Are we screwed, p.10
Are We Screwed?, page 10
Hansen’s paper caused a debate within 350.org. Should it join the public opposition to Keystone XL? By the narrow definition of people like Leach, Keystone XL was just one more pipeline traversing the United States. The question Phil Aroneanu and the others asked themselves was whether they could convince people to accept Hansen’s wider global definition: that the pipeline symbolized a society intent on destroying the planet. Intellectually, it was a lot to ask of people. “I thought it was a bad idea when I first heard about it,” Phil said. “We made a big bet basically.” But there were advantages to joining the Keystone XL fight. The pipeline was tangible in ways that carbon emissions are not. A single person would decide its fate: President Obama. So if 350.org could pressure Obama to reject it, it would be a financial and moral blow to the fossil fuel industry. It would directly threaten the status quo.
That was a big if, of course. America’s most influential green groups had spent more than $22 million lobbying to get a climate bill passed through Congress, and still the fossil fuel industry had defeated them. How did seven recent Middlebury grads and their old adviser hope to do any better? What 350.org eventually decided was that it would use a strategy that the green groups had been reluctant to consider: it would try to get its supporters arrested. The radical climate activist Tim DeChristopher had been urging 350.org to do this for years. “He was like ‘You guys say you’re building a movement, but you’re not willing to put your bodies on the line,’” Phil said. “And we’d be like ‘Nobody’s ready to do that yet.’” But by the summer of 2011 things had changed. Copenhagen had failed. New climate laws had died. Congress was hopelessly polarized. The fossil fuel industry was reaping record profits. Then here came this pipeline. “We were young in age, and we could take risks,” Phil said. “That actually put us in a pretty powerful position.”
In late June 2011, 350.org sent out an invitation to its supporters. “We want you to consider doing something hard,” McKibben, Hansen, and other prominent activists wrote in an open letter. Later that August, 350.org would be helping lead a two-week demonstration in front of the White House. The target was Keystone XL, “a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent”—the Canadian tar sands. They urged people “to come to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer” to protest the pipeline. But, they warned, it could “get you arrested.” This wasn’t just about a piece of steel. Anyone who attended would be standing up for a fairer and less destructive future. “It’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions affecting our planet,” the letter read. “We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies.”28
By the time the protest began, more than two thousand people had signed up. What happened on day one set a pattern for the next two weeks. A group of people sat down in an off-limits area near the White House, police told them to leave, anyone who didn’t was arrested, and a new group moved in. This wasn’t the sort of thing mainstream green groups were normally comfortable with. For decades they’d written reports, lobbied politicians, and led letter-writing campaigns. “They’d never really thrown down publicly in a mass protest kind of way,” Phil said. But midway through the protest the leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and several others wrote to President Obama to express their solidarity. “Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil disobedience,” they explained. “Regardless … we want to let you know that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone Pipeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House.”29
The protest was radicalizing America’s green movement, “shifting their strategies,” Phil said. It was also pushing Keystone XL onto the national radar. When it first began, few reporters had heard of the pipeline. That’s one reason 350.org scheduled the protest in late August, one of the deadest news times of the year. “Congress was on break, so we were the only story in town,” said 350.org cofounder and communications director Jamie Henn. “The first few days I did press, and we were ignored by everything but Democracy Now.” But as the arrests added up—more than 1,250 in total, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Daryl Hannah—so did media coverage. The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and Politico reported on the protest. “We saw how it began to break through,” Henn later recalled. “People hadn’t seen something like this done before on climate.”30
Republicans were also beginning to notice. Later that fall, 350.org worked with the Sierra Club to organize a massive follow-up protest. On a chilly November afternoon more than twelve thousand people encircled the White House to protest Keystone XL. The message seemed to resonate. Four days later the U.S. State Department decided to postpone a decision on the pipeline until the 2012 presidential election was over. Republicans were pissed. “That was the point where we were all like ‘What’s going on?’” a GOP aide later explained to Politico. Keystone had gone from “being a quirky Energy and Commerce subcommittee issue to being a full House national issue,” said Lee Terry, a Republican House member from Nebraska.31 It became a staple on Fox News and right-wing radio. In April 2012 Mitt Romney himself took it on. “I will build that pipeline if I have to myself,” said the Republican nominee for president.32
Keystone XL opponents dared him to try. By the time Allyse joined 350.org as a digital campaigner, their numbers and intensity were surging. “It was clear Keystone XL was animating people,” she recalled. In early 2013 Sierra Club leader Michael Brune broke with his group’s 120-year ban on civil disobedience in order to get arrested outside the White House. “We need to create political moments that break through the lethargy and the paralysis that is gripping Washington,” he said.33 Days later more than fifty thousand people, many of them in their twenties and early thirties, rallied across the U.S. capital. Even at that point 350.org still considered it “an incredible long shot” that Obama would reject the pipeline, Allyse explained. “But it was an impossible battle that thousands and thousands of our supporters cared deeply about.”
Many progressive commentators couldn’t understand why. To most media and policy people—and I’ll admit that for a time I shared their concerns—Keystone XL was just a pipeline. If it was rejected, others would surely be built. Weren’t there better things to get people riled up over? More potentially effective things, like an economy-wide tax on America’s carbon emissions? “Greens are wrong to make their political stand on the Keystone pipeline,” Time’s Bryan Walsh argued.34 The New York Times’s Andrew Revkin deemed it “an unnecessary issue” that let conservatives misrepresent progressives as “anti-jobs.” Michael Levi from the Council on Foreign Relations argued that fighting Keystone XL was polarizing U.S. politics to the point where Congress would never pass new climate policies.35
To 350.org they were all missing the point. Critics like Walsh and Revkin and Levi were focused on the national implications of a piece of steel, but the people fighting Keystone XL saw it in global terms. To them, the pipeline represented a political and economic system that had no regard for the planet. “It was symbolic of a larger story,” Allyse said. The only way they were going to defeat Keystone XL was to convince Obama this larger story was legitimate. So far they hadn’t been successful. In March 2012 the president had invoked national security to approve the bottom half of Keystone XL—from Oklahoma to Texas. “We need as much [oil] as possible,” Obama said.36 But a year later, after winning reelection, he signaled that he was coming around to 350.org’s view. “The pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical” to deciding if it gets built, he said.
“That was a turning point,” Henn argued. “That said to us, okay, we’re on our turf here. It isn’t a debate about jobs, about the American economy, about energy independence—it’s about climate change.”37
Keystone XL’s youngest opponents were convinced they could win the debate. In March 2014 more than twelve hundred college students and recent grads gathered in Washington, D.C., for a protest march named XL Dissent. The Nation later remarked on the “sheer size, intensity, and noise” of their march from Georgetown University to the White House, where nearly four hundred of them were arrested. “The inaction on the part of Obama and the system in general is what’s making [this] necessary,” explained Tufts University junior Evan Bell.38 Phil helped train some of the leaders but wasn’t directly involved. “Young people really took it to the next level,” he said. “They felt very strongly like their lives were going to be on the line because of Keystone.”
Since 350.org joined the fight in 2011, more than seven hundred antipipeline protests had taken place across the United States. By 2015 it was clear they were having an impact. Obama was sharing his skepticism about Keystone XL openly. At one point he referred to tar sands oil as “extraordinarily dirty.” But nothing could have prepared Phil and Allyse and everyone else at 350.org for what happened on November 7. Standing at a podium inside the White House, Obama announced he was officially rejecting the pipeline. Approving it, he said, would undermine America’s “global leadership” on climate change.39
“I cried so many times that day,” Allyse Heartwell recalled. “To actually see that win happen felt extraordinary and hopeful.” “It was huge,” Phil said. “It basically said that even though the game is rigged, even though the fossil fuel companies can outspend us, we can still beat them.” Obama no longer viewed Keystone XL as just a piece of steel. He saw it the way that seven recent college grads and their adviser wanted him to back in 2011: as an opportunity to reject the legitimacy of fossil fuels.
This was a worst-case scenario for the fossil fuel industry. It was bad enough to lose a potentially lucrative export route from Canada’s tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. But by rejecting Keystone XL, Obama had revealed a vulnerability that the industry had tried to conceal for years. I was first clued into it when I visited Washington, D.C., one chilly February to meet and interview the oil lobbyists trying to persuade the Obama administration to approve Keystone XL. What I learned was that it’s in the fossil fuel industry’s best interest to debate the future in the narrowest possible national terms. To the lobbyists I interviewed, Keystone XL was merely a steel pipe—one that would create thousands of jobs, reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil, and have little impact on U.S. carbon emissions. The last thing those lobbyists wanted was to debate Keystone XL on the global terms set out by 350.org. As TransCanada’s CEO Russ Girling would later acknowledge, “We were ill prepared for what ensued.”40
When I arrived in Washington that February, Canada was exporting more than 1.2 million barrels of oil per day to the United States and had plans to nearly triple that amount by 2020. Canada was by far America’s largest supplier of foreign oil. But up in the tar sands province of Alberta where that oil was produced, people were unsure how long this lucrative relationship would last. During the run-up to the 2008 election, Obama’s top energy adviser, Jason Grumet, had declared that carbon emissions from the tar sands were “unacceptably high.” “If the only way to produce those resources would be at a significant penalty to climate change,” he explained, “then we don’t believe those resources are … going to play a growing role in the long term future.”41
For the eight years that George W. Bush was president, tar sands oil from Canada had been an easy sell. It powered the U.S. economy. It cut reliance on the Middle East. It created jobs. By the narrow terms of national interest there was little to debate. But now Barack Obama was threatening to widen those terms. By evaluating the climate impact of the tar sands, he was proposing to make them global. That was not a debate that producers of the world’s most polluting oil wanted to have. “As long as George Bush was the president, [the tar sands] had a certain umbrella, had a certain protection,” one Canadian politician fretted in 2009. “It was clear [then that] the United States was not going to impose any legislative or regulatory changes that would harm our operations and our export of oil from Athabasca tar sands. But that has changed.”42
If the tar sands industry wanted to keep selling millions of barrels of oil to the United States, it had to persuade American decision makers to think nationally instead of globally—just as they had under George W. Bush. In Washington, D.C., I arranged to meet Paul Frazer, one of the high-powered lobbyists hired by Alberta’s provincial government to do the job. I thumbed through a copy of the New Yorker as I waited in the spartan front lobby of his downtown office. Then Frazer burst into the room with a firm handshake and a smile. “Hello! How are you?” he exclaimed. His hair was parted down the middle, and he was wearing black and white polka-dot suspenders, a yellow tie, and impossibly shiny shoes. It was the outfit of a professional charmer.
His job was to convince senators, energy officials, and other key policy makers in the U.S. capital that the climate change impact of tar sands production was none of their concern. During our half-hour chat, he provided several versions of the pitch he used. Carbon emissions in Canada were a challenge, he admitted, but companies like Exxon were doing their best to lower them. “Canada can chew gum and walk at the same time,” he said. Having brushed off those concerns, Frazer quickly pivoted to the jobs, prosperity, and security the U.S. gains from having a big source of oil next door. Frazer was so confident in his approach that when fifty Democratic members of Congress wrote a letter in 2010 warning about the “climate change implications” of the Keystone XL pipeline, Frazer told his employer back in Alberta to relax. “I said, ‘Take a breath, this isn’t going anywhere,’” he said. “‘It’s not like the sky is falling.’”43
In retrospect, the sky was beginning to fall—at least for Keystone XL. After Frazer and I said our goodbyes, and as I stood waiting for the elevator to take me down to street level, it dawned on me that money and charm can hide the truth for only so long. For a year after the Democrats’ 2010 letter, lobbyists like Frazer continued their PR offensive as if nothing happened. “The message in Washington has been that there are no problems with the oil sands industry at all,” an environmentalist explained to me.44 By the summer of 2011 that message was becoming much harder to defend. First came Hansen’s prediction that Keystone XL would be “game over” for the climate, and then 350.org’s two-week protest outside the White House.
Few people felt the impact more than the CEO of TransCanada. When Russ Girling took his job in 2010, he assumed that most Americans were concerned only about their national interest—that they would easily overlook the tar sands industry’s soaring emissions to gain the four thousand construction jobs and millions of barrels of oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would provide. “My job, as I expected when I came in, would be pretty much ninety-nine percent focused on running the business,” Girling said. He was wildly mistaken. Within a few years he found himself trapped in a global debate about the carbon impact of tar sands. “Girling figures he spends half his time trying to assure skeptics that pipelines proposed to carry oil-sands crude, known also as bitumen, won’t destroy the planet,” read a Bloomberg profile of the CEO.45
Among the skeptics Girling had to assure was his own mother. One of her favorite actors was Robert Redford, who put out a video describing tar sands as “the dirtiest oil on the planet.” She asked her son whether that was true. No, Mom, Girling attempted to explain, I’m not going to “blow up the planet.” Another personal affront came in 2014, when Neil Young—whose music Girling described as “really, really good”—toured Canada criticizing the tar sands and Keystone XL. One colleague later explained that “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Russ lose his cool.” But the TransCanada CEO, who earned over $8 million in 2012, admitted that the tar sands opposition was getting to him. “These things grind on you 24/7,” he said.46
As opposition to Keystone XL became louder and more sustained, Washington’s fossil fuel lobbyists found it harder to dismiss their industry’s impact on climate change. So they added another argument to their repertoire. The bluntest and most forceful version of it I heard came from Jane Moffat, executive director of the Canadian-American Business Council, a cross-border trade group with strong ties to Washington’s diplomatic community. Its members include ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Shell. Moffat and I met in an office overlooking K Street, which is to lobbying what Wall Street is to finance.
Like Frazer, Jane Moffat radiated charm and energy. “So great to meet you!” she said upon my arrival. But she lacked some of his smooth-talking veneer. When I asked her about the green groups raising concerns about Keystone XL, her reply was swift and dismissive: “They just scream on the paper about a bunch of stuff that isn’t even true. I don’t think anybody takes them seriously.” I countered that people seemed to be taking their concerns more seriously all the time. She quickly pivoted. “We’re not getting off fossil fuels in the next thirty to fifty years, are we?” she asked. “We’re not shutting down the pipes tomorrow.” To her, the idea of shifting off oil was “naïve.” And once policy makers had accepted her version of the status quo, she was certain they’d see Keystone XL as little more than a steel pipe. “The pipeline’s only really about this big,” she said, making a circle shape with her arms. “It’s not that big.”47
As I left Moffat’s office, the gesture stayed in my mind. She wanted to shrink the terms of the Keystone XL debate to the space between her arms. But for the tens of thousands of people whom groups like 350.org had rallied against the pipeline, those terms were as large as the Planet Earth. They weren’t protesting a piece of steel. “The question now is whether we continue down the path toward cataclysm or make a bold break towards a brighter future,” wrote Conor Kennedy, the eighteen-year-old son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., before being arrested outside the White House in 2014.48 By then the fight against Keystone XL had become a referendum on the legitimacy of a status quo that threatens the planet—along with the survival of an entire generation.
