We actually better pass the Big Bill
One Friday closer to a place we do not want to go
Greetings from the mountains of Vermont, where the color has crept down the mountains to about the 1500 foot mark—the next few weeks are glory unbound here, and I’m apt to get a little giddy. Apologies.
But the giddiness this year is deeply tempered—because it’s beginning to feel like we better imagine the unimaginable: that the U.S. Congress will fail once again to address the climate crisis. For 30 years our Senators and representatives have done essentially nothing; their only real attempt, the cap-and-trade fiasco of 2009, didn’t even get to a vote in the Senate. And this may not either. Or it may—the battle is playing out in private, in a handful of offices in the gray buildings that flank the Capitol. Most of big business has deployed to block the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, reasoning that a livable planet is not worth paying a slightly higher corporate tax rate. But how do the rest of us deploy?
One way is Call4Climate, which connects you easily to your own representatives. But what if you live in a state where that’s useless because they’re going to do the right thing or the wrong thing? Much of the outcome seems to come down to Prime Minister Manchin of West Virginia (and perhaps the unreadable Sen Sinema of the parched state of Arizona). If you wanted to reach Mr. Manchin, the best way would be through his constituents. The remarkable Cheseapeake Climate Action Network has set up a twice-weekly phone bank for folks to call voters in the Mountain State. I can’t promise you it’s going to work; I can promise you that if this bill doesn’t pass, the US Congress won’t act on this scale for years, and that the Glasgow global climate conference will be a sputtering failure. So, let’s try.
For newcomers, these Friday posts round up some of the week’s climate news, before devolving into the next chapters of my new book about nonviolence. (Thank you to those who’ve written to say they’re enjoying it!). I’ve said that beginning in October these Friday posts will go only to paid subscribers (my share of your subscription goes to support the emerging organizing at Third Act.)
Anyway, of note:
+Boston University divested its $2.5 billion endowment and did it with grace and candor, declaring that it wished to be on “the right side of history.” Meanwhile, the Harvard president, who was forced to divest his institutions $42 billion endowment earlier in the month after a decade-long campaign, refused to even utter the word. “Different folks use the word in different ways. I think my message speaks for itself,” Larry Bacow told the Harvard Crimson.
+Oh, and the MacArthur Foundation, which hands out the genius awards, divested its $8 billion endowment. Activists quickly called on the Nobel Prize Foundation to follow suit.
+The Jewish climate campaign Dayenu (full disclosure, I’m on the board, despite my status as a Methodist), has been running an inspired campaign throughout this season of high holidays, which included blowing the shofar in front of 16 Congressional offices; Chuck Schumer came out to join in the fun.
+Lots of banks promised not to fund oil drilling in the Arctic, but they’re not doing a very good job of keeping their promises. A new study found that they’ve come up with a variety of creative ways to evade their promises; meanwhile, other researchers discovered that financial mega-giant Vanguard has no serious way of keeping track of the climate impact of its investments: there’s one ESG employee for each 300 companies in which it holds a stake.
+Andrew King and Kenneth Pucker, writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, warn us not to trust corporate efforts to measure all their social and environmental impacts with new accounting schemes. “Such proposals for monetizing corporate planetary impacts” they write, are “alluring, impossible, and perilous.”
+The good folks at the Million Trees initiative in NYC wrote to say they’re doing their best about the urban forestry troubles I described in Wednesday’s post.
+The ongoing battle over the Line 5 tarsands pipeline (did you know a big pipeline ran across the bottom of the Great Lakes?) continues: new data shows that retrofitting the pipeline with a tunnel to keep it in business would “would result in an estimated 27 million metric tons of CO2 emitted every year. This is the equivalent of adding 6.8 new coal-fired power plants or nearly 6 million new cars to the road in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”
+Climate expert and expert musician Ellie Barber, who performs under the name Ollella, has a pretty powerful new song, Walking on Fire. “As our climate continues to change and life becomes increasingly uncertain, we’ll be forced to confront the emotional weight of the changes around us,” she writes. “Art and music play an imperative role in this – they open the door for us to participate in collective catharsis, connection, sharing, and grieving.”
+Offshore wind development may turn out to be a potent tool for reviving coastal communities—Fall River Massachusetts is a fairly bedraggled place, but the proposed Mayflower Wind project could turn its docks into a humming staging ground for the new energy era. Among other things, the local community college is planning a National Offshore Wind Institute. Maybe worth mentioning stuff like this when you call Senator Manchin’s constituents.
Meanwhile, here’s the next installment of my novel, this week coming to you from Colorado, India, and Beijing. Catch up on the first 9 chapters of The Other Cheek by visiting the archive.
That afternoon Cass and MK were cleaning up the zen garden, one of their weekly tasks. They raked the stones smooth, and pulled up the few weeds sprouting on the edges. Cass was heavily silent, and eventually MK grabbed her rake and made her sit down on the bench at the edge of the rocks.
“Girl, we are going to talk right now,” said MK. “I know you’re moping, and I know why you’re moping, and so I’m going to tell you something I should have told you before, and you’re not going to like to hear it, but it’s important.”
“What?” said Cass.
“A week ago—a week before he got kicked out—Matti Persson asked me if I wanted to spend some time with him. He asked if I wanted to . . . be involved.”
Cass blushed much harder than before, and held herself very still. “And I told him I wanted nothing to do with him,” said MK. “I told him that as far as I knew you two were together, and that was that.”
Cass was silent for a minute. Finally she said, “how did he take that?” “He just grinned at me,” said MK. “In his pretty way. And then he left.” Cass got back up to rake the rocks for a minute, erasing her footprints as she backed into a corner, waiting for the lump in her throat to ease. “You’re a good friend,” she said, and walked back toward the dorm.
After five days the walk had settled into something like a routine. The DL was up at 3:30 to meditate with a few other monks; the rest of the encampment would begin to stir at dawn, and after a simple breakfast they’d be walking by 6. They tried to stay on village paths, which got easier as the terrain began to flatten out in the Shivalik foothills, and small farms more common. But there were hours every day when the only routes were along the highways, with buses and trucks and scooters careening. A single file of monks and volunteers, shuffled every hour by Sonam, formed a cordon along the edge of the road, offering at least a little safety for the few hundred people walking beside them. The crowd grew each day, as pilgrims arrived from Dharamsala and from abroad; there was a shifting knot of reporters, who got to walk with the DL by turns.
“A good thing about walking is that you have plenty of time to talk. There’s no need to ‘cut to the chase,’” he told a correspondent from the New York Times one morning as they neared the far outskirts of Chandigarh.
“Okay. But there was one question my editors wanted me to ask above all: Do you feel like Gandhi on the Salt March?” the reporter asked.
“Ha! Good to see you know your history! But no—very different,” the DL said. “And not just because he was a mahatma, a great soul, a leader of hundreds of millions, not just an ordinary monk. He also had a very well-thought-out plan. He was walking to Dandi to make salt—he knew that would shake the British. It was an act of defiance—it was like when your colonists threw the tea into the ocean in Boston, also to bother the British. I am not defying anyone—you see this flag on my shoulder, right? I am just walking home.”
“Are you saying your walk is not symbolic?” he asked.
“Everything is symbolic,” he answered. “Think of Gandhi again, and all his symbols. The spinning wheel where he sat every morning, spinning cloth to symbolize self-reliance and independence from the outside world. Maybe on our walk we will visit his ashram at Sabarmati and see the spinning wheel, because it was more powerful than all the guns the British had. So yes, my walk is symbolic—I have a flag on my shoulder, and a flag is always a symbol. But the world will figure out what the symbol is, not me. It’s symbolic, but it’s not strategic.”
“But why are you carrying a Chinese flag? The Chinese are the—the other side, anyway.”
“Since you know about Gandhi, you know he went to England, right? The year after the Salt March, for talks in London about independence. And while he was there he took a trip to Lancashire to see the mill workers—the very people he was putting out of work by telling Indians to make their own cloth. People told him not to go, that there would be riots and anger. But he went to the town of Darwen, wearing just his white dhoti. And he was, in fact, mobbed—but by workers who were cheering for him, because they were poor and they knew instinctively that he was for the poor. They rang the bell at the mill, and all the women who worked there came running out and gathered around him, and two of them hooked their arms through his and they shouted ‘3 cheers for Mr. Gand-eye. Hip, Hip Hurrah!’”
“Are you saying the Chinese will welcome you?”
“Ha! No! Only that the idea that there are always two sides is not necessarily right. Chinese people have nothing to fear from Tibetan people. There are things we can teach each other.” A truck took a corner in the road a bit too fast, and narrowly missed the line of monks, a few of whom yelled at the young boy hanging on the back bumper.
“Another thing,” the Dalai Lama said. “When Gandhi marched to the sea he was I believe 61. I am 83, so we are going a good deal slower. Gandhi was a very fast walker, but not me. When I was a boy, and I had to flee from Lhasa over the mountains to India, yes—I walked fast. Also, the air was much clearer then. Even Dharamsala is very high, and the air is clear, but it feels to me as if every step we take closer to Delhi it gets harder to breathe. I would wear a mask, but that would be a symbol too, and one that would embarrass our Indian friends, I think.”
By 11:30, with the sun hot overhead, they’d reached a makeshift booth with an awning overhanging. Volunteers who’d gone ahead were beginning to dish out lunch, as the walkers sprawled in the shade. “It’s important to eat a good meal,” the Dalai Lama told the reporter. “Sometimes in the West people think that monks must not eat very much, so they give me a very small bowlful, and then I have to fill up on rice. And we are walking, walking. We must eat or we will be skinny like Gandhiji. And salt, in his honor, so no cramps!”
“AN UNDENIABLE SENSE OF HISTORY HANGS OVER THE EARLY DAYS OF THE DALAI Lama’s long march toward China,” a young aide was reading from the nytimes.com website, to the long table at the Propaganda Department. Director Liu sat at the table’s end, impassive, chin resting on his fingertips. “Though the monk in his red robes discounts the parallels, it’s hard for Indians not to remember Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, often described by historians as one of the decisive blows to imperial power in the subcontinent.
Gandhi’s biographer, historian Ramachandra Guha of the Indian Institute of Science, said the Tibetan spiritual leader had always reminded him of Gandhi, right down to his sense of humor. “The Chinese flag on his shoulder—there’s something unexpected about it, as unexpected as Gandhi kneeling on the beach to make salt,” he said.
“I am just walking home,” the Dalai Lama said, as a truck overladen with timber veered near the line of marchers he was leading north of the city of Chandrigarh on the edge of the vast Punjabi plain, nearly wiping out the ever-larger column of marchers en route to Delhi, and from there, apparently, to the Tibetan border now claimed by the government in Beijing. Asked about pervasive rumors of an assassination attempt early in the walk, the 83-year-old monk simply laughed and said “At my age every day that passes is an attempt on my life.”
“I told you we should have killed him, and I tell you again,” said Colonel Wang. “If a truck crashes into the line, that’s a problem solved.”
“Is it, Miss Wang?” the director asked. “As I said the last time you made the suggestion, it’s not our decision to make. But if our colleagues in security asked my opinion, I’d tell them to be very careful at this point about making martyrs.”
“And I’d tell them that we’ve got parts of the party not fully involved in fighting ‘the three evils’ of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism, which chairman Xi has identified,” she said, biting off the words as she rose to leave.
When the door shut behind her, most of the table full of bureaucrats looked uneasily at Director Liu, who sighed. “Forget it,” he said. “Colonel Wang will do what she’ll do, and her friends will do what they will do. In the meantime, we have a more immediate problem than an old man wandering through India. Assistant director Shang?”
A heavyset woman stood and walked to the front of the room, where she clicked on a projector. The first slide on her powerpoint said simply “31 days.” “That’s how long Beijing’s air quality has been unhealthy this time,” she said. “Not officially—officially we’ve only had nine poor-air days, and two school-closing days. But the hourly figures published on Twitter from the roof of the U.S. embassy make it clear that 2.5 micrometer particulates have been above 100 micrograms for the last month. Anything above 35 micrograms is considered unhealthy. We’ve had spikes as high as 500 micrograms. Tens of thousands of people are in the hospital.”
“My son was in the hospital yesterday,” a man at the end of the table said. “They sent him home with an asthma inhaler, and said to keep him inside, and to buy an air purifier. Which is 6,500 yuan.”
“And there aren’t any to be had anyway,” said Shang. “Which is kind of my point. Our job is not to solve the pollution problem. There are teams working on that, and they say real progress may be years away. Our job is solve the problem of people getting upset about the pollution problem. You all know that, for years, we’ve permitted limited dissent on environmental issues. It’s a good safety valve, and it puts pressure on local leaders to start cleaning up their industries. You also know how hard it is to control. We let Chai Jing put up her film two years ago, Under the Dome, and it got 200 million views in two days before we took it down.”
“Friends still quote that part where she asks the little girl, ‘have you ever seen stars,’ and she says ‘never,’” said the man at the end of the table.
“Yes,” said Shang. “Exactly. And the thing is, our tracking data on social media shows that the level of comments is reaching that level of concern again. People simply don’t talk about much else. It’s not just Beijing. In Tianjin, they’ve been counting how many days since you could see the top of the television tower. People are wagering on it. In Shanghai, there are bars where you can buy cans of fresh air from the Canadian Rockies. In Beijing there’s a website counting down the days till the 2022 Winter Olympics, because people figure we’ll shut down the factories again and there will be another run of blue sky days. The proportion of selfies showing people wearing facemasks is reaching 40%.”
“Just talk, though?” the director asked.
“Just talk. But our survey data show that people increasingly blame the authorities. As you know, it’s difficult to poll for public opinion when people are worried that saying what they believe might get them in trouble, but our colleagues at the Social Science Research Institute have developed some clever methodologies. Their Index of Public Trust is showing record low levels now, and it correlates pretty perfectly with pollution levels.” She flipped a new slide up on the screen. “You’ll note Ordos, at the top—famous ghost city, no jobs, but also not much pollution. Comparatively, people are calm. Baoding, where the small particulates routinely top 1000 micrograms? Tiananmen levels.”
The group fell quiet. “We all know this problem, because we all feel it,” said the director eventually. “Any ideas?”
“More odd-even car days?” said the man in the gray suit.
“I don’t mean ideas for solving it,” the director said. “We all know how to solve it—shut down the dirtiest factories and burn a lot less coal. And we all know that’s not going to happen fast, because of money. So ideas for helping manage the perceptions?”
“It’s not easy,” said Shang, flipping another slide on the screen. “In Tianjin they had a thousand nursing students in white doing traditional dance in the middle of town to show it was safe to be out. Seventeen of them collapsed. There was no media about it, of course, but the whole city seems to know. They’ve had to filter “17” on the internet platforms, because it was becoming a code word.”
“We have the traditional methods of distraction,” said the director. “Trouble over Taiwan, trouble over Japan. But each time we use them they work a little less: the number of our countrymen who really care what Japan did during World War II diminishes with each day’s deaths, as you might expect. And our great distraction—the rise of the economy—is less compelling too. Because everyone has a tv now, and a refrigerator. But we can do them again, and we can hope the wind changes and blows this stuff out.”
“Actually, director, I had an idea,” said a young woman who was sitting not at the table, but at a chair against the wall, along with a few other junior aides. People at the table craned to look at her; they seemed startled to hear a voice from the back benches.
“Miss . . .”
“Cheung, sir. I’m newly arrived, from my post-graduate work in psychology at Princeton.”
“Ah. Then . . . quickly please.”
“It’s that, we all know Chinese people love to gamble. And we have a little lottery here, for the People’s Sports Association, and it’s growing. But the prizes are small. In the U.S. sometimes the prize gets very large: more than a billion dollars, like 8 billion yuan. And when that happens, it’s all anyone talks about. What they’d do if they won. For a few weeks no one talks about politics. They just line up to get more tickets. What if we had a lottery that was going to make the richest person in China?”
No one said a word, watching the director. He’d seemed puzzled at first as she spoke, but by the time she’d finished he was looking thoughtful. Taking the cue, a few of the colleagues around the table began slowly to speak.
“A patriotic lottery,” said one. “The proceeds for some great task. An aircraft carrier for the navy. They could name it after the winner too.”
“Or building the new moon lander they’re always talking about at the National Space Administration?”
“I see the appeal,” the director said. “Obviously this would take much consultation with other . . . relevant bodies. But we can set up a working group to study the idea. Mr. Leung, you will coordinate? And perhaps you will include Miss . . . Cheung in your group?”
As he spoke, a few blocks away a young mother led two small girls wearing surgical masks that covered half their faces through the underpass beneath Chang’an Avenue that separates Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City. One of the girls was coughing almost constantly, her thin body racked as she tried to suck in enough air. The three of them emerged from underpass and walked toward the giant portrait of Mao, which hung over the crowd of tourists waiting to buy tickets to tour the emperor’s palace; most of the tourists wore masks too, some of them souvenir models that said “Beijing!” across the front in cheerful rainbow-lettered English.
The mother sat the girls down, telling them to wait, and then walked a few paces away and sat down herself. She reached inside her quilted jacket and pulled out and unfurled a Chinese flag, across the front of which she’d scrawled the Chinese characters for “pollution” in white brushstrokes. She reached down with a lighter and touched the flame to the hem of her dress, but the blaze had barely bloomed before she was tackled by a plainclothes-man. In seconds he’d put out the fire and begun to hustle her out of the square, the two girls following close behind, hand in hand.
Another policeman reached around the shoulder of a Canadian tourist who was holding her Samsung at arm’s length. She’d been filming Mao’s portrait, but the fire had unfolded right in front of her. The plainclothesman grabbed the phone and strode off after his partner. “Hey,” the Canadian cried. “Come back here.” But the small outcry behind him immediately died in the sheer vastness of the gray square—it wasn’t fifteen seconds before woman, cops, and children had vanished into the haze, with no one understanding what had just happened. And it wasn’t fifteen seconds after that before the short burst of film had uploaded into the Canadian’s Dropbox account, next to the other scenes of her trip.
Beckie Perrimore sat at her computer, finishing a short essay on Medium about her trip to China. It included pictures of a waiter slicing the Peking duck at the restaurant near her hotel, and of her tour group visiting a tumbledown section of the Great Wall, and a photo of the knockoff “Kim Horton’s” donut shop in downtown Chengdu. (So far that had been the picture her Calgary neighbors liked the most on Facebook.) But she also included a 15-second GIF of the scene from in front of the Forbidden City, under the heading: “Watch out for snatch-and-grab thieves at tourist sites. They’ll create a distraction to steal your stuff.”
A law enforcement student at an Arizona community college, looking for graphics for a paper he was doing on “crime overseas,” grabbed a screenshot of the mugging and stuck it in his essay; his professor’s husband, a Chinese émigré, saw the photo on the paper in the top of his wife’s class folder. A few emails later he’d tracked down the source, and published the short video on a web site run by Chinese Americans who’d left Beijing in the wake of Tiananmen. “Pollution protests reaching new heights in China,” it said—and it was reposted on Grist.org, an environmental web site that an intern at Buzzfeed monitored. She stuck it under a more memorable headline (“Does Beijing’s Pollution Come from Chinese Setting Themselves on Fire?”), at which point it ended up in Fu Ting’s monitor out on Third Ring Road, since “pollution” was now high on the list of search terms his floor of digital analysts was charged with finding.
He flagged the post for his superiors, and the next shift one of his senior colleagues, watching a feed of the CBS Evening News, was startled to see the same shaky image, this time at the end of a feature on the Dalai Lama’s walk. “We’re starting to see the Chinese flag show up in unusual places,” the anchorman said, as the woman lit herself on fire. “Given the growing unease, will the authorities be able to put out all the new blazes as easily as they extinguished this one?”
“This is what I mean,” said Miss Wang the next evening, at a small gathering in a restaurant near her office at the Central Military Commission. She’d passed her iPad with the CBS clip around the table as dinner was beginning. “Clearly this is connected to the splittist and his march,” she said. “Liu and his idiots at Propaganda—if idiots is all they are—think it will just go away if we do nothing. It will not go away. That is the Chinese flag he is defiling, and the insolence is spreading.”
“Colonel Wang, is there some link between this woman and the Tibetans?” an older man in a rumpled uniform asked.
“Ministry of State Security says no,” she said. “That she’s worried about her children. They’ve questioned her . . . extensively. But that makes it worse. It must mean that news of his actions is leaking back in, and everyone with a petty grievance will seize on it.”
“Or it means a coincidence,” he said. “Follow up on this, Colonel, and thank you for your initiative,” he said, raising a shot glass of baijiu to his chin and downing it as he stared at her.
“I certainly will, General Youxia,” she said, raising her own glass.