by Naomi Klein
Perhaps most importantly, if we are going to avoid a future marked by more brutal scapegoating of the most vulnerable and blameless, we will need to find the fortitude to go head-to-head with the powerful players that bear the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis. Taking on the fossil fuel sector can seem impossibly daunting: it has unlimited wealth to spend lobbying politicians to pass draconian laws that target activists and to purchase public relations advertisements that pollute the public airwaves. And yet this sector is far more vulnerable to various forms of pressure than it first appears.
For the past five years, a central strategy of the climate justice movement has been to demonstrate that these companies are immoral actors whose profits are illegitimate because their core business model depends on destabilizing human civilization. That strategy has led hundreds of institutions to pledge to divest from fossil fuel stocks. More recently, the Sunrise Movement and others have focused on getting elected politicians to take a “no fossil fuel money” pledge, which well over half the contenders for the Democratic Party leadership quickly agreed to sign. If it became the policy of a governing party to refuse fossil fuel donations, and to shun fossil fuel lobbyists, the industry’s hold over policymaking would be dramatically weakened. And if, under public and regulatory pressure, media outlets stopped running advertisements from fossil fuel companies, much as they stopped running tobacco ads in the past, the industry’s outsized influence would be further eroded.
With less misinformation skewing debates, and a clear separation between oil and state, the path would be far clearer for the kinds of robust regulations that would quickly reign in this rogue sector, because all extractive companies function within a nonnegotiable “grow-or-die” framework: they need to constantly reassure investors that their product will be in high demand not just today but well into the future. This is why a central piece of every fossil fuel company’s valuation rests not only in the projects it currently has in production but also in the oil and gas it has “in reserve”—the deposits it has discovered and purchased for development decades down the road.
According to Stephen Kretzmann, executive director of Washington-based Oil Change International, as soon as governments begin denying new exploration and drilling permits on the grounds that we need to transition rapidly to 100 percent renewable energy, investors will start to jump ship. “This defining of financial and political limits on the industry reveals their most persistent myth: that we will always need them. In fact, the reverse is true. Real climate leaders of the next decade will need to have the courage to literally withdraw all industry licenses (social, political, legal), to stop expansion of the industry urgently, and to manage a decline of production over the next few decades in a way that is fair and just towards workers and frontline communities.” It may also be necessary to take over some of these companies to make sure that the remaining profits go to land and water remediation and worker pensions, rather than into investor pockets. Which in turn demands a decisive turn away from the free-market fundamentalism that has defined so much of the last half-century.
The message coming from the school strikes is that a great many young people are ready for this kind of deep change. They know all too well that the sixth mass extinction is not the only crisis they have inherited. They are also growing up in the rubble of market euphoria, in which the dreams of endlessly rising living standards have given way to rampant austerity and economic insecurity. And techno-utopianism, which imagined a frictionless future of limitless connection and community, has morphed into addiction to the algorithms of envy, relentless corporate surveillance, and spiraling online misogyny and white supremacy.
“Once you have done your homework,” Greta Thunberg says, “you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking . . . We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.”
Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It’s too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let’s put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care.
Let’s forge a Global Green New Deal—for everyone this time.
A HOLE IN THE WORLD
The hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself.
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico while it was drilling at the greatest depths ever attempted. Eleven crew members died in the fiery explosion and the wellhead ruptured, causing oil to gush uncontrollably from the ocean floor. After many failed attempts, the well was finally capped on July 15, leaving behind 4 million barrels (168 million gallons) of oil, the largest spill ever recorded in US waters.
JUNE 2010
EVERYONE GATHERED FOR THE TOWN hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.
“Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to,” the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.
And for a while the crowd, made up mostly of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to “doing better” to process their claims for lost revenue—then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the representative from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they had read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that “the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up.”
“Put it in writing!” someone shouted out. By now the air-conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O’Brien approached the mic. “We don’t need to hear this anymore,” he declared, hands on hips. It didn’t matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, “we just don’t trust you guys!” And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you’d have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks, residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston, and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would “make it right.” Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would “leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before,” that he was “making sure” it “comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis.”
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits the
re, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground (shrimp, crab, oysters, and finfish) will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I traveled through nearby marshes in a shallow-water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh that BP was using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a seven-foot blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall, sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will kill not only the grass aboveground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So, places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose not only their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like Hurricane Katrina—which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be “restored and made whole,” as President Obama’s interior secretary pledged to do? It’s not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf War spill, when an estimated eleven million barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf, the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It’s not a perfect comparison, given that so little cleanup was done, but according to a study conducted twelve years after the disaster, nearly 90 percent of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being “made whole,” the Gulf Coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast’s legendary culture will further contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast don’t just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art, and endangered languages—much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company’s Gulf of Mexico Regional Oil Spill Response Plan specifically instructs officials not to make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal”—which is no doubt why its officials consistently favor folksy terms like “make it right.”)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP has spent weeks failing to plug the hole in the earth that it made. Our political leaders cannot order fish species to survive, or bottlenose dolphins not to die in droves. No amount of compensation money can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water, and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
“Everything is dying,” a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. “How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don’t know.”
This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things: corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During congressional testimony, BP’s Hayward said, “The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear” on the crisis, and that “with the possible exception of the space program in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime.” And yet, in the face of what geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as “Pandora’s well,” they are like the men facing the angry crowd at the town hall meeting: they act like they know, but they don’t know.
BP’S MISSION STATEMENT
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to reengineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her groundbreaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the earth was seen as alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans, like indigenous people the world over, believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform or desecrate “the mother,” including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature’s mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted, and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be “put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man.”
Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called “the energy frontier,” it dabbled in synthesizing methane-producing microbes and announced that “a new area of investigation” would be geoengineering. And of course, it bragged that at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had “the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry,” as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not even have the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said, “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail, so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, CEO Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads, IF YOU KNEW YOU COULD NOT FAIL, WHAT WOULD YOU TRY? Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent “$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year.”
These priorities go a long way toward explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted t
o the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase “little risk” appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that thanks to “proven equipment and technology,” adverse effects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, “Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels.” The effects on fish, meanwhile, “would likely be sublethal” because of “the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons.” (In BP’s telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there was apparently “little risk of contact or impact to the coastline” because of the company’s projected speedy response (!) and “due to the distance [of the rig] to shore” (about 48 miles, or 77 kilometers). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70 kilometers an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean’s capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77-kilometer trip. (A shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida 306 kilometers away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awestruck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee.
