The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (21 page)

August 24, 2011

D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake

The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they’ll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

A “keystone” in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line—as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing—these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.

Bill McKibben was among those already arrested. He is an environmentalist and author who founded the group 350.org, named after the estimated safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 350 ppm (parts per million—the planet is currently at 390 ppm). In a call to action to join the protest, McKibben, along with others including journalist Naomi Klein, actor Danny Glover, and NASA scientist James Hansen, wrote the Keystone pipeline is “a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet.”

The movement to oppose Keystone XL ranges from activists and scientists to indigenous peoples of the threatened Canadian plains and boreal forests, where the tar sands are located, to rural farmers and ranchers in the ecologically fragile Sand Hills region of Nebraska, to students and physicians.

Asked why the White House protests are taking place while President Obama is away on a family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, McKibben replied: “We’ll be here when he gets back too. We’re staying for two weeks, every day. This is the first real civil disobedience of this scale in the environmental movement in ages.”

Just miles to the east of Martha’s Vineyard, and almost exactly 170 years earlier, on Nantucket, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, abolitionist, journalist, and publisher, gave one of his first major addresses before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass is famous for stating one of grassroots organizing’s central truths: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Demanding change is one thing, while getting change in Washington, D.C., is another, especially with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ hostility to any climate-change legislation. That is why the protests against Keystone XL are happening in front of the White House. Obama has the power to stop the pipeline. The Canadian corporation behind the project, TransCanada, has applied for a permit from the U.S. State Department to build the pipeline. If the State Department denies the permit, Keystone XL would be dead. The enormous environmental devastation caused by extracting petroleum from the tar sands might still move forward, but without easy access to the refineries and the U.S. market, it would certainly be slowed.

TransCanada executives are confident that the U.S. will grant the permit by the end of the year. Republican politicians and the petroleum industry tout the creation of well-paying construction jobs that would come from the project, and even enjoy some union support.

In response, two major unions, the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union, representing more than 300,000 workers, called on the State Department to deny the permit. In a joint press release, they said: “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil. . . . Many jobs could also be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid, maintaining and expanding public transportation—jobs that can help us reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency.”

Two Canadian women, indigenous actress Tantoo Cardinal, who starred in
Dances with Wolves
, and Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in
Superman
, were arrested with about fifty others just before the earthquake hit Tuesday. Bill McKibben summed up: “It takes more than earthquakes and hurricanes to worry us—we’ll be out here through September 3. Our hope is to send a Richter 8 tremor through the political system on the day Barack Obama says no to Big Oil and reminds us all why we were so happy when he got elected. The tar sands pipeline is his test.”

November 9, 2011

Keystone XL: Ring Around the Rose Garden

More than 10,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., last Sunday with a simple goal: Encircle the White House. They succeeded, just weeks after 1,253 people were arrested in a series of protests at the same spot. These thousands, as well as those arrested, were unified in their opposition to the planned Keystone XL pipeline, intended to run from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas. A broad, international coalition against the pipeline has formed since President Barack Obama took office, and now the deadline for its approval or rejection is at hand.

Bill McKibben, founder of the global movement against climate change 350.org, told me: “This has become not only the biggest environmental flash point in many, many years, but maybe the issue in recent times in the Obama administration when he’s been most directly confronted by people in the street. In this case, people willing, hopeful, almost dying for him to be the Barack Obama of 2008.”

The president, until recently, simply hid behind the legal argument that, as the pipeline was coming from Canada, the proper forum for the decision fell with the U.S. Department of State and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That was until a key Clinton insider was exposed as a lobbyist for the company trying to build Keystone XL, TransCanada. The environmental group Friends of the Earth has exposed a series of connections between the Clinton political machine and Keystone XL. Paul Elliott is TransCanada’s top lobbyist in Washington on the pipeline. He was a high-level campaign staffer on Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House in 2008, and worked as well on Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1996 and Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign in 2000.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) received emails following a Freedom of Information Act request, documenting exchanges in 2010 between Elliott and Marja Verloop, whom FOE describes as a “member of the senior diplomatic staff at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.” Verloop in one email cheers Elliott for obtaining the buy-in on Keystone XL from conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, writing: “Go Paul! Baucus support holds clout.”

Another person arrested at the White House during the August-September protests was Canadian author Naomi Klein. Of the cozy email exchange, she said, “The response of the State Department was, ‘Well, we meet with environmentalists, too.’ But just imagine them writing an email to Bill McKibben: when he says, ‘We got more than 1,200 people arrested,’ and they would write back, ‘Go Bill!’? The day that happens, I’ll stop worrying.” Klein went on to explain the environmental impact of the project: “Tar sands oil emits three times as much greenhouse gases as a regular barrel of Canadian crude, because, of course, it is in solid form. So, you have to use all of this energy to get it out and to liquefy it.”

Adding to the controversy, the
New York Times
revealed that the State Department chose as an outside group to run the environmental impact study of Keystone XL, a company called Cardno Entrix. It turns out Cardno Entrix listed as one of its major clients none other than TransCanada. The environmental impacts are potentially extreme, with, first, the potential for a catastrophic leak of the toxic tar sands extract, and, secondly but no less significant, the potential long-term impacts on the global climate. The Obama campaign also drew fire for hiring Broderick Johnson, a lobbyist who formerly represented TransCanada.

Nebraska’s Republican governor, Dave Heineman, called a special session of the state legislature, beginning November 1, to discuss the pipeline. After a week of deliberation, several bills are being reviewed, including LB1, the Major Oil Pipeline Siting Act, which would require stringent review of any pipeline passing through Nebraska, seriously slowing the Keystone XL approval process. The movement in Nebraska is broad-based, from environmentalists to ranchers to Native Americans.

The State Department inspector general is investigating whether all federal laws and regulations were followed in the permitting process, and President Obama now says he will make the final decision. He has powerful corporations pushing for the pipeline, but a ring of people he needs for re-election outside his window. As Bill McKibben said of the human chain at the White House: “Every banner that people carried yesterday had quotes from that wonderful rhetoric of that election: ‘Time to end the tyranny of oil,’ ‘In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow.’ We’re looking for some kind of glimmer, some kind of echo, of that Barack Obama to re-emerge.”

March 8, 2012

The Bipartisan Nuclear Bailout

Super Tuesday demonstrated the rancor rife in Republican ranks, as the four remaining major candidates slug it out to see how far to the right of President Barack Obama they can go. While attacking him daily for the high cost of gasoline, both sides are traveling down the same perilous road in their support of nuclear power. This is mind-boggling, on the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission warning that lessons from Fukushima have not been implemented in this country. Nevertheless, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: They’re going to force nuclear power on the public, despite the astronomically high risks, both financial and environmental.

One year ago, on March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast coast of Japan, causing more than 15,000 deaths, with 3,000 more missing and thousands of injuries. Japan is still reeling from the devastation—environmentally, economically, socially, and politically. Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister at the time, said last July, “We will aim to bring about a society that can exist without nuclear power.” He resigned in August after shutting down production at several power plants. He said that another catastrophe could force the mass evacuation of Tokyo, and even threaten “Japan’s very existence.” Only two of the fifty-four Japanese power plants that were online at the time of the Fukushima disaster are currently producing power. Kan’s successor, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, supports nuclear power, but faces growing public opposition to it.

This stands in stark contrast to the United States. Just about a year before Fukushima, President Obama announced $8 billion in loan guarantees to the Southern Company, the largest energy producer in the southeastern U.S., for the construction of two new nuclear power plants in Waynesboro, Georgia, at the Vogtle power plant, on the South Carolina border. Since the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and then the catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986, there have been no new nuclear power plants built in the U.S. The 104 existing nuclear plants are all increasing in age, many nearing their originally slated life expectancy of forty years.

While campaigning for president in 2008, Barack Obama promised that nuclear power would remain part of the U.S.’s “energy mix.” His chief adviser, David Axelrod, had consulted in the past for Illinois energy company ComEd, a subsidiary of Exelon, a major nuclear-energy producer. Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel played a key role in the formation of Exelon. In the past four years, Exelon employees have contributed more than $244,000 to the Obama campaign—and that is not counting any soft-money contributions to PACs, or direct, corporate contributions to the new super PACs. Lamented by many for breaking key campaign promises (like closing Guantánamo, or accepting super PAC money), President Obama is fulfilling his promise to push nuclear power.

That is why several groups sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month. The NRC granted approval to the Southern Company to build the new reactors at the Vogtle plant despite a no vote from the NRC chair, Gregory Jaczko. He objected to the licenses over the absence of guarantees to implement recommendations made following the Japanese disaster. Jaczko said, “I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened.”

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the NRC, explained how advocates for nuclear power “distort market forces,” since private investors simply don’t want to touch nuclear: “They’ve asked the federal government for loan guarantees to support the project, and they have not revealed the terms of that loan guarantee . . . it’s socializing the risk and privatizing the profits.”

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service, noting the ongoing Republican attack on President Obama’s loan guarantee to the failed solar power company Solyndra, said, “The potential for taxpayer losses that would dwarf the Solyndra debacle is extraordinarily high . . . this loan would be 15 times larger than the Solyndra loan, and is probably 50 times riskier.”

As long as our politicians dance to the tune of their donors, the threat of nuclear disaster will never be far off.

Race, Racism, and the Myth of Post-Racial America

July 22, 2009

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Troy Anthony Davis, and the Twenty-First-Century Color Line