by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Simon Mayeski (left)
and 350.org banner
Eve Simmons
Siena
Lori Saldaña
Mike Cappiello
Rev. Dr. Beth Johnson
Group shot from the
rally
Line of march
The pipeline sign
“Keystone hates
Bambi”
“Obama, take a stand”
Lone
counter-protester who drove his truck around the block during the action
“We will
respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that our failure to do so
would betray our children and future generations.”
—
President Barack Obama
Those words were
featured prominently at a demonstration against construction of the Keystone XL
pipeline at the Federal Building in downtown San Diego September 21. They were
carried on a sign held by one of the protesters as the nearly 250 people
marched around the building, and they were quoted by Eve Simmons of the San
Diego Energy and Climate Reality Project and San Diego’s branch of the
anti-global warming group 350.org when she MC’d a rally that followed the
march. The action was part of a nationwide campaign, including similar protests
in almost 200 other cities demanding that the Obama administration “draw the
line” and stop the Keystone XL pipeline as a sign that they’re serious about
stopping human-caused climate change.
Five days
earlier, on September 16, Simmons and fellow San Diego 350.org founder Simon
Mayeski had spoken to Activist San Diego (ASD) at the Joyce Beers Community
Center in Hillcrest. Simmons’ talk there drew on some of the same materials as
Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth, updated to show how much more human-caused climate
change has happened in the five years since the film and how the indicators of
global warming, including melting icecaps and glaciers and ocean acidification,
have got worse. Mayeski briefed the audience on how the anti-Keystone movement
got started and what can be done to stop climate change in general and the
pipeline in particular.
Both the ASD
meeting and the downtown demonstration revealed a divide within the
environmentalist movement that’s been apparent at least since the late 1970’s,
when Amory Lovins published Soft Energy Paths, which argued that humans were facing an environmental catastrophe but
it could be stopped without ending the capitalist economic system. Barry
Commoner, a scientist who was active in both the environmental and socialist
movements (and eventually ran as an alternative Presidential candidate in
1980), argued that the sweeping changes needed to achieve an environmentally
stable and sustainable society couldn’t be achieved under capitalism. The
divide was summed up by a man who stood in front of the September 21 march
videotaping it, who said he was disappointed with the action’s focus on
lobbying President Obama to kill the pipeline. “Obama can’t be trusted,” he
said. “He isn’t going to do anything to stop it.”
What Is Keystone XL?
The Keystone XL
pipeline is actually the middle leg in a series of three pipelines designed to
carry oil produced from Canadian tar sands to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico
in the U.S. The first and third legs are already being built, but because the
middle one crosses the U.S.-Canada border, the U.S. State Department has to
certify the project before construction can begin. Earlier this year the State
Department issued a report saying they didn’t think Keystone XL would have a
measurable effect on the U.S. environment — but the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) issued their own report, which said the pipeline should not be
built.
Obama has
delayed his decision whether to allow the pipeline to go forward several times,
and environmentalist activists seized on the delays to mount a major push to
get Obama to kill the project. More recently, the Republican majority in the
U.S. House of Representatives has threatened to allow the federal government to
shut down and block renewal of the U.S.’s debt ceiling unless funding is
stripped from Obama’s Affordable Care Act (commonly known as “Obamacare”) and
Keystone XL is approved.
At the ASD
meeting, Simmons explained the significance of Keystone XL both for its
supporters and its opponents. “Peak oil is running out,” she said, “so we’re
going after ‘tight oil.’” This means oil — and also natural gas — that is
increasingly difficult to extract from the ground. One process for extracting
“tight oil” is hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” for short, which involves
injecting water and toxic chemicals into the ground in order to break it up and
get it to release oil or gas. Another is heating tar sands in order to release
the so-called “dirty oil” within them — which, as a pair of pictures Simmons
and Mayeski showed at their ASD appearance dramatically showed, turns pristine
wilderness full of carbon dioxide-absorbing trees into mud flats full of toxic
residues.
“Beneath the
Canadian boreal forest — which provides twice as much oxygen (from plant
photosynthesis) as all of Latin America — lies the dirtiest fuel in the world,”
Simmons told ASD. “We’re turning the world’s biggest carbon sink into the
world’s biggest carbon bomb.” At the rally, she was even more dire: “The
Keystone XL pipeline would bring to market more than twice the amount of oil
burned throughout human history.” Though Canadian companies can extract this
oil even without the pipeline, Keystone opponents say that without the pipeline
it would be prohibitively expensive for them to market it.
The case against
Keystone can be summed up in four points: 1) The Canadian tar sands oil itself
will add so much carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere that global warming
will become irreversible. As pioneering climate-change researcher Dr. James
Hansen has said, building Keystone would be “game over for the climate.” 2) The
process of extracting it is itself energy-intensive as well as highly
polluting. 3) The pipeline runs alongside or under major U.S. aquifers and
therefore directly threatens the drinking water needed by millions of people.
4) It’s an elaborate multi-million dollar economic commitment to continued
reliance on fossil fuels at a time when we need to be moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.
Part of the
program at the September 21 rally was an invitation for people to write on
signs and express their own reasons for opposing the pipeline. Concerns ranged
from the future effects of climate change on human survival — one woman simply
put on her sign that she was against Keystone because “I love humanity!” — to
the Native American sacred sites that would be destroyed by the pipeline’s
construction. “I just turned 10 and I may not be able to vote or drive,” said a
young girl identified only as Siena, “but I’ve been an environmental activist
since I was five.” She pleaded with Obama to live up to his words about our
responsibility to protect the environment for future generations, and kill the
pipeline so she and her fellow 10-year-olds can have an environmentally sane
and sustainable future.
Embracing Civil
Disobedience
Former
California Assemblymember Lori Saldaña, currently head of the San Diego branch
of the Sierra Club, announced that the implications of building Keystone are so
dire that the Sierra Club’s nationwide leadership agreed to support civil
disobedience campaigns to stop it. “The Sierra Club never endorsed civil
disobedience until Keystone,” she said. “Our national officers were arrested in
front of the White House protesting Keystone. These volunteer opportunities
never go away. We always have these battles to fight. This is the future: clean
energy. Keep your voices loud and keep going.”
One way Saldaña
said people could stay involved is by attending meetings of city councils, the
County Board of Supervisors and the state legislature and speaking out on
critical environmental and energy issues. “I know both sides,” she said —
alluding to her long career as an activist, her six years in the Assembly and
her return to activism after she was termed out of office. “I know how tough it
is to stand before elected representatives and tell them what the people need
done. But testifying in person and writing letters and postcards are among the
tools you have.”
Matt Cappiello,
a medical student at UCSD, recalled being arrested as part of the anti-Keystone
demonstration in front of the White House two years ago to which Saldaña had
referred. “Pretty much the entire economy is driven by fossil-fuel
consumption,” he said. “We have multinational corporations who encourage us to use
more fuels and who out-lobby us 150 to 1. There’s a knowledge gap between
environmentalists and the ordinary American public that doesn’t know the dirty
details of tar-sands extraction. In San Diego a lot of people are more
concerned about going to the beach or clubbing. We need wake-up calls, and
that’s why we need civil disobedience.”
Though Cappiello
said the people organizing civil-disobedience campaigns against Keystone are
doctors, teachers and other people with professional careers — not “your typical
granola-crunching hippies” — he identified the anti-Keystone campaign with the
Occupy movement. Cappiello said three factors had delayed Obama from approving
Keystone: the anti-Keystone rally in Washington, D.C. (“the largest
environmental demonstration in U.S. history,” he called it), Occupy and the
need for Obama to galvanize his progressive base to get re-elected in 2012. He
boasted that the pressure of their campaign opened the mainstream media to
coverage on the negative impacts of Keystone and got 350.org founder Bill
McKibben on national television.
But the most
radical perspective at the September 21 rally came from a surprising source:
Reverend Doctor Beth Johnson, pastor of the First Unitarian-Universalist
Fellowship at Palomar in North County. “We are not alone in our commitment to
the earth,” she said. “We will not let this outrageous pipeline proceed. The
pipeline is a visible, outward sign of greed and ignorance of the inconvenient
truth. Stopping the pipeline is a moral issue. We hold the President
accountable. … We’re drawing the line at fear, ignorance, greed, coercion and
the Keystone XL pipeline, the outward sign of a cancerous capitalist economy.”
Liberals vs. Radicals at
ASD
Rev. Dr. Johnson
would have felt right at home if she’d attended the Activist San Diego meeting
on Keystone and climate change five nights earlier. The featured speakers, Eve
Simmons and fellow San Diego 350.org founder Simon Mayeski, took what might be
called a liberal approach to climate change. Simmons gave a rather apologetic
defense of large-scale solar and wind projects which might have been less
apologetic if she hadn’t noticed ASD board member Jorge Glackman’s comment in
his introduction that such projects “are very wasteful ways to exploit climate
change.” She also said “some” climate scientists endorse “small
fourth-generation” nuclear reactors as a necessary part of the transition from
fossil fuels to renewable sources. Later she told this reporter that she’d been
part of anti-nuclear demonstrations in the 1970’s but avoided saying whether
she now personally supports nukes.
Mayeski
quarreled with Simmons’ apparent endorsement of nuclear power (though she had
been careful to avoid saying whether she supported it herself). “We tried
nuclear power, and it hasn’t worked,” he said. “It may have worked at the
beginning, but as the climate has got worse, many places where the plants are
have become more prone to accidents. It’s possible the flooding at Fukushima
was caused at least in part by climate change. We need to stop nuclear power as
soon as possible.”
In the parts of
their talks that addressed what people could do, Simmons and Mayeski
acknowledged the need for political activism but put more stress on individual
solutions. Simmons pointed out that 40 percent of San Diego’s energy use is for
transportation and another 40 percent for heating and lighting buildings. “The
Empire State Building was just retrofitted, and its owner is saving $4.4
million per year,” she said. “The sun and wind have no borders. Every country
has them. If you own your own home or business, or have some say in your HOA
(homeowners’ association, the governing board for condo complexes), install
rooftop solar panels, warm your home with sunlight, create new energy jobs, and
if you own an electric car that’s your gas station,”
Simmons also
advised her audience “never to buy a fossil-fuel car again. Go electric. They
are getting cheaper and cheaper.” She also called on people to use more public
transit and to divest themselves of their investments in energy companies and
other enterprises that rely on fossil fuels. Another recommendation Simmons
made was to buy fewer things made of plastic. “Peak oil” researcher Richard
Ledford has pointed out that only 50 percent of the oil produced in the world
is burned for energy; the other 50 percent is used to make plastic. As far as
political activism goes, Simmons said people should “call your political
representatives and demand an end to subsidies for fossil fuels. Demand a price
on carbon emissions.”
Mayeski’s
presentation took a similar tack, emphasizing personal responsibility and
liberal political action. “Each of us has the ability to fight climate change
by reducing our own carbon footprint,” he said. “We can ride a bus or trolley,
ride a bicycle or walk. Conserving water is important because it takes a lot of
energy to process and store water. We can work on increasing our home’s
efficiency, including changing lightbulbs, using more efficient machinery or
installing solar energy.” He also recommended that people become vegetarians —
even though he admitted “I’m not there yet” — because it’s a lot more
energy-efficient to consume protein and other nutrients directly from plants
rather than having them processed through animals first.
His political
strategy focused more on outreach to friends, neighbors, family members and
co-workers than on directly confronting elected officials or pursuing civil
disobedience. Mayeski promoted the “SIM center” downtown — a computer center
with space for up to 20 people, and their laptops, at a time — where “we’ve had
‘climate chats’ that are a San Diego 350.org invention. … We do a lot of public
outreach. This is a day in a long campaign.” Mayeski also showed slides of more
traditional protests his group has been involved with, including one outside
the San Diego Gas & Electric visitors’ center right after it opened, where
they displayed a multi-segment sign painted to look like a pipeline. The same
sign, with a slogan denouncing Keystone, was used in the September 21
demonstration.
When the ASD
meeting was opened to questions and comments from the audience, it quickly
became clear that many of the people attending were more radical than the
speakers. The first question asked how you can combat climate change when manufacturers,
especially in high-tech, pursue a policy of planned obsolescence so people have
to keep buying new gadgets whose production produces carbon emissions and
wastes scarce resources.
“There’s not
enough time to talk about every issue,” Simmons conceded. “The U.S. produces 30
percent of the world’s waste. One thing we can do is a revenue-neutral carbon
tax on the oil companies, as other countries have done. When a pack of
cigarettes went up in price, a lot of people stopped smoking. If we can make it
more logical and more profitable for people to make better choices, they will.”
ASD founder and
acting executive director Martin Eder said he wanted to hear the speakers say
more about the role of corporations in climate change. “You can’t stop climate
change without system change,” he said. “The profit motive is the reason
climate change and the destruction of ecosystems are happening. Unless we take
a global look at social organization, corporations will sell us the very air we
breathe and be happy with the situation.”
Jorge Glackman
said that while the U.S. debates whether to use tax policy to address climate
change, “the workers in developing countries are suffering. We have a class
system in this country and we have to talk about the ways we relate to each
other and to the earth.” Glackman particularly denounced the “REDD+” program —
short for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” — as a
“mechanism by which corporations buy carbon credits from developing countries.
This is having a damaging effect on the indigenous people. Sometimes the
‘positive’ solutions have bad effects.” (For more information and a defense of
REDD+, visit http://www.un-redd.org.)
Former San Diego
City Councilmember Floyd Morrow summed up the concerns of many of the audience
members when he called for the U.S. to establish a “declaration of interdependence” with the rest of the world. He also said
we need to get rid of policies based on so-called “supply-side economics” and
in particular the Laffer curve, which purported to show that government would
get more revenue, not less, if it drastically cut taxes on the rich. “It’s
important to protect our forests around the world, because we are interdependent,” Morrow said. “Each living thing
must be respected. The oceans and the air are the most important things we
have. It bothers me that there’s no overview of the human condition.”
