Are we screwed, p.26
Are We Screwed?, page 26
That conviction led him from a career in politics into his current role as an oil lobbyist. Under George W. Bush, the United States enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act to make America less reliant on oil from the Middle East. To accomplish this goal, the act encouraged the full-bore development of tar sands, shale oil, and whatever other heavy oil could possibly be pulled from the ground. The act was designed to make America secure, but in the process it would let multinational oil corporations like Exxon make billions of dollars in extra profits. Corcoran was a true believer. And a few years after the act was passed, he teamed up with the American Petroleum Institute and other oil companies to ensure its aims were implemented.
The group that resulted from this alliance, the Center for North American Energy Security, which Corcoran now led, has an explicitly national perspective on the world. Its primary goal, in his telling, is to make America strong and safe. The best way to do that is by expanding the profits of the oil companies based there. Which is why the “low-carbon fuel standard” proposed by Democratic senators such as California’s Henry Waxman was such a threat to Corcoran. The legislation had an explicitly global perspective on the world. It recognized that the short-term energy security and profits obtained by digging up high-polluting oil would make the climate much warmer and would have negative long-term consequences for the entire planet.
Corcoran and his oil company allies fought the low-carbon fuel standard with all the money and influence at their disposal. In Washington, they identified policy makers and congressional staffers who were potentially unsympathetic to climate change legislation. “Then we talked to those people to (a) alert them it exists, (b) explain why it was a mistake, and (c) try to get support to repeal it,” Corcoran said. The Center for North American Energy Security issued briefing notes targeting legislators from oil- and gas-producing states such as Texas and Oklahoma, warning that the low-carbon fuel standard would be “a severe self-inflicted wound to our national security and economic recovery.”25 The center reached out to local constituents in those states and got them to add pressure.
The lobbying offensive appeared to work. Soon enough proponents of the low-carbon fuel standard realized that the wider House legislation it was included with would not have enough votes to make it past the committee stage. “So they deleted the low-carbon fuel standard,” Corcoran explained, “and then the legislation moved out of committee.” The Senate, too, dropped a proposed low-carbon fuel standard after comparable pressure. I couldn’t believe how candid Corcoran was being with me. All around us old white dudes were sitting in conversation on plush chairs and couches as a large flat-screen TV on the wall played sports highlights from ESPN. “I’m not suggesting it was only the Center for North American Energy Security” that killed the climate change laws, he said. “But I would say that we were a big part of it.”26
Corcoran and his allies weren’t doing press conferences. They weren’t surveying regular people across America to see if they wanted the low-carbon fuel standard “deleted.” His group didn’t even have a functioning website. “Nothing against the Internet, it just didn’t fit our needs,” Corcoran explained. “We’re not doing public outreach—we leave that to others.”27 To him, it wasn’t very important that our political system represent regular people. He thought it should protect the interests of large corporations instead. He believed that what was good for fossil fuel corporations was also good for America. Which was why his lobbying battles took place behind closed doors, where regular people couldn’t participate. They took place in exclusive social clubs like the one where we were drinking our coffee now.
The defeat of the low-carbon fuel standard was just the beginning. In the years that followed, oil companies and groups such as Corcoran’s attacked dozens of state-level fuel standards across the United States They derailed a historic bipartisan effort to limit America’s carbon emissions and create a new economic model that emits far less—the Waxman-Markey cap and trade climate bill of 2010. They went on to spend more than $500 million on lobbying to weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and hundreds of millions more to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Corcoran exuded a cool confidence as he described their victories. “We’ve been successful,” he said in his smooth, gentlemanly drawl, leaning back in his chair in the Republican clubhouse where the Koch brothers have a membership.
It was time to leave. Corcoran led me back upstairs and past the portrait of George W. Bush and outside into the frigid winter air of a February morning. We said our goodbyes, and he walked off down the block. I remained outside the Capitol Hill Club for a few minutes trying to wrap my mind around everything I’d heard. I soon realized that the hour I’d spent with this oil lobbyist from Illinois had taught me an important lesson about how power really works in America—and why it’s so resistant to change: The profits of companies like Exxon are incompatible with a future that values more than just money. It’s in their best interest to align themselves with the national interest rather than the global one. And they’re not all that interested in democracy.
So when I first heard Senator Sanders argue that “we have an energy policy that is rigged to boost the profits of big oil companies like Exxon, BP, and Shell at the expense of average Americans,” I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. The status quo I’ve described throughout this book—the relentless focus on short-term profits, the explicitly national perspective, and the insider politics—is the primary obstacle to my generation’s future survival. Sanders spoke for many people my age when he declared that “enough is enough.” I wasn’t the only one who agreed that “it’s time for a political revolution that takes on the fossil fuel billionaires, accelerates our transition to clean energy, and finally puts people before the profits of polluters.”28 Corcoran had to be defeated.
In the spring of 2015, when Saba Hafeez applied for a campus organizer job with MoveOn.org, it was working with another activist group, Democracy for America, to try to induce Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to run for president. Warren had said several times that she wouldn’t, but the two groups were running a $1.25 million campaign to convince her otherwise.29 They were opening up two offices in Iowa and one in New Hampshire. They believed that Warren—who was smart, passionate, and progressive in the Senate—would challenge vested interests in a way that the establishment insider Hillary Clinton simply could not. Warren’s voice “soars above the turgid Washington morass like Yo-Yo Ma playing a cello suite from a hang glider over a sewage plant,” MoveOn wrote.30
Saba’s job was to do the tireless work of gathering signatures from strangers. She ended up being great at it. She and the rest of the Iowa team set up tables around the University of Iowa. “I would just go up to students telling them, ‘Hey sign this,’ and then give them background info,” she said. Many students and faculty already knew about the progressive senator, and “I was really shocked by their enthusiasm.” Her team gathered over 365,000 signatures, and Saba was selected to go to Washington to deliver them in person to Senator Warren. But when she arrived, Warren remained adamant that she wasn’t running for president. MoveOn and Democracy for America officially ended their campaign. “It doesn’t feel like there is an obvious way that we could change her mind,” MoveOn’s Ben Wikler said.31
Saba was faced with a dilemma. After participating on the MoveOn campaign, she wanted to be involved in the 2016 presidential election, but she was unsure who to support. At the time she was becoming more interested in female identity. She added a women’s studies minor to her degree. Clinton seemed the obvious choice, since “women in politics and leadership positions is something I really care about.” But Saba had been drawn to Warren because the senator wanted to transform America. Warren critiqued the vested interests responsible for gender inequality—as well as two endless Middle East wars, rampant racial injustices, and the overheating of our planet. Clinton was a strong female leader, but Saba believed she was more interested in ruling the country than in changing it. “I am a proud feminist, but that doesn’t mean that I will back a candidate based on their gender over their ideas,” she explained.
Which is why Saba decided in the summer of 2015 to get Bernie Sanders elected president. Sanders had entered the race only a few months earlier. He was considered an extreme long shot. National polling put him behind Hillary Clinton by about 56 points.32 His biggest practical issue was money. Among his major policy goals was to challenge an economy that, in his words, made “the rich richer and everyone else poorer.”33 But that type of language wasn’t likely to endear him to the CEOs and billionaires whose donations are required to fund a serious bid for president. “In this day and age, you do need a whole lot of money,” Sanders admitted.34
One reason was that the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United had removed any limits on election spending. “Liberals warned that hard-to-track political spending by outside interest groups would explode,” Bloomberg reported. “If anything, the alarms underestimated the decision’s effects.” The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University later calculated that Senate election spending by outside groups—in the form of political action committees, or super PACs—doubled to $486 million by 2014. And when you added presidential elections, the figure approached $1 billion. Most of this money came from just 195 people and their spouses. It was no exaggeration to say that political power was being created by billionaires.35
Political leaders weren’t necessarily happy about this situation. During Clinton’s early campaigning, she declared that “we need to get this corporate and unchecked money out of politics.” Not long after, though, she was meeting with rich potential donors to a Democratic super PAC known as Priorities USA. “Clinton really had no other choice,” NBC reported. The Republican National Committee was expected to spend close to $2 billion getting its nominee elected.36 If she spurned super PACS altogether, it would create a financial disadvantage. So Clinton decided to play by the system’s rules. She courted super PACS, she took millions of dollars from Wall Street, and she justified it as a compromise on the road to becoming president.
Sanders chose a much different path. But then, he didn’t really have a choice. No billionaire who’d made a fortune from our current economic system was going to support a candidate who wanted to radically change it. And so Sanders decided to ask regular people to finance his campaign. If enough of them gave small amounts, it could eventually equal the spending of a CEO or a corporation. Within six weeks of entering the race, Sanders had raised $6 million in small donations. “Can a candidate … who is prepared to take on billionaires—can you win elections?” he asked.37 So far the answer was no. But by the end of 2015, his crowdsourced fund-raising was exploding—$33 million in small donations compared to Clinton’s $37 million. “We are making history,” declared Sanders’s campaign manager.38
The campaign was winning over people like Saba Hafeez. She’d spent her whole life inside a society that seemed to care only about making money. And she’d witnessed the consequences: an oil-driven war in Iraq, a financial collapse, and soaring carbon emissions. As a serious female contender for president, Clinton seemed to challenge this state of affairs, but she was being funded by the corporations and rich people who were perpetuating it. “It’s really important for me to have a female candidate, but it’s more important to have someone whose values align with my values,” Saba said. Sanders wanted to create an economy that worked for the betterment of humankind. And Saba saw no contradiction in the regular people paying for it. “He’s playing by a different set of rules,” she said.
By late summer of 2015, many of the people Saba had worked with at MoveOn were now supporting Sanders. “When Bernie announced and it was clear Senator Warren wasn’t running, it was the natural thing to do,” said one campaign official.39 Saba decided to add to the momentum by forming a student group at the University of Iowa. She suspected that people of her generation would be naturally drawn to the Vermont senator’s message of radical change, that they were less tied to the status quo than their parents and grandparents, and that they had more to gain from transforming it. With a few other students, she launched Hawkeyes for Bernie right before the fall semester began. Its goal was to foment a revolution.
The conventional wisdom was that people Saba’s age didn’t care about politics—they were self-centered, apathetic, and cynical. Saba knew those stereotypes weren’t true: “There’s this negative perception like students don’t care, which is false.” But when Hawkeyes for Bernie booked a large auditorium for its first general meeting in early September, Saba hoped she wouldn’t be proven wrong. “I remember being a little bit worried,” she said. “I was like ‘Oh no, what if we don’t get a bunch of students?’” She couldn’t make it to the meeting because of a class conflict. But organizers sent her photos of a packed auditorium—close to one hundred students in total. “That was really reassuring,” she explained.
As the weeks and months passed, Saba got more and more messages from students wanting to help out. A lot of them were people she figured would never “want to be involved in politics,” she recalled. “They were like the typical college kids who go out, go to bars, smoke pot, and you would think they don’t care, but once again that’s false.” Early-summer polling suggested that Millennials supported Clinton over Sanders as the Democratic nominee,40 but by the fall that trend was starting to reverse. NBC polls found that Clinton’s support among 18-to-29-year-olds had “steadily fallen” from 36 percent in August to 26 percent in October.41 And a survey conducted in early November by Harvard’s Institute of Politics confirmed Sanders had become the preferred Democratic nominee among people of Saba’s age.42
Even more remarkably, it was happening as many media outlets dismissed the Sanders campaign as unrealistic. After reviewing mainstream coverage over the summer of 2015, Rima Regas concluded that Bernie Sanders’s “ability to succeed is always described in doubtful terms.” Reporting focused more on his personality or appearance than on what he stood for. “Overall there is a version of a ‘wall of silence’ built by the media when it comes to serious reporting and analysis of his policies,” Regas wrote.43 New York Times public editor Elizabeth Spayd shared his opinion, conceding in early September that her newspaper “hasn’t always taken [the Sanders campaign] very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times.”44
Yet on sites like Reddit, a groundswell of Millennial support for Sanders was building. During the summer and early fall, Sanders was regularly the most discussed political subject on the sprawling user-generated site. By October a subreddit known as “/r/SandersForPresident” had more than 115,000 subscribers. “Bernie Sanders’s Internet fan base has swelled into a digital army, and his supporters on Reddit have been the ground troops,” the New Republic wrote. “The site has helped draw massive crowds to his rallies and aided his campaign in raising $26 million in the third quarter.”45 To Saba, it wasn’t at all surprising. “I feel like that’s just democracy in action,” she explained. “Individuals are talking about him like crazy on a day-to-day basis, whereas most media [are] just neglecting him.”
To his young and digitally connected supporters, Sanders provided a more global view of America’s place in the world than Clinton. It was especially evident during the first Democratic debate in October. Asked to name the biggest security threat to the United States, Clinton answered in the explicitly national terms of America’s ongoing War on Terror. “It has to be [the] continued threat from the spread of nuclear weapons, nuclear material that can fall into the wrong hands,” she said. “I know the terrorists are constantly seeking it.” Sanders took a wider perspective: “If we do not address the climate change … the planet we’ll be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he said. Vox’s Max Fisher observed that you could interpret this several ways. Sanders was either dodging a question on U.S. foreign policy, “[or] he may be showing us that he’s different, that he takes into account larger issues.”46
During the second Democratic debate, which was held the day after ISIS terrorists killed 130 people in Paris, Sanders stuck to that perspective. “Senator Sanders, you said you wanna rid the planet of ISIS,” the moderator John Dickerson said. “In the previous debate you said the greatest threat to national security was climate change. Do you still believe that?” Sanders replied without pause, “Absolutely. In fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism. And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re gonna see countries all over the world … struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops. And you’re gonna see all kinds of international conflict.”47
Republicans immediately slammed Sanders. “I would view that assertion as pretty absurd,” said Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said Sanders was probably stoned: “There is a ballot initiative in Arizona concerning the substance that he must have been consuming.”48 Sanders’s view on climate change and terrorism was in fact fairly mainstream. The Department of Defense, for one, sees the climate as a threat multiplier that could “threaten stability in a number of countries.” But sites like PolitiFact were skeptical: “We couldn’t find any evidence of a ‘direct’ relationship between climate change and terrorism, though many reports have noted an indirect link.”49 It appeared as though Sanders was oversimplifying a complicated issue.
Yet the broader point he was making was impossible to dispute: over a decade of military interventions in the Middle East had done nothing to make the United States safe from the existential threat of climate change. Saba knew firsthand that the threat America faced from Islamic extremists was exaggerated. She knew how badly the region was misrepresented. And as Republican leaders called for severe restrictions on Muslim immigration in the wake of the Paris attacks, she shook her head in dismay: “It just blows my mind these conversations are still happening.” To her, Sanders was the only candidate who acknowledged the true threat to her future. “He’s the only one, Democrat or Republican, that takes climate science seriously,” she said. “I think that resonates with a lot of people—at least, a lot of millennials.”
