AlterNet.org: Fracking

When Drones Guard the Pipeline: The Militarization of Our Fossil Fuels

Winona LaDuke with Frank Molley, Honor the Earth — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:22:00 -0700

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.

I’m in South Dakota today, sort of a ground zero for the XL Keystone Pipeline, that pipeline, owned by a Canadian Corporation which will export tar sands oil to the rest of the world. This is the heart of the North American continent here. Bwaan Akiing is what we call this land-Land of the Lakota. There are no pipelines across it, and beneath it is the Oglalla Aquifer wherein lies the vast majority of the water for this region. The Lakota understand that water is life, and that there is no new water. It turns out, tar sands carrying pipelines (otherwise called “dilbit”) are sixteen times more likely to break than a conventional pipeline, and it seems that some ranchers and Native people, in a new Cowboy and Indian Alliance, are intent upon protecting that water.

This community understands the price of protecting land. And, the use of military force upon a civilian community- carrying an acute memory of the over 133,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the National Guard upon Lakota people forty years ago in the Wounded Knee standoff. That experience is coming home again, this time in Mi’gmaq territory.

Militarization of North American Oil Fields

This past week in New Brunswick, the Canadian military came out to protect oil companies. In this case, seismic testing for potential natural gas reserves by Southwestern Energy Company(SWN), a Texas based company working in the province. It’s an image of extreme energy, and perhaps the times.

SWN exercised it’s permit to conduct preliminary testing to assess resource potential for shale gas exploitation. Canadian constitutional law requires the consultation with First Nations, and this has not occurred. That’s when Elsipogtog Mi’gmaq warrior chief, John Levi, seized a vehicle containing seismic testing equipment owned by SWN. Their claim is that fracking is illegal without their permission on their traditional territory. About 65 protesters, including women and children, seized the truck at a gas station and surrounded the vehicle so that it couldn’t be removed from the parking lot. Levi says that SWN broke the law when they first started fracking “in our traditional hunting grounds, medicine grounds, contaminating our waters.” according to reporter Jane Mundy in on line Lawyers and Settlements publication. This may be just the beginning.

On June 9, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) came out en masse, seemingly to protect SWN seismic exploration crews against peaceful protesters – both native and non-Native, blocking route 126 from seismic thumper trucks. Armed with guns, paddy wagons and twist tie restraints, peaceful protestors were arrested. Four days later the protesting continued, and this time drew the attention of local military personnel. As one Mi’gmag said, “Just who is calling the shots in New Brunswick when the value of the land and water take a backseat to the risks associated with shale gas development?”

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country, albeit New Brunswick. New Brunswick is sort of the El Salvador of Canadian provinces, if one looks at the economy, run akin to an oligarchy. New Brunswick’s Irving family empire stretches from oil and gas to media, they are the largest employer in New Brunswick and the primary proponents of the Trans Canada West to East pipeline which will bring tar sands oil to the St. Johns refinery owned by the same family. Irving is the fourth wealthiest family in Canada, the largest employer, land holder and amasses that wealth in the relatively poor province. The Saint John refinery would be a beneficiary of any natural gas fracked in the province. In general, press coverage of Aboriginal issues is sparse there at best.

Fracking proposals have come to their territory with a vengeance, and the perfect political storm has emerged- immense material poverty (seven of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada), a set of starve or sell federal agreements pushed by the Harper administration (on first nations), and extreme energy drives.

Each fracking well will take up to two-million-gallons of pristine water and transform the water into a toxic soup, full of carcinogens. The subsistence economy has been central to the Wabanaki confederacy since time immemorial, and concerns over SWN’s water contamination have come to the province. A recent Arkansas lawsuit against SWN charges the company with widespread toxic contamination of drinking water from their hydro-fracking.

Canada is the home to 75% of the worlds mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in the Canadian courts. Canadian corporations and their international subsidiaries are being protected by military forces elsewhere, and this concerns many. According to a U.K. Guardian story, a Québec Court of Appeal rejected a suit by citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Montreal-based Anvil Mining Limited for allegedly providing logistical support to the DRC army as it carried out a massacre, killing as many as 100 people in the town of Kilwa near the company's silver and copper mine. The Supreme Court of Canada later confirmed that Canadian courts had no jurisdiction over the company's actions in the DRC when it rejected the plaintiffs' request to appeal. Kairos Canada, a faith-based organization, concluded that the Supreme Court's ruling would "have broader implications for other victims of human rights abuses committed by Canadian companies and their chances of bringing similar cases to our courts".

In the meantime, back in New Brunswick, a heavily militarized RCMP came out to protect the exploration crews. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has many faces, from ranchers in Nebraska and Texas who reject eminent domain takings of their land for a pipeline right of way, to the Lakota nation which walked out of State Department meetings in May in a show of firm opposition to the pipeline. All of them are facing a pipeline owned by TransCanada, a Canadian Corporation.

On a worldwide scale communities are concerned about their water. In El Salvador, more than 60% of the population relies on a single source of water. In 2009, this came down to choosing between drinking water and mining. In 2009, after immense public pressure, the country chose water. It established a moratorium on metal mining permits. Polls show that a strong majority of Salvadorans would now like a permanent ban. A testament to how things can change even in a politically challenged environment.

Up in Canada’s version of El Salvador, twelve people, both native and non were arrested, some detained and interrogated by investigators by the RCMP forces on June l4, and after a day of the federal military “making their presence” felt, the people of the region have concerns about how far Canada will go to protect fossil fuels.

Here in Bwaan Akiing, I am hoping that people who want to protect the water are treated with respect. And, I also have to hope that those 7,000 plus American owned drones aren’t coming home, omaa akiing, from elsewhere to our territories in the name of Canadian oil interests.

Video by Charles LeBlanc

Winona LaDuke is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth in White Earth Reservation, MN.

Fracking Is Already Straining U.S. Water Supplies

Tom Kentworthy, Think Progress — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:38:00 -0700

Some of America's most intensive oil and gas development is occurring in drought-prone regions where water is scarce.

As the level of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells in the United States has intensified in recent years, much of the mounting public concern has centered on fears that underground water supplies could be contaminated with the toxic chemicals used in the well-stimulation technique that cracks rock formations and releases trapped oil and gas. But in some parts of the country, worries are also growing about fracking’s effect on water supply, as the water-intensive process stirs competition for the resources already stretched thin by drought or other factors.

Every fracking job requires 2 million to 4 million gallons of water, according to the Groundwater Protection Council. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has estimated that the 35,000 oil and gas wells used for fracking consume between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons of water each year. That’s about equal, EPA says, to the water use in 40 to 80 cities with populations of 50,000 people, or one to two cities with a population of 2.5 million each.

Some of the most intensive oil and gas development in the nation is occurring in regions where water is already at a premium. A paper published last month by Ceres, a nonprofit that works on sustainability issues, looked at 25,000 shale oil and shale gas wells in operation and monitored by an industry-tied reporting website called FracFocus.

Ceres found that 47 percent of these wells were in areas “with high or extremely high water stress” because of large withdrawals for use by industry, agriculture, and municipalities. In Colorado, for example, 92 percent of the wells were in extremely high water-stress areas, and in Texas more than half were in high or extremely high water-stress areas.

“Given projected sharp increases in production in the coming years and the potentially intense nature of local water demands, competition and conflicts over water should be a growing concern for companies, policymakers and investors,” the Ceres report concluded. It goes on to say that:

Prolonged drought conditions in many parts of Texas and Colorado last summer created increased competition and conflict between farmers, communities and energy developers, which is only likely to continue. … Even in wetter regions of the northeast United States, dozens of water permits granted to operators had to be withdrawn last summer due to low levels in environmentally vulnerable headwater streams.

Another recent study by the University of Texas looked at past and projected water use for fracking in the Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville shale plays in Texas, and found that fracking in 2011 was using more than twice as much water in the state as it was three years earlier. In Dimmit County, home to the Eagle Ford shale development in South Texas, fracking accounted for nearly a quarter of overall water consumption in 2011 and is expected to grow to a third in a few years, according to the study.

Moreover, an April report by the Western Organization of Resource Councils found that fracking is using 7 billion gallons of water a year in four western states: Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota. “Fracking’s growing demand for water can threaten availability of water for agriculture and western rural communities,” said Bob Leresche, a Wyoming resident and board member of the group.

The national oil and gas trade association, American Petroleum Institute, correctly notes that the “industry’s water use is small when compared to other industrial and recreational activities.” But even though hydraulic fracturing usually accounts for just 1 percent or 2 percent of states’ overall water use, the Ceres study notes that “it can be much higher at the local level, increasing competition for scarce supplies.”

New ways to frack

Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry, along with companies drawn by the opportunity to profit from a better way to frack, are all seeking ways to reduce and even eliminate fracking’s thirst.

A new company in Texas, Alpha Reclaim Technology, sees using treated wastewater from municipal sewage-treatment plants as part of the answer. Founded in 2011, the company has signed up cities to provide about 21 million gallons of treated wastewater a day and is negotiating with oil and gas exploration and production companies to make the switch in the Eagle Ford shale play.

With regard to water use and fracking, Jeremy Osborne, the company’s vice president and general counsel, says, “We are really in a collision course here in Texas”—a course he says is accelerated by drought and population growth.

But Jillian Ryan, Alpha Reclaim Technology’s vice president for government affairs, said changing longstanding practices in the oil and gas industry can be a challenge. While the industry talks a good game about conserving water, Ryan says, “We can have a hard time getting oil and gas companies to live up to what they are talking about. Nobody wants to change. It’s easier to drill a water well where they are drilling [for oil and gas].”

Another player in this oil and gas niche is GASFRAC Energy Services, a Canadian company that says it has successfully fracked about 2,000 wells using liquid propane gas in place of water. Most of these wells are in Canada, but about 100 of them are in Texas.

Environmentalists and fracking critics, however, are alarmed at the thought of fracking with propane. Prompted by the possibility that GASFRAC would be employed in New York state and could evade a state moratorium on fracking by using propane instead of water, environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, protested to the commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Similar to water-based fracking, the groups said, fracking with propane also requires “the addition of toxic chemicals.” Because GASFRAC’s method is proprietary, the groups said in their letter that “there is little publicly-available information on the process” and the exact chemicals it uses.

Propane is also very flammable, and in two cases in Alberta in 2011, fires broke out during GASFRAC fracking operations, injuring a total of 15 workers.

Cornell University engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea is among those who are very skeptical of fracking in shale formations with propane and other alternatives to water. Ingraffea has been studying fracturing since doing research for his doctorate in the 1970s. He finds that even modern fracking practices, using millions of gallons of water per well to yield what he says is just 10 percent to 15 percent of oil and gas out, are “very inefficient and inelegant.”

Using propane or a propane-butane combination, Ingraffea says, has a positive side in that it eliminates a key problem with water-based fracking: the disposal of vast quantities of flowback water that returns to the surface after fracking is completed and is often contaminated with things such as salts and radioactivity.

But, he added, no one has yet clearly demonstrated that fracking with propane or some of the other alternatives—such as using a nitrogen or carbon dioxide gel—can compete on economics with water. Propane, he said, “is expensive and nobody really knows how much it takes to develop a typical shale gas well with a lateral that is a mile or two long.”

Oil and gas service companies such as Halliburton and Schlumberger have thrown a lot of money and bright minds at seeking efficiencies over many years, said Ingraffea, and if there was a “silver bullet you would think those companies would have hit it very hard.”

As the Ceres report concludes:

Shale energy development highlights the fact that our water resources were already vulnerable before additional demands were introduced. Regulators, water managers and ultimately all significant economic players who rely on abundant supplies of water must double-down their efforts to better manage this limited and most precious resource.

Tar Sands Mining Beginning in Utah: Why the U.S. Is Becoming Ground Zero For the Dirtiest Energy [With Slideshow]

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:35:00 -0700

The practice that has devastated parts of Canada is already underway in the U.S. and things could get a lot worse.

Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. Follow her trip on Facebook or on Twitter.

A few years ago most Americans had never heard of tar sands. Now, thanks to mounting opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and a recent spill in Arkansas, vocabularies have grown, and so has a movement. Environmentalists have ignited a firestorm of protests over the pipeline, prompting rallies in DC and states across the country, resulting in high-profile arrests and media blitzes.

Keystone XL, which would allow more dirty oil from the environmentally ravished boreal forests of northern Alberta to flow through the U.S., has become a rallying call of sorts, a tangible way for environmentalists and other concerned residents to fight the elusive specter of climate change.

With all the focus on blocking the Obama administration’s approval of Keystone XL, the general public has mostly missed a project plugging along at 8,000 feet atop the Tavaputs Plateau in Eastern Utah (part of the ever-larger Colorado Plateau), and not far from beloved Arches and Canyonlands national parks. This fall a Canadian company named U.S Oil Sands (formerly Earth Energy Resources) leapt another legal hurdle on its multi-year journey to becoming the first large-scale tar sands mine in the U.S. Local and regional activists have been fighting the development for years, but it has somehow missed the national conversation, which is odd because the potential for tar sands and oil shale development in Utah could be massive.

“We don’t want the unconventional fuel industry to gain a foothold on the Colorado Plateau,” said Taylor McKinnon of Grand Canyon Trust. “The U.S. unconventional fuel carbon bomb is bigger than Alberta’s."

What’s at Stake

Tar sands (also known as oil sands) are rocks that have bitumen (a form of oil) mixed in with sand, clay and water. Tar sands are usually extracted by strip mining an area to remove the rock, then crushing it and using heat, water and chemicals to separate the oil, which is then diluted with other hydrocarbons in order to make it liquid enough to be transported to a refinery. (Sometimes in situ recovery is possible, where steam and chemicals are pumped into underground wells to enable the bitumen to come to the surface.) The process is energy- and water-intensive and the waste massive and dangerous, at least as it has been done in northern Alberta (see photos here).

Utah is the primary location of tar sands in the U.S., but oil shale abounds in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. Oil shale is similar to tar sands, but when heated the rock releases kerogen, an oil-like substance. The presence of oil shale in the West is no secret—Ute Indians referred to it as “rocks that burn.” What is new, however, is the economics of bringing these unconventional fuels to market and the green light from Washington.

The federal government has approved 132,100 acres of land available for tar sands development in Utah and another 687,000 acres in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado for oil shale. (This is a scaled-back number, thanks to pressure from environmental groups, from what was first proposed in the Bush administration’s 2005 Energy Policy Act.)

U.S. Oil Sands (which did not return interview requests) has already dug its shovel into part of 32,000 acres it has leased in the Tavaputs Plateau. The company started a 200-acre test mine and last October it received sign-off from the state to continue its project following approval from the Water Quality Division. The Division’s director, Walt Baker, believed the company didn’t need a groundwater pollution permit. “He concluded that there is no groundwater to pollute in the project site, around 213 acres in the arid high country between Vernal and Moab,” reported Judy Fahys of the Salt Lake Tribune.

But the environmental group Living Rivers disagrees. Ironically, the site of the test mine is referred to on U.S. Oil Sands’ website as PR Spring, the name of a nearby freshwater spring. Additionally, Jeremy Miller reported for High Country News in July 2012 that the company actually plans to use groundwater from the site to supply the necessary water for the process. As his HCNcolleague Stephanie Paige Ogburn wrote in October 2012, “Apparently the groundwater is not too deep to drill into as a water source, but still deep enough to be immune from pollution runoff.”

The company anticipates that it will produce 2,000 barrels of oil a day once it is ramped up to full production. With a seven-year project lifespan, one estimate puts its contribution to the country’s fuel supply at six hours.

And the process won’t be easy. Miller describes what it would look like:

Heavy machinery would scour bitumen from the pit around the clock … The sand and mineral fines remaining after the oil has been removed will be combined, shoved back into the pit and covered with topsoil. But processing expands such wastes by as much as 30 percent. The overflow will be dumped into surrounding ravines—a method starkly reminiscent of Appalachia's mountaintop coal mining. And the project will create miles of light pollution, illuminating one of the country's last great "dark" regions.

The company claims the next part of the process makes its version of tar sands mining environmentally friendly by using a citrus-based solvent (although there is much disagreement about this). As Neal Clark of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance said, “We don’t feel it’s an appropriate use of public lands to vet these unproven technologies that have wide-ranging impacts on air and water quality and habitat to companies that haven’t proven the technology whatsoever.”

But the story doesn’t end with the solvents, as Miller continues:

In order to utilize the solvent, the sands must first be sent through a series of on-site crushers. Hot water is added to the resulting slurry, generating a "froth" of oil, solvent and fine sand particles. This mixture is then passed through a series of separation towers, where the crude oil is isolated. It's then trucked to refineries in Salt Lake City for processing. Unlike conventional light crude oil, the heavy crude generated from PR Spring—like Canada's—requires extra, energy-intensive refining steps to remove impurities, such as sulfur and heavy metals, before it can be turned into anything useful.

State and local governments have largely welcomed the project and the county is quite literally paving the way, turning dirt roads into asphalt to speed things along. But opposition of another sort is mounting.

The Fight

“The kids, bless their hearts, don’t want to file lawsuits, they want to stand in front of bulldozers,” said John Weisheit of Living Rivers. “But that’s cool, I support that.”

Weisheit’s organization, along with the environmental law firm Western Resource Advocates, has been leading the charge in litigation to halt tar sands and oil shale development in the region. While they haven’t had a lot of success in court, with the U.S Oil Sands project they have managed to substantially delay development and the company is still searching for investors. Weisheit considers that a win for his side.

In May, Living Rivers, Grand Canyon Trust, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Rocky Mountain Wild filed a 60-day notice of intent to sue the BLM. The groups contest that the government agency failed to consider the impact to endangered species that would result from making 800,000 acres of land available to tar sands and oil shale development.

“PR Springs, that is real wilderness up there,” said Weisheit. “There are roadless areas nearby, bald eagles forage up there, and some golden eagles. Sometimes I see so many I can’t believe it.”

The area is home to deer, elk, bear, and the threatened Mexican spotted owl, and it straddles two critical watersheds, the Colorado River (which 30 million people depend on) and the Green River. Nearby Desolation Canyon and its rivers give refuge to three endangered fish species and PR Springs sits just northeast of Moab, Utah, a destination town for recreation enthusiasts and nature lovers, surrounded by national and state parks of prized beauty.

Activist groups like Before It Starts are mounting education camps at the site and doing direct action, but they know PR Springs is just the tip of the iceberg. Another tar sands project at Asphalt Ridge has also been green-lighted near the town of Vernal, Utah, just to the north.

But the largest deposit of tar sands is further south in the state, in an area known as the Tar Sands Triangle, wedged between Canyonlands National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and the Dirty Devil River Watershed. In essence, it’s prime canyon country.

And tar sands development would be dwarfed by the impacts of oil shale development.

What’s the price of pursuing these unconventional fuels? Well, the BLM said it would "completely displace all other uses of the land."

Kurt Repanshek, writing in 2010 for National Parks Traveler said, according to the BLM’s own Oil Shale and Tar Sands Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, that the agency believed its plan (now slightly scaled back) would mean that the air nearby could be:

… contaminated with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, while air close to the site could be contaminated with benzene, toluene and formaldehyde. More than 100,000 acres of wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and herbicides could cause 'chronic or acute toxicity' in wildlife and habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost.

And that’s coming from the agency giving the go-ahead.

Grand Canyon Trust's McKinnon said he doesn’t believe it’s possible that the already-stretched Colorado River Basin could support that level of industry without “unacceptable impacts.”

“The notion of mining climate disaster fuels in a region that is ground zero for global warming impacts is itself alarming,” said McKinnon. “It’s bad land use policy, it’s bad water policy and it’s bad public policy.”

Can Utah's Beautiful Wildlands Survive an Energy Grab?

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:11:00 -0700

A town known for its astounding natural beauty is in the cross hairs of energy developers.

Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. You can follow the trip on Facebook or follow Tara on Twitter.

Utah always blows my mind — the red rocks, the canyons, the rivers, the mountains and ... the love of industry, the dirtier the better.

The first stop on our Hitting Home tour was Moab, Utah — a town surrounded by the gorgeous Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Fisher Towers, Dead Horse State Park, and tons of “undesignated” wildlands of astounding beauty.

In town we also saw a tailings pile of uranium mining waste; talked with local residents concerned about impacts from a new plan to fly helicopter tours over the area; we trekked up into the Book Cliffs outside of Moab and saw a test mine for what may be the first U.S. tar sands mine; we saw oil pumpers adjacent to national parks and gas being flared from towers along breathtaking ridges; and we met people who were fighting to protect their land, and the local watershed, from encroaching drilling operations.

In Nearby Dutch Flats, a company is accepting wastewater from fracking operations across the Colorado border, and neighboring Green River has plans for a nuclear power plant and perhaps also a refinery that could process the tar sands coming down from the Book Cliffs.

Utah has always been friendly to energy development — and it has also always been a haven for those who enjoy wild places and wildlife. It’s unclear how long those two value sets can coexist as energy development grows and natural resources like water and clean air grow scarcer.

Stay tuned for a story about tars sand and oil shale development in Utah.

Pro-Fracking Greens Called Out in Ecologist Sandra Steingraber's New Manifesto

Jeff Biggers, YES! Magazine — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:05:00 -0700

In a statement, ecologist Sandra Steingraber denounced Illinois’ new fracking regulations and described the need for a movement dedicated to abolishing fracking nationwide.

A new salvo has been fired in the national battle against fracking.

Within hours of the Illinois General Assembly's vote on its controversial bill on hydraulic fracking last Friday night, the AP's headline rippled across nationwide newspapers: "Illinois lawmakers approve nation's toughest fracking regulations."

With New York readying to rescind or keep in place that state's temporary moratorium, and high stakes battles taking place across the nation about whether to regulate fracking or place moratoriums on it, Steingraber and a network of citizen groups have viewed Illinois as the staging ground for a fracking rush that will have an extraordinary ripple effect. Not so fast, says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, the renowned scientist whom Rolling Stone has called the " toxic avenger." She returned to her native Illinois last week to join a growing citizens uprising against gas drilling and sand mining operations she defines as "an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment."

Once hailed by the Sierra Club as the "new Rachel Carson," Steingraber denounced Illinois’ bill as "the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations." She testified in front of a last minute committee hearing of the Illinois House of Representatives, protested with sit-in activists, met with bill negotiators, and was even tossed out of the Illinois General Assembly for speaking out (see video at the bottom of this article).

With Gov. Pat Quinn's signature imminent, Business Insider gushed that Illinois “could become the epicenter of America's next oil boom."

Not under their watch, says Steingraber and the Illinois anti-fracking shock troops.

Issuing a "Fracking Manifesto," she has thrown down the gauntlet on Illinois' regulatory fallout as a cautionary tale for citizens groups, environmental organizations and frackers across the nation.

"We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation," the manifesto declares. "If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, non-violent methods."

The full document is below.

A Fracking Manifesto

from Sandra Steingraber and the people of Illinois to the nation

We know that high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracking, or HVHF, is an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment.

We know that HVHF and its attendant technologies:

contribute to groundwater contamination, including 219 cases in Pennsylvania alone;
turn massive amounts of fresh, drinkable water into massive amounts of briny, poisonous flowback fluid for which there is no failsafe disposal solution;
vent hazardous air pollutants that are associated with cancer, asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm birth;
release radioactive substances—including radon, which is the number two cause of lung cancer—and benzene, which is a proven cause of leukemia—from deep geological strata;
fragment forests in ways that decimate birds and wildlife, sabotage natural flood control systems, and pour sediment into rivers and streams;
industrialize communities in ways that vastly increase truck traffic, noise pollution, light pollution, stress, crime, and the need for emergency services;
offer jobs that are dangerous, toxic, and temporary, with a fatality rate seven times that of other industries; and
leak prodigious amounts of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas.

We know these problems cannot be prevented by any set of rules or government office, let alone state agencies like those in Illinois, which have been cut to the bone by budget cuts and cannot be counted on for regulatory enforcement.

We have heard the warnings of our brothers and sisters living in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio, whose children, pets, and livestock are sick, whose property values are ruined, whose water is undrinkable.

We have heard the pleas of our neighbors in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, where strip-mining for “ frac sand” has devastated communities, destroyed landscapes, and filled the air with carcinogenic silica dust. We are aware that our own beloved Starved Rock State Park is already threatened by industrial mining of silica sand used for fracking operations and that the pressure to strip-mine Illinois for sand will only increase with every well that is drilled and fracked.

We assert that fracking is a moral crisis. In a time of climate emergency, it is wrong to further deepen our dependency on fossil fuels. In a state such as Illinois, where chronic drought and water shortages are already forecast for our children’s future, it is wrong to destroy fresh water resources in order to bring new sources of climate-killing gas and oil out of the ground.

We reject the legitimacy of Illinois’ fracking regulatory bill, which was the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations. Responsible only to their funders and their members, these environmental groups do not represent us nor are they empowered to negotiate on our behalf. We consider the fracking regulatory bill to be a subversion of both science and democracy. Throughout its creation, no comprehensive health study or environmental impact study was ever commissioned. No public hearings or public comment periods ever took place. And yet it is the public that is being compelled to live with the risks sanctioned by this bill. It is an unjust law.

Knowing that our own government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of the citizenry, knowing that no one is coming to save us, we declare our intent to save ourselves from the ravages of shale gas and oil extraction via HVHF. We declare our intent to join together in a fracking abolitionist movement.

As such, no longer shall national environmental organizations based far from impacted realities make decisions that will have life-changing impacts on the people living in impacted zones. We will call out organizations that betray core values and integrity. We will openly inform their membership and their funders and reveal the truth of where they stand and at whose expense.

We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation. If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, nonviolent methods.

We hereby commit ourselves to building a powerful movement that will protect Illinois’ children—and safeguard the living ecosystem on which their lives depend—for generations to come. In short, we declare our intent to take the future into our hands. And that future is unfractured.

Sign on and join our movement.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber

Springfield, Illinois

Jeff Biggers wrote this article and shot these videos for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Winner of the David R. Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Jeff is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, among other books. His website is www.jeffbiggers.com.

Has There Been a Great Progressive Reversal? How the Left Abandoned Cheap Electricity

Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, AlterNet — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 12:14:00 -0700

The authors say the Left went from viewing cheap energy as a fundamental human right to a threat to the planet and harmful to the poor. (Followed by an exchange with AlterNet environment editor Tara Lohan and the authors).

Editor's Note: From time to time we publish articles we don't necessarily agree with. We encourage differences of opinion, for the sake of open debate. AlterNet's environmental editor Tara Lohan replies to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger at the end of their article, and we've added the authors' response to Lohan below it.

Eighty years ago, the Tennessee Valley region was like many poor rural communities in tropical regions today. The best forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were being rapidly depleted of nutrients, resulting in falling yields and a desperate search for new croplands. Poor farmers were plagued by malaria and had inadequate medical care. Few had indoor plumbing and even fewer had electricity.

Hope came in the form of World War I. Congress authorized the construction of the Wilson dam on the Tennessee River to power an ammunition factory. But the war ended shortly after the project was completed.

Henry Ford declared he would invest millions of dollars, employ one million men, and build a city 75 miles long in the region if the government would only give him the whole complex for $5 million. Though taxpayers had already sunk more than $40 million into the project, President Harding and Congress, believing the government should not be in the business of economic development, were inclined to accept.

George Norris, a progressive senator, attacked the deal and proposed instead that it become a public power utility. Though he was from Nebraska, he was on the agriculture committee and regularly visited the Tennessee Valley. Staying in the unlit shacks of its poor residents, he became sympathetic to their situation. Knowing that Ford was looking to produce electricity and fertilizer that were profitable, not cheap, Norris believed Ford would behave as a monopolist. If approved, Norris warned, the project would be the worst real estate deal “since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Three years later Norris had defeated Ford in the realms of public opinion and in Congress.

Over the next 10 years, Norris mobilized the progressive movement to support his sweeping vision of agricultural modernization by the federal government. In 1933 Congress and President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It mobilized thousands of unemployed men to build hydroelectric dams, produce fertilizer, and lay down irrigation systems. Sensitive to local knowledge, government workers acted as community organizers, empowering local farmers to lead the efforts to improve agricultural techniques and plant trees.

The TVA produced cheap energy and restored the natural environment. Electricity from the dams allowed poor residents to stop burning wood for fuel. It facilitated the cheap production of fertilizer and powered the water pumps for irrigation, allowing farmers to grow more food on less land. These changes lifted incomes and allowed forests to grow back. Although dams displaced thousands of people, they provided electricity for millions.

By the '50s, the TVA was the crown jewel of the New Deal and one of the greatest triumphs of centralized planning in the West. It was viewed around the world as a model for how governments could use modern energy, infrastructure and agricultural assistance to lift up small farmers, grow the economy, and save the environment. Recent research suggests that the TVA accelerated economic development in the region much more than in surrounding and similar regions and proved a boon to the national economy as well.

Perhaps most important, the TVA established the progressive principle that cheap energy for all was a public good, not a private enterprise. When an effort was made in the mid-'50s to privatize part of the TVA, it was beaten back by Senator Al Gore Sr. The TVA implicitly established modern energy as a fundamental human right that should not be denied out of deference to private property and free markets.

The Rejection of the State and Cheap Energy

Just a decade later, as Vietnam descended into quagmire, left-leaning intellectuals started denouncing TVA-type projects as part of the American neocolonial war machine. The TVA’s fertilizer factories had previously produced ammunition; its nuclear power stations came from bomb making. The TVA wasn’t ploughshares from swords, it was a sword in a new scabbard. In her 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson described modern agriculture as a war on nature. The World Bank, USAID, and even the Peace Corps with its TVA-type efforts were, in the writings of Noam Chomsky, mere fig leaves for an imperialistic resource grab.

Where Marx and Marxists had long viewed industrial capitalism, however terrible, as an improvement over agrarian feudalism, the New Left embraced a more romantic view. Before the arrival of “progress” and “development,” they argued, small farmers lived in harmony with their surroundings. In his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful, economist E.F. Schumacher dismissed the soil erosion caused by peasant farmers as “trifling in comparison with the devastations caused by gigantic groups motivated by greed, envy, and the lust for power.” Anthropologists like Yale University’s James Scott narrated irrigation, road-building, and electrification efforts as sinister, Foucauldian impositions of modernity on local innocents.

With most rivers in the West already dammed, US and European environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and the International Rivers Network tried to stop, with some success, the expansion of hydroelectricity in India, Brazil and elsewhere. It wasn’t long before environmental groups came to oppose nearly all forms of grid electricity in poor countries, whether from dams, coal or nuclear. “Giving society cheap, abundant energy,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1975, “would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Elaborate justifications were offered as to why poor people in other countries wouldn't benefit from cheap electricity, fertilizer and roads in the same way the good people of the Tennessee Valley had. Biomass (e.g., wood burning), solar and efficiency “do not carry with them inappropriate cultural patterns or values.” In a 1977 interview, Amory Lovins added: “The whole point of thinking along soft path lines is to do whatever it is you want to do using as little energy — and other resources — as possible.”

By the time of the United Nations Rio environment conference in 1992, the model for “sustainable development” was of small co-ops in the Amazon forest where peasant farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and Jerry’s for their “Rainforest Crunch” flavor. A year later, in Earth in the Balance, Al Gore wrote, “power grids themselves are no longer necessarily desirable.” Citing Schumacher, he suggested they might even be “inappropriate” for the Third World.

Over the next 20 years environmental groups constructed economic analyses and models purporting to show that expensive intermittent renewables like solar panels and biomass-burners were in fact cheaper than grid electricity. Greenpeace and WWF hired educated and upper-middle class professionals in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg to explain why their countrymen did not need new power plants but could just be more efficient instead.

When challenged as to why poor nations should not have what we have, green leaders respond that we should become more like poor nations. In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argued that developed economies should adopt “appropriate technology” like those used in poor countries and return to small-scale agriculture. One “bonus” that comes with climate change, Naomi Klein says, is that it will require in the rich world a “type of farming [that] is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture.”

And so the Left went from viewing cheap energy as a fundamental human right and key to environmental restoration to a threat to the planet and harmful to the poor. In the name of “appropriate technology” the revamped Left rejected cheap fertilizers and energy. In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want — cheap electricity — but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power.

From Anti-Statism to Neo-Liberalism

At the heart of this reversal was the Left’s growing suspicion of both centralized energy and centralized government. Libertarian conservatives have long concocted elaborate counterfactuals to suggest that the TVA and other public electrification efforts actually slowed the expansion of access to electricity. By the early 1980’s, progressives were making the same claim. In 1984, William Chandler of the WorldWatch Institute would publish the “The Myth of the TVA,” which claimed that 50 years of public investment had never provided any development benefit whatsoever. In fact, a new analysis by economists at Stanford and Berkeley, Patrick Klein and Enrico Moretti, find that the "TVA boosted national manufacturing productivity by roughly 0.3% and that the dollar value of these productivity gains exceeded the program's cost."

Even so, today's progressives signal their sophistication by dismissing statist solutions. Environmentalists demand that we make carbon-based energy more expensive, in order to "harness market forces" to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Global development agencies increasingly reject state-sponsored projects to build dams and large power plants in favor of offering financing to private firms promising to bring solar panels and low-power "microgrids" to the global poor — solutions that might help run a few light bulbs and power cell phones but offer the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.

Where senators Norris and Gore Sr. understood that only the government could guarantee cheap energy and fertilizers for poor farmers, environmental leaders today seek policy solutions that give an outsized role to investment banks and private utilities. If the great leap backward was from statist progressivism to anarcho-primitivism, it was but a short step sideways to green neoliberalism.

But if developed-world progressives, comfortably ensconced in their own modernity, today reject the old progressive vision of cheap, abundant, grid electricity for everyone, progressive modernizers in the developing world are under no such illusion. Whether socialists, state capitalists, or, mostly, some combination of the two, developing world leaders like Brazil’s Lula da Silva understand that cheap grid electricity is good for people and good for the environment. That modern energy and fertilizers increase crop yields and allow forests to grow back. That energy poverty causes more harm to the poor than global warming. They view cheap energy as a public good and a human right, and they are well on their way to providing electricity to every one of their citizens.

The TVA and all modernization efforts bring side effects along with progress. Building dams requires evicting people from their land and putting ecosystems underwater. Burning coal saves trees but causes air pollution and global warming. Fracking for gas prevents coal burning but it can pollute the water. Nuclear energy produces not emissions but toxic waste and can result in major industrial accidents. Nevertheless, these are problems that must be dealt with through more modernization and progress, not less.

Viewed through this lens, climate change is a reason to accelerate rather than slow energy transitions. The 1.3 billion who lack electricity should get it. It will dramatically improve their lives, reduce deforestation, and make them more resilient to climate impacts. The rest of us should move to cleaner sources of energy — from coal to natural gas, from natural gas to nuclear and renewables, and from gasoline to electric cars — as quickly as we can. This is not a low-energy program, it is a high-energy one. Any effort worthy of being called progressive, liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high-energy planet.

******

What 'Cheap' Energy? A Response by AlterNet's Environmental Editor Tara Lohan

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus believe that the left has abandoned cheap energy, but the truth is cheap energy doesn’t really exist anymore. We’ve dammed two-thirds of the globe’s major rivers and we’ve drilled and mined the easiest to reach fossil fuels. Cheap energy also doesn’t exist because we’ve come to understand that massive hydro projects and burning fossil fuels come with a price tag — a cost to human health and the environment that gets externalized and is a price often paid by the poorest. Asthma, heart disease, cancer, undrinkable water, and unlivable homes are just some of the bills that have come due for communities that live near areas where fossil fuels are extracted or burned. And this so-called “cheap" energy that is often produced — where does it go? Are the communities of Appalachia any richer for the coal mining that’s taken place there for 100 years? Coal that keeps the lights on in Washington DC and in China.

When Shellenberger and Nordhaus get to the end of their piece and assert that, “the 1.3 billion who lack electricity should get it. It will dramatically improve their lives, reduce deforestation, and make them more resilient to climate impacts,” I’m not convinced at all of how exactly they plan to provide that energy. I only know it’s supposed to be “cheap” and shouldn’t come from “intermittent” renewable sources.

There are very few progressives and environmentalists who would argue that poor people around the globe should be denied access to food and electricity that will improve their lives, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus seem to assert. Although since both movements are large and diverse, it would be impossible to generalize about everyone as they seem to.

It is important to understand that poor communities not only bear the brunt of resource extraction and development, they will also suffer theworst impacts of climate change. And it is poor nations that have been outspoken in demanding action on climate change, including drastically reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are quick to criticize the left and groups like International Rivers for being opposed to massive hydro power plants, but what about the communities that actually live there? It turns out that there is huge backlash against such projects by local and indigenous communities across the globe, in Brazil, Guatemala, Ethiopia, China, Malaysia, and other countries. These too are poor people and they’re likely to be even poorer—both culturally and economically—if they’re displaced from their traditional lands because of large dam building or the associated environmental/agricultural costs.

These are complex problems, and there are no easy solutions — and in fact solutions are likely to vary from one place to the next. What may be beneficial to one community, may not be in another. And certainly, regardless of which side of the political and ideological spectrum you’re on, the communities themselves should have the primary voice.

Yet Shellenberg and Nordhaus assert that burning coal saves trees, an idea that would be laughable to Appalachians who’ve watched their forested mountaintops be blown off for coal mining. And to say that “Fracking for gas prevents coal burning but it can pollute the water” is a gross understatement. Fracking can and does pollute water. It also pollutes the air, emits more greenhouse gases during extraction than the industry would like to admit, fragments wildlands, industrializes rural and suburban communities, and sickens people.

Let’s not trivialize the impacts of fossil fuel extraction; this is serious business. If we’re going to find solutions, we have to be realistic and forward-thinking. It’s hard to see how the "modernization and progress" they espouse comes from pushing for more reliance on the dirtiest forms of energy we know.

Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus respond:

It is a testament to the hold that apocalyptic, Malthusian environmentalism has upon contemporary progressivism that publishing an article arguing that the Left ought to get back in the business of fighting for cheap grid electricity for the world's poor requires a warning label.

Nonetheless, Lohan does a useful service, illustrating our point even as she attempts to rebut it. Lohan insists, “there are very few progressives and environmentalists who would argue that poor people around the globe should be denied access to food and electricity that will improve their lives.” But she has already told us that cheap energy doesn’t exist, that she is not convinced it is possible to provide it, and that poor communities around the world don’t want it anyway.

Lohan points to the fact that 2/3 of the world's rivers are dammed. One wonders whether she has followed the news of plans by Brazil and the Congo to dam theirs. She claims "we’ve drilled and mined the easiest to reach fossil fuels," but then turns around and complains about the drilling resulting from the boom in natural gas.

Lohan acknowledges that bringing electricity to the poor involves trade-offs and then proceeds to ignore them. She points to the local impacts of dam building in China and Brazil without acknowledging that those dams have played a large role in allowing those nations to achieve universal access to grid electricity. She invokes the poor as those who will suffer most from climate change and ignores the reality that modern energy makes the poor vastly less vulnerable to climate impacts. And she bizarrely suggests that coal mining is a major cause of deforestation, pointing to the Appalachia region. In reality, cheap electricity (whether it comes from coal or less polluting sources of energy) creates fertilizer and electricity, which obviate the need for high rates of deforestation.

A progressivism truly committed to social justice would take the trade-offs associated with social justice and the environment seriously, including the uncomfortable reality that the global poor deserve access to modern electricity, just like us, even if it comes from coal. It would recognize that the real alternatives to coal for most of the world today are hydro, nuclear, and gas. And it would stop insisting that a couple of solar panels, sufficient to run a light and a cell phone for a few hours a day, are all the global poor really need while luxuriating in the comfort of modern, high energy societies.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are leading global thinkers on energy, climate, security, human development, and politics.

Native American Communities From New York Launch Fight Against Fracking and For the Environment

Andrew Bard Epstein, AlterNet — Tue, 28 May 2013 13:10:00 -0700

Since New York was dubbed the "Empire State," Native American territory has been ransacked by ecological exploitation.

Five years ago, Hickory Edwards was called to the water. A citizen of the Onondaga Nation, whose territory just south of Syracuse is the heart of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (also known as the Six Nations or Iroquois), Edwards had never explored the rivers and streams that traverse the league's traditional homeland in upstate New York.

And then, one day, everything changed.

"I went to my cousin's house and they had just gotten a two-person kayak, so I borrowed one and went with them down the Onondaga Creek," Edwards remembered. "I knew it was an old trading route from our peoples. I got out on the water and brought my cousin along and we just headed east into the rising sun."

Nine days later, he was in Mohawk Country, 150 miles away. Sometimes alone, often with friends or family, Edwards has been making the trip ever since. "It's something I think I was put here for," he said.

In July, Edwards' annual journey will change course -- and get a lot bigger.

A Broken Promise

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first treaty between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and European settlers. Consecrated with the Two Row Wampum -- a belt of purple and white beads still held by the Onondagas -- the agreement committed the parties to friendship, peace and sovereignty, each row representing the parallel paths of Indians and settlers. It was to hold force "as long as the grass is green, as long as the rivers flow downhill and as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west."

Successive settler governments -- first the Netherlands, followed by England, and eventually the United States -- renewed these basic principles, knowing their survival was linked to the good relations and guidance of their native neighbors. The U.S. Constitution's sixth article even enshrined such treaties as "supreme Law of the Land." In the 1790s, Congress explicitly prohibited the seizure of land without federal approval and Indian consent.

But laws made were not necessarily laws obeyed. As New York became the "Empire State," Six Nations territory was reduced by coercion, subterfuge and outright violence, their former lands ransacked by ecological exploitation. Onondaga, one of a half dozen Haudenosaunee sovereignties in upstate New York (there are more in Canada), now amounts to only 9.3 square miles.

Haudenosaunee leaders have long pushed to reverse these trends. This summer, their efforts will receive an historic boost. A yearlong educational effort to mark the four-century anniversary of the original treaty, the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign seeks to enact a three-part vision of "peace, friendship, and a sustainable future in parallel forever." The culmination in late July is a massive canoe trip down the Hudson River from Albany to New York Harbor. Coordinating the some 300 paddlers is Edwards, who's building a dugout canoe using the age-old methods of his ancestors.

Building a Movement

"We have the possibility to build a movement that shifts New York State's thinking," said Andy Mager, an organizer with Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, one of the key coalition partners in the campaign.

Founded in 1999 by the Syracuse Peace Council, NOON has worked to build solidarity and understanding among the area's non-native residents, a task that became particularly vital in 2005. That year, the Onondagas filed a land rights action petitioning the federal court to declare that New York violated the law when it seized Onondaga land. They also challenged five corporations -- Honeywell International among others -- which turned Onondaga Lake, the birthplace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, into one of the most polluted bodies of water in North America.

"It is the duty of the Nation's leaders to work for a healing of this land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations," Sid Hill, Tadadaho (spiritual leader) of the Onondaga Nation, said at the time. He hoped it would "hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace, and respect among all who inhabit this area."

Though the Onondagas explicitly stated that a victory in court would yield no evictions, NOON recognized a need to educate the community. "We saw how much controversy had erupted in other neighboring communities when the Cayugas or the Oneidas had filed their land claims, just based out of sheer ignorance and misunderstanding," said Lindsay Speer, another NOON organizer. "I think we were actually really successful."

The courts were less open-minded. Repeatedly rejecting the Onondagas' claim, they refused even to hear the evidence. Meanwhile, in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled against the Oneidas (another member of the confederacy), relying in part on the "Doctrine of Discovery," a 15th-century papal bull granting Christian explorers the right to seize "pagan" land and incorporated into U.S. jurisprudence by John Marshall in 1823.

Many in the community began realizing the need for a broader educational effort that reached beyond central New York.

When several hundred canoes arrive at Pier 96 at 57th street on Manhattan's west side on August 9, they'll at least be difficult to ignore. "Hopefully, we'll reach enough people that when it comes down to even the basic arguments inside of someone's house, we'll have more people defending us," said Lena Duby, who's helping to coordinate on-the-ground support for the paddlers.

Protecting the Land

The campaign reaches beyond issues that affect only indigenous people. With New York Governor Andrew Cuomo expected to announce whether he'll lift the state's moratorium on natural gas drilling in the next months, organizers have made opposition to fracking a key tenet of Two Row Renewal. The Marcellus Shale runs directly under both the Haudenosaunee's traditional homeland and the Onondaga's territory.

For many, the equation is simple. "You can't live without water. Water is life," Edwards said. The highly invasive fracturing process mixes millions of gallons of freshwater with numerous (and largely undisclosed) toxic chemicals, injecting the admixture deep underground to push natural gas above. Just over the Pennsylvania border, about 80 miles to the south of Onondaga, fracking has already scarred the land.

Pointing at a soft rise at the Onondaga Nation's southern border, Edwards explained, "Our water comes right from that hill over there. That's where we drink from." Some of their neighbors have already sold rights to natural gas companies. "Everything around here will get contaminated," he added.

Jake Edwards, chief of the Onondaga Nation and Edwards' uncle, believes the Two Row Wampum offers a different path. "In order to heal the environment, as the modern world calls it, then our people need a healing also," he said at the New York City launch of the campaign in March. "Treaties should've been honored 400 years ago and carried on. Our environment wouldn't be in the bad shape it is if we paid attention to the original agreements."

With threat of catastrophic climate change looming, it's a lesson the campaign's leaders believes people are ready to hear. "Nature's going to help our message," said Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Onondaga's Turtle Clan and a veteran of the Red Power movement, referring to the rise in extreme weather linked with global warming. "Nobody's exempt from this."

How Powerful Friends and Cozy Relationships Helped Cheniere Energy Cash in on Natural Gas Exports

Peter Mantius, DC Bureau — Tue, 28 May 2013 12:44:00 -0700

The company went from economic disaster to dominating the industry -- here's how they pulled it off.

Five years ago, Cheniere Energy Inc. was losing tens of millions of dollars a quarter and slashing its workforce in half, as crippling debt threatened to force it into bankruptcy. Today it’s the undisputed leader in the nation’s promising new energy sector: exporting liquefied natural gas, or LNG. That remarkable turnaround followed its industry-leading decision in 2010 to reverse course and export, rather than import, natural gas.

Cheniere’s success in executing that costly and risky switch is a direct result of its ability to obtain a unique regulatory status. Federal energy regulators have awarded the company a combination of federal permits — so far withheld from all 20 competitors seeking similar treatment — that have worked like sprinkled pixie dust, attracting major customers and investors to Cheniere and giving wing to its stock.

Among the power brokers who’ve hitched a ride:

Spencer Abraham, a former secretary of the Department of Energy (2001-2005), who formed a consulting firm in late 2005 that landed Cheniere as its first major client. That prompted one television stock touter to rate Cheniere stock a “triple buy” as a “pure play on cronyism.”
John Deutch, a former director of the CIA (1995-1996) and recent chairman of a DOE advisory committee on natural gas, who serves as a Cheniere director and holds company stock and options worth $1.7 million.
Vicky Bailey, a former commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (1993-2000), a former senior deputy to Abraham at the DOE and current Cheniere director with stock and options worth $1.6 million.
Neil Bush, the younger brother of former President George W. Bush, who served as co-chairman of a company that partnered with Cheniere in 2001 and collected at least $22 million in royalty payments over a decade.

There’s no evidence any of the four acted illegally or improperly for the Houston-based energy company. But each has benefitted financially, and each has been in position to wield influence on its behalf with government officials. And Cheniere’s bumpy 15-year journey from relative obscurity has been marked by remarkably favorable government treatment.

From 2000 to 2008, Cheniere was committed to building several multi-billion-dollar LNG import terminals in Texas and Louisiana to serve the nation’s anticipated need for natural gas. The facilities were in various stages of completion when the import market simply dried up, knocking the company’s stock from $40 in October 2007 to $1.12 a year later. The culprit: major new domestic gas supplies obtained from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale formations.

With his back to the wall, Cheniere’s energetic chief executive, Charif Souki, opted to switch from importing LNG to exporting it. It was a brassy idea, given Cheniere’s debt load and its need for fresh money (many billions of dollars) and time (four or five years) to build the necessary export facilities. How could Souki possibly beat less-encumbered competitors? He’s managed.

The pivot point in the company’s turnaround came in May 2011 when the DOE granted Cheniere authority to export LNG to countries without a free trade agreement with the United States. That includes Japan, India, China, Korea and most of Europe — the LNG markets that really matter. Permits to export to free-trade countries like Canada and Mexico are automatically granted and therefore far less valuable.

Cheniere was the first to apply for the prized non-FTA export permit, but when other companies quickly followed suit, the DOE slapped a moratorium on approvals. Then on May 17, the DOE ended its moratorium by granting Freeport LNG a provisional non-FTA export permit.

The DOE had processed Cheniere’s application in nine months. Freeport’s, filed in December 2010, took 30 months. And Freeport still can’t begin construction on its export terminal until it clears another challenging regulatory hurdle with FERC.

The DOE’s selective favor has provided Cheniere a distinct market advantage, rescuing it from a lingering cash crunch and setting the table for a spectacular run for the company’s stock — ticker symbol “LNG.”

In August 2010, just before Cheniere announced plans to seek the DOE’s permission to export LNG, its stock traded at $2.41. Just after the permit was bestowed, the stock had surged to $11.56, a 380 percent gain.

With the DOE permit in hand, the company quickly signed 20-year LNG contracts with groups in the United Kingdom, Spain, India and Korea to export LNG from its Sabine Pass, La., terminal on the Texas border along the Gulf Coast.

The Sabine Pass export facilities weren’t built yet — or even financed — and they couldn’t be finished before 2016. But the DOE permit and the new foreign commitments provided Cheniere extraordinary momentum. Bechtel signed a $3.9 billion construction agreement, and the Blackstone Group stepped up with a $2 billion lead investment — a good start toward the more than $5.6 billion needed for the first construction phase.

Cheniere also needed a site permit from FERC, the lead environmental regulator for LNG terminals. That green light arrived like clockwork in April 2012 and allowed the company to avoid risky and costly delay.

In order to bestow that accommodation, FERC had to reject arguments by the Sierra Club and others who demanded a full environmental impact statement, or EIS, on the project. The commission opted instead for a shorter review known as an environmental assessment after concluding that it was not “reasonably foreseeable” that billions of dollars in LNG exports from Sabine Pass would simulate domestic gas drilling using the environmentally disruptive fracking process. FERC’s denial of compelling evidence of a link between LNG exports and new fracking flew in the face of analyses by the U.S. Energy Information Agency and several private firms.

Craig Segall, a Sierra Club attorney, said federal regulators have turned a blind eye to the fracking boom’s potential threat to water and air quality. As the DOE weighs whether to allow exports of up to 45 percent of current domestic gas production, it has so far deferred to FERC and “refused to disclose, or even acknowledge, the environmental consequences of its decisions.

“The DOE needs to change course,” Segall wrote in a recent Sierra Club analysis.

If FERC’s decision to waive an EIS for Sabine Pass stands as a precedent in handling other LNG export applications — including Freeport LNG’s — it could have profound implications for federal policy on fracking, not to mention climate change.

Those energy policies are the purview of Deutch, 74, who joined the Cheniere board in 2006. Two weeks before the DOE granted Cheniere its crucial LNG export license, DOE Secretary Steven Chu picked Deutch to chair a new advisory panel to study fracking’s role in the shale gas boom and to recommend ways to frack more safely and cleanly.

Deutch, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, already had a running start on the issue. That same month, MIT released a landmark study called “The Future of Natural Gas.” Deutch had served on the study group that prepared it.

The MIT report concluded that natural gas was a clean-burning “bridge fuel” to a future dominated by renewable energy sources. It found that fracking’s environmental impacts were “challenging but manageable.” It did not call for federal regulation of the process, and it downplayed fracking’s release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The study viewed the emerging worldwide LNG trading market as a positive development, although it did not explicitly recommend unlimited U.S. exports of LNG.

Critics of the MIT study noted that it was sponsored primarily by an affiliate of Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation’s leading frackers and a speculator in land leases for future drilling. They noted Chesapeake’s hand in framing the research and that the study’s results often dovetailed with the company’s positions.

Even so, the MIT study — along with the findings of the DOE’s Deutch-led advisory panel on fracking — may be the best approximation available of the national policy for developing and marketing natural gas. President Obama indirectly endorsed the MIT work in early March when he nominated its lead author, MIT physics professor Ernest Moniz, to replace Chu as his Secretary of Energy. Moniz was sworn in as the nation’s new energy chief May 21.

In recent weeks, both Moniz and Deutch have come under fire for their financial ties to the energy industry. Moniz has since quit an advisory board for a private equity partnership — run by Deutch’s son — that invests in energy projects.

Responding to questions about his potential conflicts, Deutch wrote in an email to the DCBureau: “All of my business relationships, including my position as a director of Cheniere, were disclosed to the DOE prior to my appointment as chair of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Subcommittee on unconventional gas. All members of the subcommittee had relationships that contributed to their knowledge and experience in natural gas matters.”

Moniz has testified that he plans to continue the agency’s deliberate approach toward granting more non-FTA export permits. He promised to consider each of the 19 remaining applications on a case-by-case basis, in the order the applications were received, weighing the national interest each time.

Meanwhile, as its competitors are held at bay, Cheniere races ahead with construction of Sabine Pass export facilities capable of handling 2.2 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2016.

That’s roughly 3.5 percent of all U.S. natural gas production. If every pending export project were to get the green light — and many in the energy industry and the media argue that they should — LNG exports would near half of current domestic gas production.

Souki has said he considers it likely that some, but not all, his potential competitors will finish their projects. “It’s not going to be a monopoly,” he said in a TV interview in January. “Other people see this is something that makes sense. There is so much gas in the United States and so much demand on a global basis, that there is no limit to how much can be exported.”

But challenges will weed out competitors. “Unless you’re ready to spend $100 million and two years in planning, you’re not going to have anything,” Souki added.

Aside from Freeport LNG, three other groups are waiting in the wings as likely Cheniere competitors, but they still need DOE and FERC permits:

Dominion Cove Point LNG, a $3.4-$3.8-billion project by the utility Dominion on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
Cameron LNG, a $6-$7-billion project by Sempra Energy in Hackenberry, La.
Golden Pass, a $10 billion project by ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum International on the Texas shore of the Sabine River, a few miles from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal.

The Sabine Pass terminal already has facilities, completed in 2008, to import up to 4 billion cubic feet per day. Construction on the export facilities began last summer.Roughly 20 federal and state agencies get involved in LNG terminal projects, Patricia Outtrim, Cheniere’s vice president for government and regulatory affairs, told a Senate panel May 21. “An LNG project can take up to three years, and a sponsor must spend up to $100 million for compliance to receive all necessary permits. The vast majority of these costs are spent during the FERC process.”

Before natural gas can be sent off by ocean tanker it must be purified, cooled to -160 C and liquefied. Cheniere has authorization from FERC to build four liquefication units, or trains, at Sabine Pass and it has applied for permission for build two more.

Souki has expressed hope that the company is now on firmer ground with its export contracts than it was with its old import agreements. Planned import deals evaporated between 2006 and 2008. This time Souki’s export deals with the UK’s BG Group PLC, Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa, Korea’s KOGAS and India’s Gail provide Cheniere with revenue topping $2.5 billion a year for 20 years.

The company did not respond to an emailed question about whether Cheniere needs to meet certain construction or financing schedules in order to collect that promised revenue. The company’s new bet is that the fracking boom will provide ample domestic gas supplies to keep U.S. natural gas prices far below other world markets indefinitely. Today, U.S. gas sells for roughly $3.50 per thousand cubic feet, while prices in Europe top $10 and prices in Asia often top $15.

That wide gap, and Cheniere’s unique position to exploit it, has driven the company’s stock above $30. But even if U.S. gas prices rise and world prices drop, shrinking or erasing the arbitrage opportunity, Souki can count on the four large fixed-price contracts, along with more recent deals with France’s Total and the UK’s Centrica.

A Cheniere official said Souki would not agree to be interviewed or to answer emailed questions. “As Charif is traveling, he will not be available for an interview,” media specialist Diane Haggard said in an email May 22. “He is really the only person who would be able to respond to your questions, so I am unable to provide another candidate for an interview.”

Souki, 60, was born in Lebanon and educated in the U.S. (Colgate and Columbia universities). Fluent in Arabic and French, he worked as an investment banker before co-founding Cheniere as an oil and gas exploration company in 1996. He once told an interviewer that the name Cheniere is derived from “chene,” the Acadian word for oak — such as those that grow in the Louisiana marshes near Sabine Pass.

During the late 1990s, the company pumped a few gas and oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.

The election George W. Bush in 2000 opened up new opportunities in the energy industry, and the new president mentioned his interest in seeing LNG storage and import facilities developed. That energized a host of speculators who began scouring the Texas-Louisiana coastline for sites on deep channels that could accommodate 1,000-foot LNG tankers.

Both Cheniere and Crest Investment Co. — Neil Bush’s company — set their sights on Quintana Island, a long skinny strip connected by a bridge to the mainland near Freeport, Tex. Souki prepared far more diligently than Crest for actual LNG development. He’d hired a team headed by Charles Reimer, who’d run a major LNG plant in Indonesia, and took a plan to the local harbor commission.

Despite Crest’s relative lack of experience or preparation, it drew the commission’s nod for a three-year lease option to build an LNG facility on Quintana.

At the time of the competition for rights to Quintana Island, Neil Bush’s role in Crest wasn’t widely known. But details emerged in a sworn deposition Bush gave in 2003 divorce proceedings. According to The Los Angeles Times, Bush testified that he served as “co-chairman” of Crest and was paid about $60,000 a year for working “maybe three or four hours a week” on miscellaneous consulting tasks.

Neil Bush, now 58, is one of former President George H.W. Bush’s five children. He’s the younger brother of George W. Bush, the 43rd president, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and possible 2016 Presidential candidate. Neil Bush has been involved in a wide variety of businesses over his career. In 1991, his business reputation was tarnished when the federal Office of Thrift Supervision cited his role in the $1.3 billion failure of Silverado Savings and Loan in Colorado. As a Silverado director, the OTS said, Bush had “multiple conflicts of interest” with developers seeking loans from Silverado.

In June 2001, Crest traded its Quintana lease option to Cheniere for Cheniere stock and guaranteed royalty payments to Crest ranging from $2 million to $11 million a year.Years later, when Crest was pursuing Quintana Island, the public face of the company was Jamal Daniel, a Syrian-born Houston businessman who grew up in Lebanon before moving to Geneva, Switzerland, after high school. According to the LA Times, local harbor commission memos described Daniel as a friend of Spencer Abraham, the new president’s Secretary of Energy. Like Crest’s Daniel and Cheniere’s Souki, Abraham has family roots in Lebanon.

An internal memo specified that Cheniere would be responsible for project operations while Crest would “handle the political permitting side,” according the LA Times’s 2004 report. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas and Abraham’s DOE office urged FERC to approve LNG import plans at Quintana, the newspaper added.

Neil Bush did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

In 2003, Cheniere sold a majority interest in the Quintana Island project to Michael Smith. The company retained a 30 percent interest in Freeport LNG until 2010, when it sold that stake for $128 million. But complex obligations related to the “Crest Royalty” remained on Cheniere’s books until they were finally resolved in 2012, according to the company’s annual report.

Today, Smith and ConocoPhillips share control Freeport LNG. In an October 2012 interview with the Houston Business Journal, Smith expressed frustration that the DOE hadn’t given his company the prompt permitting treatment Cheniere received.

“It would be completely unfair that one company (Cheniere) has the exclusive right to export (to non-free-trade agreement countries) from the United States,” he told the HBJ. “I think it’s a little unprecedented. But if that happens, then we would have to try to export to free-trade countries — there are just not a lot of free-trade countries who are in need of LNG.”

As Cheniere began to disengage from Freeport in 2003, it focused on building giant import terminals at Sabine Pass, Corpus Christi and another site in Louisiana. In December 2003, it filed with FERC for regulatory approvals.

At the time, more than a dozen companies were in the process of announcing plans for large LNG terminals. While the demand for the import projects was high, local resistance and regulatory hurdles raised development costs and risks. Projects on the East and West coasts faced longer odds than those on the Gulf Coast, where the oil and gas industries are more widely accepted.

Environmental issues even snagged ExxonMobil. In the face of heavy local resistance in November 2004, the industry giant withdrew its plans for an LNG import terminal in Mobile Bay, Ala.

Cheniere pressed on and worked hard to win local support at Sabine Pass in particular.

“Our message to Washington,” Cheniere President Keith Meyer told the Houston Business Journal, “is that we know there is resistance on the East and West coasts to some of these projects, but the nation needs this supply. So don’t let that resistance frame the debate or determine the way all of these projects are addressed.”

Cheniere had the right touch. FERC delivered the permit in December 2004, just under a year after Cheniere had filed its application. Anticipation of that approval supercharged the company’s stock. The week before it filed its FERC application, shares sold for $3.48. By the time FERC delivered, shares had rocketed to $32.35.

During the year that FERC was considering Cheniere’s application, buzz about LNG imports was building. In February 2004, Abraham, nearing the end of his term as Secretary of Energy, gave the keynote address at a Houston energy conference touting LNG as the next great global energy industry.

Abraham resigned at the end of the first Bush-Cheney term. Several months later, he founded The Abraham Group, a Washington, D.C.-based energy consulting group. In October 2005, a day after he unveiled his new venture, Abraham announced that Cheniere had hired his group to review its LNG options.

News that Cheniere had employed Abraham drew raves from Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’ stock tip show. Cramer declared that investors could bet on Abraham to “work the Spencer magic” and deliver the necessary government permits. Give it 18 months, Cramer said in the segment that included his crack about the “pure play on cronyism.” Seven years later, the Abraham Group’s website still includes an article on Cramer’s gushing commentary.

While DOE and other agencies have roles in approving LNG terminals, a 2005 law gave FERC the lead role in addressing environmental issues.

Cheniere wasted little time in adding an experienced FERC hand to its board of directors. When Vicky Bailey joined the board in March 2006, she brought eight years of experience — virtually the entire Clinton Administration — as one of FERC’s five decision-making commissioners. Bailey had also worked for Abraham as a senior DOE official in the Bush Administration.

By the end of 2006, FERC had nearly tripled the permitted LNG import capacity of both Sabine Pass and Freeport LNG’s Quintana Island, in which Cheniere still held a 30 percent stake. And it gave another Cheniere LNG terminal project, Creole Trail in Louisiana, approval to begin construction.

While there’s no evidence Bailey did anything to obtain those FERC approvals, they easily fell within the 18-month window Cramer had allowed for “the Spencer magic.”

Bailey declined to comment. Efforts to interview Abraham were unsuccessful. An official at his consulting firm accepted emailed questions but did not respond by the stated deadline.

In spite of the new FERC permits, the company’s shares began feeling headwinds after hitting an all-time high of $43.72 in April 2006. Perhaps investors began to question the strength of import demand. In any case, work on the Corpus Christi and Creole Trail terminal projects slowed or halted.

Still, Souki managed to rekindle shareholder excitement the following winter by spinning off the Sabine Pass project into a tax-advantaged master limited partnership, apparently the first one ever allowed by the IRS for an LNG terminal. Cheniere kept 88 percent control of the publicly traded new entity, Cheniere Energy Partners. And Cheniere’s stock nearly matched its record high in the months after the MLP’s initial public offering in March 2007.

The excitement continued two months later when Cheniere sponsored a springtime Washington, D.C., summit on LNG hosted by The Abraham Group. It drew former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and luminaries from LNG leaders Qatar, Algeria and Trinidad & Tobago.

But by then the LNG import market was turning inexorably against the company. The fracking-powered shale gas boom took hold in 2008, driving down prices and killing demand for imported gas. That April the company announced that it was laying off roughly half its work force. Cheniere’s stock fell like a rock, hitting a low of $1.12 that fall amid the general market collapse.

Stuck with more than $2.5 billion in debt and lacking major customers, Cheniere began hearing whispers of bankruptcy from financial analysts at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

Souki himself pulled no punches in his April 27, 2009 letter to shareholders, saying: “Our challenge this year will be to correct our balance sheet. The company is too leveraged for the new capital market environment in which the world exists today. Management will focus on deleveraging the company.”

But those days are ancient history now. Souki and Cheniere are back on top. The company’s market value has soared past $6.5 billion, and the value of Souki’s shares are climbing toward $300 million.

Last fall, a chorus of opinion piece writers touted the economic benefits of fracking shale gas. The group included MIT’s Deutch, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, fracking pioneer George Mitchell, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Pulitzer Prize-winning energy analyst Daniel Yergin.Meanwhile, Cheniere has named long-time Abraham aide Majida Mourad to vice president for government relations. Like Souki and Abraham, Mourad has Lebanese roots. She once held senior positions with Abraham’s U.S. Senate campaign in Michigan, with his office at DOE and with The Abraham Group. Abraham himself has continued to promote the economic benefits of exporting LNG as well as the engine that drives it: the fracking of shale gas formations.

Then in December, a DOE-commissioned study by NERA Economic Consulting concluded that LNG exports would be a net economic benefit to the nation. It downplayed concerns that exports would drive up domestic gas prices and shift wealth from consumers to energy investors. Instead, the report concluded that the more LNG exports, the more net benefit to the economy.

While the study triggered widespread criticism for its methodology and conclusions, Abraham was quick to praise it. In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, Abraham and Bill Richardson, Secretary of DOE under President Bill Clinton, touted both gas drilling and LNG exports as an economic and foreign trade bonanza.

In his opening remarks at the hearing, Wyden said, “The current application process for approval of LNG export terminals may not properly reflect these larger economic challenges I’ve described. I am not convinced that that application process is right for these times.”Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is one who isn’t sold. At a Senate committee hearing May 21, he noted that only five years ago the smartest people in the energy industry were certain the U.S. would be importing gas indefinitely — that is, until they “suddenly changed their minds.”

Moniz said he’s listening, promising that his analysis won’t stop with NERA’s conclusion that unlimited LNG exporting is all good. “Everything’s on the table until I have done my analysis,” Moniz testified. “That’s my commitment to Chairman Wyden.”

Peter Mantius is a reporter in New York. He covered business, law and politics at The Atlanta Constitution from 1983-2000. He has also served as the editor of business weeklies in Hartford, CT, and Long Island. He is the author of Shell Game (St. Martin’s Press 1995), a nonfiction book on Saddam Hussein’s secret use of a bank office in Atlanta to finance billions of dollars in arms purchases from Western countries before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Going to Jail to Save the Wild from Oil and Gas Drilling

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers — Sun, 26 May 2013 10:23:00 -0700

Tim DeChristopher bid at auction for drilling rights to protect 150,000 acres of Utah's wilderness -- and paid the price.

So if we now have representative government in name only, and are governed instead by corporations and their lobbyists, what’s to be done? Tim DeChristopher wrestled with that reality and decided what he would do.

As a result, he spent almost two years in prison. He’s out now, and you can learn the whole story in the new documentary, Bidder 70.

In December 2008, as the Bush administration was coming to an end, this environmental activist, then 27 years old, went to an auction of gas and oil drilling rights on more than 150,000 acres of Utah wilderness, all of it public land. It was a sale DeChristopher believed to be illegal.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: Instead of getting dragged out they said “Hi. Are you here for the auction?”

And I said, “Yes, I am.” And they said, “Are you here to be a bidder?” And I said, “Well, yes, I am”.

AUCTIONEER in BIDDER 70: I have two and a quarter in the back and now to two and a half…

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: I saw right away with that bid card they’d given me, I could really disrupt this process. I had all these visions of my future and all the catastrophic effects of climate change, but if I start to bid on this there’s a decent chance I could go to prison. Could I live with that? And I thought, well, yeah. It’d suck, but I could live with it.

AUCTIONEER in BIDDER 70: Three fifths and four and five...

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: And I finally took that step, and jumped all the way in and started winning parcels. I started winning all the parcels.

AUCTIONEER in BIDDER 70: And five, are you all in? Are you all done? At fifty dollars, sold fifty dollars to Bidder number 70, Bidder 70[…]

REPORTER 1 in BIDDER 70: An environmentalist threw a controversial oil and gas lease auction into turmoil today.

REPORTER 2 in BIDDER 70: Well Tim DeChristopher says he’s willing to go to jail, and it’s possible that’s where he’ll wind up.

REPORTER 3 in BIDDER 70: A college student may face federal criminal charges for disrupting that auction with bogus bids.

BILL MOYERS: The federal government indicted Tim DeChristopher on two felony counts, even though the oil and gas auction had been quickly declared null and void by the new Obama administration and its Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

KEN SALAZAR in BIDDER 70: Because of the need to review these parcels, and because of their proximity to landscapes of national significance, I have directed the Bureau of Land Management not to accept the bids on the 77 parcels.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: To see this land and this view, there’s no way that I could ever regret what I did. To see that the land looks like this, that it’s this beautiful, and to know it’s going to keep looking like this, it’s still going to look this way, and there’s not going to be an oil rig in the way. There’s not going to be a road cut right through the middle of it. That’s really reaffirming, and I think really justifies my actions.

BILL MOYERS: The legal process dragged on. Tim DeChristopher held out for a trial by jury, despite government attempts to make a deal.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: I’ve been offered a couple informal plea bargains. The one formal one was for as little as thirty days in jail. My lawyers said they do really want you to serve some time to set an example that discourages other people from doing this and I said that’s exactly why I’m not going to take this deal, because I have the opposite motivation, and it’s really rubbed me the wrong way about any kind of solution that doesn’t involve a jury.

BILL MOYERS: The jury was instructed by the judge to rule only on the strict letter of the law and not to make any moral judgments. They found Tim DeChristopher guilty and he was sentenced to two years in federal prison.

Outside the courtroom, activists from Peaceful Uprising, the grassroots environmental group DeChristopher co-founded, protested the verdict. Twenty-six were arrested.

Now Tim DeChristopher is free and contemplating both his own future and that of the climate change movement in the name of which he said he picked up that bidder card with the number 70.

Welcome Tim.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Thanks for having me.

BILL MOYERS: You are free. Five years have passed, two of them in prison. Was it worth that much of your time?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think more so than I anticipated. You know, when I went into this, I was pretty focused on the direct impacts of my actions, keeping that oil in the ground under those parcels and stopping this particular auction. And that was mostly effective. That goal was met. And I think the impacts on myself and on the climate movement over the past few years and on the community of people that has grown up around that action, the group Peaceful Uprising that I helped start I think those impacts turned out to be much more important than just keeping that oil in the ground.

BILL MOYERS: So when did you know for sure that you were going to be convicted?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: During the jury selection of the trial. That was what really did it. There was a moment during the jury selection we had this huge jury pool because it was a high profile case. And there was a moment where the prosecution and the judge found out that most of that jury pool had gotten a pamphlet before they came in on the first day from the Fully Informed Jurors Association. And it was a pamphlet that didn't say anything about my case, but it talked about jury's rights. It talked about why we have juries. And it, you know, quoted the founders of the country on juries being the conscience of the community. And the prosecution flipped out over this. It was the only time I saw the prosecutor completely lose his cool during the whole process. And we went into the judge's chambers and the prosecutor was screaming and saying, "We should have a mistrial here." And wanted to just throw the whole thing out.

BILL MOYERS: Because of this pamphlet that were—

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Right. Right. I mean, the prosecutor was almost spitting when he was reading from this and saying, "This notion of voting your conscience it’s out in space." And he was terrified. He was, he was really scared of what was on that pamphlet. And then rather than get rid of the whole jury pool, the judge called the jurors in one at a time to his chambers. And I was—

BILL MOYERS: Each one individually?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Privately?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. And my legal team and I were on one side of the table. The prosecution was on the other side. The judge was at the head of the table and there was one juror at a time at the other end. And the judge would say, "You understand it's not your job to decide what's right or wrong here. Your job is to listen to what I say the law says, and you have to enforce it, even if you think it's morally wrong. Can you do that? Can you follow my instructions, even if you think they're morally wrong?"

And unless they said yes, they weren't on the jury. And I was sitting in the seat closest to the juror. And I watched one person after another say, “Yes, your Honor, I'll do whatever you tell me to do, even if I think it's morally wrong." And they meant it. And that's when I knew that I was going to be convicted.

BILL MOYERS: Because they were going to decide if the law had been broken, not if it was a good law?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. Yeah. And the judge would define for them what the boundaries of that law was. And, you know, so basically it was if he committed this action, then he's guilty and you have to convict him.

BILL MOYERS: Had you thought about whether it's the duty of a jury to decide that an act is morally right or wrong, or to decide in fact if in the law has been broken?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Not before I started the legal process. You know, leading up to my trial I was reading up about jury rights and jury nullification and the history of juries. And why the founding fathers thought it was so important to have jury trials.

Because, you know, they saw this system where if the government was passing law that were out of line with the conscience of most of our society, people would refuse to follow that law. Take their case before a jury of their peers, who would decide whether or not that law was you know, in accordance with their shared values and the conscience of our community.

BILL MOYERS: You talked a good bit about that in your in the statement you made at your sentencing hearing. You quoted the Founding Fathers. So I did a little research before I came here and came across John Adams.

Quote, "It is not only the juror's right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." But that was over 200 years ago.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: And that's been part of the evolution of our legal system over the past 200 years, as we've evolved from a people who set up a government afraid of the power of government, afraid of the concentration of power and wanting to keep power in the hands of people. And now we have a government that wants to concentrate as much power as they can and is afraid of the people.

You know, that's been the huge shift that we've had over that over the course of those centuries. And we've seen an extreme minimization of the role of the jury and a restriction on the right to a jury. You know, we have hardly any jury trials anymore. Hardly any of the people that I was locked up with in prison had gone through jury trials, because they're pressured into plea bargains. And it's just taken for granted by everyone in our legal system that defense attorneys, judges, prosecutors, that defendants will be punished if they exercise their right to a jury trial.

You know, the first thing a public defender will tell one of their defendants is, "You know, if you try to take this to trial, you'll get 30 years. You'll get 40. You know, you need to make a plea bargain so you just get ten or 15." And that's, you know, considered a good deal. And if you're punished for exercising a right, then it's not a right. So essentially the right to a jury trial no longer exists.

BILL MOYERS: So you're saying that the jury that convicted you and sent you to prison failed to act as "The conscience of the community"?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Well, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure on them to do that. You know, I mean, these are people who have no experience who have, you know, probably never been on jury duty before because it's a rare thing. Even though we're locking up unprecedented numbers of people, we have very few jury trials. So they don't have that kind of experience.

And they come into this huge courthouse, go through two different metal detectors and security screenings, come into this, you know, majestic courtroom, with the judge sitting up above them, speaking to them in this very patriarchal kind of way. And with all this authority behind them and saying, "It's not your job to do what's right or wrong." And people believed that. And, you know, watching that happen, it, I'd say it was the first time I really understood how some of the great atrocities in history could happen, where you'd have an entire population that, you know, plays out the plans of a tyrannical dictator, how things like genocide could happen when people are willing to let go of their own moral agency and say, "Well, it's not my job to decide what's right or wrong."

BILL MOYERS: But in a country as large and diverse as this, how can we know that 12 people, much less one person, represent the conscience of the community.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Well—

BILL MOYERS: A big community, a lot of different opinions, beliefs, moral values, religious convictions.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: And you're certainly not going to get the same kind of answer every time. And that's why, you know, civil disobedience is always a risky thing. It does always involve that risk of taking your case before a jury of 12 random people. And it should. You know, to break an existing law, you should have to feel that strongly about it.

You should have to be that confident that this law's out of line with the values of our community. And be that willing to make that sacrifice. You know, I don't think it should be an easy or convenient thing. There should be that kind of risk involved in civil disobedience. But by the same token, those citizens, those 12 citizens on the jury, should be empowered and fully informed to make whatever kind of ruling they see is appropriate.

BILL MOYERS: Do you see any irony in the sentence you received, up to two years in prison, compared to what happened to BP when that oil spill killed 11 workers, injured 17 and wreaked havoc with the environment along the Gulf Coast. Yet no one from the company went to jail. They paid a big fine, but no one went to jail.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I mean, there's certainly irony there, but I also think that the law is the tool of those in power. And you know, it's corporations like BP that are in power right now. I mean Glenn Greenwald wrote a great book called “With Liberty and Justice for Some” about how we have a two-tiered justice system in this country.

We don't really have a rule of law, we have two justice systems. And the division is not necessarily strictly between rich people and poor people. The division is between those that promote the concentration of power in the hands of the elite versus those that threaten to distribute that power or take away some of that power. And I think part of the mistake that a lot of people make is thinking that the law or words like legal are synonymous with moral or just. And that's not the case, I mean most of our great examples of morality throughout history are people who broke the law.

BILL MOYERS: That remind me of a scene from the film. Take a look.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: There’s been a lot of historical influences from civil disobedience that have influenced me, and you know, most of them were preaching non-violence and this idea of non-violence not meaning being soft. Kind of a strong peaceful resistance, and that power that comes through love.

JOHN SCHUCHARDT in BIDDER 70: It doesn’t start so much as with a movement of thinking as a movement of the heart. The young people who saw segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, those four students ignited a movement that ultimately involved hundreds and thousands of people, because that movement of the heart, touched the hearts of others.

DAVID HARRIS in BIDDER 70: The initial preface of that revolution has to be a simple one.

The civil rights movement kind of introduced the whole notion of the possibility of making social change happen.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: I think that’s part of what my generation lacks, is that we haven’t had these tangible examples of what it looks like when people take power and are committed to changing the system.

JOHN SCHUCHART in BIDDER 70: Dr. King said if I can get five percent, I can change the situation. I only need five percent. It’s never a matter of the majority. It’s always a matter of conscience, and conscience only operates through an individual.

BILL MOYERS: I was impressed with the statement you made in your hearing, your sentencing hearing. You said, "I say this," what you just talked about, the conscience of the community and why you were doing what you were doing. "I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me." Is there evidence that people are signing up in sufficient numbers for similar acts of civil disobedience to reach some kind of critical mass?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. I think the numbers that it takes for civil disobedience, if people are actually committed to it, are not overwhelming majority numbers. I mean, you know, for years there have been all these polls that say, you know, only half of Americans are, you know, believe climate change is happening or, you know, only a third of them actually understand what climate change really is. Those sort of polls happen all the time.

And, you know, they're generally presented in a kind of discouraging way. And I look at that and I say, "Well, that's plenty. You know, that's more than enough." That you know, a third of Americans who might understand this issue. That's 100 million people. That's more than enough to create change in this country if those people are willing to actually act like they believe it. If you know these are the people that understand that our children's future is on the line right now.

If they're willing to act like that, then we can create the change that we need to.

BILL MOYERS: Did you see that cover of The Nation magazine recently? "It's Not Warming, It's Dying," referring to the earth. Do you agree with that, that it's more than global warming? It's actually an existential threat to the planet?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Not really. I mean, I think it's an existential threat to our industrial civilization. It's a threat to the kind of planet that we have evolved on, the kind of planet that we've always lived on. But I think both the planet and human beings are resilient. And I think there will be some kind of survival. The thing that scares me is what we will have to do in order to survive.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Whether we'll turn against each other. You know, I mean, I don't think seven billion people can survive in a climate constricted world. And it's that process of contraction where things can get really ugly. And, you know, I don't think it's even to the direct impacts of it that is the scariest. I think the scariest is, you know, who's making the decisions during that time of chaos. And what kind of drastic measures are we going to be willing to resort to. And again, that's where, you know, a lot of our historic atrocities happen. You know, if we look at places like Darfur, it's not the direct impacts of the water crisis and the water shortage that they that, you know, is why Darfur is such a humanitarian crisis. It's because of what people were willing to do in the face of that crisis and the way that they turned against each other. That's where things got really ugly.

And I think those are those are the challenges that we now face as a climate movement as it's in all likelihood too late for any amount of emissions reductions to stop runaway climate change which means that we are on this path of rapid change. We know we're going down this path of unprecedented change. And so it's really important who is calling the shots during that time. The collapse of industrial civilization with an ignorant, apathetic citizenry that's afraid of their own government and feels like they have to accept what corporations want to do, that's really scary. That really ugly. And that's, I think, the big challenge that we face now.

BILL MOYERS: You were quoted somewhere saying, quote, "The climate justice movement is not looking for Walmart to be a friendlier corporate master. They want to overthrow Walmart." Can you help us understand what this means?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: We don't want Walmart to be a greener, corporate citizen. We want Walmart to be subservient to human interests. We don't think corporations should be masters of men. And you know, that's really, that's the difference between the climate justice movement and the environmental movement, in my opinion.

Or the big green side of the environmental movement. That we're not looking for a cleaner, greener version of the world that we have now. We're looking for a genuinely healthy and just world.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, people are driving hybrids and they are urging businesses to go green. And they're trying to save energy here and there. But yet, there's a recent poll that shows people do not think about the environment in the terms they did the day after Earth Day back in 1971. They're not as concerned about it.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. And, you know, I think one of the weaknesses of the environmental movement and parts of the climate movement is that it's always encouraged people to think as consumers, to think about what they can do in their consumer purchases to drive in a hybrid of, you know, buy the right light bulbs and that sort of thing.

And I think that's understandable because we have so many reminders of our role as a consumer. You know, we see, like, 3,000 advertisements a day that all remind us you're a consumer. That's who you are. And we don't have nearly as many reminders that we're also citizens of what was once the greatest democracy in the world.

We're also human beings and community members who can connect with one another and inspire one another. And these are also ways that we can be powerful. You know and these are also the ways that we need to engage. And I think I think there's more of that now. I think in the past few years, especially for the younger generation, there's been more of the reminders that we are citizens. That we can shape our society. And there's been this resurgence of people power which I think will have big reverberations.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70: The way the environmental movement has been for the past thirty years, it’s like a football game. And there are some players on the field that are fighting it out, but most of the people in the stadium are up in the stands. Most of them just paid their money at the door, and now they’re just yelling and screaming, and it’s not working. Our team is getting slaughtered. The refs have been paid off, and the other side is playing with dirty tricks. And so it’s no longer acceptable for us to stay in the stands. It’s time to rush the field, and it’s time to stop the game

ASHLEY ANDERSON in BIDDER 70: When you’re occupying the Department of the Interior saying, “You’re perpetuating climate change, destroying lives around the world. We’re not going to take that anymore, and we’re going to risk arrest.”

CORI REDSTONE in BIDDER 70: Much of what prepared me to be arrested in D.C. was the background and training I received through Peaceful Uprising, and I was ready. I was ready to get arrested.

JOAN GREGORY in BIDDER 70: In all my fifty-eight years I have never taken that bold a stand. Tim has helped me to find my own strengths.

BILL MOYERS: I have a hunch that most people listening to us now, watching us now agree that our government has been captured by big money, big business, corporate America. But they don't know how, what to do about it. And unlike you, many of them married, have children, have obligations, own homes. Two years in prison would totally disrupt their life and their commitments to others, their obligation to others. What do you say to those people?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Well, not everyone has to do what I did. Not everyone can, not everyone should. I think we need a diverse movement. You know, if we look at social movement history, the ones that have been most successful and most powerful are the ones that have used a variety of tactics and a variety of strategies.

And I think, you know, not everyone has to go to prison. But I think everyone has to feel empowered to take strong actions. And, you know, no one can say, "This is the kind of action that we need right now "because nobody knows. Nobody has the answers. You know, nobody has ever stopped a climate crisis before.

You know, so nobody can say, "This is what's definitely going to work." And, you know, that's what's limited us in the past in the movement, is when we've had one element that said, "You know, listen, we know how change happens in Washington. We know how to do things. You know, this is what's politically feasible and you have to do it our way." You know, up until 2009 with the Waxman-Markey Bill, that really held back the movement.

BILL MOYERS: And that bill did what?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: That was the cap and trade bill that, you know, was a big corporate handout bill written in collusion between the biggest green groups and some of our biggest corporate polluters, like Shell and DuPont.

BILL MOYERS: You say it was a dividing line in the story?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that bill was really the turning point for the climate movement because up until that point, the groups with so much money and access in Washington, you know, held everybody unchecked basically. Their rhetoric about, "This is what's politically feasible," that held sway with so many other folks in the movement who said, "Okay, well, I guess we'll do it your way even though this bill doesn't really make sense and doesn't seem to do anything worthwhile. We'll do it your way.”

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: But they failed even to pass that bill. It turns out they didn't even know what was politically feasible. And so then, you know, the rest of the movement afterwards said, "Well, we tried it your way and it didn't work. And now rather than start from what's politically feasible, we're going to start from what we know is necessary.

"And rather than working from, you know, what corporations tell us they'll accept, we're going to work for what we actually want, something that's actually in line with our vision for society." And so there's been this huge resurgence of the climate justice side of the movement and the real grassroots side of the climate movement over the past few years. And that's both moved past the mainstream of the big green groups and also swayed some of those big green groups.

BILL MOYERS: Well I think you know that the president of the Sierra Club Michael Brune got himself arrested recently in a protest outside the White House over the Keystone pipeline.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: The change in the Sierra Club has been a tremendous shift over the past few years. You know, when we look at the challenge that we have right now of creating that drastic shift from where we are right now where, you know, we have one party that doesn't believe in climate change and one party that provides empty rhetoric and no action, that's a dramatic shift that we need to get to actual appropriate response to the climate crisis. You know, to get us to that point it's going to take really confrontational actions.

I don't look at the political spectrum as this straight line between left and right. And I think it's more like a really steep pyramid. And I found that a lot of people on the bottom have far more in common with each other regardless of whether they're on the left and the right than they do with anybody at the top of that pyramid.

BILL MOYERS: Let me double back to something you said a moment ago I let slip by because it scares people to hear you and anybody else talk this way. You said we have to overthrow the corporations. What do you mean when you say overthrow corporate power?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I mean get corporations into an economical rather than a political role. You know, corporations do have a role to play in our economy, but they don't have a role to play in our government that…

BILL MOYERS: They have a stake in policy.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: But they, corporations don't have a conscience. And so they're not appropriate for being part of our political system.

And when I say overthrow I mean ending corporate personhood, I mean kicking them out of our government. And that will take a constitutional amendment to get that to happen. And I think that'll be a dramatic shift. And I think it'll it's a huge battle. They're not going to easily give that up.

BILL MOYERS: So you're not talking about using force to overthrow anybody?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: No.

BILL MOYERS: But you are calling for a radical overhaul of how our society functions?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, yeah. But I think that's an overhaul to bring us in alignment with our values, you know, which is why I think that this is a challenge that we can actually rise up to. I don't think it's an impossible challenge because it's not primarily about changing people's values.

I think most people regardless of where they are politically, if you get them in an honest moment to really talk about what they value they're not going to talk about that they value their SUV or they value, you know, the extra few thousand square footage on their home.

They're going to talk about human relationships. Almost everyone is going to be talking about their friends and their family and their communities as the things that they truly value. And you know, when we're talking about that radical shift it's about aligning our world with those values, not so much about changing them which is why I think this is possible.

BILL MOYERS: So now that you're a free man, are you a danger to society? There are people who say you are.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I, you know, I'm a danger to a certain part of society. I'm--

BILL MOYERS: Which part?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: I'm a danger to the, to that part of the power structure that wants to concentrate power in the hands of the few. You know, I don't think I'm a danger to the rest of society.

BILL MOYERS: Don't you think the power structure in every age, in every time, in every place always sees civil disobedience as a threat?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah. I mean, civil disobedience is always a criticism of the existing power structure. And it's always been that way. That's the role of civil disobedience. That's the role of dissent.

BILL MOYERS: What's next for you?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: In the fall I'll be going to Harvard Divinity School to study to become a Unitarian minister.

BILL MOYERS: Not law school with your concern about juries and the founding fathers and civil disobedience.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: No, because I think a lot of what we're facing is really spiritual struggles. I mean, you know, as I was saying I think we have enough people onboard, but not enough people who really have faith in their own power to make a difference. And that to me is an internal struggle, something that's more on a spiritual level. And…

BILL MOYERS: Take me a little further.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: --and the point, well, the--

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean a spiritual?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: You know, the point where I full decided it's something that I've been considering for a while, but the point that I fully decided that I was going to become a minister or go to divinity school was the same point that I mentioned earlier was when I knew that I was going to be convicted. That point when I watched one juror after another say yes, I'll do whatever you tell me to do even if I think it's morally wrong that to me was a huge turning point. Because I saw two things in that situation where the was telling people they had to let go of their own moral authority. I saw how willing people were to let go of their moral authority. But at the same time I saw the vulnerability of the prosecutor.

And you know, he was a US attorney, he was the United States attorney, he represents the United States of America, he's got the whole power of the United States government behind him and he was terrified. He felt vulnerable to the notion of citizens using their conscience in exercising their civic duties.

BILL MOYERS: In fairness to him I read his statement. He said, he said respect for the law is the bedrock of the civilized society.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Yeah, but the bedrock of the rule of law is the conscience of the community and the values of our citizenry. And I think that that's where he missed it, you know. Because at the same time he said the rule of law's the bedrock of our society, not acts of civil disobedience. He failed to understand that acts of civil disobedience are what have shaped the rule of law in this country and how it's been acts of civil disobedience that have made the rule of law line up with the values of our people.

BILL MOYERS: So what are the spiritual needs you think you would like to attempt to address?

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Well, I think part of it is the empowerment that comes through connecting with the community. And I think that's part of why churches and religious institutions have played such an important role in so many social movements throughout our history because there's so much alienation, especially right now in our society and so much that encourages people to view themselves as an isolated individual.

And as an isolated individual people are weak and they look at the problems that we face, and even if they understand these issues they look at it and say, "You know, I'm just one person. What can I do against these corporations or this government? They're so big and so powerful." And that's true. And you know, honestly as an, an isolated individual can't make a difference in any of these issues. But people are not isolated individuals, they're connected to something much bigger than themselves.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER in BIDDER 70:They tried to convince me that I was like a little finger out there on my own that could easily be broken. And all of you out here were the reminder for all of us that I wasn’t just a finger all alone in there, but that I was connected to a hand with many fingers that could unite as one fist, and that that fist could not be broken by the power that they have in there. That fist is not a symbol of violence. That fist is a symbol that we will not be misled into thinking we are alone. We will not be lied to and told we are weak. We will not be divided and we will not back down. That fist is a symbol that we are connected and that we are powerful. It’s a symbol that we hold true to our vision of a healthy and just world, and we are building the self-empowering movement to make it happen.

BILL MOYERS: Tim DeChristopher, I've truly enjoyed this conversation and I wish you well.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Thank you.

Why Citizens in Colorado Can’t Keep the Oil Industry Out of Their Backyards

Phillip Doe, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:45:00 -0700

Fracking in some neighborhoods means residents could expect heavy industrial activity out their back door for up to three or four months a year, 24/7, over half a decade.

Do you want to know how cold it can get in Antarctica in midwinter? Go to a city council meeting in Greeley, Colorado, any time regulation of the oil and gas industry is on the agenda. You’ll get an idea. Last week, the room temperature felt near absolute zero from the iciness of the council’s reaction to citizen petitions to rein in industry designs on their neighborhood, a place called Fox Run.

What was up for debate was a proposal to approve permits for 16 horizontally fracked oil wells on a small parcel of undeveloped land, itself about 16 acres within the city. The 16 wells would be only 350 feet from the back door of some residences. These wells, according to the oil company, would be fracked four at a time, meaning the citizens of these neighborhoods could expect heavy industrial activity out their back door for up to three or four months a year, 24/7, over half a decade, perhaps. We’re talking literally tens of thousands of truck trips to deliver water, chemicals, steel pipe and a variety of heavy industrial machinery via a single point of ingress.

Envision, if you will, the Saturday afternoon barbeque, with the excited voices of children at play competing with the drone and earth rattle of drilling next door as unknown quantities of who-knows-what are spewed onto the festivities. This scene could be played out over and over again as money is made for the few and public health and social wellbeing are sacrificed by the many. That was the argument most often made by the homeowners.

Add to this that some local businesses would actually be only 200 feet from the wells. It happens that the man who owns the 16 acres for the drilling site also owns the street-front buildings in which these businesses are housed. They had all voluntarily agreed to the reduced setback, and no one suspected collusion in these robust economic times. As the owner said--employing small town, Daddy Warbucks logic--these people couldn’t tell him what to do with his land. That would be a takings, and he would have to be compensated, royally. In his mind, his individual rights were superior to the public’s.

His understanding is almost certainly wrong, for the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed over and over again that the protection of the public’s health and well-being is superior to property rights, but no use to talk to this scion of private-property-rights-uber-alles. The only thing keeping the takings assertion alive for the oil boys and rent-seeking land owners is that government refuses to look at the health implications of fracking systematically, even though a host of scientific and public policy leaders at all levels of government and academia are asking for them. The EPA is studying the impacts on water. A draft of this study is to be released in 2014, but the agency has scrubbed any analysis of air impacts as a result of oil industry pressure.

In the end, despite roughly 45 people speaking in opposition to the permit, and only about 7 in favor--four of them owners of the permits and the property involved--in an audience of about 150 people, the city council voted 7-0 in favor of the oil company and private enrichment over repeated calls for caution and deferral until the health impacts of fracking are better understood.

Of the opposition, many are homeowners in Fox Run, some are tearfully concerned about their children, all are concerned about the air impacts. A doctor, head of the pulmonary unit at the Greeley Hospital, tried to appeal to the council’s better angels. Another woman explained that Fox Run is home to two city-chartered apartments for the disabled, 40 units in all. These units were built with $4 million in public money from HUD. Ranging in age from 20 to 70, many of these citizens are wheel chair bound, and the majority use oxygen, in the newer unit all but one. The impacts on them might prove frightful she reasoned.

One person said she had heard the vote was rigged, it had already been decided, but she had come to the meeting anyway just to find out. Her intelligence would prove out.

Leading the charge for adoption was Mayor Tom Norton. Of stentorian voice, and coifed in surprisingly vivid auburn hair, he was in control, for, after all, he was used to a much larger stage. He had been president of the Colorado Senate during the heyday of former Governor Bill Owens. Owens fancied himself a Texas oilman and had the pickup and plates to prove it, though perhaps not the chin, but that too has been altered to fit his rough and ready oil patch persona.

Norton, himself an engineer, had risen to become Owen’s Director of the Department of Transportation, before retiring to Greeley, his longtime residence, and running for mayor. A family affair, Governor Owens appointed Tom’s wife, Kay, President of Northern Colorado University. It too is in Greeley. She still heads this university of over 12,000 students. Previously, she was a staff lawyer for Monfort Meat Packing.

This “private sector” experience she recently wrote caused her to take the lead in leasing 246 acres of mineral rights under the university to Mineral Resources, Inc., the same family oil company that was seeking approval for 16 oil wells that would run under Fox Run.

In glowing terms she described the Richardson family owners as our neighbors, much in the same fashion they had described themselves at the hearing. She went on to fancifully describe their oil business as “boutique”. She reasoned, too, that since city records showed the Richardsons already had leases to the mineral rights under most of the city, both public and private, a little more land couldn’t hurt and might foster orderly development.

She also wrote that the university considered student public health issues and, in her opinion, there was nothing to worry about. In fact, she effused, the state’s regulations would only get stronger and more protective of the students.

The idea of stricter regulation to protect public health was not what husband Tom argued last winter when the state was considering greater setbacks. The proposal, eventually adopted, increased the setbacks from 350 feet to 500 feet. But as Matt Lepore, the head of the state’s oil regulatory agency, the COGCC, said to the press, these regulations were not to protect public health, but to reduce noise and dust near homes, or more concisely, the anger factor in neighborhoods invaded by the industry. Lepore added that the state hadn’t really gotten its head around the health issues. This fiscally wasteful and cynically driven form of decision-making was recognized as dangerously flawed by COGCC Commissioner Holton who said in these debates:

“I just felt like we should wait until we get some good data, in order to make a decision. If it’s 100 feet, fine, if it’s 1000 feet, whatever. Basically it looked to me like we were just changing the rules because we could, and I don’t think that is a good idea.”

Norton speaking for the city council, felt none of these compunctions, he was worried about reduced revenues to the city if some areas were no longer available to the industry because of a 500-foot setback rule. After all he said, the city already has over 400 operative wells and with the potential for many more, new setbacks might “affect the $3.2 million in annual city revenue from oil and gas, and the $900 million of royalties projected over 25 years to Greeley…”.

Clearly, the Nortons see Greeley as a classic company town where public services are paid out of monopoly oil and gas revenues. Moreover, Mayor Tom and the council need not have worried because the COGCC and the Department of Public Health approved a setback of only 200 feet for businesses in the case at hand. The Richardsons, father and son, did admit under friendly questioning that the council needed to act quickly because the new setback rules, which become effective on August 1, would make their well oiled plans more difficult, perhaps requiring even more official variances.

Unknown to most in the audience was that Mayor Tom, only weeks earlier, dressed all in black, with resplendent auburn mane, had come to Denver to testify against HR 1275, the only significant piece of fracking legislation before the 2013 state legislature. It would have funded a one-year effort to survey reported health impacts from people living near fracking. Mayor Tom said it was unnecessary, that everyone was happy with fracking in Greeley, for revenues from fracking helped pay for public services. His testimony was seconded by the boldly feckless Dr. Chris Urbina, Governor Hickenlooper’s choice to head of the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment. Urbina spoke against the bill because of the dangers of collecting medical data too hurriedly, as opposed to the dangers of collecting none at all, apparently. These two presumed representatives of the public provided the cover needed to allow state representative from Greeley, Dave Young (D), to vote against the measure, thus ensuring its defeat. Company town, indeed!

Greeley has suffered greatly from oil and gas development. Its attempt to deny drilling within the city boundaries back in the 1980s was met with one of those great, dunderheaded decisions that only courts can make. The Colorado Supreme Court, uninformed about geography, reasoned that oil and gas development was so important to the state that any attempt to deny the industry access to the city proper would pose a threat to maximum development. Colorado is 104,000 square miles in size. Greeley is 47. Couldn’t they do the math?

Consider, too, that most of Colorado is underlain by shale deposits, the ancient sea floor that is giving up its treasure to the industry through the “magic” of horizontal fracking. All the incorporated cities and towns in the state comprise about 1900 square miles, less than 2 percent of the state. Yet, it is this wrongheaded 1980s court decision that is allowing the oil and gas industry to invade cities at will across the state.

The testimony of the city planner, parrying the comments of the young attorney, Matt Sura, who had been hired to represent the homeowners, was straight out of Charles Dickens. Sura was masterful in pointing out the numerous holes and unanswered questions in the city’s evaluation of the 16 drilling permits. Chief among them was the unanswered question of the impacts of these wells on public health, particularly for those people living in close proximity to the wells. The city manager, with obsequiousness one might expect of a Uriah Heep before his betters, told the council that he thought the city had done a stellar job of answering all questions except the questions concerning public health. But said he, that shouldn’t concern the council since the public’s health was a matter of state and federal concern. It was not their responsibility.

Surely there can be no truth in the old notion that we deserve the government we get.

How Corporations Are Subverting Attempts to Rein in Their Power

Thomas Mc Donagh, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:07:00 -0700

Citizens have won important policy victories only to be undermined by the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts.

In 2009, when the government of El Salvador refused to issue an environmental permit to a Canadian mining corporation, community activists in Las Cabañas rejoiced. For years they had been fighting a pitched battle against the efforts of the company, Pacific Rim, to mine for gold in their region - plans that included the dumping of toxic arsenic in their rivers. It was not a campaign without risk. Four Salvadoran anti-mining activists have been assassinated in the course of their courageous efforts. That victory, however, may well prove to carry a high cost for the people of El Salvador. In a legal assault filed in a World Bank trade court, Pacific Rim is now demanding $315 million in compensation payments from the Salvadoran government, an amount equal to one third of the country’s annual education budget.

That is just one example among many where citizens have fought for and won an important policy victory only to find that victory undermined by corporations using the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts. There are many others. Public health campaigners in Uruguay won a huge victory in 2010 when the national government passed new health laws to discourage tobacco consumption. Even though those new laws (including aggressive new warnings on cigarette packages) directly mirrored the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the U.S. corporate tobacco giant Philip Morris retaliated with a $2 billion legal action against the government.

Nowhere is this muscle-flexing by multinational corporations a greater threat than on issues related to sustainable development. The result is a little known but enormous legal obstacle planted directly in the policy path toward a sustainable future. The Democracy Center has just documented that threat in an important new report released this week: Unfair, Unsustainable and Under the Radar: How Corporations Use Global Investment Rules to Undermine a Sustainable Future.

For many this system of corporate-driven investment rules and “dispute resolution” burst into public view a decade ago when Bechtel, the San Francisco-based engineering conglomerate, sued the people of Bolivia for $50 million following the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt, after investing just $1 million in the country. A global citizen campaign aimed at the corporation ultimately forced Bechtel to drop that case for a token payment of 30 cents. Yet in the years since, the pile of corporate cases has only grown ever higher.

Another typical current case features dangerous exposure to lead in Peru. When the national government there revoked the operating license for a smelter plant in La Oroyo (operated by Doe Run Peru) in July 2010, the health of the local population and the surrounding environment got some badly needed respite. The village, located high in the Peruvian Andes, has been declared one of the most polluted sites on earth, and in 2007 99% of the children under seven in the neighborhood closest to the town’s smelter had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. The government deemed that Doe Run Peru’s failure to meet environmental cleanup commitments at the site constituted a breach of the country’s environmental legal standards. However Doe Run’s parent company, the Renco group, has other ideas. The corporation, owned by US billionaire Ira Rennert, has hit back with an $800 million damages claim, enough money to pay the yearly salaries of almost 15,000 Peruvian school teachers (or nearly 6,000 Peruvian health workers).

The world today is covered by an expanding web of over three thousand bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements. These agreements grant rights to corporations and allow them to sue governments for policy initiatives that they claim interfere with their profits. The resulting legal cases, despite their far-reaching local consequences, are settled far away and behind closed doors by a small group of unaccountable private lawyers in international dispute arbitration tribunals. Flying in the face of democratic principles and judicial independence, these tribunals operate with little or no public scrutiny and where the communities directly affected are denied a voice.

The number of these investment cases has exploded in recent years, with 2012 breaking all records. By far the most popular tribunal system used by global corporations is the World Banks’ infamous International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICISID). Corporations can use this and other tribunal systems to demand hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from governments – not just for what they have actually invested in a country, but also vast amounts more for the profits they expected to earn into the future. The lawyers at these tribunals move seamlessly from the role of ‘independent’ arbiter to that of corporate attorney. Some have strong ties to multinational corporations and serious questions have been raised about their independence in an unaccountable system in which they have such a huge vested interest. Although previously used as a court of last resort by aggrieved investors, these tribunals have become the weapon of choice for corporations in their attempts to clear the path for profiting at the expense of public health and the environment.

The proliferation of these investor-state cases has three major impacts. First, in cases where the corporations win (as they often do) the result is a massive transfer of scarce public resources to wealthy private corporations. Second, even if governments are successful in mounting a legal defense, doing that comes at a cost of potentially millions of dollars in legal fees paid to one of the handful of high-priced law firms that specialise in such cases. Third, the net impact is a dangerous chilling effect on the willingness of policy makers to implement policies in the public interest for fear of costly international arbitration cases.

The international investment rules/tribunals system has been used to attack anti-nuclear efforts in Germany, public control of water in Argentina and Bolivia, anti-mining efforts across a host of nations, and today has new targets in its sights.

One new likely battleground is citizen and community efforts against oil and gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’. The proposed investment chapter of the Canada-EU free trade agreement, if approved, may give corporations the legal fire-power to challenge government regulation of this highly controversial practice. Efforts to curb the dumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere are also at risk. The South Korean government has shelved a plan to introduce a low-carbon incentive system for the auto industry because of fears that the law would breach a provision in the US-South Korea free trade agreement. If the government were to move ahead with the measure it would risk landing itself before theseinternational trade and investment courts.

Today, just as communities in El Salvador and Peru have taken up the battle to protect their natural resources, a whole global movement is emerging to rethink the relationship between economic development and social and environmental well-being, and is pushing governments to take policy action in that urgent direction. This important shift, however, is in direct conflict with the interests of transnational corporations hard-wired to maximize short-term profit and pass on the environmental and social costs of their operations to others. The Democracy Center’s report puts a spotlight on how global corporations are using the investment rules system to undermine the policies essential to sustainable development and the democratic process essential to such policies.

Long an obscure interest of trade and investment lawyers, the system of international investment rules and tribunals has remained off the radar for most of the groups and communities that it affects. This is slowly beginning to change. As the number of controversial cases rises, the injustice of the current system is becoming increasingly clear.

Much as the deregulation of financial markets encouraged by the banking sector helped lead to economic collapse, the system of international investment rules works pushed by multinational corporations is leading us toward environmental collapse. As we hurtle towards a number of ominous tipping points in terms of many of the earth’s natural systems, there has never been a more urgent time for activists, academics, development workers and others to understand the legal and political barriers that block us from changing course. This de facto privatized justice system for big business is a massive such barrier that urgently needs to be brought down.

Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:05:00 -0700

You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades," scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! "We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate."

If you didn't know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a "vanishingly small proportion" defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn't specifically address humanity's involvement -- likely because it's considered a given in scientific circles, the survey's authors point out -- but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration's been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz's first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we've already been sold the story that we're suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked -- although what Americans will get out of the deal will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management's newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club's Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not "taking any meetings on the pipeline."

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

"I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans' dinner tables every year," said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he's completely out of touch with reality. You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Are Some of the Biggest Enviro Groups Giant Sell-Outs?

Jason Mark, The American Prospect — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 -0700

As climate change worsens, the internal strains in the environmentalist movement are starting to show.

About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

In 2010, the club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, stopped taking Chesapeake Energy’s cash. Brune also made the decision to come clean with the revelation and express regret for his predecessor’s lack of better judgment. “We never should have taken this money,” Brune wrote in response to the breakup letter.

But to Steingraber and many others, the betrayal had been done.

“I call them gang-green,” says Maura Stephens, an activist based in Ithaca, New York, who spearheads several anti-fracking groups, including Frack Busters and the Coalition to Protect New York. “There are a lot of so-called environmental groups that were started with noble ideals—for example the ideals of John Muir—but who no longer live up to their mission. … They do good work on some level, but on this [fracking] they are selling us out.”

The eco-infighting over natural gas is just one example of internecine strains that appear to be intensifying in the green movement. When it comes to prescribing ways to address the planet’s ecological challenges, environmentalists increasingly find themselves at odds with each other. In a way, greens’ predicament is a measure of their own prescience. For at least 40 years, they have been warning about the consequences of overpopulation, the risks of industrial pollution, and the loss of wilderness and wildlife habitat due to human encroachment. Few heeded the warnings in time to halt the first effects of large-scale global pollution and resource depletion, and now the consequences of ignoring the warnings have come to pass. Many global fisheries are on the brink of collapse; nearly half of the planet’s land is dedicated to feeding a global population that will soon reach nine billion; freshwater scarcities in some regions are becoming acute; and, most frighteningly, we appear intent on wrecking the global atmosphere, the ecosystem on which all other ecosystems depend.

Environmentalists have found themselves being taken seriously, and it has proved to be something of a curse. As they are asked to come up with solutions for the cascading eco crises, internal divisions are becoming more obvious. The biggest divide may be between those who would do anything to cut carbon emissions and slow climate change—going so far as to support natural gas and nuclear fuel, or even supporting geo-engineering and other controversial ideas—and conservationists who don’t want to trade one earth-damaging practice for another.

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

Some environmentalists say the divisions have been fueled by gadflies looking to appear contrarian for the sake of minor celebrity. “I think, bluntly, that part of this is [happening] because there’s some value to the post-environmentalists in hippie-punching,” says Alex Steffen, a self-described “bright green” futurist who is the author of a new book, Carbon Zero. “Just saying, ‘Oh, those guys are wrong’—since there are a lot of people who want to think that traditional environmentalists are wrong—is a great way to sell books and get speaking gigs.”

It’s true that some of the noise seems calculated for effect. But it would be dangerous to wave off the differences of opinion. A careful look at the environmental movement reveals a profound gap among people who share a worry about the state of Earth. There is a real split over what should be considered a smart survival plan for billions of people on a finite planet. That split, if it’s not navigated constructively, threatens to sap the environmental movement’s political muscle just when it is needed most to achieve its goal: keeping the planet healthy enough to maintain our civilization.

***

In a sense, today’s differences are just a new variation on a century-old dispute. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American environmentalists fell into two distinct camps. The first, led by Sierra Club founder John Muir, was part of the larger Romantic movement that viewed wild areas as pristine places that needed to be saved from the scourge of humanity’s hand. The second, led by the founding head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, thought of nature more like a garden—something to be tended by man. Natural resources, in Pinchot’s view, should be mindfully stewarded to conserve them for future generations.

The split between those who esteem nature for its intrinsic value and those who want to protect it for its instrumental value persisted through the years. Some 21st-century environmentalists—most prominently the leaders of The Nature Conservancy—now talk almost exclusively about environmental protection in terms of preserving ecosystem services. We should invest in nature and protect natural infrastructure because humans benefit from them: Wetlands blunt hurricanes, forests suck up carbon dioxide, clean rivers bring us water. At the same time, some environmentalists have been re-energized by a nascent grassroots movement to recognize legal rights for natural systems, an effort inspired by the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia that grant nature formal rights.

Opposing opinions on what constitutes appropriate use of modern technology also divides some putative eco allies. An instinctual techno-skepticism has formed an undercurrent in environmental thought—at least since Silent Spring and the backlashes to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and near disaster at Three Mile Island. As worries intensify about unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions, however, some greens are rethinking their posture toward once-verboten technologies. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who twice has been arrested at the White House while opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, has said, “Next-generation, safe nuclear power is an option which we need to develop.” Nuclear power is anathema to many other environmentalists, but the British writer George Monbiot reversed his long-standing opposition two years ago and wrote in The Guardian, “Abandoning nuclear power at a time of escalating greenhouse gas emissions is far more dangerous than maintaining it.”

The use of genetically modified organisms also highlights this divide. Even as most rank-and-file environmentalists remain suspicious of them—with their vibe of Promethean overreach and their control by monopolist corporations like Monsanto—some self-identified greens say GMO technologies are the only way to feed a growing population. In a speech earlier this year, Mark Lynas, another British environmentalist, told the Oxford Farming Conference, “The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food.”

Another rift involves the geographic scope of individual environmentalists’ concerns. Ever since Henry David Thoreau set up a shack on Walden Pond, environmentalism has been animated by a love of place. A righteous parochialism was the spark that inspired scores of successful environmental campaigns: a desire to protect this river, this forest grove, this mountaintop. On the other hand, environmentalism has also been animated by a planetary consciousness from the moment the Apollo mission beamed back images of a tiny blue marble floating in space. For a generation these two ideals were in chorus, exemplified best by the greenie bumper sticker: “Think Global, Act Local.” But in the era of global climate change, a love for the local and a concern for the global might be in conflict.

This is best illustrated by the controversies over putting giant solar installations in the Mojave Desert and building a wind farm off of Martha’s Vineyard. One person’s blueprint for clean energy infrastructure is another person’s unthinkable desecration of a beloved place. While some environmentalists argue that we have to pave parts of the desert with solar panels in order to save other parts of the desert from a four-degree Celsius temperature rise, others see that as heresy.

“I think the important split is actually between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not,” Steffen, the futurist, told me. “The key to intelligent planetary thinking is to recognize that goal number one is to be promoting the stability of planetary systems, and then figuring out goal number two: how to get the greatest set of interesting possibilities for humanity into that constraint. And I worry that this debate between ‘old environmentalists’ and ‘post-environmentalists’ or whatever totally misses the larger point. The only kind of conservation worth having is one that starts at those larger systems, talks about what is necessary to maintain their stability, and starts scaling down from there into the particularities of political contexts, and specific places, and technological systems.”

Achieving those goals could get increasingly difficult, however, if the movement is publicly split, as has happened with the issue of hydrofracking for natural gas.

***

The Sierra Club, under the leadership of its previous executive director, Carl Pope, wasn’t the only prominent environmentalist organization heralding natural gas as a bridge fuel that could take our energy system from carbon-intense coal to renewables like wind and solar. (When burned, gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal.) Among the most vocal proponents of natural gas today are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based liberal think tank the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus and Shellenberger ticked off greens in the early aughts with the essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which urged green groups to rethink the core assumptions of their political strategy. The pugnacious pair is often bashed for their rhetoric, but the two are genuine in their hawkishness on the climate and their commitment to global equity.

“As we look ahead to the human-development challenge, we’re going to need other kinds of low-carbon and zero-carbon energy,” Shellenberger says. “If we have everything riding on solar and wind, then we have all of our eggs in one basket.”

Nordhaus adds: “Look, we have two billion people who don’t have access to anything other than wood and dung [for energy]. Assume a world of nine billion people. Now assume that we have perfect economic redistribution from rich to poor, and everybody makes $15,000 a year. And then just do the math on global energy use—it still triples. You can’t meet that all with renewables.”

But since the fracking boom began in earnest, a larger, anti-fracking grassroots has emerged. Small towns in the East that were unaccustomed to the thrum of the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked to find themselves surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery and with compressors in their back lots whirring all night long. Some homeowners had their wells contaminated with flammable methane. Places like Ohio and Arkansas that weren’t used to seismic activity started to experience earthquakes when underground wastewater injections stimulated geologic faults. Today, the movement against gas fracking has become a cause célèbre (Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo have an “Artists Against Fracking” group) and is one of the most invigorating issues among grassroots environmentalists. At February’s Forward on Climate rally near the White House, easily a fifth of the placards in the crowd of 35,000 had to do with gas drilling.

“No sensible person would ever be a proponent of shale gas,” anti-fracking activist Maura Stephens says. “The number of people whose water is contaminated, I can’t even count. And the number of people who have been given a gag order and been given shut-up money is incredible. The whole idea is to do the harm and then mitigate.”

“Of all the forms of fossil-fuel extraction, fracking is the only one that is wrapped up in a green myth,” says Sandra Steingraber, who wrote the letter against the Sierra Club. “The demand for energy is not some inexorable thing like gravity. We control that. And it’s plain to me that we could reduce our energy use by half and entirely run our economy on renewables.”

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have a nearly opposite worry: that the intensity from partisans like Steingraber and Stephens has forced some big green groups to retreat from gas. The World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental research organization, is an example of that shift. As recently as early 2012, the organization was expressing qualified enthusiasm for gas as a “potential game changer” that “should be part of America’s low-carbon energy mix.” But when asked recently to comment on the gas controversy, Jennifer Morgan, director of the institute’s climate and energy program, chose her words carefully. “It’s an extremely fraught and tough discussion,” Morgan told me. “I think we recognize both the risks—and the risks are significant—and the potential opportunity.”

And, of course, the Sierra Club has retreated from natural gas under its new executive director. Last week at a conference in Santa Barbara organized by The Wall Street Journal, Michael Brune warned that fracking’s greenhouse-gas emissions might be worse than coal due to leaks of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. The club also has launched a new section on its website: “Beyond Gas.”

***

Whether the question is shale-gas development, nuclear power, utility-scale solar and wind, or GMO crops, the core of the debate among environmentalists comes down to what’s realistic. That, of course, is the same dilemma that confronts any political movement, whether on the right or on the left. But environmentalists’ conundrum is especially complicated because it involves a system beyond our control: Earth.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger say their pragmatism is grounded in what is politically possible given a range of shitty options. In the other camp, Steffen, Steingraber, and Stephens also claim the mantle of pragmatism, one based on geophysical necessity. The existential threat of climate change has become a sort of projection screen: Either it confirms that we are locked into business as usual, or it’s proof that we need to make a societal 180-degree turn in how we relate to the planet.

“Those of us who are calling ourselves the latter-day abolitionists, our idea of what’s possible is grounded in physical and natural laws. How much water and land and resources do we need to feed ourselves?” Steingraber says. “My hope that is that we can help people imagine, have a vision of a future when blasting gas out of the ground to make our tea kettles whistle is just barbaric, which it is.” It’s a view Nordhaus and Shellenberger call naïve.

It’s clear that, much of the time, environmentalists are arguing past each other. Beyond any debates over strategy or technology, the various factions of greens harbor completely different ideas about human nature and the planet’s capacity to hold us. While some eco-policy wonks appear to have internalized the notion that there are no alternatives to our modern, energy-dependent ways, the environmental grassroots remain committed to encouraging a change in consciousness that will prompt a new, less resource-intense mode of living. It’s as if the environmental movement is playing three-dimensional chess, but with the players operating on totally different planes.

Such differences of opinion aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Political movements often benefit from some degree of ideological tension. The differences only become a political liability because our environmental situation urgently needs a solution. Carbon emissions continue to rise, the number of humans continues to grow, and Earth isn’t getting any bigger.

The environmental movement has a surplus of good ideas for how to manage ecological problems. It’s got plenty of smart and passionate people. The one key asset it doesn’t have is time to sort its issues out.

AlterNet.org: Fracking

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