A few months ago, I wrote a column for RedEye about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry dirty, high-carbon Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. The tar sands represent the second biggest pool of carbon on earth after the Saudi oil fields, and it would be disastrous for the climate if it all ends up in the atmosphere.
President Obama had the single-handed ability to stop the pipeline from being built and thanks to Bill McKibben and the climate group 350.org, “environmentalists” (which I put in ironic quotes because it should include anyone who wants the planet to not be a barren wasteland in the next couple of centuries) won about as big a victory as one can in the modern political era.
Obama delayed the decision on the pipeline permit until 2013, no doubt to get it out of the way during election season. Nevertheless, as McKibben said, “There are no final victories in a fight like this.”
For now the pipeline is no more and the tar sands will continue to trickle out of Alberta’s devastated boreal forests at a less apocalyptic rate. Some prognosticators view this as less of a victory than others, but the fact remains that by “rerouting” and “reassessing” the Keystone XL using impact statements not written by the very company that wanted to build the pipeline (as was done before in a suspicious if not outright corrupt move by the State Department), the pipeline’s future is in serious jeopardy.
The economics alone of delaying the pipeline could spell its doom. Even if it’s rerouted to avoid Nebraska (where even the Republican politicians vehemently opposed it) and then approved, TransCanada claims it will have to spend $1 million a day on delays. Even if the pipeline is killed entirely, however, Canada will still try to bring it’s tar sands to market, likely taking China’s money to run a pipeline to the coast of British Columbia. The point is not that we don’t want a pipeline running across the U.S., though; the point is that the movement has to be about keeping the tar sands (and as many other fossil fuel sources as possible) in the ground.
But that’s a fight for another day. Right now, 350.org, with its demonstrations and arrests outside the White House, has proven that there’s still potency in the tactics that worked for the Civil Rights movement (in fact, McKibben’s demonstration was inspired after he read Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr.) when allying itself with NIMBY factions, such as those in Nebraska.
After the failure of cap-and-trade in Congress, those of us most concerned about climate change felt like we were running out of both options and time. This at least proves that there’s still gas left in the tank (pun intended) for a widespread movement to do something about our fossil fuel addiction before it’s too late.
Another lesson we’ve learned is that demonstrations targeted at one single issue have a chance to be more effective than an inchoate rage against what is probably 1,200-345,000 different political and economic issues. Occupy Wall Street, for all the zeitgeist it has created, has yet to move votes, issues, or politicians, which in a democracy, is kinda the point.
Having recently made the biggest charitable contribution of my life to 350.org (movie money, baby), I feel as though I’ve at least earned the right to make a suggestion about where the movement should focus next: fossil fuel subsidies. While many politicians in both parties seem either eager or OK with cutting Medicare and Social Security, no one put on the table the $70.2 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel energy.
The myth of clean energy is that it’s much more expensive than traditional oil and coal, but the truth is that solar and wind have been fighting uphill for thirty years as politicians lined the pockets of these dirty energy industries (see slightly dated but still pertinent image above, courtesy the Environmental Law Institute). Attacking fossil fuel subsidies has several advantages.
First of all, it’s simple. Unlike agitating for a cap-and-trade program (which is still something we really need), the idea that the government pays polluting industries to pollute is easy for everyone to understand. Like the pipeline, it’s not “Hey, we need to reinvent our industrial economy, here’s a 3,700 page document explaining how the first miniscule step of that will work,” it’s “Hey, your hard-earned money is going to finance energy companies that already rake in billions in profit while destroying the environment and poisoning us.” Simple.
Second, it fights conservatives on their end of the field. For all the acolytes of free markets, let’s get something clear: there is no free market in energy. There are century-old dirty energy industries that have maintained their dominance in this decade and the last largely through taxpayer funding. The price of wind and solar is dropping rapidly (which in the fake-as-fake Solyndra non-scandal is actually why that company went out of business: the price of solar panels has been dropping so fast; in fact, solar cells may begin dropping in price by as much as 7% per year). Soon, it’s going to make a lot of sense for millions of homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their roofs and save large amounts of money on their electric bills. Cutting coal and oil subsidies will only hasten that.
Third, in an election year, it has the chance to do serious damage to the Republican narrative that our only hope is to drill, baby, drill–to sheer off every last mountain, to blow a hole in every last well, to frack every last crevice of the earth. If these deficit hawks are so worried about our children’s future, why not start with the $44 billion we hand over just to oil and gas companies? Every last energy proposal by a Republican candidate relies–no, demands–that we maintain huge taxpayer support for industries that poison and kill people every day while feeding into a planetary disaster.
There has to be a pretty good slogan in there somewhere.
