OMNI
FOSSIL FUELS INDUSTRY
NEWSLETTER #3, January 4, 2015.
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and ENVIRONMENTAL CARE. (#1 August 5, 2012; #2 March 15, 2013).
What’s at
stake: creating the political will for a livable world.
My blog: War Department/Peace Department
My Newsletters:
Index:
Nos.
1-2 below
Contents of
Oil Newsletter #3 Local Event, Analysis,
History
OMNI’s Climate
Change Book Forum (2006-)
Payne,
Oil, Wars, Warming: Ken Silverstein, The
Secret World of Oil
Cohan,
Big Oil Wants to Burn It All
Margaret
Brown’s Film of the Terrible Consequences of Deepwater Horizon Explosion
Chomsky,
Canada’s Shale Gas
Action
Organizations, Campaigns
Major
Avenues for Change: Legislative, Legal,
Mass Action
Citizens
Climate Lobby (CCL): Carbon Tax
Atmospheric
Trust Litigation, Our Children’s Trust: Going to Court for the Public Trust
Moyers &
Co.: The
Children’s Climate Crusade, Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust
Democracy
Now: Naomi Klein, Reject Keystone XL, Demand
Radical Change
DeWald,
Students Working for Divestment in Schools Campaign,
350.org:
Divestment, a Global Movement
Oil
Change International: Exposing True Costs of Fossil Fuels and Pushing for
Sustainable Energy
Related
OMNI Newsletters and Reports
Previous
Oil Fossil Fuels Newsletters
The OMNI Climate Change Book
Forum (2006-) presents Lolly Tindol’s lecture on the book State of the World
2014: Governing for Sustainability. This is
an especially important, comprehensive book, whose 22 chapters explore most
major aspects of the roles of government or governance in coping with the
consequences of climate change already affecting our planet and its inhabitants
significantly. Lolly has
created an extensive power-point presentation.
Last month she presented a
lecture on State of the World 2013:
Sunday, January 4
Fayetteville Public Library,
Walker Auditorium, 1:30
Table of Contents
Author Biographies
The Worldwatch
Institute, State of the World 2014: Governing for Sustainability
Citizens expect their governments
to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international
conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate
legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership
is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Action—on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises—is
being driven by local, people’s, women’s, and grassroots movements around the
world, often in opposition to the agendas pursued by governments and big
corporations.
These diverse efforts are the
subject of the latest volume in the Worldwatch Institute’s highly regarded
State of the World series. The 2014 edition, marking the Institute’s
40th anniversary, examines both barriers to responsible political and economic
governance as well as gridlock-shattering new ideas. The authors
analyze a variety of trends and proposals, including regional and local climate
initiatives, the rise of benefit corporations and worker-owned firms, the need
for energy democracy, the Internet’s impact on sustainability, and the
importance of eco-literacy. A consistent thread throughout the book is that
informed and engaged citizens are key to better governance.
The book is a clear-eyed yet
ultimately optimistic assessment of citizens’ ability to govern for
sustainability. By highlighting both obstacles and opportunities, State
of the World 2014 shows how to effect change within and beyond the
halls of government. This volume will be especially useful for policymakers,
environmental nonprofits, students of environmental studies, sustainability, or
economics—and citizens looking to jumpstart significant change around the
world.
About State of the World
Worldwatch's flagship
publication, State of the World, has educated a broad audience of students,
journalists, policymakers, and concerned citizens about trends in sustainable
development for a quarter century. The book has been published in 36 languages,
and over the years it has authoritatively assessed issues ranging from
population, energy, and agriculture to materials use, health, and trade policy.
Topics are covered from a global perspective, with an emphasis on innovation
and problem-solving. State of the World is recognized as a classic of
environmental literature, having attracted luminaries from Kofi Annan to
Mikhail Gorbachev to write forewords for the book. News media, policymakers,
and NGOs worldwide cite the book for its cutting-edge analysis, reliability,
and careful documentation of its arguments, all marshaled to speed the global
transition to a sustainable world.
At last month’s Forum Lolly lectured on the State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible?
We
cannot expect even two such encyclopedic anthologies to cover every important
topic in a subject so encompassing. But
the editors were napping when they
omitted essays on US imperialism, militarism, and unnecessary wars (egregious
waste of money needed for the climate change emergency), on over-population (a
major source of CO2 and consumption of resources), and on the New Deal and its
extension into the 1970s (affirmative government in action). --Dick
ANALYSIS
OIL: Root Cause of
Endless War, Distinct Threat to Humanity
The need for
oil has been and continues to be responsible for the destruction of nature and
man. Are we so tunnel visioned? When will we stop and look at the destruction
and do something about it?
Published:
November 16, 2014 | Author: Michael Payne | NationofChange | Op-Ed
The Secret World of Oil
by Ken Silverstein. Verso, 2014.
A
riveting, immersive investigative exposé of the corrupt and violent side of the
globe's key industry
The oil
industry provides the lifeblood of modern civilization, and bestselling books
have been written about the industry and even individual companies in it,
like ExxonMobil. But the modern oil industry is an amazingly shady meeting
ground of fixers, gangsters, dictators, competing governments and
multinational corporations, and until now, no book has set out to tell the
story of this largely hidden world.
The global
fleet of some 11,000 tankers—that’s tripled during the past decade—moves
approximately 2 billion metric tons of oil annually. And every stage of
the route, from discovery to consumption, is tainted by corruption and
violence, even if little of that is visible to the public.
The Secret World of Oil includes up-close portraits of the
figures behind the scenes of the oil industry. Supported by funding from the
prestigious Open Society, this is both an entertaining global travelogue
and a major work of investigative reporting.
·
Where to buy >
Reviews
·
“Ken Silverstein’s sharp investigative
reporting has again dragged a cast of shady operators into the public eye with
his must-read book, The Secret
World of Oil. Oil is the cause of so much pain in the world. As the fossil
fuel industry tightens its grip on our warming planet, The Secret World of Oilnames
names, and exposes the brokers, lobbyists, and fixers who profit from the
misery of millions and the accelerating pollution of the planet.”
·
“Ken Silverstein is one of the best
investigative journalists of his generation—or any generation. His latest book, The Secret World of Oil, is a
masterpiece of revelation. With a deft combination of detail and color, Silverstein
exposes the darkest shade of crude: the fixers and middlemen who arrange the
deals that provide us with the oil we need to keep our cars running and our
homes warm. As Silverstein shows, these deals enrich the kleptocrats of our
world and make life worse, rather than better, for their unfortunate subjects.
It is a shameful and captivating tale about a pipeline of corruption that we
must fix.”
·
“Much has been written about the oil industry,
but Ken Silverstein provides an entirely new window into this vitally important
universe. For the first time, we encounter the fixers, flacks, and traders
behind the secretive deals that drive the industry and enrich its leading
operators. After reading this book, you will never think about oil in the same
way again.”
·
“Silverstein writes with keen reportorial
objectivity but also understandable skepticism about...the frighteningly
tyrannical hold that oil has on the free (and not-so-free) world. The book’s
revelations make Wall Street corruption seem tame by comparison.”
To Save the Planet, We Need to Leave Fossil Fuels in the
Ground—but Oil Companies Have Other Plans.
They say no to any “stranded assets.”
- William D. Cohan
- December 10, 2014 |
This
article appeared in the December 29, 2014 edition of The Nation. [Under the
title “Big Oil Wants to Burn It All”
--Dick]
- Share
- A
hydraulic fracturing operation near Mead, Colorado (AP Photo/Brennan
Linsley)
- A growing
and powerful Greek chorus—composed of activists, environmentalists,
billionaires, former Goldman Sachs partners, former Goldman Sachs partners
who are also former Treasury secretaries, and a former vice president of
the United States—has been sounding an urgent message to the world: Big
Oil companies cannot, and must not, sell the vast fossil-fuel reserves
they have spent billions of dollars finding, digging up and refining.
These voices warn that if ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell are allowed to
burn all their carbon, the planet’s temperature will rise beyond the
2-degrees-Celsius threshold that, a consensus of scientists holds, is the
tipping point to environmental Armageddon. In economic terms, this means
we can have either a safe planet or an ExxonMobil worth hundreds of
billions of dollars, but we can’t have both. Nothing less than Earth’s
future is at stake.
- In June,
that chorus seemed to find an important ally: President Obama. In an
interview on Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously, Obama told New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman that Big Oil must leave two-thirds of its
fossil fuel in the ground. “We’re not going to be able to burn it all,”
Obama said.
- There’s
just one problem: Big Oil doesn’t agree. On the contrary, Big Oil wants to
burn all of the fossil fuel it has found, and then some. It doesn’t want
anyone telling it what it can and cannot do. Indeed, there is increasingly
a sense that the latest efforts of the environmentalists—including the
worldwide People’s Climate March in September—are desperate ones,
reflecting political impotence in the face of an intransigent Congress.
“The climate movement is choosing these narratives not because they are
objectively the best way to describe the problem,” said Steve Coll, the
author of Private Empire, the definitive book on the history of
ExxonMobil. “It’s because they are the best way to describe the problem in
the absence of comprehensive legislation to actually fix the problem,
which they can’t achieve in the United States.”
- That
political reality just got a whole lot worse, too, in the wake of the
midterm elections, when lawmakers deep inside Big Oil’s pockets swept
further into power. Caught in a moment of seeming ennui a few days later,
Bill McKibben, the Middlebury College professor and 350.org leader, was at
something of a loss to describe exactly how the movement presses on from
here. “My guess is [the election] means we need to really push outside the
formal political system, so things like divestment become even more
critical,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That said, we’re already working as
hard on it as we know how to.” On December 2, McKibben resigned as the
chair of 350.org. His interim successor, K.C. Golden, reached by phone,
acknowledged there is “a yawning gap” between what is morally and
ethically the right thing to do on the environment and “what the political
system is able to deliver.” Nevertheless, he argues that “a lot of things
are moving in the right direction.” Divestiture, he says, is one of them:
“It’s one step at a time. Divestment gives every person, every
institution, every pension fund the opportunity to take control and do
something positive.”
- * * *
- Big oil
companies have made no secret of their belief that they can have it all:
both a huge market valuation and a planet that suffers no catastrophic
effects from climate change. For the record, ExxonMobil is the world’s
second-most-valuable company (trailing distantly behind Apple), and its
AAA-rated bonds are yielding only slightly more than similar-duration
Treasury securities, suggesting that creditors are not the slightest bit
worried about a default or a write-down of the value of the so-called
stranded assets—oil and gas that ExxonMobil has found but that
environmentalists hope will never be sold. “They’re some of the biggest
political players on Earth, and they have enormous clout,” McKibben said
of Big Oil. “So they will use that clout to try and ensure that they’re
allowed to burn everything they’ve got, and there’s all this stuff they
continue to look for every day.”
- In truth,
Big Oil seems more or less indifferent to the political and media
commotion. It’s as if Big Oil is from Mars and the scientists,
environmentalists and enlightened politicians are from Venus. ExxonMobil
is busy spending $40 billion this year searching in the remotest parts of
the globe—Banyu Urip, anyone?—for new sources of fossil fuel. And it
continues to rake in the dough: in 2014, ExxonMobil is expected to
generate EBITDA (Wall Street jargon for the amount of cash a company
generates annually) of around $80 billion, enjoying a whopping 19 percent
profit margin (based on a consensus revenue estimate of around $430
billion) and an astounding annualized return on equity of nearly 20
percent. In other words, Big Oil remains incredibly profitable. For Big
Oil, it’s simply business as usual. In late September, Rosneft, the
Russian oil giant, announced that its joint venture with ExxonMobil in the
Arctic has discovered a major cache of oil and gas.
- * * *
- Like Lee
Raymond, his hard-charging predecessor, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has
become the embodiment of Big Oil. Tillerson grew up in rural Texas and
Oklahoma. He is a proud Eagle Scout, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is his
favorite book. After receiving his civil-engineering degree from the
University of Texas, Tillerson joined Exxon and never left. In 2006, at
53, he became CEO. According to Private Empire, he brought to the top job
a more nuanced view of climate change. Whereas Raymond was essentially a
climate-change denier, Tillerson has been willing to throw Exxon’s
considerable financial resources into studying the issue, lobbying
Congress and trying to communicate more diplomatically. “But the essential
convictions and the business model haven’t changed,” Coll said. In fact,
Tillerson has made few concessions on the subject of climate change.
- Tillerson
rarely grants one-on-one interviews with journalists—he declined my
repeated requests—but occasionally he will appear in a comfortable forum.
One such moment occurred in June 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR) in Manhattan. Tillerson came ostensibly to trumpet that, thanks to
the newly rediscovered wonders of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the
country was awash in natural gas, of which ExxonMobil was the largest
domestic producer (owing to the $35 billion acquisition of XTO Energy that
Tillerson engineered in 2010). This was before the world had been clued in
fully that the United States was on the verge, as Tillerson described it,
of “energy security.” It was, he said, “nothing short of extraordinary.”
(In October, the United States passed Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest
producer of liquid petroleum, and that new dynamic has sent OPEC into some
unexpected turmoil.)
- Tillerson
then addressed his critics. “Ours is an industry that is built on
technology, it’s built on science, it’s built on engineering, and because
we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas—science,
math and engineering—what we do is a mystery to them, and they find it
scary,” he said. “And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for
opponents of development—activist organizations—to manufacture fear. And
so as these technologies emerge, we know the immediate response from
certain…interested parties out there is going to be to manufacture fear,
because that’s how you slow this down. And nowhere is it more effective
than in the United States.”
- During
the question period, David Fenton, the founder of the public relations
firm Fenton Communications, asked Tillerson about the effects of burning
fossil fuels on the environment. “The seas will rise, the coastlines will
be unstable for generations, the price of food will go crazy,” Fenton
said. “This is what we face, and we all know it…. [If] we burn all these
reserves that you talked about, you can kiss future generations goodbye.”
- Tillerson
was unimpressed. He said the scientific models that spit out such
conclusions were flawed, so the ability to predict “with any accuracy” the
impact of carbon emissions on the climate “is really pretty limited.” He
did concede that continuing to burn carbon would “have a warming impact”
on the planet, but he didn’t believe anyone could say how much. Then he
added something extraordinary: the solution to the unknown impact of
climate change was merely one of “adapting” to new circumstances. “As
human beings…we have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we will
adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem, and it has
engineering solutions. The fear factor that people want to throw out
there, to say ‘We just have to stop this,’ I do not accept.”
- Six
months after Tillerson spoke at the CFR, John Watson, the chairman and CEO
of Chevron, showed up there, too. Much of the East Coast was still reeling
from the near-catastrophic consequences of Hurricane Sandy, the size and
scope of which many environmentalists blamed on climate change. Indeed, a
new World Meteorological Organization report found that in the 2000s,
there were nearly 3,500 natural disasters from floods, storms, droughts
and extreme temperatures—almost five times the number of such disasters
reported in the 1970s. Watson echoed Tillerson’s observation that the
United States was increasingly energy-secure and called it a
“once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
- Watson
said the “best estimates” for the next “twenty or thirty years” were that
“we’re still going to be deriving 70 percent to 80 percent of our energy
from fossil fuels,” despite the remarkable progress made in the use of
renewables. Was there nothing that could be done? moderator Alan Murray
wondered. “There’s nothing you can do about it if you want light, heat,
mobility and affordable energy,” Watson replied.
- Fenton
was in the audience that day, too. Again he asked what a Big Oil CEO
intended to do to slow the warming of the planet. Like Tillerson, Watson
was unmoved. “We have a long way to go before we can replace the current
forms of energy that we have today with affordable versions that are less
carbon-intensive,” Watson said.
- * * *
- If there
was any remaining doubt that Big Oil cannot be shamed into reducing the
hunt for, and burning of, fossil fuels, it was pretty much erased with the
recent release—courtesy of The New York Times—of a transcript made of a
private speech given by Richard Berman, an influential political
consultant, to the Western Energy Alliance’s annual meeting this past June
in Colorado Springs. Berman, the founder and CEO of the Washington-based
Berman and Co., was hoping Big Oil would help fund a $3 million
public-relations campaign against what he called “Big Green Radicals.” The
subject of his presentation was “Big Green Radicals: Exposing
Environmental Groups.”
- In his
talk, Berman described the fight against environmentalists as “an endless
war” that could only be won by appealing to people’s emotions—fear, love,
anger, greed and sympathy—rather than to their rational thought. (“FLAGS”
is Berman’s self-styled acronym for this strategy.) “Fear and anger have
to be part of this campaign,” he told his audience. “If you want to win,
that’s what we’re going to do. We’re not going to get people to like the
oil and gas industry over the next few months…. What you got to do is get
people fearful of what is on the table, and then you got to get people
angry over the fact that they are being misled. No one likes being lied
to. No one likes being told, ‘Oh, this won’t hurt.’ And so that is central
to the messaging campaign going forward.” Berman said that green groups
are well funded and are not going away anytime soon. “They are in the
business to change laws,” he continued. “And you change laws by changing
people’s behavior. You change laws by changing people’s attitudes, which
in turn is followed by legislators changing their opinion. So think of it
as an endless war. And you have to budget for it.”
- Environmentalists
are waging their side of this war with vastly fewer resources than Big Oil
commands, but with an increasingly diverse arsenal of tactics. As Berman
implicitly concedes, climate campaigners have had some impact on public
awareness, even though that has not translated yet into political gains.
And for activists like Marcie Smith of the Responsible Endowments
Coalition, divestment is more about turning fossil-fuel companies into
social pariahs than it is about depressing their stock price. “It’s about
sending a political signal that the fossil-fuel industry’s environmentally
destructive and politically corrupt business practices are no longer
tolerated,” she said.
- Taking on
Big Oil also requires venturing onto its economic terrain. One
environmentalist who has done so is Mark Campanale, a former money manager
and the founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based
nonprofit. To get Big Oil to ‘fess up about the magnitude of its “stranded
assets,” Campanale has encouraged activist investors to put resolutions on
shareholder ballots during the spring corporate proxy season. It’s a
clever tactic born of Campanale’s finance background. But like the
“stranded assets” argument generally, it has met with only modest success.
- In
October 2013, with Campanale’s help, Ceres, a nonprofit environmental and
shareholder activist organization, corralled seventy institutional
investors with some $3 trillion of assets under management to demand that
Big Oil come clean about the fossil-fuel assets that it might never be
able to turn into cash. “We would like to understand ExxonMobil’s reserve
exposure to the risks associated with current and probable future policies
for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050,” the
investors wrote to Tillerson. The activists wanted a resolution in
ExxonMobil’s May 2014 proxy requiring the company to prepare a report, by
September 2014, to address the “stranded assets” dilemma.
- That’s
the last thing Tillerson wanted, of course. And thus began an arduous
negotiation. On March 20, the two sides announced a compromise: ExxonMobil
would release its first-ever public assessment of the risks to its balance
sheet of the “stranded assets,” and the activists would withdraw their
resolution. The environmentalists crowed. “I think Exxon coming to the
table…was incredibly important because, just a few short years ago, Exxon
had been a climate denier,” explained Danielle Fugere, the president and
chief counsel of As You Sow, an environmental activist organization.
- But it
seemed like a Pyrrhic victory, at best. Some would say that Tillerson
snookered them. ExxonMobil’s thirty-page report was nothing more than a
defense of the status quo and a rehash of much of what Tillerson had said
two years earlier at the CFR. The company did not believe it was sitting
on any stranded “hydrocarbon reserves,” nor did it believe any would
become stranded. On the contrary, Tillerson argued, burning as much fossil
fuel as possible was the key to lifting billions of people out of economic
hardship and helping them achieve a better life.
- Please
support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
- To
accompany this narrative, the report had two sets of photos: one
contrasted a man plowing a field using yoked oxen with a farmer driving a
big industrial tractor; the other contrasted a bent-over woman, dressed in
primitive garb and feeding sticks into a wood fire outside her mud hut,
with an Asian woman and her daughter heating a meal in stainless-steel
pots on a stove in a spotless kitchen.
- ExxonMobil
did acknowledge that there was “always the possibility that government
action”—in the form of a carbon tax, a “cap and trade” regulation or a
“carbon capture” plan where carbon emissions are buried underground—“may
impact the company,” but it dismissed as “highly unlikely” any chance of
new laws or regulations that would prevent its proven reserves from being
burned. That kind of reform seems even less likely to happen in the 114th
Congress, which begins in January. The company cited its own studies as
finding that the “world will require all the carbon-based energy that
ExxonMobil plans to produce”—35 percent more in 2040 than in 2010—and that
it did not “anticipate society being able to supplant traditional
carbon-based forms of energy with other energy forms, such as renewables,
to the extent needed to meet this carbon budget.”
- ExxonMobil
is not alone in this view. Also in response to activist pressure, Royal
Dutch Shell on May 16 produced a twenty-page letter that managed the
intellectual jujitsu of seeming to acknowledge the climate conundrum while
making it clear that Shell—like Exxon—would have no stranded assets,
adding: “There is a risk that focusing on ‘stranded assets’ or the concept
of the ‘carbon bubble’ distracts attention away from the reality of a
growing population, increasing prosperity and growing energy demand.” The
message from Big Oil seemed to be, in the words of environmental writer
Mark Hertsgaard, “You don’t think we’re going to burn this? Just watch
us.”
- Even
though it sure seemed that ExxonMobil had extended a large middle finger
to the environmental activists, they did not necessarily see it. “This is
a behemoth corporation and, at the very least, they’ve acknowledged the
issue of climate-change risk,” said Natasha Lamb at Arjuna Capital. “In my
estimation, ExxonMobil was not giving us the finger. It was giving global
government the finger [by] saying, ‘You’re not going to do anything about
this risk, so we can sit pat.’” Fugere, at As You Sow, said she found the
proxy exercise illuminating, if only to prove definitively that ExxonMobil
will not be swayed. “They believe that the demand for fossil fuel will
increase; that’s an incredibly important perspective,” she said. “They are
creating a fiction.” Undaunted, Lamb and Fugere proposed a new resolution
for ExxonMobil’s 2015 proxy: that the company commit to increasing the
amount of capital it returns to shareholders through stock buy-backs and
dividends, instead of spending the money on increasingly costly
fossil-fuel exploration.
- Of
course, divestiture is the easiest step for an investor if he or she no
longer believes a stock will make money; just sell the stock and be done.
McKibben and former vice president Al Gore have been leading advocates of
large endowments and pension funds divesting themselves of Big Oil stocks.
In September, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—built, in part, on the wealth
of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of what has become
ExxonMobil—said it would begin immediately divesting the stocks it owns in
coal and tar-sands companies and then, eventually, in all fossil-fuel
companies. “The divestment movement will continue to grow very, very
quickly,” McKibben said, “and I think as it does, it’ll be one of the
several things that’s putting pressure on the political system to shift.”
He is particularly heartened by the University of Dayton’s June
announcement that it would eliminate fossil-fuel stocks from its $670
million endowment. “It’s a good indication, I think, of which way the
world is going,” he said. In Stockholm to accept an award on December 1,
McKibben asked the city to sell its fossil-fuel stocks.
- But there
are big hurdles for the divestiture movement. For starters, at a price
equal to just less than five times its estimated 2014 EBITDA of $80
billion, ExxonMobil’s stock is cheap, making it attractive to
institutional investors, particularly in an overheated market. Google, by
contrast, trades at around fourteen times its estimated 2014 EBITDA. None
of the twenty-four research analysts who cover ExxonMobil have “sell”
recommendations on its stock—about par for the course on Wall Street,
where the big banks depend on corporations for fees and are loath to urge
investors to dump their securities, especially when they appear to be
cheap. And this is despite a 40 percent drop since June in the market
price of a barrel of crude oil.
- At
ExxonMobil’s annual research analysts’ meeting, held in March at the New
York Stock Exchange, there was not a single mention of the words “stranded
assets” or “carbon bubble.” One questioner noted that many of the
company’s new capital expenditures seem to be for projects that are
getting harder to do. But Tillerson swatted away this concern deftly.
- Still,
the activists remain hopeful their divestiture message is gaining
traction. McKibben and others point to Stanford University’s decision in
May to sell off the coal stocks in its $18 billion endowment. But, in
truth, this was a minor concession on Stanford’s part, amounting to a
couple of million dollars. (Stanford made no mention of divesting oil and
gas stocks, or of ExxonMobil’s 2002 pledge of $100 million—out of a
projected $225 million budget—to create the Global Climate and Energy
Project at the university.) And the mighty Harvard, with an endowment of
$36 billion, won’t even go that far. In a statement issued in October
2013, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said she preferred “engagement”
with the Big Oil companies to divestment. “We should think about how we
might use our voice not to ostracize such companies but to encourage them to
be a positive force both in meeting society’s long-term energy needs while
addressing pressing environmental imperatives,” she wrote, in delicious
corporate-speak.
- Campanale,
at Carbon Tracker, said he understands the dilemma supposedly faced by
large institutional investors, which insist that divestiture, for them, is
not as simple as just selling stock. So-called passive fund managers feel
constrained to buy fossil-fuel stocks because these companies are a big
part of the world economy, and it can be unwise, professionally, to leave
them out of a portfolio. “If you do, you’ll ultimately lose your
investors’ money, so it’s better just to run with the herd,” he said of
their thinking. But while Campanale is sympathetic to these concerns, he
remains unbowed: “It’s irrational to invest in more fossil fuels, knowing
that we’ve got enough already invested to burn the planet.”
- * * *
- After the
November 2014 election, Ceres, the environmental group that works with
Carbon Tracker, lamented that while GOP control of Congress “will
certainly have consequences,” the more important development from the
group’s perspective was the release of a report by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change that demanded “substantial emissions reductions
over the next few decades and near zero emissions of CO2 and other
long-lived [greenhouse gases] by the end of the century” and urged a
complete phasing out of fossil fuels in favor of “clean energy.” Ceres
sees a huge opportunity for investors. “The inevitable and necessary shift…will
unleash innovation and create multitrillion-dollar investment
opportunities,” wrote Christopher Fox, director of special projects, in a
recent blog post. “At the same time, this essential shift will create
risks for any current and future investments in fossil fuels.”
- There’s
no denying anymore that we have been thoroughly warned about the dangers
of continuing to burn fossil fuels. The problem is that it’s increasingly
hard to believe that Big Oil won’t get its way. “The Exxons of the world
have all the money,” McKibben allows. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think
we’re going to win.” He worries that we’re running out of time, though,
and points to the “massive and irrevocable” melting of the West Antarctic
ice sheet. “That’s Exxon’s gift so far to the planet,” he says. “I don’t
know whether we can stop them in time or not, but we’re definitely putting
a dent in everyone’s understanding of the future.”
- Mark
Hertsgaard believes that winning this fight requires raw political power.
Every one of the successful social movements in this country started with
political protest. Mere resolutions on corporate proxy statements are
insufficient. “It’s not like we don’t have enough policy proposals,” he
concludes. “It’s not like we don’t have enough legal advocates or inside
players in Washington, DC. That is not the problem. The problem is that
there is no political power behind that, and in order to get the
government to make Exxon leave that stuff in the ground, to really leave
two-thirds in the ground—that’s going to take political power and not a
bunch of shiny reports.”
-
- Read
Next: Dan Zegart has an idea. “Want to Stop Climate Change? Take the
Fossil Fuel Industry to Court.”
- William
D. Cohan
- December
10, 2014 | This article appeared in the December 29, 2014
edition of The Nation.
·
The Great Invisible review: an eloquent
return to Deepwater Horizon
4/5stars
Though at its heart a work of advocacy, this documentary about the
aftermath of BP’s disastrous oil spill is nuanced and cinematic
A hydraulic fracturing operation near Mead, Colorado (AP
Photo/Brennan Linsley)
A
growing and powerful Greek chorus—composed of activists, environmentalists,
billionaires, former Goldman Sachs partners, former Goldman Sachs partners who
are also former Treasury secretaries, and a former vice president of the United
States—has been sounding an urgent message to the world: Big Oil companies
cannot, and must not, sell the vast fossil-fuel reserves they have spent
billions of dollars finding, digging up and refining. These voices warn that if
ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell are allowed to burn all their carbon, the
planet’s temperature will rise beyond the 2-degrees-Celsius threshold that, a
consensus of scientists holds, is the tipping point to environmental
Armageddon. In economic terms, this means we can have either a safe planet or
an ExxonMobil worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but we can’t have both.
Nothing less than Earth’s future is at stake.
In
June, that chorus seemed to find an important ally: President Obama. In an
interview on Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously, Obama
told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that Big Oil
must leave two-thirds of its fossil fuel in the ground. “We’re not going to be
able to burn it all,” Obama said.
There’s
just one problem: Big Oil doesn’t agree. On the contrary, Big Oil wants to burn
all of the fossil fuel it has found, and then some. It doesn’t want anyone
telling it what it can and cannot do. Indeed, there is increasingly a sense
that the latest efforts of the environmentalists—including the worldwide
People’s Climate March in September—are desperate ones, reflecting political
impotence in the face of an intransigent Congress. “The climate movement is
choosing these narratives not because they are objectively the best way to
describe the problem,” said Steve Coll, the author of Private Empire, the
definitive book on the history of ExxonMobil. “It’s because they are the best
way to describe the problem in the absence of comprehensive legislation to
actually fix the problem, which they can’t achieve in the United States.”
That
political reality just got a whole lot worse, too, in the wake of the midterm
elections, when lawmakers deep inside Big Oil’s pockets swept further into
power. Caught in a moment of seeming ennui a few days later, Bill McKibben, the
Middlebury College professor and 350.org leader, was at something of a loss to
describe exactly how the movement presses on from here. “My guess is [the
election] means we need to really push outside the formal political system, so
things like divestment become even more critical,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That
said, we’re already working as hard on it as we know how to.” On December 2,
McKibben resigned as the chair of 350.org. His interim successor, K.C. Golden,
reached by phone, acknowledged there is “a yawning gap” between what is morally
and ethically the right thing to do on the environment and “what the political
system is able to deliver.” Nevertheless, he argues that “a lot of things are
moving in the right direction.” Divestiture, he says, is one of them: “It’s one
step at a time. Divestment gives every person, every institution, every pension
fund the opportunity to take control and do something positive.”
* * *
Big
oil companies have made no secret of their belief that they can have it all:
both a huge market valuation and a planet that suffers no catastrophic effects
from climate change. For the record, ExxonMobil is the world’s
second-most-valuable company (trailing distantly behind Apple), and its
AAA-rated bonds are yielding only slightly more than similar-duration Treasury
securities, suggesting that creditors are not the slightest bit worried about a
default or a write-down of the value of the so-called stranded assets—oil and
gas that ExxonMobil has found but that environmentalists hope will never be
sold. “They’re some of the biggest political players on Earth, and they have
enormous clout,” McKibben said of Big Oil. “So they will use that clout to try
and ensure that they’re allowed to burn everything they’ve got, and there’s all
this stuff they continue to look for every day.”
In
truth, Big Oil seems more or less indifferent to the political and media
commotion. It’s as if Big Oil is from Mars and the scientists,
environmentalists and enlightened politicians are from Venus. ExxonMobil is
busy spending $40 billion this year searching in the remotest parts of the
globe—Banyu Urip, anyone?—for new sources of fossil fuel. And it continues to
rake in the dough: in 2014, ExxonMobil is expected to generate EBITDA (Wall
Street jargon for the amount of cash a company generates annually) of around
$80 billion, enjoying a whopping 19 percent profit margin (based on a consensus
revenue estimate of around $430 billion) and an astounding annualized return on
equity of nearly 20 percent. In other words, Big Oil remains incredibly
profitable. For Big Oil, it’s simply business as usual. In late September,
Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, announced that its joint venture with
ExxonMobil in the Arctic has discovered a major cache of oil and gas.
* * *
Like
Lee Raymond, his hard-charging predecessor, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson has
become the embodiment of Big Oil. Tillerson grew up in rural Texas and
Oklahoma. He is a proud Eagle Scout, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is
his favorite book. After receiving his civil-engineering degree from the
University of Texas, Tillerson joined Exxon and never left. In 2006, at 53, he
became CEO. According to Private Empire, he brought to the top job
a more nuanced view of climate change. Whereas Raymond was essentially a
climate-change denier, Tillerson has been willing to throw Exxon’s considerable
financial resources into studying the issue, lobbying Congress and trying to
communicate more diplomatically. “But the essential convictions and the
business model haven’t changed,” Coll said. In fact, Tillerson has made few concessions
on the subject of climate change.
Tillerson
rarely grants one-on-one interviews with journalists—he declined my repeated
requests—but occasionally he will appear in a comfortable forum. One such
moment occurred in June 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in
Manhattan. Tillerson came ostensibly to trumpet that, thanks to the newly
rediscovered wonders of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the country was
awash in natural gas, of which ExxonMobil was the largest domestic producer
(owing to the $35 billion acquisition of XTO Energy that Tillerson engineered
in 2010). This was before the world had been clued in fully that the United
States was on the verge, as Tillerson described it, of “energy security.” It
was, he said, “nothing short of extraordinary.” (In October, the United States
passed Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of liquid petroleum, and
that new dynamic has sent OPEC into some unexpected turmoil.)
Tillerson
then addressed his critics. “Ours is an industry that is built on technology,
it’s built on science, it’s built on engineering, and because we have a society
that by and large is illiterate in these areas—science, math and
engineering—what we do is a mystery to them, and they find it scary,” he said.
“And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of
development—activist organizations—to manufacture fear. And so as these
technologies emerge, we know the immediate response from certain…interested
parties out there is going to be to manufacture fear, because that’s how you
slow this down. And nowhere is it more effective than in the United States.”
During
the question period, David Fenton, the founder of the public relations firm
Fenton Communications, asked Tillerson about the effects of burning fossil
fuels on the environment. “The seas will rise, the coastlines will be unstable
for generations, the price of food will go crazy,” Fenton said. “This is what
we face, and we all know it…. [If] we burn all these reserves that you talked
about, you can kiss future generations goodbye.”
Tillerson
was unimpressed. He said the scientific models that spit out such conclusions
were flawed, so the ability to predict “with any accuracy” the impact of carbon
emissions on the climate “is really pretty limited.” He did concede that
continuing to burn carbon would “have a warming impact” on the planet, but he
didn’t believe anyone could say how much. Then he added something
extraordinary: the solution to the unknown impact of climate change was merely
one of “adapting” to new circumstances. “As human beings…we have spent our
entire existence adapting, OK? So we will adapt to this,” he said. “It’s an
engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions. The fear factor that
people want to throw out there, to say ‘We just have to stop this,’ I do not
accept.”
Six
months after Tillerson spoke at the CFR, John Watson, the chairman and CEO of
Chevron, showed up there, too. Much of the East Coast was still reeling from
the near-catastrophic consequences of Hurricane Sandy, the size and scope of
which many environmentalists blamed on climate change. Indeed, a new World
Meteorological Organization report found that in the 2000s, there were nearly
3,500 natural disasters from floods, storms, droughts and extreme
temperatures—almost five times the number of such disasters reported in the
1970s. Watson echoed Tillerson’s observation that the United States was
increasingly energy-secure and called it a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”
Watson
said the “best estimates” for the next “twenty or thirty years” were that
“we’re still going to be deriving 70 percent to 80 percent of our energy from
fossil fuels,” despite the remarkable progress made in the use of renewables.
Was there nothing that could be done? moderator Alan Murray wondered. “There’s
nothing you can do about it if you want light, heat, mobility and affordable
energy,” Watson replied.
Fenton
was in the audience that day, too. Again he asked what a Big Oil CEO intended
to do to slow the warming of the planet. Like Tillerson, Watson was unmoved.
“We have a long way to go before we can replace the current forms of energy
that we have today with affordable versions that are less carbon-intensive,”
Watson said.
* * *
If
there was any remaining doubt that Big Oil cannot be shamed into reducing the
hunt for, and burning of, fossil fuels, it was pretty much erased with the
recent release—courtesy of The New York Times—of a transcript made
of a private speech given by Richard Berman, an influential political
consultant, to the Western Energy Alliance’s annual meeting this past June in
Colorado Springs. Berman, the founder and CEO of the Washington-based Berman
and Co., was hoping Big Oil would help fund a $3 million public-relations
campaign against what he called “Big Green Radicals.” The subject of his
presentation was “Big Green Radicals: Exposing Environmental Groups.”
In
his talk, Berman described the fight against environmentalists as “an endless
war” that could only be won by appealing to people’s emotions—fear, love,
anger, greed and sympathy—rather than to their rational thought. (“FLAGS” is
Berman’s self-styled acronym for this strategy.) “Fear and anger have to be
part of this campaign,” he told his audience. “If you want to win, that’s what
we’re going to do. We’re not going to get people to like the oil and gas
industry over the next few months…. What you got to do is get people fearful of
what is on the table, and then you got to get people angry over the fact that
they are being misled. No one likes being lied to. No one likes being told,
‘Oh, this won’t hurt.’ And so that is central to the messaging campaign going
forward.” Berman said that green groups are well funded and are not going away
anytime soon. “They are in the business to change laws,” he continued. “And you
change laws by changing people’s behavior. You change laws by changing people’s
attitudes, which in turn is followed by legislators changing their opinion. So
think of it as an endless war. And you have to budget for it.”
Environmentalists
are waging their side of this war with vastly fewer resources than Big Oil
commands, but with an increasingly diverse arsenal of tactics. As Berman
implicitly concedes, climate campaigners have had some impact on public
awareness, even though that has not translated yet into political gains. And
for activists like Marcie Smith of the Responsible Endowments Coalition,
divestment is more about turning fossil-fuel companies into social pariahs than
it is about depressing their stock price. “It’s about sending a political
signal that the fossil-fuel industry’s environmentally destructive and
politically corrupt business practices are no longer tolerated,” she said.
Taking
on Big Oil also requires venturing onto its economic terrain. One
environmentalist who has done so is Mark Campanale, a former money manager and
the founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based nonprofit. To get
Big Oil to ‘fess up about the magnitude of its “stranded assets,” Campanale has
encouraged activist investors to put resolutions on shareholder ballots during
the spring corporate proxy season. It’s a clever tactic born of Campanale’s
finance background. But like the “stranded assets” argument generally, it has
met with only modest success.
In
October 2013, with Campanale’s help, Ceres, a nonprofit environmental and
shareholder activist organization, corralled seventy institutional investors
with some $3 trillion of assets under management to demand that Big Oil come
clean about the fossil-fuel assets that it might never be able to turn into cash.
“We would like to understand ExxonMobil’s reserve exposure to the risks
associated with current and probable future policies for reducing greenhouse
gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050,” the investors wrote to Tillerson. The
activists wanted a resolution in ExxonMobil’s May 2014 proxy requiring the
company to prepare a report, by September 2014, to address the “stranded
assets” dilemma.
That’s
the last thing Tillerson wanted, of course. And thus began an arduous
negotiation. On March 20, the two sides announced a compromise: ExxonMobil
would release its first-ever public assessment of the risks to its balance
sheet of the “stranded assets,” and the activists would withdraw their
resolution. The environmentalists crowed. “I think Exxon coming to the table…was
incredibly important because, just a few short years ago, Exxon had been a
climate denier,” explained Danielle Fugere, the president and chief counsel of
As You Sow, an environmental activist organization.
But
it seemed like a Pyrrhic victory, at best. Some would say that Tillerson
snookered them. ExxonMobil’s thirty-page report was nothing more than a defense
of the status quo and a rehash of much of what Tillerson had said two years
earlier at the CFR. The company did not believe it was sitting on any stranded
“hydrocarbon reserves,” nor did it believe any would become stranded. On the
contrary, Tillerson argued, burning as much fossil fuel as possible was the key
to lifting billions of people out of economic hardship and helping them achieve
a better life.
To
accompany this narrative, the report had two sets of photos: one contrasted a
man plowing a field using yoked oxen with a farmer driving a big industrial
tractor; the other contrasted a bent-over woman, dressed in primitive garb and
feeding sticks into a wood fire outside her mud hut, with an Asian woman and
her daughter heating a meal in stainless-steel pots on a stove in a spotless
kitchen.
ExxonMobil
did acknowledge that there was “always the possibility that government
action”—in the form of a carbon tax, a “cap and trade” regulation or a “carbon
capture” plan where carbon emissions are buried underground—“may impact the
company,” but it dismissed as “highly unlikely” any chance of new laws or
regulations that would prevent its proven reserves from being burned. That kind
of reform seems even less likely to happen in the 114th Congress, which begins
in January. The company cited its own studies as finding that the “world will
require all the carbon-based energy that ExxonMobil plans to produce”—35
percent more in 2040 than in 2010—and that it did not “anticipate society being
able to supplant traditional carbon-based forms of energy with other energy
forms, such as renewables, to the extent needed to meet this carbon budget.”
ExxonMobil
is not alone in this view. Also in response to activist pressure, Royal Dutch
Shell on May 16 produced a twenty-page letter that managed the intellectual
jujitsu of seeming to acknowledge the climate conundrum while making it clear
that Shell—like Exxon—would have no stranded assets, adding: “There is a risk
that focusing on ‘stranded assets’ or the concept of the ‘carbon bubble’
distracts attention away from the reality of a growing population, increasing
prosperity and growing energy demand.” The message from Big Oil seemed to be,
in the words of environmental writer Mark Hertsgaard, “You don’t think we’re
going to burn this? Just watch us.”
Even
though it sure seemed that ExxonMobil had extended a large middle finger to the
environmental activists, they did not necessarily see it. “This is a behemoth
corporation and, at the very least, they’ve acknowledged the issue of
climate-change risk,” said Natasha Lamb at Arjuna Capital. “In my estimation,
ExxonMobil was not giving us the finger. It was giving global government the
finger [by] saying, ‘You’re not going to do anything about this risk, so we can
sit pat.’” Fugere, at As You Sow, said she found the proxy exercise
illuminating, if only to prove definitively that ExxonMobil will not be swayed.
“They believe that the demand for fossil fuel will increase; that’s an incredibly
important perspective,” she said. “They are creating a fiction.” Undaunted,
Lamb and Fugere proposed a new resolution for ExxonMobil’s 2015 proxy: that the
company commit to increasing the amount of capital it returns to shareholders
through stock buy-backs and dividends, instead of spending the money on
increasingly costly fossil-fuel exploration.
Of
course, divestiture is the easiest step for an investor if he or she no longer
believes a stock will make money; just sell the stock and be done. McKibben and
former vice president Al Gore have been leading advocates of large endowments
and pension funds divesting themselves of Big Oil stocks. In September, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund—built, in part, on the wealth of the heirs of John D.
Rockefeller, the founder of what has become ExxonMobil—said it would begin
immediately divesting the stocks it owns in coal and tar-sands companies and
then, eventually, in all fossil-fuel companies. “The divestment movement will
continue to grow very, very quickly,” McKibben said, “and I think as it does,
it’ll be one of the several things that’s putting pressure on the political
system to shift.” He is particularly heartened by the University of Dayton’s
June announcement that it would eliminate fossil-fuel stocks from its $670
million endowment. “It’s a good indication, I think, of which way the world is
going,” he said. In Stockholm to accept an award on December 1, McKibben asked
the city to sell its fossil-fuel stocks.
But
there are big hurdles for the divestiture movement. For starters, at a price
equal to just less than five times its estimated 2014 EBITDA of $80 billion,
ExxonMobil’s stock is cheap, making it attractive to institutional investors,
particularly in an overheated market. Google, by contrast, trades at around
fourteen times its estimated 2014 EBITDA. None of the twenty-four research
analysts who cover ExxonMobil have “sell” recommendations on its stock—about
par for the course on Wall Street, where the big banks depend on corporations
for fees and are loath to urge investors to dump their securities, especially
when they appear to be cheap. And this is despite a 40 percent drop since June
in the market price of a barrel of crude oil.
At
ExxonMobil’s annual research analysts’ meeting, held in March at the New York
Stock Exchange, there was not a single mention of the words “stranded assets”
or “carbon bubble.” One questioner noted that many of the company’s new capital
expenditures seem to be for projects that are getting harder to do. But
Tillerson swatted away this concern deftly.
Still,
the activists remain hopeful their divestiture message is gaining traction.
McKibben and others point to Stanford University’s decision in May to sell off
the coal stocks in its $18 billion endowment. But, in truth, this was a minor
concession on Stanford’s part, amounting to a couple of million dollars.
(Stanford made no mention of divesting oil and gas stocks, or of ExxonMobil’s
2002 pledge of $100 million—out of a projected $225 million budget—to create
the Global Climate and Energy Project at the university.) And the mighty
Harvard, with an endowment of $36 billion, won’t even go that far. In a
statement issued in October 2013, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said she
preferred “engagement” with the Big Oil companies to divestment. “We should
think about how we might use our voice not to ostracize such companies but to
encourage them to be a positive force both in meeting society’s long-term
energy needs while addressing pressing environmental imperatives,” she wrote,
in delicious corporate-speak.
Campanale,
at Carbon Tracker, said he understands the dilemma supposedly faced by large
institutional investors, which insist that divestiture, for them, is not as
simple as just selling stock. So-called passive fund managers feel constrained
to buy fossil-fuel stocks because these companies are a big part of the world
economy, and it can be unwise, professionally, to leave them out of a
portfolio. “If you do, you’ll ultimately lose your investors’ money, so it’s
better just to run with the herd,” he said of their thinking. But while
Campanale is sympathetic to these concerns, he remains unbowed: “It’s
irrational to invest in more fossil fuels, knowing that we’ve got enough
already invested to burn the planet.”
* * *
After
the November 2014 election, Ceres, the environmental group that works with
Carbon Tracker, lamented that while GOP control of Congress “will certainly
have consequences,” the more important development from the group’s perspective
was the release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
that demanded “substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades and
near zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived [greenhouse gases] by the end
of the century” and urged a complete phasing out of fossil fuels in favor of
“clean energy.” Ceres sees a huge opportunity for investors. “The inevitable
and necessary shift…will unleash innovation and create multitrillion-dollar
investment opportunities,” wrote Christopher Fox, director of special projects,
in a recent blog post. “At the same time, this essential shift will create
risks for any current and future investments in fossil fuels.”
There’s
no denying anymore that we have been thoroughly warned about the dangers of
continuing to burn fossil fuels. The problem is that it’s increasingly hard to
believe that Big Oil won’t get its way. “The Exxons of the world have all the
money,” McKibben allows. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think we’re going to
win.” He worries that we’re running out of time, though, and points to the
“massive and irrevocable” melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. “That’s
Exxon’s gift so far to the planet,” he says. “I don’t know whether we can stop
them in time or not, but we’re definitely putting a dent in everyone’s understanding
of the future.”
Mark
Hertsgaard believes that winning this fight requires raw political power. Every
one of the successful social movements in this country started with political
protest. Mere resolutions on corporate proxy statements are insufficient. “It’s
not like we don’t have enough policy proposals,” he concludes. “It’s not like
we don’t have enough legal advocates or inside players in Washington, DC. That
is not the problem. The problem is that there is no political power behind
that, and in order to get the government to make Exxon leave that stuff in the
ground, to really leave two-thirds in the ground—that’s going to take political
power and not a bunch of shiny reports.”
Read
Next: Dan Zegart has an idea. “Want to Stop Climate Change? Take the Fossil Fuel
Industry to Court.”
Fire boat
response crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater
Horizon. Photograph: Reuters
Thursday
30 October 2014 18.00 EDT
“This is what you call
Hard Luck City,” says a man delivering groceries to families displaced to
makeshift trailers in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He’s a warm,
elderly, bon mot-spewing African American with a thick Alabama accent, and the
fact that his name is Roosevelt is a biting irony. These citizens, whose local
oyster shucking economy has been destroyed by the negligence of enormous
corporations inexorably tied to our government, are getting no New Deal.
As news cycles spin in seemingly ever-increasing velocity,
public outrage is like a chef at an enormous range, placing roiling pots on
backburners as the latest crisis comes along demanding attention. In early 2010
the nation was stunned, saddened and furious at BP and its subcontractors after
an accident killed 11 workers and spilled over 200m gallons of oil
into the Gulf of Mexico. “Something must be done!” shouted our
politicians and pundits. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that nothing
has been done. The Great Invisible is a reminder that the problem of offshore
drilling, and our energy policy in general, is still a bubbling pot.
expand
A brown pelican coated in
heavy oil off the coast of East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana, after the 2010
oil spill. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
The last thing we need is another shoddily produced,
finger-pointin’ issue-oriented documentary animated solely by indignation.
Thankfully, director Margaret Brown understands this. Despite
a few talking heads and the occasional reliance on graphics and maps, The Great
Invisible is a rebuke to the Alex
Gibney factory-style, information-dump doc. Shots are edited and
composed. Scenes play out, with subjects artistically lit and the camera
mounted on a tripod. It isn’t an immersion experience like, say, Leviathan, but shooting with good lenses,
hiring a composer like David Wingo and approaching editing like
a storyteller, not a pamphleteer, goes a long way in giving a signal boost to
your activist film.
Avoiding a direct A to B storyline, Brown offers a series of
tableaux, checking in on different strata of people touched by this tragedy in
different ways. She has a knack for finding fascinating subjects, like the
gabby shrimp peeler, an immigrant from Vietnam who has lived long enough in
bayou country to have the most unique accent you’ll hear in a movie this year.
The Great Invisible is, at its heart, a
work of advocacy. No one who owns stock in BP or any of the profits-thirsty,
corner-cutting third parties will feel too good about themselves while watching
grieving fathers talk about their dead sons. Or images of oil-drenched
pelicans. Or wealthy conventioneers literally laughing and smoking cigars as
they talk wistfully of the old days of even less government oversight.
But Brown puts some spin on the ball. She holds the scene (and
it really does feel like a scene, not fly-on-the-wall cinema vérité) until the
boozing oil men begin to deviate a bit from the script. These aren’t pig
caricatures from Eisenstein’s Strike – these are intelligent
men who are well aware that their work can have lasting environmental effects,
but is also fundamental to the US and therefore world economy. It may be
face-saving, but the implication is that they, too, would like to see change
but don’t really have the ability – and certainly not the incentive – to make
it happen.
A similarly difficult moment comes early in the film, as we root
around the Gulf communities reliant on offshore drilling for employment. Audio
of President Obama calling for a moratorium on new drilling – which common
sense says would seem welcome as poison is actively spewing into the sea around
them – is viewed as a malign government overreach. A sign on the road says that
Obama only wants to drill when it’s into your wallet. The litigator hired
by BP to oversee a $20bn payment fund (a
northerner by the name of Kenneth Feinberg) discusses how many refused to file
a claim due to mistrust, while others had no tax returns to prove their work in
fishing or other related industries was stunted by the spill. “We do things
with a handshake down here” is a cultural leap the suits aren’t ready to take.
Another direction the film looks is right in the lens. How
reliant are you on fossil fuels? The Great Invisible isn’t so
naïve as to think we should all just abandon our cars, nor expect Americans
suddenly to start paying European rates without uprooting the economy. Without
giving away the ending, and for a movie about a policy in limbo it actually has
something of an ending, it does conclude with something concrete to get angry
about. No spoilers, but it’s the government, stupid.
Characters weave in and out Brown’s film, and most striking is
the old volunteer Roosevelt. “Mr Rosie,” some call him, as he’s stretching
every dollar to boil cheap spaghetti and tomato sauce for 350 people. As the
corporations scheme to maximize profits from of the earth, the pesky
inhabitants still find a way to get by.
Noam
Chomsky Slams Canada 's Shale
Gas Energy Plans
Martin Lukacs, GuardianUK
Martin Lukacs, Guardian
Lukacs
reports: "Canada's rush to exploit its tar sands and shale gas resources
will destroy the environment 'as fast as possible,' according to Noam Chomsky.
In an interview with the Guardian, the linguist and author criticised the
energy policies of the Canadian government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper."
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What's
missing to solve climate change? Political Will
We’re
creating the political will for a livable world by empowering individuals to
experience breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power.
About
CCL
[OMNI collaborates with
CCL. Our strong committee is headed by Shelley
Buonaiuto (goodhelp@cybermesa.com ) with Dr.
Robert McAfee, Gladys Tiffany, et al.]
—
What is Carbon
Fee and Dividend? —
Citizens’
Climate Lobby proposes that a fee be placed on fossil fuels, based on the CO2
content of those fuels. Revenue from that fee would be returned to the public
as a monthly dividend to protect households from rising costs associated with
the carbon fee.
Learn
more about Carbon Fee and Dividend
Capitol-domeWant to know more about Citizens’
Climate Lobby?
Join
our intro call
Our
Next International Call
Jan.
10: David Hone, Climate Change Advisor
for Shell
David
Hone, Climate Advisor for Shell On our January call, we’ll discuss why
businesses should embrace carbon pricing with our guest David Hone, Climate
Change Advisor for Shell. He is also a board member of the International
Emissions Trading Association and also the Washington-based Center for Climate
and Energy Solutions (C2ES). Check out David’s blog, which includes recent
posts about the COP20 meeting in Lima.
Join
our next International Call
Latest
Tweets from Citizens' Climate Lobby
The
beef with beef: New diet guidelines might reflect environment cost
http://t.co/bMKdv7dzb0 #climate
3 hours ago
Great
op-ed in Fairbanks: RT @DRTucker: Alaska delegation should press #climate
solution http://t.co/BjD7VWnpB8 @lisamurkowski
5 hours ago
Be
a part of the #climate solution that benefits everyone. Don't miss our next intro
call! https://t.co/e4IPNs4XQx
18 hours ago
Understand
the facts: #Climate Change’s Evolving Role in Extreme Weather
http://t.co/QxGEXtfUJQ
20 hours ago
First
bill of the year has us on the edge of our seats! Senate panel to mark up
Keystone bill http://t.co/faUXLB7qEV #climate
22 hours ago
Things
get serious: Will #climate change kill off Pinot Noir? http://t.co/9rHJAXStcf
1 day ago
Follow
@citizensclimate
Latest
News from Citizens' Climate Lobby
Respect
is a Catalyst for Success
Respect
is a Catalyst for Success
Respect
is the most effective strategy for building up the possibility of effective
outcomes in regards to climate negotiations.
December
29, 2014
Gardner
should back revenue-neutral carbon fee
Gardner
should back revenue-neutral carbon fee
As
someone who prides himself on empowering people by getting government out of
the way and letting innovation and creativity thrive, Senator-elect Cory
Gardner should be solidly behind a revenue-neutral carbon fee.
December
26, 2014
Climate
Hike 2015: Spend time in a natural wonder while fundraising for CCL
Climate
Hike 2015: Spend time in a natural wonder while fundraising for CCL
The
first time I saw Glacier National Park (GNP), I thought to myself, “This must
be where nature goes to show off.”
December
22, 2014
In
June 2014, 600 volunteers went
to
Washington,DC to ask Congress
to
take action on climate change.
See
what happened
What
Others Are Saying
"The
Citizens' Climate Lobby has identified the issue of pricing carbon as a vitally
important lever in promoting dialog and action on climate protection. If you've
been looking for that one group to join, you can stop looking now."
Dr.
Daniel Kammen
Professor
- University of California, Berkeley
"Most
impressive is the work of Citizens' Climate Lobby...If you want to join the
fight to save the planet, to save creation for your grandchildren, there is no
more effective step you could take than becoming an active member of this
group."
Dr.
James Hansen
Climate
scientist and former head of the NASA Goddard Institute
"With
all the negative news on climate and Congress it's understandable to feel
discouraged. But hopelessness is not a
strategy for making a difference and neither is acting alone. Citizens' Climate Lobby is the antidote, the
missing link, the Harvard of citizen activism."
Sam
Daley-Harris
Founder,
RESULTS, Microcredit Summit Campaign, and the Center for Citizen Empowerment
and Transformation
What's
missing to stop global warming? Citizens like you. Get in the game. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
CCL
Community
Laser
Talks Home Page
Regional
Economic Model Report
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and Video
Monthly
Meetings and Actions
CCL
Regional Conferences
Citizens’
Climate Education Corp
Citizens'
Climate Lobby
1330
Orange Ave #300
Coronado,
CA 92118
gro.ybboletamilcsnezitic@lcc
Phone:
619-437-7142
Be social
ourchildrenstrust.org/
OUR
CHILDREN'S TRUST. We lead a game-changing, youth-driven,
global climate recovery campaign, securing the legal right to a healthy
atmosphere and ...
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Federal Lawsuit. Five individual teenagers, and two non-profit
...
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Our Team. Executive Director & Chief Legal Counsel. Julia
...
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We support youth in bringing legal action in courts,
administrative ...
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This film, "A Climate of TRUST", ... necessary for
climate ...
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We are adults, part of the ruling generation, and we care
about ...
|
Oregon TRUST plaintiff Kelsey Juliana talks with Bill Moyers
...
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Moyers
& Company, The Children's
Climate Crusade, Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s
Trust |
BillMoyers.com - 2 days ago
From the Web. Our
Children's Trust: Legal campaigns in your state · PRINT TRANSCRIPT ..
|
Students Rise Up to Fight Climate Change With
National Divestment Network
Dinah DeWald, Common Dreams
"The fossil fuel divestment movement is powerful, and marks a new phase in environmental and climate justice struggles ... Together, students have decided to fight this industry in our school communities, and support the work of others fighting this industry on all fronts."
READ MORE
Dinah DeWald, Common Dreams
"The fossil fuel divestment movement is powerful, and marks a new phase in environmental and climate justice struggles ... Together, students have decided to fight this industry in our school communities, and support the work of others fighting this industry on all fronts."
READ MORE
350.0RG DIVESTMENT
CAMPAIGN: MASS ACTIONS PETITIONS
Off to a great start!
\Dear friends,
Last week, we launched a new platform to help people organize
fossil fuel divestment campaigns in their communities.
We’ve been blown away by the
response: there are already almost 100 new divestment campaigns up and running
across the country! And that’s on top of the over 300
college and university campaigns currently underway.
We’re off to a great start, but if we’re going to make a real
impact on the fossil fuel industry, we need this campaign to grow even larger.
Getting started on a local campaign is simple:
·
Get a petition started so you can build your local group and
start showing your city, state, or religious institution that there’s public
support for divestment.
·
Set up a local meeting and email petition signers, your friends,
and local groups to get them involved.
·
Plan your campaign: we’ve got some great resources on the
website and our crew will be on hand to provide support every step of the way.
Your fellow organizers are already racking up some impressive
wins: the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee voted to divest this week, Vermont state-senators are hearing testimony in favor of
a divestment bill, and big moves are underway in San
Francisco , Seattle
Together, we’ve also started an exciting discussion about the
potential for sustainable reinvestment to help revitalize our economy while
protecting our environment (the $200 million your city might have invested in
the fossil fuel industry is a lot of money that could go towards energy
efficiency, new industries, and more).
And our local efforts are making a national impact. Politicians
have talked about divestment on the Senate floor, the New York Times ran a
front-page Business Section story on the campaign, and think-tanks and big
banks like HSBC are talking about downgrading fossil fuel stocks.
I just joined 350.org two months ago, and I’m amazed at how
much we’ve accomplished already. Now, we need to keep up the momentum. Your
local divestment campaign will make a big difference.
Onward,
Jay 350.org is
building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter,
and sign up for email alerts. You can help power
our work by getting involved locally, sharing your story, and donating here.
To
stop receiving emails from 350.org, click here.OIL CHANGE INTERNATIONAL
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7:54
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Dear friends,
Thank you so much. It’s great to be facing our biggest challenges in 2015 after receiving more support from more of you than ever before. Seriously, wow. On behalf of all of us at Oil Change International, we’re truly honored by and grateful for your support. We know that keeping our end of the bargain means delivering effective campaigns to identify and remove barriers to our clean energy future. We are working hard at doing just that. First up this year will be an old favorite, as the oil industry’s paid Representatives in Congress will be pressing forward on the Keystone XL pipeline this coming week. (Please try to contain your shock and surprise…) We’ve got some surprises planned for them though, so it should be an interesting week. More soon. Stay tuned by visiting our website, liking us onFacebook, or following us on Twitter Buckle up. :-) Best, Steve Kretzmann Executive Director Oil Change International |
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Oil Change International
campaigns to expose the true costs of
fossil fuels and facilitate the coming transition towards clean energy.
We are dedicated to identifying and overcoming barriers to that transition.
We are a 501c3 organization and
all donations are
fully tax deductible.
Check out our blog at PriceOfOil.org and
find out how much oil and coal money your Representatives take at DirtyEnergyMoney.com.
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US Capitalism #21, 12-28
US Chamber of Commerce #2, 12-21
UN Human Rights DAY #6, 12-15
Vegetarian Action #14, 12-10
Causes/Prevention of Wars #5, 11-30
Cuba #3, 11-29
Contents Oil
Fossil Fuels Newsletter #1
McKibben’s
Fossil Fuels Resistance, Article in Rolling
Stone
Removing
Industry Supports
Coalition-building:
Wilderness Society, End Tax Breaks and Subsidies
Finding
Money for Alternatives: Economic Conversions
History: ExxonMobil and Oil Culture
History:
Local Business as Usual in that Culture
More
Resistance:
Action
Toolkit
Books
and Articles on Oil
Local
Resisters: OMNI
350
Toni
Menninger
Contents Oil
Fossil Fuels Newsletter #2
Keystone
XL Protest in Oklahoma
Keystone
XL Protest State Department’s Study
350.org
Versus Keystone XL
McKibben’s
Bus Tour, Do the Math, Confronting the Industry
McKibben’s
Petition
Klare:
Extreme Oil
Hannah,
From “Good” to BAD Oil
END OIL NEWSLETTER #3
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