This Changes Everything (32 page)

Regardless of whether the conservancy resumed drilling for oil in Texas because it had no choice or because it wanted to get the petro dollars flowing again after the initial controversy had died down, the issue has taken on new urgency of late. That’s because, in November 2012, and with little
fanfare, the last of the Attwater’s prairie chickens disappeared from the Preserve. Aaron Tjelmeland, the preserve manager, said of the birds that there are “none that we know about.” It is worth underlining this detail: under the stewardship of what
The New Yorker
describes as “the biggest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world”—boasting over one million members and assets of
roughly $6 billion and operating in thirty-five countries—an endangered species has been completely wiped out from one of its last remaining breeding grounds, on which the organization earned millions drilling for and pumping oil and gas. Amazingly, the website for the Texas City Prairie Preserve continues to boast that the “land management techniques the conservancy utilizes at the preserve are
best practices that we export to other preserves.” And though it mentions in passing that there are no more Attwater’s prairie chickens on the land, it says nothing about its side business in oil and gas.
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The disappearance of the prairie chickens is no doubt the result of a combination of factors—invasive species, low numbers of captive-bred birds, drought (possibly linked to climate change),
and the relatively small size of the reserve (the conservancy’s preferred explanation). It’s possible that the oil and gas drilling played no role at all.

So let’s set the birds aside for a moment. Even if a few had survived, and even if a few return in the future, the fact remains that The Nature Conservancy has been in the oil and gas business for a decade and half. That this could happen in
the age of climate change points to a painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions: large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests—they have merged with them.

The Nature Conservancy, I should stress, is the only green group (that I
know of, at least) to actually sink its
own oil and gas wells. But it is far from the only group to have strong ties with the fossil fuel sector and other major polluters. For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF
(originally the World Wildlife Fund) has had a long relationship with Shell, and the World Resources Institute has what it describes as “a long-term, close strategic relationship with the Shell Foundation.” Conservation International has partnerships with Walmart, Monsanto, Australian-based mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton (a major extractor of coal), as well as Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil,
Toyota, McDonald’s, and BP (according to
The Washington Post
BP has channeled $2 million to Conservation International over the years).
^I
And that is the barest of samplings.
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The relationships are also more structural than mere donations and partnerships. The Nature Conservancy counts BP America, Chevron, and Shell among the members of its Business Council and Jim Rogers, chairman of the board
and former CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest U.S. coal-burning utilities, sits on the organization’s board of directors (past board members include former CEOs of General Motors and American Electric Power).
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There is yet another way in which some green groups have entangled their fates with the corporations at the heart of the climate crisis: by investing their own money with them. For
instance, while investigating The Nature Conservancy’s foray into oil and gas drilling, I was struck by a line item in its 2012 financial statements: $22.8 million of the organization’s endowment—one of the largest in the U.S.—was invested in “energy” companies (that figure has since gone up to $26.5 million). Energy, of course,
means oil, gas, coal, and the like.
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Curious, I soon discovered
that most big conservation groups did not have policies prohibiting them from investing their endowments in fossil fuel companies. The hypocrisy is staggering: these organizations raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is preserving wildlife and attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet some have turned around and invested that
money with companies that have made it abundantly clear, through their reserves, that they intend to extract several times more carbon than the atmosphere can absorb with any degree of safety. It must be stated that these choices, made unilaterally by the top tier of leadership at the big green groups, do not represent the wishes or values of the millions of members who support them through donations
or join genuinely community supported campaigns to clean up polluted rivers, protect beloved pieces of wilderness, or support renewables legislation. Indeed, many have been deeply alarmed to discover that groups they believed to be confronting polluters were in fact in business with them.
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There are, moreover, large parts of the green movement that have never engaged in these types of arrangements—they
don’t have endowments to invest or they have clear policies prohibiting fossil fuel holdings, and some have equally clear policies against taking donations from polluters. These groups, not coincidentally, tend also to be the ones with track records of going head-to-head with big oil and coal: Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have been battling Shell’s and Chevron’s alleged complicity
with horrific human rights abuses in the Niger Delta since the early 1990s (though Shell has agreed to pay out $15.5 million to settle a case involving these claims, it continues to deny wrongdoing, as does Chevron); Rainforest Action Network has been at the forefront of the international campaign against Chevron for the disaster left behind in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Food & Water Watch has helped
secure big victories against fracking; 350.org helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement and has been at the forefront of the national mobilization against the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Sierra Club is a more complex case: it has also been a part of these campaigns and is the bane of the U.S. coal industry—but between 2007 and 2010, the group secretly took millions from a natural gas company.
But under new leadership—and facing pressure from the grass roots—it has cut ties with the fossil fuel sector.
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Even so, almost no one’s hands are clean. That’s because many of the top foundations that underwrite much of the environmental movement—including groups and projects with which I have been involved—come from fortunes, like the Rockefeller family’s, that are linked with fossil fuels.
And though these foundations do fund campaigns that confront big polluters most do not prohibit their own endowments from being invested with coal and oil. So, for example, the Ford Foundation, which has supported the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council (and helped support a film that is accompanying this book), reported in 2013 that it had nearly $14 million in Shell
and BP stocks alone (another multimillion-dollar stock holding is Norway’s Statoil).
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In North America and Europe, it’s virtually impossible to do public interest work of any scale—in academia or journalism or activism—without taking money of questionable origin, whether the origin is the state, corporations, or private philanthropy. And though more accountable grassroots movement financing models
are desperately needed (and crowdfunding is a promising start), the fact of these financial ties is not what is particularly noteworthy, nor proof of some nefarious corruption.

Where following the financial ties between funders and public interest work becomes relevant is when there is a compelling reason to believe that funding is having undue influence—shaping the kinds of research undertaken,
the kinds of policies advanced, as well as the kinds of questions that get asked in the first place. And since it is generally accepted that fossil fuel money and conservative foundations have shaped the climate change denial movement, it seems fair to ask whether fossil fuel money and the values of centrist foundations have shaped parts of the movement that are in the business of proposing solutions.
And there is a good deal of evidence that these ties have indeed had a decisive influence.

The big, corporate-affiliated green groups don’t deny the reality of climate change, of course—many work hard to raise the alarm. And yet several of these groups have consistently, and aggressively, pushed responses
to climate change that are the least burdensome, and often directly beneficial, to the largest
greenhouse gas emitters on the planet—even when the policies come at the direct expense of communities fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rather than advancing policies that treat greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants demanding clear, enforceable regulations that would restrict emissions and create the conditions for a full transition to renewables, these groups have pushed convoluted
market-based schemes that have treated greenhouse gases as late-capitalist abstractions to be traded, bundled, speculated upon, and moved around the globe like currency or subprime debt.

And many of these same groups have championed one of the main fossil fuels—natural gas—as a supposed solution to climate change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it releases,
particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us into catastrophic levels of warming (as explained in chapter four). In some cases, large foundations have collaborated to explicitly direct the U.S. green movement toward these policies. Most infamously within the movement, a 2007 road map titled “Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming”—which
was sponsored by six large foundations—advocated carbon trading as a response to climate change and supported both natural gas and expanded nuclear power. And as these policies were being turned into political campaigns, the message sent to green groups was essentially “step in line, or else you’re not going to get your share of the money,” recalls Jigar Shah, a renowned solar entrepreneur, former
Greenpeace USA board member, and one-time director of the industry-focused Carbon War Room.
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The “market-based” climate solutions favored by so many large foundations and adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel sector as a whole. For one, they succeeded in taking what began as a straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through
a jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue came to seem too complex and arcane for nonexperts to understand, seriously undercutting the potential to build a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters. As Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle has observed, “The movement to technical and market-based analyses as the core of reform environmentalism gutted whatever
progressive vision”
the movement had previously held. “Rather than engaging the broader public, reform environmentalism focuses debate among experts in the scientific, legal, and economic communities. It may provide technical solutions to specific problems but it neglects the larger social dynamics that underlie environmental degradation.”
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These policies have also fed the false perception that
a full transition to renewable energy is technically impossible—since if it were possible, why would all these well-meaning green groups be spending so much of their time pushing trading schemes and singing the praises of natural gas, even when extracted through the ecologically destructive method of fracking?

Often these compromises are rationalized according to the theory of “low-hanging fruit.”
This strategy holds, in essence, that it’s hard and expensive to try to convince politicians to regulate and discipline the most powerful corporations in the world. So rather than pick that very tough fight, it’s wiser and more effective to begin with something easier. Asking consumers to buy a more expensive, less toxic laundry detergent, for instance. Making cars more fuel-efficient. Switching
to a supposedly cleaner fossil fuel. Paying an Indigenous tribe to stop logging a forest in Papua New Guinea to offset the emissions of a coal plant that gets to stay open in Ohio.

With emissions up by about 57 percent since the U.N. climate convention was signed in 1992, the failure of this polite strategy is beyond debate. And yet still, at the upper echelons of the climate movement, our soaring
emissions are never blamed on anything as concrete as the fossil fuel corporations that work furiously to block all serious attempts to regulate emissions, and certainly not on the economic model that demands that these companies put profit before the health of the natural systems upon which all life depends. Rather the villains are always vague and unthreatening—a lack of “political will,”
a deficit of “ambition”—while fossil fuel executives are welcomed at U.N. climate summits as key “partners” in the quest for “climate solutions.”
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This upside-down world reached new levels of absurdity in November 2013 at the annual U.N. climate summit held in Warsaw, Poland. The gathering was sponsored by a panoply of fossil fuel companies, including a major miner of lignite coal, while the
Polish government hosted a parallel “Coal & Climate Summit,” which held up the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels as part of the battle against global warming. The official U.N. climate nego
tiation process gave its tacit endorsement of the coal event when its highest official—Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—agreed to deliver a
keynote address to the gathering, defying calls from activists to boycott. “The summit’s focus on continued reliance on coal is directly counter to the goal of these climate negotiations,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “which is to dramatically reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
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