By Heather Smith
Last
year at this time I sat in a hotel lobby, surrounded by
multigenerational families digging into buffet dinners, and typed up my
predictions for how the rabblerousers of the environmental movement
would fare in 2014.
What did the future hold? Would Republicans
win control of the Senate, as they were so ardently planning to? Would
the activism that was migrating away from one big fight (Keystone XL)
dwindle once it dispersed out to smaller, more regional battles over
fossil fuel infrastructure like coal terminals? Would it ever rain in
California again?
Here are some things I was not expecting: the
way that Twitter — despite the fact that it is now a full-fledged
business beholden to its shareholders and the work of pulling in
advertising dollars — would play an even bigger role in activist
organizing. Certain messages — #yesallwomen, #blacklivesmatter,
#alivewhileblack, #iftheygunnedmedown — took issues that the media
initially passed over and kept them in the spotlight.
I was not
expecting a 300,000-plus person march in New York City, and I did not
expect to see coalition-building (or at least the early stages of it)
between environmental groups and civil rights groups. I was pleasantly
surprised to find that, when Naomi Klein’s new book came out, she did
not face a chorus shouting “Commie!” just for saying that capitalism
isn’t working out super well for everyone at the moment.
Here’s how it all unfolded, in a month-by-month breakdown.
January
The
pipeline formerly known as KXL South and now known as the less
controversial “Gulf Coast Pipeline” formally opens on Jan. 22, at 10:45
a.m., and begins pumping crude from Cushing, Okla., to refineries in
Texas. For those opposed to KXL, this is a huge bummer: Because the
pipeline doesn’t cross an international border, it doesn’t need
presidential approval — but somehow, Obama felt like approving it,
anyway.
With the pipeline built, the only thing to do is to
organize a pipeline watch in order to keep an eye out for leaks along
the route. “We know the reality,” says Kathy DaSilva of Nacogdoches,
Texas. “If we are not out watching, we are going to have a contaminated
aquifer. We’re going to have to police this ourselves and document it
ourselves.”
Also in January: the Final Supplemental Environmental
Impact Statement for the rest of Keystone XL is finally released — late
on a Friday, right before the Super Bowl. The report concludes that KXL
won’t make a difference to the climate or the environment — not because
getting tar-sands crude out of the ground and refining it is great for
the atmosphere (it isn’t), but because there is so much money to be made
from this resource that people will extract and sell it to someone,
even if they have to charter a damn limo to drive it across the Canadian
border.
February
Another
draft of the environmental chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP) trade agreement is leaked. It does not look good. But also, the
TPP — which would create trade alliances that could be used to weaken
environmental regulations within its many, many member countries —
appears to be fractious, and no closer to actual completion.
In
Nebraska, a district court rules in favor of Randy Thompson and two
other people whose property had been threatened by KXL — specifically,
by LB1161, which gave TransCanada eminent domain to build across their
property. To KXL’s opponents, this is an unexpected cupcake from the
sky: for complex reasons, the ruling effectively resets the clock on the
pipeline’s approval process.
March
398
college students from across the country stage a die-in on a fake oil
spill and lock themselves to the White House fence, then proceed to wait
for six hours, in the rain, to be arrested. The protest itself,
scrupulously organized by the group XL Dissent, is very much a creation
of the Homeland Security era. It is carefully coordinated with
Washington, D.C., police, which gave the students a discounted fine ($50
per protestor instead of the usual $100) but also demanded that they
use zip-ties to lock themselves to the White House fence if they didn’t
want to be charged with a felony.
In Canada, Enbridge wins
government approval for its plans for Line 9B, a 38-year-old pipeline
that Enbridge plans to expand and reverse the flow of. Like the ongoing
boom in oil-by-rail, Line 9B is a sign of the times. As new pipelines
(like KXL) hang in limbo, oil and gas companies skirt environmental
review and public scrutiny by expanding old networks and pumping crude
through existing pipelines.
Meanwhile, Carson City becomes the
first California municipality to ban oil drilling — at least
temporarily. The 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill rolls
around, bringing with it uncomfortable realizations that it is really
time to start considering tar-sands crude as “oil” in the eyes of the
law and taxing it accordingly, if we want to have any money in the Oil
Spill Liability Trust Fund.
April
A
group called the Cowboy & Indian Alliance travels all the way to
Washington, D.C., from pipeline country and occupies the National Mall
for a week. Right before they arrive, Obama again delays making a
decision on Keystone.
May
Detroit
— which is in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings, as well as an
unevenly distributed urban renaissance driven by a single billionaire —
begins shutting off water to customers who are behind paying their water
bills. A grassroots resistance against the shutoffs begins to develop,
composed of residents who argue that water is a human right and that an
income-based payment plan should be available to the city’s residents,
nearly half of whom live below the federal poverty line.
June
Climate
change unexpectedly becomes the big hot issue in several upcoming
Senate races, particularly the one between Rep. Gary Peters (D-Mich.)
and the Republican candidate, former Michigan Secretary of State Terri
Lynn Land. This is almost entirely due to a $100 million midterm attack
on climate change deniers in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Maine,
New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, organized by Tom Steyer’s NextGen
climate super PAC, which is itself responding to the Koch brothers’
super PAC, Americans for Prosperity.
The Obama administration
releases its new EPA rules. The federal Department of Transportation
grants oil-by-rail activists something they’ve long agitated for, and
issues an emergency order requiring that railroads tell state emergency
responders when and where they are routing trains full of highly
explosive Bakken crude. The railroads promptly turn around and try to
force state emergency responders to sign non-disclosure agreements
promising not to share the information with anyone else. The federal
government responds by declaring that public release of details about
oil-train routes and shipments do not pose a serious security risk.
Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper approves the Northern Gateway pipeline.
If Keystone XL was Plan A, Northern Gateway is Canada’s Plan B for
getting tar-sands crude to market.
The Wet’suwet’en — one of the
First Nations opposed to Northern Gateway — have already built and
occupied blockades along the proposed route. “We’ll just say ‘you don’t
have jurisdiction,’” Freda Huson, one of the nation’s leaders, tells the
Globe and Mail.
Later in June, the Supreme Court of Canada
resolves a three-decades old case raised by First Nations groups in
British Columbia about logging in their traditional hunting grounds. The
decision gives First Nations not only control over the land that they
live on, but the land where they hunt and fish — bad news for the
Northern Gateway pipeline.
Meanwhile, the environmentally
inclined billionaire boys’ club of Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and
Henry Paulson releases the “Risky Business” report, which states that
not fighting climate change will take out between $66 billion and $106
billion of coastal property in the U.S. alone.
A federal judge
blocks a coal mine expansion on public land in Colorado for what could
be a precedent-setting reason: failing to consider how that expansion
could exacerbate climate change. On June 29, TransCanada’s permit to
build the Keystone XL pipeline across South Dakota quietly expires,
making KXL look less and less like a done deal.
July
The
Iowa Supreme Court rules that utilities don’t have a leg to stand on
when they complain that solar panel startups are muscling them out of
their exclusive rights to sell electricity in an area. This ruling is
just one of many battles playing out across the country at the state and
local level. Washington state manages to lop $2,500 off the cost of
solar panels by streamlining the installation-approval process, while
other states like Florida and Wisconsin go in the opposite direction,
making solar more expensive and harder to obtain.
After
protesters block utility shut-off trucks and hold a giant march
featuring Mark Ruffalo, Detroit Water and Sewerage District (DWSD)
announces that it will stop shutting off people’s water, at least for
now. Another coal export terminal planned for the West Coast bites the
dust.
August
A
police officer shoots and kills Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old,
in Ferguson, Mo. Not, in itself, an unusual occurrence, sadly. Still,
something about Brown’s death really gets to people, especially after
Ferguson police respond to a candlelight vigil by dragging out an
eye-popping quantity of decommissioned military gear and proceeding to
arrest reporters, tear-gas peaceful protesters, and act like they are
putting on a summer stock theater production of Full Metal Jacket.
Activist networks that have been developing since the shooting of
Trayvon Martin, another unarmed teenager, two years earlier, begin to
converge on Ferguson.
The state of Oregon rules against another
coal terminal proposed for the Port of Morrow, and in Washington, the
Lummi people launch a protest that plans to bring together indigenous
tribes from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest for a unified front
against Big Coal and Big Oil.
On the East Coast, the Tennessee
Gas Pipeline Northeast Expansion Project, which Kinder Morgan was
planning on running between Boston and New York State, is put on hold,
perhaps permanently, after activists argue that the east cost needs to
focus more on renewable energy options. “Before we sink more money in
gas infrastructure,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) writes in an
editorial in the Berkshire Eagle, “we have an obligation wherever
possible to focus our investments on the clean technologies of the
future — not the dirty fuels of the past.”
September
The
People’s Climate March – months in the making – surges through New York
City, right before the United Nations Climate Summit. It’s meant to be
the most inclusive climate march ever. Some say a little too inclusive:
Groups like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers are
fighting the EPA’s power plant regulations at the same time that they
are participating in the march.
People converge on New York from
all over the U.S. The march appears to be everything it was intended to
be: massive (more than 300,000 people turn out), peaceful, and
inclusive. It appears to have very little effect on the U.N. Climate
Summit — but then, not many people were really expecting it to. The next
day, a smaller protest, Flood Wall Street, blocks off Broadway for
several hours and results in the arrest of 102 people, including two
Captains Planet and one polar bear.
The new report from the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is released,
and the Peoples’ Climate March organizers announce their support for
Ferguson October, a conference in Ferguson for groups interested in
protesting the militarization of police departments.
October
In
Detroit, the judge in charge of Detroit’s bankruptcy, Steven Rhodes,
rules that water may be “a necessary ingredient to sustaining life,” but
there is no “enforceable right to free and affordable water.” A few
weeks later, Catarina de Albuquerque, the U.N. special rapporteur on the
human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, visits Detroit and
disagrees — the city’s water shutoffs, she says, amount to a violation
of basic human rights.
November
Oh,
the elections. The midterm elections do not go well for environmental
activists. On the local level, there are a few victories, like tiny
Richmond, Calif., where Chevron spent $72 per voter to elect a more
Chevron-friendly slate of candidates, and lost, big time.
Still,
immediately after the elections, some unexpected good climate news:
President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the heads of state for
the two biggest greenhouse-gas emitters in the world, are together
pursuing ambitious new emission reductions.
The lame duck Senate
votes not to approve Keystone. In the chambers, Greg Grey Cloud, a
Native American activist, bursts into a song of thanks and is promptly
kicked out of the chamber.
In Missouri, a grand jury decides not
to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown. Protests break out
across the country in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland,
San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, and Washington, D.C., all of them
working from common themes — staging die-ins in public spaces, blocking
highways and other main transportation routes, and targeting areas
associated with holiday shopping. At this point, it becomes manifestly
clear that a lot of organizing went down during Ferguson October, and
that America has a burgeoning civil rights movement on its hands.
December
In
New York, another grand jury decides not to indict a police officer who
choked Eric Garner, a Staten Island resident, to death. Protests,
again, break out across the country, and many environmentalists —
including the director of the Sierra Club — declare their support.
The
actual details of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership remain
mysterious, but that doesn’t stop a smorgasbord of rabblerousers from
fretting about it. Digital privacy activists worry it will be used to
enable surveillance. Elizabeth Warren worries it will be used to gut
financial regulations. Opponents fear that with the Senate now
controlled by Republicans, TPP is more likely to win approval.
All
year, the price of oil has been falling, and by now a barrel costs just
a little more than half its most recent peak. Oil is trading at its
lowest since the recession of 2009, prompting allegations that OPEC (in
particular, Saudi Arabia) is putting the screws to Iran, Russia, and the
U.S. shale oil boom in one fell swoop.
It is at this moment,
while fracking operators in the U.S. find themselves in a financial
squeeze, that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announces that he will ban
fracking in New York entirely.
New York isn’t the first state to
ban fracking; that would be Vermont. But it’s the site of much more
valuable land, fracking-wise. The ban vindicates the work of
anti-fracking activists across the state, who spent years working
together to use zoning to not-quite-ban fracking piece by piece, at the
local level.
At a press conference, Barack Obama essentially
makes fun of Keystone XL in a way that made the pipeline’s eventual
approval seem highly unlikely. “Keystone is not American oil,” Obama
says. “It’s Canadian oil that is wrung out of tar sands in Canada. It
would save the Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an
enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way
through the United States down to the Gulf.”
“It’s not,” he
continues, “going to be a huge benefit to U.S. consumers. It’s not even
going to be a nominal benefit for U.S. consumers.”
What does
2015 hold? I have a mantra for situations like these, courtesy of one of
the better philosophers of our time: “The future is unwritten.” That’s
not going to stop me from trying to predict it, though. Stay tuned.
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