by Naomi Klein
Operation Climate Change
While the scale and connectivity of this kind of anti-extraction activism is certainly new, the movement began long before the fight against Keystone XL. If it’s possible to trace this wave back to a time and place, it should probably be the 1990s in what is surely the most oil-ravaged place on the planet: the Niger Delta.
Since the doors to foreign investors were flung open near the end of British colonial rule, oil companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its land, water, and people with undisguised disdain. Wastewater was dumped directly into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly, turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills. In an often cited statistic, an Exxon Valdez–worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty years, poisoning fish, animals, and humans.25
But none of this compares with the misery that is gas flaring. Over the course of extracting oil, a large amount of natural gas is also produced. If the infrastructure for capturing, transporting, and using that gas were built in Nigeria, it could meet the electricity needs of the entire country. Yet in the Delta, the multinational companies mostly opt to save money by setting it on fire, or flaring it, which sends the gas into the atmosphere in great pillars of polluting fire. The practice is responsible for about 40 percent of Nigeria’s total CO2 emissions (which is why, as discussed, some companies are absurdly trying to collect carbon credits for stopping this practice). Meanwhile, more than half of Delta communities lack electricity and running water, unemployment is rampant, and, in a cruel irony, the region is plagued by fuel shortages.26
Since the 1970s, Nigerians living in the Delta have been demanding redress for the damage done to them by multinational oil giants. The fight entered a new phase at the start of the 1990s when the Ogoni—a relatively small Indigenous group in the Niger Delta—organized the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), led by the famed human rights activist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. The group took particular aim at Shell, which had extracted $5.2 billion from Ogoniland between 1958 and 1993.27
The new organization did more than beg the government for better conditions, it asserted the rights of the Ogoni people to control the resources under their lands and set about taking those rights back. Not only were oil installations shut down, but as Nigerian political ecologist and environmental activist Godwin Uyi Ojo writes that, on January 4, 1993, “an estimated 300,000 Ogoni, including women and children, staged a historic non-violent protest, and marched against Shell’s ‘ecological wars.’ ” That year, Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoni territory, forsaking significant revenues (though the company remains the biggest oil player in other parts of the Delta). Saro-Wiwa stated that the Nigerian state “will have to shoot and kill every Ogoni man, woman and child to take more of their oil.”28
To this day, oil production has ceased in Ogoniland—a fact that remains one of the most significant achievements of grassroots environmental activism anywhere in the world. Because of Ogoni resistance, carbon has stayed in the ground and out of the atmosphere. In the two decades since Shell withdrew, the land has slowly begun to heal, and there are tentative reports of improved farming output. This represents, according to Ojo, “on a global scale, the most formidable community-wide resistance to corporate oil operations.”29
But Shell’s banishment was not the end of the story. From the start of the protests, the Nigerian government—which relies on oil for 80 percent of its revenues and 95 percent of its export earnings—saw the organized Ogoni as a grave threat. As the region mobilized to take its land back from Shell, thousands of Delta residents were tortured and killed and dozens of Ogoni villages were razed. In 1995, the military regime of General Sani Abacha tried Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his compatriots on trumped-up charges. And then all nine men were hanged, fulfilling Saro-Wiwa’s prediction that “they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.”30
It was a wrenching blow to the movement, but residents of the Niger Delta fought on. By employing increasingly militant tactics like taking over offshore oil platforms, oil barges, and flow stations, this community-led resistance managed to shut down roughly twenty oil installations, significantly reducing production.31
A key and little examined chapter in the Niger Delta’s fossil fuel resistance took place at the tail end of 1998. Five thousand young people belonging to the Ijaw Nation, one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, held a gathering in Kaiama, a town in a southern province of the Delta. There, the Ijaw Youth Council drafted the Kaiama Declaration, which asserted that 70 pecent of the government’s oil revenues came from Ijaw land and that, “Despite these huge contributions, our reward from the Nigerian State remains avoidable deaths resulting from ecological devastation and military repression.” The declaration—endorsed by a huge cross-section of Delta society—stated: “All land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are the basis of our survival,” and went on to demand “Self Government and resource control.”32
But it was Clause 4 that commanded the most attention: “We, therefore, demand that all oil companies stop all exploration and exploitation activities in the Ijaw area. . . . Hence, we advise all oil companies staff and contractors to withdraw from Ijaw territories by the 30th December, 1998 pending the resolution of the issue of resource ownership and control in the Ijaw area of the Niger Delta.”33
The Ijaw Youth Council voted unanimously to call their new offensive Operation Climate Change. “The idea was: we are going to change our world,” Isaac Osuoka, one of the movement’s organizers, told me. “There was an understanding of the link that the same crude oil that impoverishes us, also impoverishes the Earth. And that a movement to change the wider world can begin from changing our own world.” This was, in other words, an attempt at another kind of climate change—an effort by a group of people whose lands had been poisoned and whose future was imperiled to change their political climate, their security climate, their economic climate, and even their spiritual climate.34
As promised, on December 30 the youth took to the streets in the thousands. The leadership instructed participants not to carry weapons and not to drink. The demonstrations—called Ogeles, which are traditional Ijaw processions—were nonviolent and dramatic. Many participants wore black, held candles, sang, danced, and drummed. Several oil platforms were occupied, not with arms but through the sheer numbers of bodies that overwhelmed security guards. “Sometimes,” Osuoka recalled in a phone interview, “a person will have worked for a short time for the oil companies, so they knew which valve was the one to turn off.”
The Nigerian government’s response was overwhelming. An estimated fifteen thousand troops were mobilized, warships were sent, as were fleets of tanks. In some regions the government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew. According to Osouka, “In village after village, soldiers deployed by the state opened fire on unarmed citizens.” In the towns of “Kaiama, Mbiama, and Yenagoa people were killed in the streets and women and young girls were raped in their homes as the state unleashed mayhem, ostensibly to defend oil installations.”35
The confrontations continued for about a week. By the end, as many as 200 or possibly more lives were reported lost, and dozens of houses had been burned to the ground. In at least one case, the soldiers who conducted lethal raids flew into the area on a helicopter taken from a Chevron operation. (The oil giant claimed it had no choice but to allow the equipment to be used by the military, since it came from a joint venture with the Nigerian government, though as Human Rights Watch noted, “The company did not issue any public protest at the killings; nor has it stated that it will take any steps to avoid similar incidents in the future.”)36
Brutal events like these go a long way toward explaining why m
any young people in the Niger Delta today have lost their faith in nonviolence. And why, by 2006, the area was in the throes of a full-blown armed insurgency, complete with bombings of oil infrastructure and government targets, rampant pipeline vandalism, ransom kidnapping of oil workers (designated as “enemy combatants” by the militants), and, more recently, amnesty deals that offered cash for guns. Godwin Uyi Ojo writes that, as the armed conflict wore on, “grievance was soon mingled with greed and violent crimes.”37 In the process, the original goals of the movement—to stop the ecological plunder, and take back control over the region’s resource—became harder to decipher.
And yet it is worth looking back to the 1990s when the aims were clear. Because what is evident in the original struggles of the Ogoni and Ijaw is that the fight against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control, democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin. The Nigerian experience also had a huge and largely uncredited influence on other resource-rich regions in the Global South that found themselves facing off against multinational oil giants.
The most important such exchange took place in 1995, immediately after the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa, when activists from Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria formed an alliance with a similar organization in Ecuador, called Acción Ecológica. At that time Acción Ecológica was neck deep in an environmental and human health disaster that Texaco had left behind in a northeastern region of the country, an incident that became known as the “Rainforest Chernobyl.” (Chevron, after acquiring Texaco, was later ordered to pay $9.5 billion in damages by the Ecuadorian supreme court; the legal battles are still ongoing).38 These frontline activists in two of the worst oil-impacted regions on the planet formed an organization called Oilwatch International, which has been at the forefront of the global movement to “leave the oil in the soil” and whose influence can be felt throughout Blockadia.
* * *
As the experiences in Nigeria and Ecuador make clear, anti-extraction activism is not a new phenomenon. Communities with strong ties to the land have always, and will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life. And fossil fuel resistance has a long history in the United States, most notably against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Moreover, direct action against reckless resource extraction has been a part of the environmental movement for a very long time and has succeeded in protecting some of the planet’s most biologically diverse lands and waters. Many of the specific tactics being used by Blockadia activists today—tree-sits and equipment lockdowns in particular—were developed by Earth First! in the 1980s, when the group fought “wars in the woods” against clear-cut logging.
What has changed in recent years is largely a matter of scale, which is itself a reflection of the dizzying ambitions of the extractive project at this point in history. The rise of Blockadia is, in many ways, simply the flip side of the carbon boom. Thanks to a combination of high commodity prices, new technologies, and depleted conventional reserves, the industry is going further on every front. It is extracting more, pushing into more territory, and relying on more risky methods. Each of these factors is fueling the backlash, so it’s worth looking at each in turn.
All in the Sacrifice Zone
Though there are certainly new and amplified risks associated with our era of extreme energy (tar sands, fracking for both oil and gas, deepwater drilling, mountaintop removal coal mining), it’s important to remember that these have never been safe or low-risk industries. Running an economy on energy sources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones—whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.
And for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common. They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacked political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language, and class. And the people who lived in these condemned places knew they had been written off. To quote Paula Swearengin, an activist from a coal mining family near Beckley, West Virginia, a landscape ravaged by mountaintop-removal coal mining: “We live in the land of the lost.”39
Through various feats of denialism and racism, it was possible for privileged people in North America and Europe to mentally cordon off these unlucky places as hinterlands, wastelands, nowheres—or unluckiest of all, as in the case of Nauru, middle of nowheres. For those fortunate enough to find ourselves outside those condemned borders, myself among them, it seemed as if our places—the ones where we live and to which we escape for pleasure (the assumed somewheres, the centers, or best of all, the centers of everywhere)—would not be sacrificed to keep the fossil fuel machine going.
And up until quite recently, that has held up as the grand bargain of the carbon age: the people reaping the bulk of the benefits of extractivism pretend not to see the costs of that comfort so long as the sacrifice zones are kept safely out of view.
But in less than a decade of the extreme energy frenzy and the commodity boom, the extractive industries have broken that unspoken bargain. In very short order, the sacrifice zones have gotten a great deal larger, swallowing ever more territory and putting many people who thought they were safe at risk. Not only that, but several of the largest zones targeted for sacrifice are located in some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. For instance, Daniel Yergin, energy industry consultant (and author of The Prize), euphorically described the newfound capacity to extract oil from “tight rock” formations—usually shale—as being akin to discovering whole new petrostates: “This is like adding another Venezuela or Kuwait by 2020, except these tight oil fields are in the United States.”40
And of course it’s not just the communities next to these new oil fields that are asked to sacrifice. So much oil is now being extracted in the U.S. (or “Saudi America,” as some market watchers call it) that the number of rail cars carrying oil has increased by 4111 percent in just five years, from 9,500 cars in 2008 to an estimated 400,000 in 2013. (Little wonder that significantly more oil spilled in U.S. rail incidents in 2013 than spilled in the previous forty years combined—or that trains engulfed in smoking fireballs have become increasingly frequent sights on the nightly news.) In practice this means that hundreds if not thousands of towns and cities suddenly find themselves in the paths of poorly maintained, underregulated “oil bomb” trains—towns like Quebec’s Lac-Mégantic, where, in July 2013, a train carrying seventy-two tank cars of fracked Bakken oil (more flammable than the regular kind) exploded, killing forty-seven people and flattening half of its picturesque downtown. (Former North Dakota governor George Sinner said the oil trains posed a “ridiculous threat” shortly after one blew up near his native town of Casselton.)41
The Alberta tar sands, meanwhile, are growing so fast that the industry will soon be producing more of its particular brand of high-carbon oil than current pipeline capacity can handle—which is why it is so determined to push projects like Keystone XL through the U.S. and Northern Gateway through British Columbia. “If there was something that kept me up at night,” said Alberta’s (then) energy minister Ron Liepert in June 2011, “it would be the fear that before too long we’re going to be landlocked in bitumen. We’re not going to be an energy superpower if we can’t get the oil out of Alberta.”42 But building those pipelines, as we have seen, impacts a huge number of communities: the ones living along thousands of kilometers of proposed pipe, as well as those who live along vast stretches of coastline that would see their waters crowded with oil tankers, courting disaster.
No place, it seems, is off limits, and no extractive activity has set its sights on more new land than hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. To quote Chesapeake Energy’s then-CEO Aubrey McClendon, in 2010, “In the last few years we have discovered the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias of oil in the form of natural gas in the United States. Not one,
but two.”43 Which is why the industry is fighting to frack wherever it can. The Marcellus Shale, for instance, spans parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. And it is just one of many such massive blankets of methane-rich rock.
The endgame, according to Republican politician Rick Santorum, is to “drill everywhere”—and it shows. As The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg reports, “Energy companies have fracked wells on church property, school grounds and in gated developments. Last November, an oil company put a well on the campus of the University of North Texas in nearby Denton, right next to the tennis courts and across the road from the main sports stadium and a stand of giant wind turbines.” Fracking now covers so much territory that, according to a 2013 Wall Street Journal investigation, “more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a well that has been drilled and fracked since 2000.”44
In Canada, the ambitions are just as aggressive. “As of mid-2012, the entire underground subsoil of Montréal, Laval, and Longueuil (three of the main cities in Québec) had been claimed by gas and petrol companies,” reports Kim Cornelissen, a former politician turned anti-fracking campaigner in the province. (So far, Quebec’s residents have managed to fend off the gas companies with a moratorium.) In Britain, the area under consideration for fracking adds up to about half the entire island. And in July 2013, residents of the northeast of England were enraged to hear their region described as “uninhabited and desolate” in the House of Lords—and therefore eminently deserving of sacrifice. “Certainly in part of the northeast where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence where we could conduct [it] without any kind of threat to the rural environment,” said Lord Howell, who had been an energy advisor to David Cameron’s government.45
