Beyond Oil: Activism and Politics
Editor’s note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a “teachable moment” on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation’s leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. First up: the author who was among the first to sound the warning on climate change — and who later founded the activist group 350.org to do something about it.
On May 6, a little more than two weeks after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the first oil washed ashore. It was found on the beaches of the Chandeleur Islands off the coast of Louisiana — one of America’s first wildlife refuges, established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 after a decade-long struggle with the plume trade, which was killing off our seabirds. We don’t normally think of hydrocarbons as possessing a strong sense of irony, but there you go.
In fact, the BP spill and its aftermath were a slap in the face of the environmental movement in so many ways. You would have thought the most visible ecological tragedy of our time might have led our government to take real action against our worst problems. Instead, the same week that the well was finally capped the Senate punted on doing anything — anything — about climate change.
So, for those of us on the green side of things, there’s never been a better moment to sit back and say: Are we doing something wrong? We seem not to be as good at this as our forebears, who turned the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River into Earth Day 1 and the Clean Air Act, or even those ancient proto-greens who turned the fancy hat trade into the wildlife refuge system. Yale pollster Anthony Leiserowitz told The Washington Post that the difference between this summer and the awakenings after past disasters is as stark as “on versus off.” Why? Or, if you want to think more positively, what’s the recipe for doing better next time?
[embedded_link_1]
Let’s start with the president. He’s clearly a leader concerned with energy — from the start, he has said that along with health care it’s one of his top priorities. But he hasn’t found a way yet to get the urgency of the issue across to Americans: instead of talking about climate chaos, he has stuck with green jobs. The oil spill might have provided a chance to change that focus but, sadly, he was deeply compromised. Two weeks before the BP rig blew up, Obama had lifted the long-standing moratorium on new offshore drilling along much of the nation’s coastline. “What I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil,” he said at the time. A few days later he was even more certain and even more offhand: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”
If you can’t have an outspoken T.R., you can still make profound change in the wake of a catalyzing event. For proof, look no further than the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon signed virtually every piece of legislation on which modern environmental law still depends. Nixon was not, by nature, a raging green. The same taping system that revealed his Watergate crimes also caught him telling a group of auto executives in the Oval Office that environmentalists wanted to “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals.” But it didn’t matter that Nixon couldn’t care less about nature, because he cared (like pretty much every politician) about politics.
And politics had shifted in the months since Santa Barbara. People hadn’t waited for a leader to act — they had gone out and organized. The first Earth Day took place the next spring, and it’s worth recalling just how politicized and dramatic it was at its birth. At least 20 million Americans participated — about one in ten of the population.
The ferment of that time also gave birth to many environmental organizations, NRDC among them. Over the years they have grown in size and power — 40 years later, they have an army of expert lobbyists on Capitol Hill, but less to show for it lately than physics demands (and not only because the other side has a bigger army). Without a real show of force at the grass roots, those lobbyists can’t make the necessary headway with members of Congress, who are better at reading the political tea leaves than they are at reading the data about global warming.
So that’s the good news. Because if you want to, you can build a movement. Or at least you can try.
In the weeks after the BP disaster, you could feel people struggling for a way to express their outrage. Nascent groups formed on Facebook and soon had memberships in the hundreds of thousands. The big green groups coordinated with smaller, more activist outfits to host events like Hands Across the Sands, which staged hundreds of rallies on a June Saturday. I’ve had a front-row seat to watch this wave begin to build: 350.org, the group I helped found in 2008, coordinated 5,200 rallies in 181 countries in October of last year and is building toward a similar international day of action on 10/10/10 that will send world leaders a pointed political message: We’re getting to work, what about you?
[embedded_link_2]
But the success of such efforts will depend on not trying to emulate the turning points of the past. History rarely repeats itself exactly. We have a different president, we have a different world, and most of all we have a different issue. Action on climate change will demand taking on the most powerful economic force the world has ever seen, the fossil fuel industry. So, job one: stop pretending that the fight is over energy independence or oil security. We need to tell the truth. The pollution you can see, like the spill in the Gulf, is the least of our problems. What stalks our future is the invisible damage done when the structure of the CO 2 molecule traps heat that would otherwise radiate out to space. It’s not when BP makes an outlandish mistake; it’s when BP and Exxon and the rest of the fossil fuel industry carry out their daily business. It’s not when things turn black; it’s when they turn hot. The worst calamity ever to befall human civilization is happening before our eyes — in the weeks around the spill, NASA reported that we’d just come through the hottest year, and decade, ever recorded. Temperatures in Pakistan reached an unprecedented 129 degrees. We need to say it, over and over.
And then, job two: we need to build a movement that works. That grows from the power of young people and church people and peasant farmers and all the rest around the world who are already leading the fight. They can’t win it by themselves — they need our environmental organizations to help close the deal. And those environmental organizations need that grassroots movement to make their work possible. It’s time to be mad, and to mean it. Time to ask for what the science requires, not what politics permits.
The sad truth is, an ever-hotter planet is going to give us more defining moments in the seasons ahead. Sooner or later we better seize one.
Tomorrow: David Gessner on nature and adaptation.
Tell your senators not to abandon climate legislation
Photos, videos, and expert commentary
Disaster in the Gulf
More here: Beyond Oil: Activism and Politics
Letter from a Fish Shack
Dear Mr. President, I’m writing you from a fish shack, deep in a Louisiana marsh, where I sit on a dock that juts out over the water, a mile or so away from even the nearest marina. Some say that the worst of the Gulf spill has passed, that it is time to turn the national spotlight elsewhere, but that is not how the men who fish from these camps feel. You would like it here, Mr. President. While it isn’t quite the place apart from the world that it was a few months ago, you would find some quiet, away from the clamor of judging reporters and reports, far from the din and hectoring of life in the spotlight. No microphones, and no Fox News. But lots of egrets and herons and one hungry alligator cruising for dinner a hundred yards up the canal. I like to think that you would spend your time in this dilapidated fish camp that somehow survived Katrina (though its roof did not), by soaking in the quiet and reflecting on your presidency so far. And I like to think you would be quite proud of what you have accomplished, which, despite the carpers, is quite a lot, possibly more than any Democratic president in my lifetime. But I also like to think that you might re-consider a few of your choices, particularly those that involve the clean-up going on only a few miles from this shack, out on the dark and necrotic fringe of the great but dying marsh. I do not blame you for the oil spill, Mr. President, no more than I blame your predecessor for a hurricane. But my hosts at this camp, Anthony, a precocious sixteen-year-old who has captained boats since he was eight and who, like the young Mark Twain, dreams of being a Mississippi river boat captain, and his uncle, do blame you. To be honest, they would probably still blame you if you threw on a scuba outfit and swam down to the cap to plug all the leaks and then used your custom homemade oil vacuum to suck up the rest of the spill. And, frankly, Anthony and his uncle are not your problem, at least from an electoral point of view, since they wouldn’t vote for you under any circumstances. Nor am I your problem, since I, a Northeasterner from the other end of the political spectrum, will likely vote for you no matter what. But what should concern you, Mr. President, and concern you quite a bit, I think, is not the divide between me and my hosts here, but just how much we agree. What we agree about, as Anthony’s uncle and I sip our beers and stare out as the light dies on the marsh, is that the clean-up of the spill has been deeply mishandled, in ways not yet understood by you and the rest of the country. What should concern you is a deep and building anger, not just toward BP, but toward your ceding of power to BP, an anger that I might have found exaggerated in the media before heading down here three weeks ago, but that I now believe to be understated. You’ll be happy to hear that our first area of agreement has nothing to do with you, Mr. President, but with our mutual dislike of Peyton Manning, me as a Patriots’ fan and Anthony as a deep admirer of Drew Brees and the Saints, who bested Manning, a former hometown hero, in the Super Bowl. But our second overlapping opinion should concern you more. It has to do with that much-bandied-about word "freedom," and the lack of it, the sense that most people down here have that, on top of the deep depression that comes with loss of livelihood, there is also now a crippling sense of servitude. Servitude toward one’s country, toward the mission of cleaning up these beautiful and abundant waters, would be one thing, Anthony’s uncle and I agree. But the serf-like sense that one has to serve the very master who spoiled those waters in the first place is another entirely. We also agree on this: one of the small, sad sights down here these days is watching the captains of the so-called "Vessels of Opportunity" hired to help clean up the spill, who have likely not worn life jackets since they were toddlers, all buckled up as they putter out to sea each morning. It seems a badge of shame, of not being in control, which of course they aren’t, beholden as they are, not to their own government, but to a multinational corporation. It’s my understanding, from talking to people down here, that each and every one of these captains is required to sign an agreement that — as temporary BP employees paid for their part in the clean-up effort — they will not criticize the company and, of course, will not press further claims against it. At first, choosing to work on those vessels seemed like the commonsense choice — after all, their normal livelihood of catching fish was not an option, with the fishing grounds closed due to oil. But just recently, at an EPA meeting, Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told the audience he was concerned that every penny earned on one of those vessels would be counted against future compensation, while the damage to boats would go uncompensated, which means those who chose not to work for BP may do better in the long haul. The long haul is not a popular topic down here. Already there is talk of full compensation packages for two years, as if the damage to the Gulf’s reputation, if not its ecosystem, won’t last for decades. You are a reasonable man, Mr. President — too reasonable according to some. But I am not asking you to stomp your feet and wave your fist and claim to be in charge. What I am asking instead is for you to examine this situation logically and then take charge, real charge. You will say that the template for this disaster was built during the Exxon Valdez disaster two decades ago, and you are right, but this is a new disaster with new circumstances that requires a new template. Let BP pay for its mess, as they should, but they should not be in charge of every detail. They should not be out on scientific survey boats, noting when the scientists forget to put on their plastic gloves so that this fact might be used as evidence in some future lawsuit. They should not be running the show at Fort Pickens, a national seashore in the Florida panhandle where the fort was built to protect us from foreign invasion, and did so successfully until three months ago, and where the rangers, who know and love that land, have been beaten down to docility by the corporation now in control of their national park. They should not be bringing in outsiders to clean up waters that the locals have known since they were kids; they should be listening rather than ordering, taking advantage of this crucial knowledge of tides and winds. And they should not have the power to influence the bird surveyor that I spoke to the other day, who couldn’t give me any real numbers on bird deaths he had witnessed, because, as he sheepishly admitted, BP is on his organization’s board of trustees. I am a houseguest tonight, out here on the marsh, and let me use this experience to suggest an analogy with BP’s behavior. It would be as if in the middle of the night I decided to defecate in Anthony’s bathtub and then, loudly and boorishly, ordered him to clean it up in the morning. Worse still it would be as if, tomorrow morning, I were to slip him a fifty, and get him to sign something that said I could sue him if he ever mentioned what I’d done. In short, it both doesn’t make sense and is morally abhorrent, Mr. President. So don’t accept it. Gather your top scientists, environmentalists, policy makers, and make use of the people who know these waters. Demand BP’s money-of course they should pay for their own mess-but take charge of your own shores, showing that you are beholden, not to their corporation, but to your people. Because for all the differences that my hosts and I have, we all agree on one thing. It would make a world of difference if, tomorrow morning at dawn, when the Vessels of Opportunity putter past this dock on their daily commute to lay boom and spot oil, they were flying their country’s colors and not the corporate flag of green and yellow. Sincerely, David Gessner Read more of Gessner’s Gulf reporting in his online journal .
Read the rest of the post here:
Letter from a Fish Shack
Long Island Town Fights To Keep Energy Efficiency Program
Officials in a New York town say they’re prepared to sue the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in order to keep a program going that helps residents make their homes more energy efficient — an effort that’s been backed by the Obama administration as a way to cut energy use, reduce global warming pollution, and create green jobs. The local project is part of a $150 million federal stimulus initiative thrown into limbo by the agency that guarantees most of the nation’s home mortgages. In early July, FHFA told mortgage lenders that it might no longer guarantee loans for homes in municipalities that take advantage of the special financing for energy efficiency. Places including Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California, have already created those programs, and Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco have been planning similar projects (see the Spring 2010 OnEarth story, " Home Energy Makeover "). They have all put their programs on hold because of FHFA’s actions. But Babylon, New York, with a population of about 200,000, is the first municipality that’s fighting back. "We will not shut down the Long Island Green Homes program, and we will challenge this unwarranted and, in our view, unconstitutional intrusion," Babylon Town Supervisor Steve Bellone said yesterday on the steps of Babylon’s town hall. Long Island Green Homes offers energy audits and low-interest financing to residents for home energy retrofits. Babylon covers the cost of the work, such as improving insulation, upgrading boilers, and adding solar panels. The homeowner simply agrees to pay the cost back over time in monthly installments. The Babylon program and similar projects around the country are known by the acronym PACE, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy. (It’s also been called "cash for caulkers.") The PACE model topples the traditional barriers that make homeowners reluctant to undertake improvements — namely, the high up-front costs — and offers an enticing new way to curb greenhouse gas pollution. By 2020, implementing such retrofits nationwide could cut greenhouse emissions by up to 160 million tons annually — the equivalent of taking 30 million cars off the road — while saving homeowners $21 billion in utility bills each year. The efficiency improvement loan under PACE is tied to the property, not the person. So if the home is sold, the new owner takes over the payments while also benefiting from lower energy bills. If the home were to go into foreclosure, however, the energy-related loan would need to be paid off before any money could be put toward the mortgage. Babylon began issuing PACE loans in 2008. Many towns and cities fund the loans through bonds and recoup them through property tax bills, but Babylon linked them to the town’s reserve fund for solid waste improvement projects — appropriate for a project designed to reduce energy waste, according to Sammy Chu, the program director. Borrowers pay off the loan in the form of a solid-waste assessment on their homes. Homeowner Ria Muriello pays about $75 a month on her PACE loan but says her energy costs have dropped about $85 to $90 a month since the improvements. "My bills went down immediately," she says. "My house is more comfortable. The program works." About 500 homes in Babylon have received PACE loans, Chu says. None have defaulted on a mortgage in the two years of the program, but about 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide — the leading cause of global warming — have been kept out of the atmosphere. In the absence of a federal policy for cutting carbon, Chu says, PACE has allowed towns and cities to take action on climate change themselves. In Babylon, the program has also led to the creation of dozens of local jobs. One local contractor says that about 90 percent of his business involves energy audits and improvements financed by Long Island Green Homes, with each of his employees making $20 to $35 an hour. "If they had to shut it down, I would literally be out of business," says Rich Manning. "I’d be laying off everyone who works for me and looking for other work." There is evidence that homeowners who take advantage of energy efficiency improvements also have a lower risk of foreclosure. A 2009 analysis for a major financial institution (private but reported this week by Grist ) found that homes built to federal Energy Star standards for energy efficiency had default and delinquency rates that were 11 percent lower than other homes. FHFA isn’t so happy with the program, though. The agency oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-chartered agencies that buy and resell more than 50 percent of the country’s home mortgages. According to the agency, it considers the PACE loans unacceptably risky because, by being attached to the property, they are effectively liens that must be paid off first — before the mortgage — if a home goes into foreclosure. Chu says that Babylon has been trying to work something out with FHFA for a year, but the agency has not responded to its calls, letters, or e-mails. FHFA won’t comment on Babylon’s concerns, according to agency spokeswoman Corrine Russell. Before Babylon’s PACE program started in 2008, Manning, the building contractor, says he was doing about 20 energy efficiency projects a year. In the two years since, that number has grown to about 125. But he has put plans to expand from one to two crews on hold until the FHFA controversy is resolved. "These are skilled workers, they have a future in this business — they would have a future in this business," he says. "Now they’re a little scared, rightfully so." UPDATE : California’s attorney general has filed a lawsuit to keep PACE. Follow the story here .
Continue here: Long Island Town Fights To Keep Energy Efficiency Program