This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  In addition to the contamination threats, almost all these extractive projects also stand out simply for how much water they require. For instance, it takes 2.3 barrels of water to produce a single barrel of oil from tar sands mining—much more than the 0.1 to 0.3 barrels of water needed for each barrel of conventional crude. Which is why the tar sands mines and upgrading plants are surrounded by those giant tailings “ponds” visible from space. Fracking for both shale gas and “tight oil” similarly requires far more water than conventional drilling and is much more water-intensive than the fracking methods used in the 1990s. According to a 2012 study, modern fracking “events” (as they are called) use an average of five million gallons of water—“70 to 300 times the amount of fluid used in traditional fracking.” Once used, much of this water is radioactive and toxic. In 2012, the industry created 280 billion gallons of such wastewater in the U.S. alone—“enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon,” as The Guardian noted.20

  In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive—water—just to keep extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.

  This is coming, moreover, at a time when freshwater sources are imperiled around the world. Indeed, the water used in extraction operations often comes from aquifers that are already depleted from years of serial droughts, as is the case in southern California, where prospectors are eyeing the enormous Monterey Shale, and in Texas, where fracking has skyrocketed in recent years. Meanwhile, the Karoo—an arid and spectacular region of South Africa that Shell is planning to frack—literally translates as “land of the great thirst.” Which helps explain why Oom Johannes Willemse, a local spiritual leader, says, “Water is so holy. If you don’t have water, you don’t have anything worth living for.” He adds, “I will fight to the death. I won’t allow this water to be destroyed.”21

  The fight against pollution and climate change can seem abstract at times; but wherever they live, people will fight for their water. Even die for it.

  “Can we live without water?” the anti-fracking farmers chant in Pungesti, Romania.

  “No!”

  “Can we live without Chevron?”

  “Yes!”22

  These truths emerge not out of an abstract theory about “the commons” but out of lived experience. Growing in strength and connecting communities in all parts of the world, they speak to something deep and unsettled in many of us. We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in “an upside down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?”23 Put another way, a broken bank is a crisis we can fix; a broken Arctic we cannot.

  Early Wins

  It’s not yet clear which side will win many of the struggles outlined in these pages—only that the companies in the crosshairs are up against far more than they bargained for. There have, however, already been some solid victories, too many to fully catalogue here.

  For instance, activists have won fracking bans or moratoria in dozens of cities and towns and in much larger territories too. Alongside France, countries with moratoria include Bulgaria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and South Africa (though South Africa has since lifted the ban). Moratoria or bans are also in place in the states and provinces of Vermont, Quebec, as well as Newfoundland and Labrador (as of early 2014, New York’s contentious moratorium still held but it looked shaky). This track record is all the more remarkable considering that so much local anti-fracking activism has not received foundation funding, and is instead financed the old-fashioned way: by passing the hat at community events and with countless volunteer hours.

  And some victories against fossil fuel extraction receive almost no media attention, but are significant nonetheless. Like the fact that in 2010 Costa Rica passed a landmark law banning new open-pit mining projects anywhere in the country. Or that in 2012, the residents of the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina successfully fended off government plans to open the waters around their beautiful islands to offshore oil drilling. The region is home to one of the largest coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere and as one account of the victory puts it, what was established was the fact that coral is “more important than oil.”II24

  And then there is the wave of global victories against coal. Under mounting pressure, the World Bank as well as other large international funders have announced that they will no longer offer financing to coal projects except in exceptional circumstances, which could turn out to be a severe blow to the industry if other financiers follow suit. In Gerze, Turkey, a major proposed coal plant on the Black Sea was scuttled under community pressure. The Sierra Club’s hugely successful “Beyond Coal” campaign has, along with dozens of local partner organizations, succeeded in retiring 170 coal plants in the United States and prevented over 180 proposed plants since 2002.25

  The campaign to block coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest has similarly moved from strength to strength. Three of the planned terminals—one near Clatskanie, Oregon, another in Coos Bay, Oregon, and another in Hoquiam, Washington—have already been nixed, the result of forceful community activism, much of it organized by the Power Past Coal coalition. Several port proposals are still pending but resistance is fierce, particularly to the largest of the bunch, just outside Bellingham, Washington. “It’s not a fun time to be in the coal industry these days,” said Nick Carter, president and chief operating officer of the U.S. coal company Natural Resource Partners. “It’s not much fun to get up every day, go to work and spend your time fighting your own government.”26

  In comparison, the actions against the various tar sands pipelines have not yet won any clear victories, only a series of very long delays. But those delays matter a great deal because they have placed a question mark over the capacity of Alberta’s oil patch to make good on its growth projections. And if there is one thing billion-dollar investors hate, it’s political uncertainty. If Alberta’s landlocked oil patch can’t guarantee its investors a reliable route to the sea where bitumen can be loaded onto tankers, then, as the province’s former minister of energy Ron Liepert put it, “the investment is going to dry up.” The head of one of the largest oil companies in the tar sands confirmed this in January 2014. “If there were no more pipeline expansions, I would have to slow down,” Cenovus CEO Brian Ferguson said. He clearly considered this some kind of threat, but from a climate perspective it sounded like the best news in years.27

  Even if these tactics succeed only in slowing expansion plans, the delays will buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby. And, even more significantly, the delays give residents of the largest markets in Asia a window of opportunity to strengthen their own demands for a clean energy revolution.

  Already, these demands are spreading so rapidly that it isn’t at all clear how long the market for new coal-fired plants and extra-dirty gasoline in Asia will continue to expand. In India, Blockadia-style uprisings have been on full display in recent years, with people’s movements against coal-fired power plants significantly slowing the rush to dirty energy in some regions. The southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh has been the site of several iconic struggles, like one in the village of Kakarapalli, surrounded by ric
e patties and coconut groves, where local residents can be seen staffing a semipermanent checkpoint under a baobab tree at the entrance to town. The encampment chokes off the only road leading to a half-built power plant where construction was halted amidst protests in 2011. In nearby Sompeta, another power plant proposal was stopped by a breakthrough alliance of urban middle-class professionals and subsistence farmers and fishers who united to protect the nearby wetlands. After police charged a crowd of protesters in 2010, shooting dead at least two people, a national uproar forced the National Environment Appellate Authority to revoke the permit for the project.28 The community remains vigilant, with a daily rotating hunger strike entering its 1,500th day at the beginning of 2014.

  China, meanwhile, is in the midst of a very public and emotional debate about its crisis levels of urban air pollution, in large part the result of the country’s massive reliance on coal. There have been surprisingly large and militant protests against the construction of new coal-fired plants, most spectacularly in Haimen, a small city in Guangdong Province. In December 2011, as many as thirty thousand residents surrounded a government building and blocked a highway to protest plans to expand a coal-fired power plant. Citing concerns about cancer and other health problems blamed on the existing plant, the demonstrators withstood days of attacks by police, including tear gas and reported beatings with batons. They were there to send the message, as one protester put it, that, “This is going to affect our future generations. They still need to live.” The plant expansion was suspended.29

  Chinese peasants who rely on traditional subsistence activities like agriculture and fishing have a history of militant uprisings against industrial projects that cause displacement and disease, whether toxic factories, highways, or mega-dams. Very often these actions attract severe state repression, including deaths in custody of protest leaders. The projects usually go ahead regardless of the opposition, though there have been some notable successes.

  What has changed in China in recent years—and what is of paramount concern to the ruling party—is that the country’s elites, the wealthy winners in China’s embrace of full-throttle capitalism, are increasingly distressed by the costs of industrialization. Indeed, Li Bo, who heads Friends of Nature, the oldest environmental organization in China, describes urban air pollution as “a superman for Chinese environment issues,” laughing at the irony of an environmentalist having “to thank smog.” The reason, he explains, is that the elites had been able to insulate themselves from previous environmental threats, like baby milk and water contamination, because “the rich, the powerful, have special channels of delivery, safer products [delivered] to their doorsteps.” But no matter how rich you are, there is no way to hide from the “blanket” of toxic air. “Nobody can do anything for special [air] delivery,” he says. “And that’s the beauty of it.”30

  To put the health crisis in perspective, the World Health Organization sets the guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known as PM2.5) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit 671. The ubiquitous paper masks haven’t been enough to prevent outbreaks of respiratory illness, or to protect children as young as eight from being diagnosed with lung cancer. Shanghai, meanwhile, has introduced an emergency protocol in which kindergartens and elementary schools are automatically shut down and all large-scale outdoor gatherings like concerts and soccer games are canceled when the levels of particulate matter in the air top 450 micrograms per cubic meter. No wonder Chen Jiping, a former senior Communist Party official, now retired, admitted in March 2013 that pollution is now the single greatest cause of social unrest in the country, even more than land disputes.31

  China’s unelected leaders have long since deflected demands for democracy and human rights by touting the ruling party’s record of delivering galloping economic growth. As Li Bo puts it, the rhetoric was always, “We get rich first, we deal with the environment problems second.” That worked for a long time, but now, he says, “their argument has all of a sudden suffocated in the smog.”

  The pressure for a more sustainable development path has forced the government to cut its targeted growth to a rate lower than China had experienced in more than a decade, and to launch huge alternative energy programs. Many dirty-energy projects, meanwhile, have been canceled or delayed. In 2011, a third of the Chinese coal-fired power plants that had been approved for construction “were stalled and investments in new coal plants weren’t even half the level they were in 2005,” according to Justin Guay, associate director of the Sierra Club’s International Climate Program. “Even better, China actually closed down over 80 gigawatts of coal plants between 2001–2010 and is planning to phase out another 20 GW. To put that in perspective that’s roughly the size of all electricity sources in Spain, home to the world’s 11th largest electricity sector.” (In an effort to reduce smog, the government is also exploring the potential for natural gas fracking, but in an earthquake-prone country with severe water shortages, it’s a plan unlikely to quell unrest.)32

  All this pushback from within China is of huge significance to the broader fossil-fuel resistance, from Australia to North America. It means that if tar sands pipelines and coal export terminals can be held off for just a few more years, the market for the dirty products the coal and oil companies are trying to ship to Asia could well dry up. Something of a turning point took place in July 2013 when the multinational investment banking firm Goldman Sachs published a research paper titled, “The Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing.” Less than six months later, Goldman Sachs sold its 49 percent stake in the company that is developing the largest of the proposed coal export terminals, the one near Bellingham, Washington, having apparently concluded that window had already closed.33

  These victories add up: they have kept uncountable millions of tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Whether or not climate change has been a primary motivator, the local movements behind them deserve to be recognized as unsung carbon keepers, who, by protecting their beloved forests, mountains, rivers, and coastlines, are helping to protect all of us.

  Fossil Free: The Divestment Movement

  Climate activists are under no illusion that shutting down coal plants, blocking tar sands pipelines, and passing fracking bans will be enough to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as science demands. There are just too many extraction operations already up and running and too many more being pushed simultaneously. And oil multinationals are hyper-mobile—they move wherever they can dig.

  With this in mind, discussions are under way to turn the “no new fossil frontiers” principle behind these campaigns into international law. Proposals include a Europe-wide ban on fracking (in 2012, more than a third of the 766 members of the European Parliament cast votes in favor of an immediate moratorium).34 There is a growing campaign calling for a worldwide ban on offshore drilling in the sensitive Arctic region, as well as in the Amazon rainforest. And activists are similarly beginning to push for a global moratorium on tar sands extraction anywhere in the world, on the grounds that it is sufficiently carbon-intensive to merit transnational action.

  Another tactic spreading with startling speed is the call for public interest institutions like colleges, faith organizations, and municipal governments to sell whatever financial holdings they have in fossil companies. The divestment movement emerged organically out of various Blockadia-style attempts to block carbon extraction at its source—specifically, out of the movement against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which was looking for a tactic to put pressure on coal companies that had made it clear that they were indifferent to local opinion. Those local activists were later joined by a national and then international campaign spearheaded by 350.org, which extended the divestment call to include all fossil fuels, not just coal. The idea behind the tactic was to target not just individual unpopular projects
but the logic that is driving this entire wave of frenetic, high-risk extraction.

  The divestment campaign is based on the idea—outlined so compellingly by Bill McKibben—that anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic can look at how much carbon the fossil fuel companies have in their reserves, subtract how much carbon scientists tell us we can emit and still keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and conclude that the fossil fuel companies have every intention of pushing the planet beyond the boiling point.

  These simple facts have allowed the student-led divestment movement to put the fossil fuel companies’ core business model on trial, arguing that they have become rogue actors whose continued economic viability relies on radical climate destabilization—and that, as such, any institution claiming to serve the public interest has a moral responsibility to liberate itself from these odious profits. “What the fossil fuel divestment movement is saying to companies is your fundamental business model of extracting and burning carbon is going to create an uninhabitable planet. So you need to stop. You need a new business model,” explains Chloe Maxmin, coordinator of Divest Harvard.35 And young people have a special moral authority in making this argument to their school administrators: these are the institutions entrusted to prepare them for the future; so it is the height of hypocrisy for those same institutions to profit from an industry that has declared war on the future at the most elemental level.

  No tactic in the climate wars has resonated more powerfully. Within six months of the campaign’s official launch in November 2012, there were active divestment campaigns on over three hundred campuses and in more than one hundred U.S. cities, states, and religious institutions. The demand soon spread to Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Britain. At the time of publication, thirteen U.S. colleges and universities had announced their intention to divest their endowments of fossil fuel stocks and bonds, and the leaders of more than twenty-five North American cities had made similar commitments, including San Francisco and Seattle. Around forty religious institutions had done the same. The biggest victory to date came in May 2014 when Stanford University—with a huge endowment worth $18.7 billion—announced it would be selling its coal stocks.36