by Naomi Klein
This is coming as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that a big distant company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk—and never even ask my permission? How can it be legal to put chemicals in the air right where they know children are playing? How is it possible that the state, instead of protecting me from this attack, is sending police to beat up people whose only crime is trying to protect their families?
This unwelcome awakening has made the fossil fuel sector a whole lot of enemies out of onetime friends. People like South Dakota cattle rancher John Harter, who went to court to try to stop TransCanada from burying a portion of the Keystone XL pipeline on his land. “I’ve never considered myself a bunny hugger,” he told a reporter, “but I guess if that’s what I’ve got to be called now, I’m OK with it.” The industry has also alienated people like Christina Mills, who worked as an auditor for oil companies in Oklahoma for much of her career. But when a gas company started fracking in her middle-class North Texas subdivision, her views of the sector changed. “They made it personal here, and that’s when I had a problem. . . . They came into the back of our neighbourhood, 300ft from the back fence. That is so intrusive.”46
And fracking opponents could only laugh when, in February 2014, it emerged that none other than Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson had quietly joined a lawsuit opposing fracking-related activities near his $5 million Texas home, claiming it would lower property values. “I would like to officially welcome Rex to the ‘Society of Citizens Really Enraged When Encircled by Drilling’ (SCREWED),” wrote Jared Polis, a Democratic Congressman from Colorado, in a sardonic statement. “This select group of everyday citizens has been fighting for years to protect their property values, the health of their local communities, and the environment. We are thrilled to have the CEO of a major international oil and gas corporation join our quickly multiplying ranks.”47
In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphlet Common Sense, “It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.”48 Well, the distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide. In a way, the name of the company at the center of Greece’s anti-mining movement says it all: Eldorado—a reference to the legendary “lost city of gold” that drove the conquistadors to some of their bloodiest massacres in the Americas. This kind of pillage used to be reserved for non-European countries, with the loot returned to the motherland in Europe. But as Eldorado’s activities in northern Greece make clear, today the conquistadors are pillaging on their home turf as well.
That may prove to have been a grave strategic error. As Montana-based environmental writer and activist Nick Engelfried puts it, “Every fracking well placed near a city’s water supply and every coal train rolling through a small town gives some community a reason to hate fossil industries. And by failing to notice this, oil, gas and coal companies may be digging their political graves.”49
None of this means that environmental impacts are suddenly evenly distributed. Historically marginalized people in the Global South, as well as communities of color in the Global North, are still at far greater risk of living downstream from a mine, next door to a refinery, or next to a pipeline, just as they are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. But in the era of extreme energy, there is no longer the illusion of discreet sacrifice zones anymore. As Deeohn Ferris, formerly with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, aptly put it, “we’re all in the same sinking boat, only people of color are closest to the hole.”50
Another boundary breaker is, of course, climate change. Because while there are still plenty of people who are fortunate enough to live somewhere that is not (yet) directly threatened by the extreme energy frenzy, no one is exempt from the real-world impacts of increasingly extreme weather, or from the simmering psychological stress of knowing that we may very well grow old—and our young children may well grow up—in a climate significantly more treacherous than the one we currently enjoy. Like an oil spill that spreads from open water into wetlands, beaches, riverbeds, and down to the ocean floor, its toxins reverberating through the lifecycles of countless species, the sacrifice zones created by our collective fossil fuel dependence are creeping and spreading like great shadows over the earth. After two centuries of pretending that we could quarantine the collateral damage of this filthy habit, fobbing the risks off on others, the game is up, and we are all in the sacrifice zone now.
Choked in Enemy Territory
The fossil fuel industry’s willingness to break the sacrifice bargain in order to reach previously off-limits pools of carbon has galvanized the new climate movement in several important ways. For one, the scope of many new extraction and transportation projects has created opportunities for people whose voices are traditionally shut out of the dominant conversation to form alliances with those who have significantly more social power. Tar sands pipelines have proven to be a particularly potent silo buster in this regard, and something of a gift to political organizing.
Beginning in northern Alberta, in a region where the worst impacts are being felt by Indigenous people, and often ending in places where the worst health impacts are felt by urban communities of color, these pipelines pass a whole lot of other places in between. After all, the same piece of infrastructure will travel through multiple states or provinces (or both); through the watersheds of big cities and tiny towns; through farmlands and fishing rivers; through more lands claimed by Indigenous people and through land occupied by the upper middle class. And despite their huge differences, everyone along the route is up against a common threat and therefore are potential allies. In the 1990s, it was trade deals that brought huge and unlikely coalitions together; today it is fossil fuel infrastructure.
Before the most recent push into extreme energy, Big Oil and Big Coal had grown accustomed to operating in regions where they are so economically omnipotent that they pretty much ran the show. In places like Louisiana, Alberta, and Kentucky—not to mention Nigeria and, until the Chávez era, Venezuela—the fossil fuel companies treat politicians as their unofficial PR wings and the judiciaries as their own personal legal departments. With so many jobs, and such a large percentage of the tax base on the line, regular people put up with an awful lot too. For instance, even after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, many Louisianans wanted higher safety standards and a bigger share of the royalties from offshore oil wealth—but most didn’t join calls for a moratorium on deepwater drilling, despite all they had suffered.51
This is the Catch-22 of the fossil fuel economy: precisely because these activities are so dirty and disruptive, they tend to weaken or even destroy other economic drivers: fish stocks are hurt by pollution, the scarred landscape becomes less attractive to tourists, and farmland becomes unhealthy. But rather than spark a popular backlash, this slow poisoning can end up strengthening the power of the fossil fuel companies because they end up being virtually the only game in town.
As the extractive industries charge into territories previously considered out of bounds, however, they are suddenly finding themselves up against people who are far less compromised. In many of the new carbon frontiers, as well as in territories through which fossil fuel companies must move their product, the water is still relatively clean, the relationship to the land is still strong—and there are a great many people willing to fight very hard to protect ways of life that they view as inherently incompatible with toxic extraction.
For instance, one of the natural gas industry’s biggest strategic mistakes was deciding it wanted to frack in and around Ithaca, New York—a liberal college town with a vibrant economic localization movement and blessed with breathtaking gorges and waterfalls. Faced with a direct threat to its idyllic community, Ithaca became not just a hub for anti-fracking activism but a center for serious academic research into the unexplored risks: it’s likely no
coincidence that researchers at Cornell University, based in Ithaca, produced the game-changing study on methane emissions linked to fracking, whose findings became an indispensable tool for the global resistance movement. And it was the industry’s great misfortune that famed biologist and author Sandra Steingraber, a world-renowned expert on the link between industrial toxins and cancer, had recently taken up a post at Ithaca College. Steingraber threw herself into the fracking fight, providing expert testimony before countless audiences and helping to mobilize tens of thousands of New Yorkers. This work contributed to not just keeping the frackers out of Ithaca but to a total of nearly 180 fracking bans or moratoria adopted by cities and towns across the state.52
The industry badly miscalculated again when it began construction on a 12,260-horsepower compressor station carrying Pennsylvania’s fracked gas smack in the middle of the town of Minisink, New York. Many homes were within half a mile of the facility, including one just 180 meters away. And the town’s residents weren’t the only ones whose health was threatened by the station. The surrounding area is prized agricultural land dotted with small family farms, orchards, and vineyards growing organic and artisanal produce for New York’s farmer’s markets and locavore restaurants. So Millennium Pipeline—the company behind the compressor—found itself up against not just a bunch of angry, local farmers but also a whole lot of angry New York City hipsters, celebrity chefs, and movie stars like Mark Ruffalo, calling not just for an end to fracking but for the state to shift to 100 percent renewables.53
And then there was the almost unfathomably stupid idea of trying to open up some of Europe’s first major fracking operations nowhere other than the South of France. When residents of the Department of Var—known for its olives, figs, sheep, and for the famed beaches of Saint-Tropez—discovered that several of their communities were in line for gas fracking, they organized furiously. Economist and activist Maxime Combes describes scenes around southern France at the inception of the movement, where “the halls of the town-meetings in impacted communities were packed to overflowing, and very often, there were more participants in these meetings than inhabitants in the villages.” Var, Combes wrote, would soon experience “the largest citizen’s mobilization seen in the history of a Department that is usually on the right of the political spectrum.” As a result of the industry’s French folly, it ended up not just losing the right to frack near the Riviera (at least for now), but in 2011 France became the first country to adopt a nationwide fracking ban.54
Even something as routine as getting heavy machinery up to northern Alberta to keep the tar sands mines and upgraders running has ignited new resistance movements. In keeping with the mammoth scale of everything associated with the largest industrial project on earth, the machines being transported, which are manufactured in South Korea, can be about as long and heavy as a Boeing 747, and some of the “heavy hauls,” as they are called, are three stories high. The shipments are so large, in fact, that these behemoths cannot be trucked normally. Instead, oil companies like ExxonMobil have to load them onto specialty trailers that take up more than two lanes of highway, and are too high to make it under most standard overpasses.55
The only roads that meet the oil companies’ needs are located in distinctly hostile territory. For instance, communities in Montana and Idaho have led a fierce multi-year campaign to prevent the rigs from traveling along the scenic but narrow Highway 12. They object to the human costs of having their critical roadway blocked for hours so that the huge machines can pass, as well as to the environmental risks of a load toppling on one of many hairpin turns and ending up in a stream or river (this is fly-fishing country and locals are passionate about their wild rivers).
In October 2010, a small crew of local activists took me on a drive along the part of Highway 12 that the so-called big rigs would have to travel. We went past groves of cedar and Douglas fir and glowing, golden-tipped larch, past signs for moose crossings and under towering rock outcroppings. As we drove, with fall leaves rushing downstream in Lolo Creek next to the road, my guides scouted locations for an “action camp” they were planning. It would bring together anti–tar sands activists from Alberta, ranchers, and Indigenous tribes all along the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, and locals interested in stopping the big rigs on Highway 12. They discussed a friend who had offered to set up a mobile kitchen and the logistics of camping in early winter. Marty Cobenais, then the pipeline campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network, explained how all the campaigns are connected. “If they can stop the rigs here then it affects the [production] capacity in the tar sands to get the oil to put in the pipelines.” Then he smiles. “That’s why we are building a Cowboys and Indians alliance.”56
Following a long fight, the rigs were ultimately barred from this section of Highway 12 after the Nez Perce tribe and the conservation group Idaho Rivers United filed a joint lawsuit. “They made a huge mistake trying to go through western Montana and Idaho,” Alexis Bonogofsky, a Billings, Montana, based goat rancher and activist, told me. “It’s been fun to watch.”57
An alternate route for the huge trucks was eventually found, this one taking them through eastern Oregon. Another bad move. When the first load made its way through the state in December 2013, it was stopped several times by activist lockdowns and blockades. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, objecting to the loads crossing their ancestral lands, led a prayer ceremony near the second shipment in Pendleton, Oregon. And though local concerns about the safety of the big rigs were real, many participants were clear that they were primarily motivated by fears over what these machines were helping to do to our climate once they arrived at their destination. “This has gone too far,” said one Umatilla blockader before she was arrested. “Our children are going to die from this.”58
Indeed, the oil and coal industries are no doubt cursing the day that they ever encountered the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia. There the sector has had to confront a powerful combination of resurgent Indigenous Nations, farmers, and fishers whose livelihoods depend on clean water and soil, and a great many relative newcomers who have chosen to live in that part of the world because of its natural beauty. It is also, significantly, a region where the local environmental movement never fully succumbed to the temptations of the corporate partnership model, and where there is a long and radical history of land-based direct action to stop clear-cut logging and dirty mining.
This has meant fierce opposition to tar sands pipelines, as we have seen. And the deep-seated ecological values of the Pacific Northwest have also become the bane of the U.S. coal industry in recent years. Between grassroots resistance to building new coal-fired plants, and pressure to shut down old ones, as well as the rapid rise of natural gas, the market for coal in the United States has collapsed. In a span of just four years, between 2008 and 2012, coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation plummeted from about 50 percent to 37 percent. That means that if the industry is to have a future, it needs to ship U.S. coal to parts of the world that still want it in large quantities. That means Asia. (It’s a strategy that global energy expert and author Michael T. Klare has compared to the one tobacco companies began to employ a few decades ago: “Just as health officials now condemn Big Tobacco’s emphasis on cigarette sales to poor people in countries with inadequate health systems,” he writes, “so someday Big Energy’s new ‘smoking’ habit will be deemed a massive threat to human survival.”) The problem for the coal companies is that U.S. ports along the Pacific Coast are not equipped for such large coal shipments, which means that the industry needs to build new terminals. It also needs to dramatically increase the number of trains carrying coal from the massive mines of the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming and Montana, to the Northwest.59
As with the tar sands pipelines and the heavy hauls, the greatest obstacle to the coal industry’s plans to reach the sea has been the defiant refusal of residents of the Pacific
Northwest to play along. Every community in Washington State and Oregon that was slated to become the new home of a coal export terminal rose up in protest, fueled by health concerns about coal dust, but also, once again, by larger concerns about the global impact of burning all that coal.
This was expressed forcefully by KC Golden, who has helped to usher in many of the most visionary climate policies in Washington State, when he wrote: “The great Pacific Northwest is not a global coal depot, a pusher for fossil fuel addiction, a logistics hub for climate devastation. We’re the last place on Earth that should settle for a tired old retread of the false choice between jobs and the environment. Coal export is fundamentally inconsistent with our vision and values. It’s not just a slap in the face to ‘green’ groups. It’s a moral disaster and an affront to our identity as a community.”60 After all, what is the point of installing solar panels and rainwater barrels if they are going to be coated in coal dust?
What these campaigns are discovering is that while it’s next to impossible to win a direct fight against the fossil fuel companies on their home turf, the chances of victory greatly increase when the battleground extends into a territory where the industry is significantly weaker—places where nonextractive ways of life still flourish and where residents (and politicians) are less addicted to petro and coal dollars. And as the corroded tentacles of extreme energy reach out in all directions like a giant metal spider, the industry is pushing into a whole lot of those kinds of places.
Something else is going on too. As resistance to the extractive industries gains ground along these far-flung limbs, it is starting to spread back to the body of carbon country—lending new courage to resist even in those places that the fossil fuel industry thought it had already conquered.
