Are we screwed, p.9
Are We Screwed?, page 9
Along the way I flipped from one radio station to the next: KBHB 810 AM Five State Ranch Radio; the daily Farm and Ranch Review on KWYR Country 1260; and KILI Radio 90.1, Voice of the Lakota Nation. South Dakota is home to one of the largest indigenous populations in the United States, with over 71,000 Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples spread over eight reservations. The proposed Keystone XL route wouldn’t enter any indigenous reserves as it traversed South Dakota, but it would go under tributaries of the Missouri River flowing alongside tribal territory. University of Nebraska engineering professor John Stansbury had calculated that an oil spill could release a toxic chemical plume “possibly stretching for 450 miles.”15
The pipeline also had a wider historical significance. The flat and austere countryside that I drove past on my way to the Rosebud Casino had been contested ever since settlers began pushing west in the 1800s. A compromise was reached in 1851, when Lakota leaders signed the first Treaty of Fort Laramie with Washington, giving them control over tens of millions of acres across the Great Plains. But decades of encroachment and war eventually shrank those borders to a few impoverished reservations. Many Lakota people think the full 1851 territory is still rightfully theirs. And it wasn’t lost on them that Keystone XL would cut through it. Leaders like Rosebud tribal chief John Spotted Tail believed that in fighting the pipeline, they could “take a stand against the nearly 200 years of judicial injustice inflicted upon Indian tribes.”
In the distance I saw a small jumble of beige buildings. As I approached, I could read the casino’s official slogan: “A little bit of Vegas on the prairie.” Inside the casino I was pointed to a small room in the basement. I’d arrived a bit early, and attendance was so far modest. Scanning the room, I saw white farmers in flannel and blue jeans, leaders from the Rosebud tribal council, a few residents of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, some antipipeline activists from Nebraska, and Cobenais, the meeting’s organizer. I poured some coffee into a Styrofoam cup and took a seat at the back. Slowly the room filled out. Alex White Plume, a fifty-nine-year-old from Pine Ridge, kicked things off by delivering an opening prayer in the Lakota language.
After he was finished, White Plume looked at the white farmers with a mischievous smile. “Excuse me if I just spoke too fast for you to understand,” he said. The whole room erupted in laughter. But the mood grew serious when Cobenais projected an aerial photo of Canada’s tar sands—the same area that I’d visited in Chapter 2—onto the basement wall. In the photo you could see miles of strip-mined darkness where the thick boreal forest used to be. The bitumen that was extracted from these mines would pass less than seventy miles from the Rosebud Casino as it was pumped through Keystone XL to refineries in Texas. “Jesus,” one of the farmers muttered. White Plume added: “Something bad is coming to our nation and to our land.”16
Four hours into the Rosebud Casino meeting, the Canadian delegation arrived. It included Dene Nation leader Bill Erasmus, from Great Bear Lake in Canada’s North West Territories, which is downriver from the tar sands; and George Stanley, a tribal leader from Alberta’s Frog Lake, which is located right in the heart of the Cold Lake tar sands deposit. In some ways this meeting was Erasmus’s idea. A few weeks earlier he had come to an important realization about the indigenous opposition to Keystone XL. “Our peoples in Canada and the United States have been working in isolation,” he explained to me. “I became intrigued by the idea of bringing us together.”17
Many North American indigenous communities do not recognize the forty-ninth parallel. Like the borders encircling their reservations, they see it as an artifice imposed by European settlers. Rather than identify as Canadian or American, aboriginals from both sides of the border prefer to think of themselves as a continental peoples. Yet local priorities and distance often thwart cross-border cooperation. The plan at today’s meeting was to draw from their shared sense of identity to create a two- to three-page Mother Earth Accord opposing Keystone XL. Erasmus and Stanley, who sat on Canada’s Assembly of First Nations, hoped to get the accord adopted by the wider leadership. Cobenais, in turn, would help push it to the National Congress of American Indians. Both groups wanted to present the accord directly to President Obama and Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, later in December.
By now we’d been in the meeting for nine hours. Marty Cobenais decided to call it a day. Everyone else was staying at the casino’s Quality Inn, so I got a room there as well. The receptionist gave me a ten-dollar credit for the slot machines down the hall. Later that evening I drifted asleep to a glowing TV screen and the howl of prairie wind.
The meeting was slow to start the next day. After a breakfast of doughnuts and orange juice, I joined Alex White Plume outside as he smoked a hand-rolled cigarette. “The ones with filters give you bad breath,” he explained. Dark clouds spat rain onto the casino’s parking lot. White Plume revealed a surprising fact: he claimed to be descended from the same tribal band as Crazy Horse, the Lakota warrior who in 1874 wiped out General Custer’s cavalry regiment at Little Big Horn.
Given his ancestral history, White Plume saw the Keystone XL pipeline as more than just a threat to South Dakota’s natural environment. In some ways he saw it as a test of his people’s commitment to their surroundings and history—the latest chapter in a centuries-old struggle to protect their land and identity from the impositions of an unjust political and economic system. “When the settlers came and killed off all our buffalo, they wiped out an ecosystem that we depended on,” White Plume said. “And now they’re trying to bring dirty oil through our country.” He paused for a second, and then laughed slowly and sadly. Back inside the casino, Chief John Spotted Tail expressed a similar sentiment. “Our ancestors protected the land when they were alive,” he said at the meeting. “Our belief is that we need to do the same.”18
For the remainder of the day, Erasmus and Stanley and Cobenais and Spotted Tail and everyone else at the meeting worked as fast as they could to finalize the Mother Earth Accord. While they drafted new clauses and crossed out old ones, I took a walk through the fields surrounding the casino. And by the time I returned, it was nearly finished. A draft copy affirmed the obligation of Native communities in the United States and Canada “to protect and preserve for our descendants, the inherent sovereign rights of our Indigenous Nations,” and it warned of the potential for Keystone XL to “impact sacred sites and ancestral burial grounds, and treaty rights throughout traditional territories.” The accord concluded by calling on President Obama and Secretary Clinton to “reject the Presidential Permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.”
I had a flight to catch so I left the meeting before it was finished. Months later it would be adopted by the National Congress of American Indians. And when the accord finally made it to Obama, it had thousands of signatories. But as I drove north through the Rosebud Reservation and then east on I-90 past fields of corn and wheat, all I could think of was White Plume’s sad laughter in the casino parking lot. To him as well as the other indigenous leaders, Keystone XL was about more than a steel pipe. It represented an economic and political system that cared little for the survival of his people or the planet. And in his fight against the pipeline, White Plume drew from a shared identity that transcended borders.
Such ideas would later become central to 350.org’s campaign against Keystone XL. Few could have guessed it then, but they eventually would help get the pipeline rejected.
When Phil Aroneanu was at Middlebury College, he and the six other students who’d formed the Sunday Night Group kept running into the same problem anytime they debated what possible difference they could make on climate change. The issue was so huge and daunting and scary that most regular people assumed their actions couldn’t possibly make a meaningful difference. So they turned inward. They blocked it out. But their adviser McKibben came up with a potential way to reverse that impulse. If you could expand people’s sense of self, he figured, and show them that the anxiety they feel about our civilization’s future is shared by their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens, they’d be more likely to believe change is possible. So in 2006 he suggested to the Sunday Night Group that they organize a march across Vermont. Hopefully, McKibben said, they would “make some headlines” and “get people riled up.”19 The result was better than they could have predicted. More than a thousand people hiked for five days from Robert Frost’s cabin in central Vermont to the federal building in Burlington.
Still, it was one thing to get people riled up in progressive Vermont. A true test of their ability to build a social movement around climate change would be whether the rest of America cared. “We really didn’t know,” Phil said. In order to find out, they teamed up with national green groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club and put out the word that they would be hosting a national day of climate-change-themed events in April 2007 called Step It Up. It was based on the decentralized structure of the Internet. Anyone could join. They could set up a march, a bike rally, a public art display—whatever they wanted—and then upload photos or videos of it to the Step It Up site. The result would be a visual archive demonstrating to someone in Alaska, say, that people in Florida and across the United States cared as much about the climate as they did. “We wanted to test the assumption that there are people out there who want to take part in [a movement],” Phil explained.
Their assumption ended up being totally correct. Mountaineers skied Wyoming’s melting Dinwoody Glacier. Scuba divers took photos of Key West’s endangered coral reefs. Gardeners planted native trees in downtown Oklahoma City. Activists walked the levees of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. In total there were more than fourteen hundred events. More than twenty members of Congress attended rallies. And McKibben was asked to testify before a House committee on climate change three days later. “We weren’t professional organizers,” Phil said. “It was pretty unbelievable what we were able to do.” The seven recent college graduates and their adviser McKibben realized that people all over America were sick of a status quo that didn’t take their future survival on this planet seriously. “We realized, ‘Wow, there is a movement, they’re out there, and all they really needed was permission to do their work,’” Phil said. “We thought, ‘What if we could take this global?’”
To do that, their group needed a name. By the time Phil and his six friends made it to that December’s international climate talks in Bali, they still hadn’t thought of one. The talks themselves were demoralizing to witness. “We’re sitting there watching the negotiations unfold painfully slowly,” he said. “No one was agreeing to anything.” But as it was all about to wrap up, they got an e-mail from McKibben, who explained that the NASA climatologist James Hansen had just a calculated a new threshold for climate change: if concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere exceeded 350 parts per million, every coastal city on Earth could be submerged underwater. McKibben suggested they name the group after Hansen’s calculation: 350. At first Phil and the others thought it was weird. But it grew on them. It was culturally neutral. It transcended national borders. “It lent a sense of scale to what we were doing,” he said.
The .org part came later. When they got home, they were faced with a practical dilemma: how did seven college grads in Vermont build a global movement? “We just decided to divide up the world into seven pieces,” Phil said. He was given the Middle East and Africa. “There’s no way that one American like me with almost no contacts in the region was going to make this happen,” he thought. “So I just started cold-calling environmental and development organizations in literally every country on those continents.” He sought out youth leaders. He set up endless Skype sessions. He flew out to conferences. His pitch was simple and compelling, in many ways mirroring the model established by Step It Up. He asked people across the region to join the 350.org mailing list, wait for the group to issue a call to action, set up an event in their area, brand it somehow with “350,” and share photos and videos online. This is what the .org in 350’s name came to stand for. It refered to a social network. And to a global identity.
Tapping into that identity was easier than Phil had expected. He didn’t have to convince anyone that climate change is a big deal. The young people he met across Africa and the Middle East felt it every day. “They were like ‘yeah, duh,’” he said. They saw it affect the food they grew and the water they drank. “They understand climate change is happening in a way that a lot of Americans don’t because we’re insulated from what’s happening in nature,” he said. But those young people lacked an outlet for their anxiety, or the sense their actions could make any sort of difference: “It’s hard to feel agency on something as big as climate change if you don’t feel part of a movement that’s global.” Phil provided basic leadership coaching. He provided tips on how to organize events and shoot videos of them. “Some of the people we trained ended up taking part in the Arab Spring,” he later claimed.
Meanwhile the other six organizers at 350.org were reaching out to people across North America, South America, India, China, Europe, and Oceania. After two years, 350.org decided to test the power of what it had created. In late October 2009, two months before the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen would start, it put out a call for action. The goal was to show world leaders that young people all over the world wanted a treaty capable of ensuring their survival. “Our hope is that a huge worldwide outpouring on Oct. 24 will set a bar to make any action in Copenhagen powerful,” McKibben wrote in an e-mail to supporters.20
More than five thousand organizers in 181 countries responded to 350.org’s call. Foreign Policy described it as “the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind,” while CNN called it “the most widespread day of political action in our planet’s history.”21 Phil Aroneanu was twenty-five years old at the time. “It was pretty incredible for a bunch of college kids and a professor,” he said.
But the euphoria Phil felt was short-lived. The world had projected big hopes onto the Copenhagen climate change talks. World leaders, UN officials, activists, and pretty much anyone involved with climate change saw in them the potential to create a historic treaty capable of limiting the global temperature rise to safe levels. Instead, the talks collapsed. Major emitters like the United States and China feuded endlessly. The result was a climate treaty so weak that Al Gore called it “an abysmal failure.”22 More setbacks were soon to come. That April, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and leaked more oil than any other spill in history. An even more demoralizing setback came later that summer, when the Senate defeated a wide-ranging bill to cap U.S. carbon emissions and push America’s economy toward clean energy. Green groups had spent over $22 million trying to get it passed. Yet ExxonMobil on its own had spent $27 million lobbying against the bill, and the oil and gas sector as a whole spent more than $175 million. It was “easily an industry record,” the watchdog group OpenSecrets noted.23
Those events were painful for Phil and the others at 350.org to witness. But they contained a crucial lesson. “We saw the limitations of just doing feel-good days of action,” he said. Such actions implied that climate change could be won if enough people became aware of the crisis and demanded that leaders take it seriously. Yet the disasters in Copenhagen, the Gulf of Mexico, and Congress had revealed just how resistant our political and economic system was to truly transformative change. Phil knew the global awareness and energy that 350.org was creating needed to be focused on challenging that system’s legitimacy. But where would you even start? “We haven’t built the kind of political power that we should,” McKibben lamented.24
Their network could bring tens of thousands of people into the streets. But behind closed doors, the Exxons of the world could simply block whatever they demanded. So it wasn’t enough for them to protest the status quo. They had to threaten it. “We needed to rethink ourselves,” Phil said. Nearly a year went by without a feasible option. But in the summer of 2011 NASA climatologist Hansen seemed to provide one. That June he wrote an incendiary critique of TransCanada’s Keystone XL project. Opposition to the tar sands pipeline was growing in Canada and across the U.S. Midwest—thanks in part to the people I met at the Rosebud Casino in South Dakota. Few people outside the region were paying much attention, but James Hansen was determined to change that. “If this project gains approval,” he warned on his website, “it will become exceedingly difficult to control the tar sands monster.” Keystone XL would lock us into decades of reliance on the planet’s most polluting oil. It would, he argued, be “game over” for the climate.25
This was a very unusual statement to make, especially for a high-profile public figure like Hansen. “Even the most radical climate activists weren’t saying stuff like that at the time,” Phil said. From a national perspective, Hansen’s “game over” argument made little sense. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry 800,000 barrels of tar sands a day to refineries in Texas. There would be a lot of climate-warming carbon in those barrels, equivalent to every car and truck on the road in Canada. But the tar sands industry would expand with or without Keystone, and new pipelines were being built all the time. What made this particular one “game over” for the climate? The University of Alberta economics professor Andrew Leach spoke for a lot of skeptics when he scoffed that Hansen’s argument was “laughably out of context.” It was the type of thing “most likely to be ignored as alarmist.”26
But Hansen wasn’t looking at Keystone XL from a national perspective. He was looking from a global one. If we burned all the planet’s oil, coal, and gas reserves, it would take us well over the safe carbon concentration of 350 parts per million that he’d identified back in 2007. However, if we succeeded in leaving much of that coal in the ground, as well as high-polluting oil sources like the tar sands, “it is conceivable to stabilize [the] climate.”27 What Hansen suggested in his paper was that Keystone XL represented a political and economic system that intended to take us over a dangerous threshold. It wasn’t the pipeline itself that would be “game over” for the climate but our status quo. It mirrored the message that 350.org was sending with its days of action: a photo of one person skiing down a glacier, say, wouldn’t help fix climate change, but the knowledge that it represented a global movement might.
