by Naomi Klein
Educated by Disaster
In Blockadia outposts around the world, the initials “BP” act as a kind of mantra or invocation—shorthand for: whatever you do, take no extractive company at its word. The initials mean that passivity and trust in the face of assurances about world-class technology and cutting-edge safety measures are recipes for flammable water in your faucet, an oil slick in your backyard, or a train explosion down the street.
Indeed, many Blockadia activists cite the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as either their political awakening, or the moment they realized they absolutely had to win their various battles against extreme energy. The facts of that case are familiar but bear repeating. In what became the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, a state-of-the-art offshore oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers, while oil gushed from the ruptured Macondo wellhead about one and a half kilometers below the surface. What made the strongest impression on the horrified public was not the tar-coated tourist beaches in Florida or the oil-soaked pelicans in Louisiana. It was the harrowing combination of the oil giant’s complete lack of preparedness for a blowout at those depths, as it scrambled for failed fix after failed fix, and the cluelessness of the government regulators and responders. Not only had regulators taken BP at its word about the supposed safety of the operation, but government agencies were so ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the disaster that they allowed BP—the perpetrator—to be in charge of the cleanup. As the world watched, the experts were clearly making it up as they went along.
The investigations and lawsuits that followed revealed that a desire to save money had played an important role in creating the conditions for the accident. For instance, as Washington raced to reestablish lost credibility, an investigation by a U.S. Interior Department agency found “BP’s cost or time saving decisions without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the Macondo blowout.” A report from the specially created Presidential Oil Spill Commission similarly found, “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, [and its contractors] Halliburton and Transocean, made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).” Jackie Savitz, a marine scientist and a vice president at the conservation group Oceana, was more direct: BP “put profits before precautions. They let dollar signs drive a culture of risk-taking that led to this unacceptable outcome.”79
And any notion that this was a problem unique to BP was quickly dispelled when—only ten days after crews stopped the gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico—an Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan, causing the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. The pipe ruptured in a tributary of the Kalamazoo River and quickly contaminated more than fifty-five kilometers of waterways and wetlands with over one million gallons of oil, which left swans, muskrats, and turtles coated in black gunk. Homes were evacuated, local residents sickened, and onlookers watched “an alarming brown mist rise as river water the shade of a dark chocolate malt tumbled” over a local dam, according to one report.80
Like BP, it seemed that Enbridge had put profits before basic safety, while regulators slept at the switch. For instance, it turned out that Enbridge had known as early as 2005 that the section of pipeline that failed was corroding, and by 2009 the company had identified 329 other defects in the line stretching through southern Michigan that were serious enough to require immediate repair under federal rules. The $40 billion company was granted an extension, and applied for a second one just ten days before the rupture—the same day an Enbridge VP told Congress that the company could mount an “almost instantaneous” response to a leak. In fact it took them seventeen hours to close the valve on the leaking pipeline. Three years after the initial disaster, about 180,000 gallons of oil were still sitting on the bottom of the Kalamazoo.81
As in the Gulf, where BP had been drilling at depths unheard of just a few years earlier, the Kalamazoo disaster was also linked to the new era of extreme, higher-risk fossil fuel extraction. It took a while, however, before that became clear. For more than a week Enbridge did not share with the public the very pertinent fact that the substance that had leaked was not conventional crude; it was diluted bitumen, piped from the Alberta tar sands through Michigan. In fact in the early days, Enbridge’s then CEO, Patrick Daniel, flatly denied that the oil came from the tar sands and was later forced to backtrack. “What I indicated is that it was not what we have traditionally referred to as tar sands oil,” Daniel claimed of bitumen that certainly had come from the tar sands. “If it is part of the same geological formation, then I bow to that expert opinion.”82
In the fall of 2010, with many of these disasters still under way, Marty Cobenais of the Indigenous Environmental Network told me that the summer of spills was having a huge impact on communities in the path of new infrastructure projects, whether big rigs, pipelines, or tankers. “The oil industry always says there is 0 percent chance of their oil hitting the shores, but with BP, we saw that it did. Their projections are always wrong,” he said, adding, “They are always talking about ‘fail-proof’ but with Kalamazoo we saw they couldn’t turn it off for hours.”83
In other words, a great many people are no longer believing what the industry experts tell them; they are believing what they see. And over the last few years we have all seen a whole lot. Unforgettable images from the bizarre underwater “spill-cam” showing BP’s oil gushing for three long months into the Gulf merge seamlessly with shocking footage of methane-laced tap water being set on fire in fracking country, which in turn meld with the grief of Quebec’s Lac-Mégantic after the horrific train explosion, with family members searching through the rubble for signs of their loved ones, which in turn fade to memories of 300,000 people in West Virginia being told they could not drink or bathe in their tap water for up to ten days after it had been contaminated by chemicals used in coal mining. And then there was the spectacle in 2012 of Shell’s first foray into the highest-risk gambit of all: Arctic drilling. Highlights included one of Shell’s giant drill rigs breaking free from its tow and running aground on the coast of Sitkalidak Island; another rig slipping its anchorage; and an oil spill containment dome being “crushed like a beer can,” according to a U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement official.84
If it seems like there are more such spills and accidents than before, that’s because there are. According to a months-long investigation by EnergyWire, in 2012 there were more than six thousand spills and “other mishaps” at onshore oil and gas sites in the U.S. “That’s an average of more than 16 spills a day. And it’s a significant increase since 2010. In the 12 states where comparable data were available, spills were up about 17 percent.” There is also evidence that companies are doing a poorer job of cleaning up their messes: in an investigation of pipeline leaks of hazardous liquids (mostly petroleum-related), The New York Times found that in 2005 and 2006 pipeline operators reported “recovering more than 60 percent of liquids spilled”; between 2007 and 2010 “operators recovered less than a third.”85
It’s not just the engineering failures that are feeding widespread mistrust. As with BP and Enbridge, it’s the constant stream of revelations about the role that greed—fully liberated by lax regulation and monitoring—seems to have played in stacking the deck. For example, Shell’s Arctic rig ran aground when it braved fierce weather in an apparent attempt by the company to get out of Alaska in time to avoid paying additional taxes in the state.86
And Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MM&A), the rail company behind the Lac-Mégantic disaster, had received, one year before the accident, government permission to cut the number of staff on its trains to a single engineer. Until the 1980s, trains like the one that derailed were generally staffed by five employees, all sharing the duties of operating safely. Now it’s down to two—but for MM&A, that was still too much. According to one of the company’s former railway workers, “It was all about cutting, cutting, cutting.” Compounding these risks, according to a
four-month Globe and Mail investigation, “companies often don’t test their oil shipments for explosiveness before sending the trains.” Little wonder then that within a year of Lac-Mégantic, several more oil-laden trains went up in flames, including one in Casselton, North Dakota, one outside a village in northwest New Brunswick, and one in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia.87
In a sane world, this cluster of disasters, layered on top of the larger climate crisis, would have prompted significant political change. Caps and moratoriums would have been issued, and the shift away from extreme energy would have begun. The fact that nothing of the sort has happened, and that permits and leases are still being handed out for ever more dangerous extractive activities, is at least partly due to old-fashioned corruption—of both the legal and illegal varieties.
A particularly lurid episode was revealed a year and a half before the BP disaster. An internal U.S. government report pronounced that what was then called the Minerals Management Service—the division of the U.S. Interior Department charged with collecting royalty payments from the oil and gas industry—suffered from “a culture of ethical failure.” Not only had officials repeatedly accepted gifts from oil industry employees but, according to a report by the department’s inspector general, several officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” For a public that had long suspected that their public servants were in bed with the oil and gas lobby, this was pretty graphic proof.88
Little wonder, then, that a 2013 Harris poll found that a paltry 4 percent of U.S. respondents believe oil companies are “honest and trustworthy” (only the tobacco industry fared worse). That same year, Gallup polled Americans about their opinions of twenty-five industries, including banking and government. No industry was more disliked than the oil and gas sector. A 2012 poll in Canada, meanwhile, asked Canadians to rate each of eleven groups on their trustworthiness on “energy issues.” Oil and gas firms and energy executives took the bottom two slots, well below academics (the most trusted group), as well as environmental and community groups (which also rated positively). And in an EU-wide survey that same year, participants were polled on their impressions of eleven different sectors and asked if they “make efforts to behave responsibly towards society”—along with finance and banking, mining and oil and gas companies again came in last place.89
Hard realities like these have posed a challenge to the highly paid spin doctors employed by the extractive industries, the ones who had grown accustomed to being able to gloss over pretty much any controversy with sleek advertising showing blond children running through fields and multiracial actors in lab coats expressing concern about the environment. These days that doesn’t cut it. No matter how many millions are spent on advertising campaigns touting the modernity of the tar sands or the cleanliness of natural gas, it’s clear that a great many people are no longer being persuaded. And those proving most resistant are the ones whose opinions matter most: the people living on lands that the extractive companies need to access in order to keep their astronomical profits flowing.
The Return of Precaution
For decades, the environmental movement spoke the borrowed language of risk assessment, diligently working with partners in business and government to balance dangerous levels of pollution against the need for profit and economic growth. These assumptions about acceptable levels of risk were taken so deeply for granted that they formed the basis of the official climate change discussion. Action necessary to save humanity from the very real risk of climate chaos was coolly balanced against the risk such action would pose to GDPs, as if economic growth still has a meaning on a planet convulsing in serial disasters.
But in Blockadia, risk assessment has been abandoned on the barricaded roadside, replaced by a resurgence of the precautionary principle—which holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk, perfect scientific certainty is not required before taking action. Moreover the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that could be harmed.
Blockadia is turning the tables, insisting that it is up to industry to prove that its methods are safe—and in the era of extreme energy that is something that simply cannot be done. To quote the biologist Sandra Steingraber, “Can you provide an example of an ecosystem on which was laid down a barrage of poisons, and terrible and unexpected consequences for human beings were not the result?”90
The fossil fuel companies, in short, are no longer dealing with those Big Green groups that can be silenced with a generous donation or a conscience-clearing carbon offset program. The communities they are facing are, for the most part, not looking to negotiate a better deal—whether in the form of local jobs, higher royalties, or better safety standards. More and more, these communities are simply saying “No.” No to the pipeline. No to Arctic drilling. No to the coal and oil trains. No to the heavy hauls. No to the export terminal. No to fracking. And not just “Not in My Backyard” but, as the French anti-fracking activists say: Ni ici, ni ailleurs—neither here, nor elsewhere. In other words: no new carbon frontiers.
Indeed the trusty slur NIMBY has completely lost its bite. As Wendell Berry says, borrowing words from E. M. Forster, conservation “turns on affection”—and if each of us loved our homeplace enough to defend it, there would be no ecological crisis, no place could ever be written off as a sacrifice zone.91 We would simply have no choice but to adopt nonpoisonous methods of meeting our needs.
This sense of moral clarity, after so many decades of chummy green partnerships, is the real shock for the extractive industries. The climate movement has found its nonnegotiables. This fortitude is not just building a large and militant resistance to the companies most responsible for the climate crisis. As we will see in the next chapter, it is also delivering some of the most significant victories the environmental movement has seen in decades.
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I. The villagers insist their struggle is committed to nonviolence and blame outsiders or even provocateurs for the arson.
II. Maxime Combes, a French economist and anti-fracking activist, observes, “The scene in the film where landowner Mike Markham ignites gas from a water faucet in his home with a cigarette lighter due to natural gas exploration in the area has had a far greater impact against fracking than any report or speech.”
III. In 2008, 1,600 ducks died after they landed in these dangerous waters during a storm; another incident led to the deaths of over five hundred more two years later. (A biologist investigating the later incident for the Alberta government explained that it was not industry’s fault that the ducks were forced to land during a violent storm—then pointed out, without apparent irony, that such storms will become more frequent as a result of climate change.)
IV. And their claims are indeed absurd: according to an independent study published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, emissions of potentially toxic pollutants from the tar sands “are two to three orders-of-magnitude larger than those reported” by companies to their regulators. The discrepancy is evident in actual measurements of these pollutants in the air near tar sands activities. The study’s coauthor, Frank Wania, an environmental scientist at the University of Toronto, described the official estimates as “inadequate and incomplete” and made the commonsense observation, “Only with a complete and accurate account of the emissions is it actually possible to make a meaningful assessment of the environmental impact and of the risk to human health.”
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LOVE WILL SAVE THIS PLACE
Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far
“I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
—Rachel Carson, 19541
“What good is a mountain just to have a mountain?”
/> —Jason Bostic, Vice President of the West Virginia Coal Association, 20112
On a drizzly British Columbia day in April 2012, a twenty-seven-seat turboprop plane landed at the Bella Bella airport, which consists of a single landing strip leading to a clapboard building. The passengers descending from the blue-and-white Pacific Coastal aircraft included the three members of a review panel created by the Canadian government. They had made the 480-kilometer journey from Vancouver to this remote island community, a place of deep fjords and lush evergreen forests reaching to the sea, to hold public hearings about one of the most contentious new pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure in North America: Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.
Bella Bella is not directly on the oil pipeline’s route (that is 200 kilometers even further north). However, the Pacific ocean waters that are its front yard are in the treacherous path of the oil tankers that the pipeline would load up with diluted tar sands oil—up to 75 percent more oil in some supertankers than the Exxon Valdez was carrying in 1989 when it spilled in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, devastating marine life and fisheries across the region.3 A spill in these waters could be even more damaging, since the remoteness would likely make reaching an accident site difficult, especially during winter storms.
The appointed members of the Joint Review Panel—one woman and two men, aided by support staff—had been holding hearings about the pipeline impacts for months now and would eventually present the federal government with their recommendation on whether the project should go ahead. Bella Bella, whose population is roughly 90 percent Heiltsuk First Nation, was more than ready for them.
