For environmentalists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, the battle is about more than just transporting tar sands oil from Alberta. It’s about whether the United States — and the rest of the world — will finally come to its senses about global warming.
by Bill McKibben, 350.org founder, in a repost from Yale e360
In the last three years, three things have happened to the climate movement, one political, one meteorological, and one geological. Taken together, they explain why 1,253 people were arrested outside the White House in late summer protesting the Keystone XL pipeline — and why that protest may be the start of something big and desperate.
Here’s the political thing: When Barack Obama was elected, he carried with him the hopes of people the world around that something might finally happen to break the 20-year stalemate that had prevented meaningful action on global warming. That hope was perhaps always excessive — but then, the man himself had done all that he could to encourage it. On the night he clinched the nomination he said that during his presidency “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.” Waiting for a messiah, we managed to convince ourselves we might have found one.
American enviros sensed he had no real intention of battling the oil companies early on: Deciding between dealing with health care and with energy, he chose to use his considerable political capital on the former. You can argue that it made moral and political sense to deal with the last question of the 20th century before turning to the first of this millennium, or you can argue it didn’t. What you can’t argue is that health care used up that capital, as the rest of the world found out in Copenhagen. The president’s State Department team had managed to accomplish nothing in the year beforehand, leaving Obama and his Chinese counterpart to scribble together a last-minute plan for a meaningless set of voluntary commitments.
That movie didn’t end the way it was supposed to, and a few months later the president made not the slightest move as carbon legislation died in the U.S. Senate. In essence, 20 years worth of work was done, and mostly wasted; there wasn’t going to be a price on carbon in America, and hence not in most of the rest of the world, anytime soon — an assumption underlined by the results of the 2010 election.
Here’s the meteorological thing.
While the administration was fiddling around with little changes (good ones, but little ones — adjustments in automobile mileage regulations, for instance, which were pretty easy to get since the federal government owned the auto industry), Mother Nature was fiddling around with the planet. Sometime in the last few years it became utterly clear we’d left the Holocene behind, bound for some new, chaotic place in which humans had fundamentally altered the planet.
2010 was the warmest year for which we have records; Arctic sea ice is now at its lowest recorded level, while Canada’s Arctic ice shelves have shrunk by half in just the last six years. And what all this has shown is that the planet is coming unglued, at least the planet on which civilization developed. We’ve seen flooding and drought on a scale never witnessed before, from the Indus to the Mississippi, from Texas to the North China Plain. By the end of last year, the world’s biggest insurance company, Munich Re, was declaring that the unprecedented run of catastrophes “cannot be explained without global warming.”
And it’s not just happening in poor places that we’ve gotten used to thinking of as climate change’s first victims. It’s happening in President Obama’s own country. While people protesting the Keystone XL pipeline were being handcuffed outside his house in August, the U.S. set a new record for the most multi-billion dollar weather disasters in a single year (and with four months to go!). We’re getting scared in a new way, as the abstract threat of climate change gives way to its very scary reality. After Irene took out much of Vermont’s infrastructure with its record rains, Gov. Peter Shumlin pointed out that the state’s weather was more like Costa Rica’s. “We didn’t used to get weather patterns like this in Vermont,” he said. The same week, the head of the Texas forest fire service said “no one on the face of this Earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions,” which was almost certainly true.
And here’s the geological thing. It’s been slowly dawning on people over the last couple of years that oil and gas companies are finding lots of new supplies. Peak oil was true in the sense that we’ve run out of the easy stuff — but as that realization spiked prices, engineers set to work making hard stuff easier, and they’ve succeeded in ways most people hadn’t expected. So now we have shale gas wells tearing up the countryside in the eastern U.S., and shale oil operations turning North Dakota into a Lutheran Kuwait.
And then there’s the granddaddy of them all, the tars sands megaproject in northern Alberta. Geologists had known about this vast deposit for years, but never figured it would be economical to develop. At $80 a barrel, and with new technologies, it turns out you can get it to work, which the Canadians have done with a vengeance. They have a pool of oil — and hence of carbon — about the same size as the one we’ve largely burned in Saudi Arabia. If we torch most of it, then it’s “essentially game over for the climate,” in the words of NASA’s James Hansen.
In other words, the idea that we’ve had for two decades that we’re destined to transition to renewable energy may be wrong. It’s increasingly possible instead that we’ll just replace cheap fossil fuel with more expensive fossil fuel. Only a price on carbon can really prevent that from happening — but there won’t be a price on carbon soon, because Obama wouldn’t stand up to the oil companies.
And so, backs to the wall, North American environmentalists are now fighting a simpler, more basic battle — not for overhauling laws and economies, but simply to keep carbon in the ground. It’s not an elegant battle with lots of complicated legislation; it is an elemental one, easy to understand, worth going to jail for. We know that we’re simply buying time — given enough years and a high enough price, Canada and everyone else will figure out some way to get oil and coal out of the ground. But if we can stop them, maybe the planet will come to its senses about global warming. Maybe we’ll be able to look at things like Australia’s about-to-be-passed carbon price and see it working (or not, since big energy is doing everything it can to weaken its provisions). Maybe we’ll get scared enough to get serious. Maybe the time we’re buying is precious.
For now, it’s a desperate battle to keep things from getting worse. We fight coal plants and coal mines, tanker ports and pipelines. Keystone XL is such a huge deal because the president can actually stop it himself, without consulting our inane Congress. That’s why we’ll be surrounding the White House on Nov. 6, circling it with people simply holding signs with quotes from his campaign. Like, “it’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” It sure is, and if Obama for once actually lives up to his words, just maybe it will signal something new about him. My guess is we’re not going to change meteorology or geology, which leaves us with politics.
– Bill McKibben, in a repost from Yale e360
Related Post:
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Wow, a very good read from Mr. McKibben – succinctly lays out the stark reality of where we stand today – not a pretty picture. His head on read of where things are is inspiring.
Our backs are absolutely against the wall and industry ($$$) has relatively recently figured out how to profitably unlock very large amounts of high carbon natural gas and oil for our future (in addition to coal).
Thanks for creating a simple, clear rallying point for the climate community!
Two hopeful new developments on tar sands are:
1) EU just passed another policy milestone in the fight to declare tar sands too dirty to burn in Europe.
2) A prestigious mock trial in UK convicted a fictional tar sands corporation of “ecocide”. It was a test of how a proposed UN international criminal court law against ecocide would play out in a real courtroom. Real judge, top lawyers and a real jury heard the case at the UK Supreme Court in London.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/sep/29/ecocide-oil-criminal-court
1,252 voices drowned out by the EU/Greece financial crisis.
Not that those arrests were even considered when the President’s team had already planned his announcement.
The pipeline project will go ahead and he and his team will be betting only a handful of voters will even remember, much less factor, that decision in their voting booth.
What matters most to the President is that the MSM crap delivers a positive message…more oil.
and what you have said, is the real tragedy here- keep the public dumb and uninformed on climate change.
would H Clinton been any better? Nope.
you can kiss away any hope of limiting climate change to being ‘dangerous’ it will become catastrophic.
BO and just about every other politician in this country are criminals.
Good article! This is a good point:
“It’s been slowly dawning on people over the last couple of years that oil and gas companies are finding lots of new supplies. Peak oil was true in the sense that we’ve run out of the easy stuff — but as that realization spiked prices, engineers set to work making hard stuff easier, and they’ve succeeded in ways most people hadn’t expected.”
That is what the peak oil nay-Sayers have been saying all along—the market will take care of it. Of course, the market is driven largely by mindless greed. I have thought for sometime that the the moneyed class has been responding to the stress of environmental uncertainties with a hording mentality—’If I have lots and lots of assets it will be OK.’
Helen Caldicott sometimes sites a study done with rats that found at a certain level of stress the rats would busy themselves with with irreverent activities. I can’t help but feel our market’s speculative banking system is comparable.
Did he get it right that there is a term limit to the Presidency and the children of the President will also be out of the White House some day. Building their own super bomb and storm shelter will be a very large undertaking. Their decisions today may make the need for an even more secure shelter necessary for the adults of tomorrow.
Good luck with that.
Death Before Discomfort.
Describing the stages of a winning strategy of nonviolent activism; in a 1914 US trade union address by Nicholas Klein, General Executive Board Report and Proceedings, Biennial Convention, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1914)
“And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. ”
Often Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi – “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
That is why we must speak up though perhaps at times it seems as though we run out of time.
Yep, there you have it – “waiting for a Messiah”. It’s called the ‘basic assumption of dependency’ and was discovered by Dr Wilfred Bion (1959; 1961).
The assumption is that there is a great and powerful boss who is there to look after them so they don’t have to learn and can be as stupid and irresponsible as they like. It is a consequence of living and working in a hierarchical or autocratic structure such as a repesentative democracy (Emery M, Searching, 1999). It is the assumption that fuels the cult of ‘leadership’.
While we know today that there is an alternative to such structures, Bion found that it took years for people to climb out of their dependency and regain their status as purposeful people, and it is gratifying to see this finally happen in the USA via 350 and Occupy Wall Street, ME
In late 2007, as president of AAAS, John Holdren (Obama’s science advisor) gave one of the most best speeches I’ve ever read.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/319/5862/424.full
The text is long–but incredible for the clarity and wisdom of goals he outlined–the first of which related to the UN’s millenium goal to eliminate poverty, but then on to the environmental, economic and energy issues.
What happened? He’s simply disappeared. How can the man who wrote and delivered that speech have failed to persuade Obama and the administrtion to do the right thing–on so many issues?
“How can the man who wrote and delivered that speech have failed to persuade Obama and the administrtion to do the right thing–on so many issues?”
How do you know he hasn’t succeeded? It’s entirely possible Obama is convinced of it factually, but is not convinced he can politically succeed in acting on it. In fact if you were Obama you might conclude that he can’t possibly win, since Americans are usually asleep and buy into the paid Attack Ads during campaigns. We didn’t even protest in mass when the 2000 election was stolen. Until the recent upsurge, very little protest again. You want to convince Obama it’s politically winnable? Get not 1,000 or 10,000 but get to 100,000 or 500,000 in the Occupation.
We think of such numbers are “really huge”but look at other countries, on a per capita basis, they have the equivalent of far far larger protests and actions than in the US.
Protests and even this occupation tactic is not the only activism, I strongly support direct action activism like creating community owned energy projects (wind, solar) community owned food gardens, shared spaces, community centers for skill sharing mutual aid job training etc etc…I’m a critic of “protest as the only tactic”..but it (along with this sharper form, Occupation) is still an important element of the mix of strategies..and should not be neglected..until we can scale up to like other countries, I am very unhappy to say it but I can see why Obama might be 100% on board in what he knows the planet needs, but “what the planet needs” is not the same as “what I can successfully push through or even had a 10% change of pushing through”
We need to press Obama, don’t get me wrong. Keep pressing him hard. But we need to act. Ourselves. On cooperation with others. On much larger, long-term, on-going, huge nationwide scale.
Peace.
Great article overall but let’s not fixate on one and only one legal action:
“. It’s increasingly possible instead that we’ll just replace cheap fossil fuel with more expensive fossil fuel. Only a price on carbon can really prevent that from happening ”
You can try to make the case that it’s the best way, but it’s not the only way. A “cap” (a progressive cap-and-dividend) on carbon with TEETH, the cap going down each year, is another way. One can debate which way, or which version and variety of which way, is better, but you can’t claim that price on carbon is “the only” way. Let’s pursue a plurality of actions.
Admittedly a Cap (much less a progressive Cap and Dividend returned to the public and the lower income especially) that has TEETH so that “this much carbon and Not One Pound More” is strongly enforced, is very very hard to get. But a price on carbon without cheating, one that has teeth, is also very very hard to pass and enforce.
Mother Nature doesn’t care about the price of carbon, she cares about how. many. pounds. of. co2 per year. we emit. If we CAP that and reduce annually at a fast enough rate as the science says, that is what the physics and the science say, will make a difference. Again, willing to hear the argument why price is more politically doable etc etc, but it’s not fair to claim it’s “the only” way.
Peace out.
Bit disturbing….climate activist denied us entry!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/john-stewart-denied-us-entry_n_996336.html
“We know that we’re simply buying time — given enough years and a high enough price, Canada and everyone else will figure out some way to get oil and coal out of the ground.”
This is quite a strange thing for McKibben to say. He’s been going around quoting Hansen’s “game over” comment, and now he describes his position as “simply buying time” – until the game is over. Because the Earth doesn’t care if we burn that oil this year or twenty years hence, Bill. If you know you’re simply buying time, maybe the time has come for you to question what you know, because you’re talking like a defeatist.
Daniel, you misread Bill’s words. We’re buying time by fighting Keystone XL, in hopes the world will soon come to its senses. Given enough years and a high enough price, Canada and everyone else will liberate enough carbon to fry the planet, whether KXL is built or not, unless the world comes to its senses.
I did time with Bill. He’s not a defeatist, but rather the most courageous and tireless person I’ve ever met.