneath the ocean's surface. And the hyperbolic enthusiasm
has gushed even higher than the oil.
The Wall Street Journal has declared North Dakota a new Saudi Arabia.
The New York Times
described a new shale-oil find in California as more than four times as
large as North Dakota's. "We could make OPEC 'NOPEC' if we really put
our minds to it," said Charles Drevna of the American Fuel and
Petrochemical Manufacturers. "We're talking decades, if not into the
hundreds of years, of supply in North America."
But all that fossil fuel will only get pumped and mined and burned if
we decide to ignore the climate issue; were we to ever take it
seriously, the math would quickly change. As I pointed out in these
pages last summer, the world's fossil-fuel companies, even before these
new finds, had five times more carbon in their reserves than we could
burn if we hope to stay below a two-degreeCelsius rise in global
temperatures. That's the red line almost every government in the world
has agreed on, but the coal, oil and natural-gas companies, propelled by
record profits, just keep looking for more – and ignore reality. A new
report shows that an anonymous group of industry billionaires has
secretly poured more than $100 million into anti-environmentalfront
groups. Weeks before Election Day, Chevron gave the largest corporate
Super PAC contribution of the post-Citizens United era, making sure
that Congress stayed in the hands of climate deniers.
But every flood erodes their position, and every heat wave fuels the
Resistance. When the Keystone pipeline first became controversial, in
2011, a poll of D.C. "energy insiders" showed that more than 70 percent
of them thought they'd have permits to build it by the end of the year.
Big Oil, of course, may end up getting its way, but so far its money
hasn't overwhelmed the passion, spirit and creativity its foes have
brought to the battle. And we're not just playing defense anymore: The
rapidly spreading divestment movement may be the single biggest face of
the Resistance. It's no longer confined to campuses; city governments
and religious denominations have begun to unload their stakes in oil
companies, and the movement is even spreading to self-interested
investors now that HSBC has calculated that taking climate change
seriously could cut share prices of oil companies by up to 60 percent.
With each passing month, something else weakens the industry's hand:
the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that's gone from
pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order. In the
few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables,
the results are staggering: There were days last spring when Germany
(pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar
panels. Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last
year came from renewables. A December study from the University of
Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9
percent of the time on renewable energy. In other words, logic, physics
and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry. For the moment, it
has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps
more easily than physics.
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Which
is where the resistance comes in. Forty-three years ago, the first
anarchic Earth Day drew 20 million Americans into the streets. That
surge helped push through all kinds of legislation – the Clean Air Act,
the Endangered Species Act – and spurred the growth of organizations
like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense
Fund. As these "green groups" became the face of the environmental
movement, they grew adept at playing an inside-the-Beltway lobbying
game. But that strategy got harder as the power of the right wing grew;
for 25 years, they've been unable to win significant progress on climate
change.
Now, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made.
The NRDC has done yeoman's work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club,
which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking
industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the
club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month,
its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House
in handcuffs.
But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established
groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don't
need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and
Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade,
which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the
industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana,
author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of
tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus
and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing
up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking
industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy –
in fact, they've overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are
the one percent of the one percent. The movements share a political
analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the
Internet than ConEd; it's a farmers market in electrons, with the local
control that it implies.
Like Occupy, this new Resistance is not obsessed with winning over
Democratic Party leaders. The Keystone arrests in 2011 marked the most
militant protests outside the White House during Obama's first term; now
Van Jones, who once worked for the president, has taken to calling
Keystone the "Obama pipeline." Used to dealing with the established
green groups, the administration thinks in terms of deals – "We'll
approve the pipeline but give you something else you want" – the kind of
logic that gains the approval of op-ed columnists and talking heads.
But given that the Arctic has already melted, we don't have room for
easy compromises. The president's insistence that he favors an "all of
the above" energy system, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and
wind, seems increasingly like a classic political hedge. In fact, if the
GOP wasn't in the tank for the oil industry, you couldn't do much worse
than Obama's campaigntrail rhetoric. Last year, the president went to
Oklahoma, posed in front of a stack of oil pipe and bragged of adding
enough new pipelines to encircle Earth. Since the election, the
president has started talking green, promising that now climate change
would be a priority – but this growing Resistance is, I think,
unconvinced. As climate leader Naomi Klein said, "This time, no
honeymoon and no hero worship."
Only grit and hard work. We've watched great cultural shifts and
organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and
immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies
may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are
so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada's
tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and
the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last
month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, said that
environmentalists were "obtuse" for opposing new pipelines. He announced
the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was
exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables
would account for just one percent of our energy in 2040, essentially
declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started.
He added, "My philosophy is to make money."
That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50
times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that
carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa's
measuring station. Right now, we're losing. But as the planet runs its
spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the
future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.
