Biden may not have hit a homer, but he keeps the game alive!
and other climate notes as we head towards Glasgow
This is my regular Friday climate news update, and unlike all the other posts of the week, it’s usually reserved for paying subscribers. But not this week, because the news out of DC was too important, so I’m sending it out far and wide. (If you want to subscribe, please do—my share of the subscription revenues goes to help with the startup of Third Act. ) Oh, and prepare for a bit of an onslaught in your inbox next week—I’ll be in Glasgow, and trying to stay warm by filing regular updates. I’m writing this one from a bus, so excuse any pothole-induced typos
So: Washington. It’s not yet a done deal, but President Biden left for the Vatican after announcing that everyone had agreed on the outlines of a $1.75 billion version of his Build Back Better bill. We don’t know if everyone has actually agreed, though as of this morning progressive caucus leader Pramila Jayapal (who deserves remarkable praise for keeping her troops together and calm) says we can expect both the BBB and the bipartisan infrastructure bill (BIF, and yes, messaging has been a problem from day one) to pass sometime next week.
It would be, by a very large margin, the biggest climate bill ever to pass the Congress, containing as it does roughly $555 billion in various tax credits and subsidies. Given that Congress has done essentially nothing in the first thirty years of of the climate crisis, this is good news. But it’s not anywhere near as good news as we’d been hoping for: Prime Minister Joe Manchin has succeeded in stripping any of the penalties that might have compelled utilities to cut emissions; instead, as Robinson Meyer lays out in useful form, the bill will supply hefty tax credits of up to 30% to developers wanting to build solar or wind (or nuclear) projects, and to consumers wanting to buy electric cars and trucks. Those kind of numbers do make spreadsheets bend: they should underwrite a flood of new projects. Which is useful enough to overbalance even the huge sack of dumb presents for the fossil fuel industry contained in the BIF. What it really means is that the tide of money will keep flowing in the right direction—and with each quarter that diminishes not only Big Oil’s share of the energy game, but also their share of political power.
Since we’re in the middle of the World Series, let’s call it like this: off the bat, it looked like the bill would be a home run—a $3.5 trillion mini-version of the Green New Deal. But Exxon’s avowed “kingmaker” Manchin (and the enigmatic vacuity that is Arizona’s Senator Sinema) huffed and puffed, and the breeze was enough to knock the ball down on the warning track. It jumped the wall: ground rule double. Which means, in essence, that the game is still alive. We’ve come nowhere near solving the climate crisis, and it won’t be enough to move Beijing to make a dramatic stand in Glasgow; it may be enough to keep the COP from collapsing in dramatic fashion like Copenhagen in 2009.
Were I the White House, I would call it exactly what it is: a big step, but not big enough. And I would thank the Sunrise Movement for building the consensus for progress, and the exuberant wonks at Evergreen Action for providing the scaffolding, and Bernie for showing, way back in 2016, that this was an issue with broad popular support. And then I’d say: we need another round of elections to really get it done. Which should be enough to get environmental justice activists back to the job of movement building; if this bill passes, we will have used up most of the juice in the battery, which means it’s time to recharge.
The other news in DC yesterday was the long hearing convened by the House Oversight Committee in the hopes of repeating what happened with tobacco executives in Congress in 1997. The intrepid Rep. Ro Khanna presided over the festivities, with key roles played by, among others, AOC and the highly adept analogist Rep. Katie Porter (bags of rice and M&Ms have rarely been put to better use).
Again, it wasn’t quite a home run—as with so much else in their long campaign of climate denial, the oil execs had learned from their tobacco brethren, and so they managed to avoid telling the truth. But at this point pretty much everyone knows their companies have been lying for decades: Exxon CEO Darren Woods was forced to contend that his predecessor Lee Raymond had been “consistent with the science” when he claimed, before the Kyoto conference, that we needn’t do anything hasty about climate change. That is not a contention that will hold up in court, and court is eventually where it’s going.
At any rate: the climate box score looks something like this: the oil industry, in its efforts to overheat the planet, is ahead 3 games to none in a best of seven series, and they were still ahead in game 4 going into yesterday’s action. But their momentum is clearly faltering, and the forces of clean energy (and scientific truth-telling) have begun to rally. Having paid off Umpire Manchin, Big Oil got a few calls to go their way yesterday, but the good guys put a bunch of runs on the board—enough to send this game into extra innings, which is all that we could realistically hope for. So we keep fighting. Only once in major league history has a team come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a playoff series—but that was my 2004 Red Sox. So, stay tuned.
As always with COP season, there’s a rising tide of climate news and announcements
+Joe Biden had promised a report on the truly important question of climate migrants, but the document the administration delivered did not go too far. “It’s really disappointing,” said Amali Tower, founder and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Refugees told Grist. “We went from a bold call and vision to, well, nothing.” Indeed, the government was painfully clear on one point: “The United States does not consider its international human rights obligations to require extending international protection to individuals fleeing the impacts of climate change.”
+As the Pope meets the president, a new analysis finds that the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has all but ignored Francis’s Laudato Si encyclical. In the years since it was written, U.S. bishops have sent 12,000 official letters to their parishioners, but “only 93 columns mentioned climate change at all, and just 56 of those described climate change in terms that suggest it is real, according to the study by professors Sabrina Danielsen and Daniel DiLeo, in Creighton’s Department of Cultural and Social Studies, and Creighton student Emily E. Burke.”
+A big win in New York State where new non-creepy governor Kathy Hochul blocked plans for two new gas-fired power plants. The stand, according to the Times, “suggested confidence that the state will be able to build renewable energy — energy like wind and solar that comes from sources that are naturally replenishing — quickly enough and at sufficient scale to reliably supply power needs while meeting climate goals adopted by law in 2019.” Sadly, Biden administration officials continue to promote natural gas, especially its export abroad. A new report in DeSmog Blog says “they’re attempting to secure international gas lock-in for years to come. This effort is being led by Biden appointees with major influence over the administration’s energy policies: U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and two senior officials at the Departments of Energy and State tasked with overseeing the role of energy in U.S. foreign policy.”
+Unalloyed good news: As I wrote in the Times on Tuesday, the fossil fuel divestment movement has passed the $40 trillion mark in endowments and portfolios abstaining from coal and gas and oil—that’s bigger than the GDP of China and the U.S. combined. And the ink had hardly dried before one of the biggest announcements yet: Dutch pension giant ABP is divesting its $568 billion fund, the fifth largest on the planet. Later in the week the University of Toronto divested—which was a lovely grace note, since it’s the alma mater of Naomi Klein, who did so much to get the whole thing started.
+Third Act updates. We’re springing into action for the first time in a few cities this afternoon, backing up young campaigners going after Chase Bank for its dismal record of lending to the fossil fuel industry. Vidya Muthupillai and I explain the plan here. And you can read Wen Stephenson’s fine interview with lead advisor Akaya Windwood here.
Since it’s Friday, it’s time for a couple more chapters in my epic yarn about nonviolence—these pages actually conclude year one of three in the story of what might be called a Hogwarts for civil disobedience. Catch up on the first 19 chapters of The Other Cheek by visiting the archive.
“They do understand that when you eat a seed you are eating a future plant? They do understand that, right?” A bald man with a soul patch so bushy he’d strung it into a braid was standing in one corner of the SGI dining hall, talking loudly to a table full of people. “They call themselves fruitarians, but they eat seeds?”
Cass and MK were sitting with Perry and Ramon, finishing a lunch of sliced oranges and apples, with banana puree on the side. “Who is that?” asked Perry.
“He calls himself Max Delicious,” said Cass. “He was supposed to be one of the facilitators for ‘Fruitarian Encounter,’ which is why the rest of these people are here. But apparently he has strong opinions on proper fruitarianism.”
“Only what falls naturally from a tree or bush,” said MK. “Much debate about nuts, legumes. They’re divided into at least three sects, and a word of advice: do not get them started on honey. Or maple syrup—do you know that sap is the blood of a tree flowing out through an open wound?”
“They got Ick to join for a day,” said Ramon. “Because they told him that Steve Jobs was a fruitarian—that that’s why he called it Apple. But then I reminded him that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer.”
“It’s been a long week in the dining hall,” said Cass. “Part of their contract for meeting here was that nothing else could be cooked in the kitchen while they were here. What if they ate a bit of rice by mistake—did you know that grain doesn’t fall from the stalk all on its own?”
“No worries, though,” said MK. “Big cookout tonight for graduation. All the meat you can eat, which is a lot in my case. And vegetables, violently ripped from their stalks.”
They bussed their trays, handing them to a man with tattoos on his forehead and a t-shirt that said “What Kind of God would Forbid Apples?”, and then they made their way into the Mandela Room. The entire SGI class—49 strong, since Matti Petersson was gone but Perry back for the day—was gathering, and once the faculty had filed in Maria rose to speak.
“We never make a big deal of graduation day,” she said. “It is the theory—a theory that has worked out over time—that you will stay linked in many ways. We need that, and the world needs that. However, we always want to mark the passage of the year. And this year has been especially . . . notable. You have all dealt well with the fact that the faculty was preoccupied with the Dalai Lama’s march, and you have all dealt well with the unexpected visitors who have appeared from time to time. Ramon, your methods in particular were novel.
And we are very grateful to have back with us Perry, who began the year here and then . . . found something more useful to do. Perry, the faculty has decided to award credit for life experience in your case, and so you will graduate with your class today. And Professor Lee tells me you have promised to do some computer consulting for her, which is good news. Would you be willing to say a few words? It’s fine to stay seated.”
“Um, thank you? And I’m sorry I bailed. And without Professor Lee I couldn’t have done much back in Vermont. And some other people helped too,” he said, looking quickly at MK and Cass who sat on either side. “But I’m not sure how much we really did. Town meetings voted to study independence, but that’s at least a couple of years away. And I’m not sure what we did was really non-violent exactly? I mean, shots were fired, even if no one really got hurt. I mean, it wasn’t like, like Gandhi?”
“I have opened a file on it,” said Professor Vukovic. “An exemplary action. In certain aspects reminiscent of the nonviolent air raids that were part of the response to the Kapp Putsch in Berlin, 13 March 1920.”
“That’s the second time he’s talked this year,” MK whispered to Perry, who blushed.
“Thank you Professor Vukovic,” Maria said, beaming. “Which reminds me—as you know one student is selected from each class to stay here at SGI for another year and help Professor Vukovic with his archive, which is the centerpiece of our school. This year the faculty has asked Cass Goldfarb to fill that role, and she has agreed.” Applause, and a few whistles, broke out, and MK reached around Perry to squeeze Cass on the shoulder.
“As you know, we don’t give diplomas,” said Maria. “It may be best for your future and for ours if there’s little formal proof of our existence. But we do stick together—one of Cass’s jobs here in the year to come will be maintaining the alumni network. And we take what we do—satyagraha, truth force, nonviolent resistance—as seriously as the members of any profession. When medical students graduate, they take the Hippocratic Oath. For us, we join together in the pledge that young people took during the civil rights struggle in Birmingham, hours before they were bitten by police dogs and blown away by firehoses. It was written by the Reverend James Lawson, who as a young man had been a Methodist missionary to India where he met many of Gandhi’s colleagues. He returned to the U.S. to work in the civil rights movement, training the original participants in the lunch counter sit in, and then playing leading roles in the birth of guerilla theater, in the March on Washington, in the Freedom Rides, and the Selma march for voting rights. He was working with striking garbage workers in Memphis in 1968 when he invited Dr. King to speak, and was nearby when he was assassinated. In Birmingham, where young people had to play a lead role in the protests, he wrote this short pledge on cards that they signed; we’ve adapted the words slightly to reflect the fact that our fellowship is not mostly Christian nor even necessarily religious. And of course no one has to take this pledge. But if you’d like, please follow along with us.”
The students and the faculty rose, and put hands on the shoulders of their neighbors.
“I promise,” said Maria.
“I promise,” they intoned.
“1—to Meditate daily on the teachings and lives of the nonviolent campaigners who have come before us.
2—to remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory.
3—to walk and talk in the manner of love.
4—to pray daily to be used by history in order that all might be free.
5—to sacrifice personal wishes in order that all might be free.
6—to observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy.
7.—to seek to perform regular service for others and for the world.
8—to refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.
9—to strive to be in good spiritual and bodily health.
10—to follow the directions of the movement, and of the captain on a demonstration.”
As they finished the class was quiet for a moment, almost solemn, and then they erupted into a roar, pounding each other on the back and trading hugs.
“Since for the moment I’m still the captain of this demonstration, I’ve gotten the signal from the staff that the fruitarians have vacated the premises,” said Maria, to more cheering. “That means we can proceed with our barbecue on the lawn outside. Professor Goccilupe, you have a few words?”
“Thank you Professor Santos,” said Tony. “First of all, the students and faculty wanted to get you something to thank you for your leadership in a turbulent year. Since you demonstrated a certain talent for, um, witchcraft, we thought a magic wand would be appropriate.” He held out a black rod, and when she began to reach for it he pressed a button in the handle, and a bouquet of bright paper flowers burst from the end, to more applause.
“And for our party this afternoon, I’ve worked with Perry to put together a playlist. The first song is one of my favorites, ‘O Happy Day.’ Perry, what can you tell us about it.”
“Um, 1970 Grammy for Best Soul Gospel Performance,” he said. “But it crossed over in a big way? Number four on the US singles charts. Number one in the UK and Germany. Number two in Ireland. Also, it’s—it’s great!”
From the outside, the orange locomotives of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe looked squat, steroidal, bulging. But inside one of the behemoths, the cab was like a dingy office: two chairs, two telephones, stacks of paperwork. Tal Hoskins and Paul Stanistreet— engineer and conductor respectively—were nearing the end of a run to the Marathon Oil refinery at Anacortes on Puget Sound. The 100-tanker unit train they were pulling had 3,180,000 gallons of oil, fracked from North Dakota’s Bakken shale, and it had been a long day. A busted coupling on a hill outside Tacoma, two long delays to wait for unloaded coal trains coming back down the track. They should, Tal calculated, just make it to the refinery before the 12 hours they were allowed under federal law expired. “Notch 4 forward,” Tal said into the phone as he moved the lever at his left, and the train picked up a little speed—with the frequent grade crossings along the crowded coastal towns speed was relative.
The day’s conversation had dwindled by now; the main topic, as often, was the ongoing fight to keep the railroad from cutting the two-man crews down to a single engineer in an effort to make more money. “How much money does Warren Buffett need exactly?” said Paul, for roughly the 500th time.
“What the hell?” responded Tal. A woman was standing by the track with a sign that said: “You might want to slow down. Trouble ahead.”
“Braking 2,” he said, pushing the mushroom-shaped horn that sounded the train’s whistle. But of course a train that weighs 24,000,000-odd pounds doesn’t slow quickly, and in any event Tal wasn’t sure why he was braking; trouble came fairly frequently on the rails, but never in his experience with a sign. Usually it was just a car on the tracks, and you sliced through it before there was even a chance to slow down; if it was dark it was hard to even tell you’d hit something. But it was easy to feel the press of the weight behind him; Isaac Newton was driving those tank cars and they were not eager to slow. As they rounded the next curve there was another woman, and another sign: “Really. Trouble up ahead.”
“Braking 4,” he said.
Paul was on the phone back to the Seattle dispatch yard, where lines of men watched computer screens with every rail line in the Pacific Northwest illuminated. “OWABF, something weird out here,” he said. “We’re just pass crossing 141.”
“OWABF, roger, what do you mean weird?” answered a voice.
“Another one,” said Tal—this woman’s sign said: “Thanks for stopping.” “Braking 6,” said Tal, and by now the train’s momentum had been broken—the dynamic brakes on every wheel had used the train’s own speed to slow it to the point where the air brakes could bring it very close to a halt.
At which point a woman on a mountain bike appeared from a trail in the spruce forest and began to pace the train on the cinder and gravel path that ran along the edge of the rails.
She was moving fast—as fast as the train, now. And as it slowed she jumped the rail and began riding directly in front of the locomotive, stopping herself gradually so the train would have no choice but to keep slowing. Eventually the rider stopped dead, and the train shuddered to a hissing halt about twenty yards away. The woman squared her bike so it was facing the locomotive, and—staring at the cab the whole time—reached with her right hand over her shoulder and into a knapsack, extracting a bow and arrow. With a fluid pull he let fly, and both Paul and Tal hit the deck. A second later a loud plop sounded, and a few seconds after that Tal was peeking over the dashboard.
He saw an arrow with a large red suction cup stuck to the front window, and he saw the back of the woman as the bike slipped away onto a forest path. He climbed down from the cab, and then up on the grille of the train, reaching for the arrow. A piece of paper was wrapped around the shaft with a rubber band, and he climbed back into the cab so he could read it over the radiophone to Seattle dispatch:
Very kind of you to stop! We are with the American Nurses Union, and while we are devoted to the job of taking care of sick people, we don’t think people should be sick unnecessarily. Take, for example, kids with asthma. Did you know that Black children are three times as likely to have it as white kids? Not because there’s something different about the lungs of Black people—because there’s something different about the lives of Black people. They’re far more likely to live near refineries and power plants. This is called environmental racism, and it would be wrong even it didn’t make people sick. So, if the oil on your train makes it a little harder for kids to breathe, we’re going to make it a little harder for you to deliver it.
Thank you for your patience.
P.S.—We are in strong solidarity with your union in the fight to keep two-man train crews. Clearly they are needed to deal with unpredictable dangers such as, for instance, us.
Two hours later, Tal and Paul were sitting in a nearby hotel, drinking Locomotive Breath Imperial Stout from the local Anacortes brewery, which went well with the Dungeness Crab.
They’d hit the twelve-hour mandated federal maximum workday while sitting on the tracks waiting for permission to resume their trip, and then they’d waited for the van to arrive with their replacements. While they waited they’d been texting colleagues around the West, and learned that a 100-car train had been halted outside Bakersfield by firefighters in full turnout gear protesting the drought in local forests; that a Canadian Pacific train carrying crude from the Alberta tarsands was dead on the rails some-where between Medicine Hat and Swift Current, where an encampment of First Nations activists angry about violated treaties and vanishing winters had built teepees on the tracks; and that the line near Reno had been halted by a crowd of mothers holding a banner that said “Gamble in Casinos, Not With Our Lives.”
Now, in the hotel, they could see from the tv above the bar that the actions spread across the entire continent. On the western edge of Lake Champlain, where trains of Bakken crude trundled through the Adirondacks en route to the port of Albany, ten Iraq War veterans had brought the engine to a halt just outside Fort Ticonderoga. “We’ve seen enough explosions to last a lifetime,” one of them explained to a reporter, who then cut to a colleague outside Newport News, where climate scientists from Virginia Tech had hauled a blackboard on to the tracks and were giving the engineer and the conductor an impromptu lecture on the dangers of the rising sea level to East Coast communities. Somewhere west of Pass Christian along the Gulf, shrimpers upset at the effects of oil spills on crustaceans had parked a boat on the tracks, and were dishing out jambalaya to the engineer, the conductor, and a crowd of reporters. In Lac Megantic demonstrators had gathered by the hundreds to mark the anniversary of the great explosion, and on stage a mother who’d lost two children to the blast was announcing the formation of a continent-wide Bomb Train Action Coalition—BTAC for short—to fight rail transit of crude. “We want a stable climate and a safe community,” she said.
“There’s hardly a line moving in the country,” said Tal, who had a brother-in-law who worked at the continent’s biggest dispatch center in North Platte, Nebraska. “Damon says they’ll have things back in motion by tomorrow, but the delays are going to be insane.”
“This is bullcrap,” said Paul. “All these people drive cars. Where do they think the gas comes from? Hell, if we ran over a few of them that would be that.”
“Except that what I’m hearing is that everywhere they made the point about two-man crews,” said Tal. “Which is more support than we’ve ever gotten before.”
“Well, there’s that,” said Paul.
When I subscribed to this newsletter I wasn't anticipating good news to ever come from it. Now it's been a few weeks of good news. I'll take whatever I can get and hope the momentum continues.