This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  The city of Richmond, California, across the bay from San Francisco, provides a glimpse of how quickly the political landscape can change. Predominantly African American and Latino, the city is a rough-edged, working-class pocket amidst the relentless tech-fuelled gentrification of the Bay Area. In Richmond, the big employer isn’t Google, it’s Chevron, whose huge refinery local residents blame for myriad health and safety problems, from elevated asthma rates to frequent accidents at the hulking facility (including a massive fire in 1999 that sent hundreds to hospital). And yet as the city’s largest business and employer Chevron still had the power to call the shots.61

  No more. In 2009 community members successfully blocked a plan by Chevron to significantly expand its oil refinery, which could have allowed the plant to process heavier, dirtier crudes such as bitumen from the tar sands. A coalition of environmental justice groups challenged the expansion in the streets and in the courts, arguing that it would further pollute Richmond’s air. In the end, a superior court ruled against Chevron, citing a wholly inadequate environmental impact report (which “fails as an informational document,” the judge tartly remarked). Chevron appealed, but in 2010 it lost again. “This is a victory for the grassroots, and the people who have been suffering the health impacts of the refinery for the past 100 years,” said Asian Pacific Environmental Network senior organizer Torm Nompraseurt.62

  Richmond is not the only place dominated by Big Oil finding new reserves of courage to fight back. As the anti–tar sands movement spreads through North America and Europe, Indigenous communities in the belly of the beast—the ones who were raising the alarm about the dangers of the tar sands long before large environmental groups showed any interest in the issue—have also been emboldened to go further than ever. They’ve launched new lawsuits for violations of their land rights, with potentially grave ramifications for industry’s access to carbon reserves, and delegations from deeply impacted First Nations communities are now constantly traveling the globe to alert more people to the devastation of their territories in the hopes that more arteries will be severed. One of these activists is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a mesmerizing speaker with an understated courage who has spent much of her early thirties on the road, showing ugly slides of oil spills and ravaged landscapes and describing the silent war the oil and gas industry is waging on her people, the Lubicon Lake First Nation. “People are listening now,” she told me, with tears in her eyes in the summer of 2013. “But it took a long time for people to get to that place.” And this, she said, means that “there is hope. But it can be pretty dire sometimes in Alberta.”63

  What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can seem impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of a continent-wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very different story.

  This networking and cross-pollinating is usually invisible—it’s a mood, an energy that spreads from place to place. But for a brief time in September 2013, Blockadia’s web of inspiration was made visible. Five carvers from the Lummi Nation in Washington State—the coastal tribe that is leading the fight against the largest proposed coal export terminal on a contested piece of the West Coast—showed up in Otter Creek, Montana. They had traveled roughly 1,300 kilometers from their home territory of mountainous temperate rainforest and craggy Pacific beaches to southeastern Montana’s parched grasses and gentle hills, carrying with them a twenty-two-foot cedar totem pole, strapped to a flatbed truck. Otter Creek is the site of a planned massive coal mine and the Lummi visitors stood on that spot, which until recently had been written off as doomed, with more than a hundred people from the nearby Northern Cheyenne Reservation, as well as a group of local cattle ranchers. Together, they explored the ways in which they had been brought together by the ambitions of the carbon frenzy.

  If the Otter Creek mine were built in the Powder River Basin, it would compromise the water and air for the ranchers and the Northern Cheyenne, and the railway transporting the coal to the west coast could disturb the Cheyenne’s ancient burial grounds. The export port, meanwhile, was set to be built on one of the Lummi’s ancient burial grounds, and the coal would then be carried on barges that would disrupt their fishing areas and potentially threaten many livelihoods.

  The group stood in the valley by the banks of Otter Creek, under a sunny sky with hawks flying overhead, and blessed the totem pole with pipe smoke, vowing to fight together to keep the coal under their feet in the ground, and to keep both the railway and port from being built. The Lummi carvers then strapped the totem pole—which they had named Kwel hoy’ or “We Draw the Line”—back onto the truck and took it on a sixteen-day journey to eight other communities, all of whom found themselves in the path of coal trains, big rigs, or tar sands pipelines and oil tankers. There were ceremonies at every stop, as the visitors and their hosts—both Native and non-Native—together drew connections among their various local battles against the extractive industries. The journey ended on Tsleil-Waututh land in North Vancouver, a pivotal community in the fight against increased oil tanker traffic. There the totem pole was permanently planted, looking out at the Pacific.

  While in Montana, Lummi master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James explained the purpose of the long journey: “We’re concerned about protecting the environment as well as people’s health all the way from the Powder River to the West Coast. . . . We’re traveling across the country to help unify people’s voices. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are at or what race you are—red, black, white or yellow—we’re all in this together.”64

  * * *

  This kind of alliance building among the various outposts of Blockadia has proven the movement’s critics wrong time and time again. When the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline began to gather momentum, several high-profile pundits insisted that it was all a waste of valuable time and energy. The oil would get out through another route regardless, and in the grand scheme of things the carbon it would carry represented little more than “a rounding error,” as Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine. Better, they argued, to fight for a carbon tax, or for stronger EPA regulations, or for a reincarnation of cap-and-trade. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera went so far as to call the strategy “utterly boneheaded,” and accused James Hansen, whose congressional testimony launched the modern climate movement, of “hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.”65

  What we now know is that Keystone was always about much more than a pipeline. It was a new fighting spirit, and one that is contagious. One battle doesn’t rob from another but rather causes battles to multiply, with each act of courage, and each victory, inspiring others to strengthen their resolve.

  The BP Factor: No Trust

  Beyond the fossil fuel industry’s pace of expansion, and its forays into hostile territory, something else has propelled this movement forward in recent years. That is the widespread conviction that today’s extractive activities are significantly higher risk than their predecessors: tar sands oil is unquestionably more disruptive and damaging to local ecosystems than conventional crude. Many believe it to be more dangerous to transport, and once spilled harder to clean up. A similar risk escalation is present in the shift to fracked oil and gas; in the shift from shallow to deepwater drilling (as the BP disaster showed); and most dramatically, in the move from warm water to Arctic drilling. Communities in the path of unconventional energy projects are convinced they are being asked to risk a hell of a lot, and much of the time they are being offered very little in return for their sacrifice, whether lasting jobs or significant royalties.

  Industry and government, for their part, have been extremely reluctant to acknowledge, let alone act upon, the stepped-up risks of extreme energy. For years, rail companies and officials have largely treated fracked oil from the Bakken as if it were the same as conventional crude—never mind the mounting evidence that it is significantly more volatile. (After announcing some mostly vo
luntary new safety measures beginning in early 2014 that were generally deemed inadequate, U.S. regulators claim to be in the process of developing a variety of tougher rules for oil-by-rail transport.)66

  Similarly, government and industry are pushing the vast expansion of pipelines carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands despite a paucity of reliable, peer-reviewed research assessing whether dilbit, as diluted bitumen is called, is more prone to spill than conventional oil. But there is good reason for concern. As a joint 2011 report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and others notes, “There are many indications that dilbit is significantly more corrosive to pipeline systems than conventional crude. For example, the Alberta pipeline system has had approximately sixteen times as many spills due to internal corrosion as the U.S. system. Yet, the safety and spill response standards used by the United States to regulate pipeline transport of bitumen are designed for conventional oil.”67

  Meanwhile, there are huge gaps in our knowledge about how spilled tar sands oil behaves in water. Over the last decade, there have been few studies published on the subject, and almost all were commissioned by the oil industry. However, a recent investigation by Environment Canada contained several disturbing findings, including that diluted tar sands oil sinks in saltwater “when battered by waves and mixed with sediments” (rather than floating on the ocean surface where it can be partially recovered) and that dispersants like those used during BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster have only “a limited effect,” according to a report in The Globe and Mail. And there has been virtually no formal research at all on the particular risks of transporting tar sands oil via truck or rail.68

  Similarly, large knowledge gaps exist in our understanding of the ecological and human health impact of the Alberta tar sands themselves, with their enormous open-pit mines, dump trucks that can reach up to five stories high, and roaring upgraders. In huge swaths of country surrounding Fort McMurray, ground zero of Canada’s bitumen boom, the boreal forest—once a verdant, spongy bog—has been sucked dry of life. Every few minutes, the rancid air is punctured by the sound of booming cannons, meant to keep migrating birds from landing on the strange liquid silver surface of the huge tailing ponds.III69 In Alberta the centuries-old war to control nature is not a metaphor; it is a very real war, complete with artillery.

  The oil companies, of course, say that they are using the safest methods of environmental protection; that the vast tailings ponds are secure; that water is still safe to drink (though workers stick to bottled); that the land will soon be “reclaimed” and returned to moose and black bears (if any are still around). And despite years of complaints from First Nations communities like the Athabasca Chipewyan, situated downstream from the mines along the Athabasca River, industry and government continued to insist that whatever organic contaminants are found in the river are “naturally occurring”—this is an oil-rich region after all.

  To anyone who has witnessed the scale of the tar sands operation, the assurances seem implausible. The government has yet to establish a genuinely independent, comprehensive system for monitoring mining impacts on the surrounding watersheds—in an industrial project whose total worth is approaching $500 billion. After it announced a flashy new federal-provincial monitoring program in 2012, the PR effort quickly spiraled out of its control. Referring to new findings from government and independent researchers, Bill Donahue, an environmental scientist with an advisory role in the program, said in February 2014 that “not only are those tailings ponds leaking, but it looks like it is flowing pretty much from those tailings ponds, through the ground and into the Athabasca River.” He added: “So, there goes . . . that message we’ve been hearing about. ‘These tailings ponds are safe, they don’t leak,’ and so on.” In a separate incident, a team of government scientists with Environment Canada corroborated outside research on widespread contamination of snow around tar sands operations, though the Harper administration did its best to keep the researchers from speaking to the press.70

  And there are still no comprehensive studies on the impacts of this pollution on human health. On the contrary, some who have chosen to speak out have faced severe reprisals. Most notable had been the experience of John O’Connor, a gentle, gray-bearded family doctor who still speaks with an accent from his native Ireland. In 2003, O’Connor began to report that, while treating patients in Fort Chipewyan, he was coming across alarming numbers of cancers, including extremely rare and aggressive bile-duct malignancies. He quickly found himself under fire from federal health regulators, who filed several misconduct charges against him with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (including raising “undue alarm”). “I don’t know, personally, of any situation where a doctor has had to go through what I’ve gone through,” O’Connor has said of the reputational smears and the years spent fighting the allegations. He was, eventually, cleared of all charges and a subsequent investigation of cancer rates vindicated several of his warnings.71

  But before that happened the message to other doctors was sent: a report commissioned by the Alberta Energy Regulator recently found a “marked reluctance to speak out” in the medical community about the health impact of the tar sands, with several interviewees pointing to Dr. O’Connor’s experience. (“Physicians are quite frankly afraid to diagnose health conditions linked to the oil and gas industry,” concluded the toxicologist who authored the report.) It has become routine, moreover, for the federal government to prevent senior environmental and climate scientists from speaking to journalists about any environmentally sensitive subjects. (“I’m available when media relations says I’m available,” as one scientist told Postmedia.)72

  And this is just one facet of what has become known as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “war on science,” with environmental monitoring budgets relentlessly slashed, covering everything from oil spills and industrial air pollution to the broader impacts of climate change. Since 2008, more than two thousand scientists have lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.73

  This is, of course, a strategy. Only by systematically failing to conduct basic research, and silencing experts who are properly tasked to investigate health and environmental concerns, can industry and government continue to make absurdly upbeat claims about how all is under control in the oil patch.IV74

  A similar willful blindness pervades the rapid spread of hydraulic fracking. For years the U.S. gas industry responded to reports of contaminated water wells by insisting that there was no scientific proof of any connection between fracking and the fact that residents living near gas drilling suddenly found they could set their tap water on fire. But the reason there was no evidence was because the industry had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation—the so-called Halliburton Loophole, ushered in under the administration of George W. Bush. The loophole exempted most fracking from regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, helping to ensure that companies did not have to report any of the chemicals they were injecting underground to the Environmental Protection Agency, while shielding their use of the riskiest chemicals from EPA oversight.75 And if no one knows what you are putting into the ground, it’s tough to make a definitive link when those toxins start coming out of people’s taps.

  And yet as more evidence emerges, it is coming down hard on one side. A growing body of independent, peer-reviewed studies is building the case that fracking puts drinking water, including aquifers, at risk. In July 2013, for instance, a Duke University–led paper analyzed dozens of drinking water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region. The researchers found that the level of contamination from methane, ethane, and propane closely correlated with proximity to wells for shale gas. The industry response is that this is just natural leakage in regions rich in gas (the same line that tar sands operators in Alberta used when organic pollutants are found in the water there). But this study found that while methane was present in most of the sampled water wells, the concentration was six t
imes higher in those within a kilometer of a gas well. In a study not yet published, the Duke team also analyzed water wells in Texas that had been previously declared safe. There, they found that contrary to assurances from government and industry, methane levels in many wells exceeded the minimum safety level set by the U.S. Geological Survey.76

  The links between fracking and small earthquakes are also solidifying. In 2012, a University of Texas research scientist analyzed seismic activity from November 2009 to September 2011 over part of the huge Barnett Shale region in Texas, which lies under Fort Worth and parts of Dallas, and found the epicenters of sixty-seven small earthquakes.77 The most reliably located earthquakes were within two miles of an injection well. A July 2013 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research linked fracking-related waste injection to 109 small earthquakes that took place in a single year around Youngstown, Ohio, where an earthquake had not been previously recorded since monitoring began in the eighteenth century. The lead researcher of a similar study, published in Science, explained, “The fluids [in wastewater injection wells] are driving the faults to their tipping point.”78

  All of this illustrates what is so unsettling about unconventional extraction methods. Conventional oil and gas drilling, as well as underground coal mining, are destructive, to be sure. But comparatively speaking, they are the fossil fuel equivalent of the surgeon’s scalpel—the carbon is extracted with relatively small incisions. But extreme, or unconventional extraction takes a sledgehammer to the whole vicinity. When the sledgehammer strikes the surface of the land—as in the case of mountaintop coal removal and open-pit tar sands—the violence can be seen with the naked eye. But with fracking, deepwater drilling, and underground (“in situ”) tar sands extraction, the sledgehammer aims deep underground. At first this can seem more benign, since the impacts are less visible. Yet over and over again, we are catching glimpses of how badly we are breaking critical parts of our ecosystems that our best experts have no idea how to fix.