By Robert S. Eshelman
Scott Parkin, an organizer at the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN), is a straight-talking, get-things-done kind of guy, more at ease toiling behind the scenes in environmental struggles than serving as a personification of them. Yet in his fight against the coal industry he has embodied the qualities that define a new-model environmental movement in the United States. In the past four years this reinvigorated, multifaceted movement has chalked up an impressive—albeit frequently overlooked—series of victories against Big Coal, a leading contributor to domestic greenhouse gas emissions and a powerful lobby whose influence stretches from Congress to rural West Virginia courthouses.
A decade ago, the coal and utility industries began to push for the construction of a new generation of coal-fired power plants. Since then, 232 plants have been proposed. The environmental justice movement has defeated 127 of them. Not a single coal-fired plant was built in 2009. This past March, following several modest moves toward greater scrutiny of mountaintop removal permits in the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was moving to block authorization of the largest mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, held by Arch Coal, an industry leader. Then, on April 1, the EPA proposed new water quality regulations for future mountaintop removal permits—imposing standards that very few, if any, mountaintop removal proposals would meet, as EPA head Lisa Jackson noted.
These victories have seriously set back—if not yet vanquished—an industry that accounts for nearly 40 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions and powers roughly half of US energy production. It’s as if the antiwar movement had brought the military’s recruitment efforts to a grinding halt. The coal industry’s ability to do harm—to the climate generally and to communities living in the shadow of coal plants or mining sites locally—has been significantly curtailed, and many in the environmental movement are beginning to speculate about the beginning of the end for Big Coal.
Since joining RAN in 2006, Parkin has traveled extensively in Appalachia, where organizations such as Coal River Mountain Watch, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Appalachian Voices are waging a fierce struggle to end mountaintop removal—a surface coal-mining technique that has leveled 500 bucolic Appalachian peaks, filled more than 2,000 miles of valley streams with toxic sludge and poisoned drinking-water supplies in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. “The people who live and work there are some of the more inspiring figures you’re going to meet in the environmental justice movement,” he says. “Once you experience the situation there and the way they struggle, you don’t want to let go; you want to do everything you can to support these people and work on this campaign.”
In Appalachia, Parkin has worked to foster relationships between RAN and local and regional groups—many of them women-led or whose rank and file include former unionized underground mine workers—and nonviolent direct-action organizations, such as Climate Ground Zero and Rising Tide North America. Back at RAN’s San Francisco offices, Parkin leads the group’s Global Finance campaign, which targets banking institutions, such as JPMorgan Chase, that fund mountaintop removal mining or the construction of coal-fired power plants. Thus, his activist work touches upon nearly every aspect of the coal process—from extraction to electricity production to the warming of the climate—and uses tactics ranging from public education and corporate pressure campaigns to local grassroots leadership development among Appalachians directly affected by mining, and nonviolent civil disobedience against mining companies or the EPA.
Parkin’s organizing approach reflects that of the anti-coal movement more broadly—embracing a sophisticated diversity of tactics and targets, an emphasis on building strong relationships between traditional environmentalists and residents of Appalachia, and an unflinching determination to shut down Big Coal wherever it attempts to go.
So how did this movement pull off such decisive victories?
Parkin says it’s all about “swarming”—the diversity of tactics and targets. It’s a strategy that shuns delusions of a single silver-bullet solution to euthanizing the coal industry—say, a binding UN climate agreement or comprehensive climate change bill in the Senate. Instead, the environmental justice movement has come to recognize that Big Coal’s broad influence and its central role in energy production make it extremely vulnerable. Each point along the continuum of coal production—from finance to extraction to burning—becomes terrain for political struggle. The movement’s all-of-the-above strategy—essentially, bringing to bear every available tactic to each register of the public and private sectors—has transformed Big Coal’s reach from asset to liability.
“We’ve beaten back the coal industry by utilizing all the tools available—a robust organizing effort, litigation and public education,” says Bruce Nilles, head of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. “Wherever the coal industry is proposing these projects, we’ve got Sierra Club members in those areas.” At the height of the rush to build new coal plants, the Sierra Club was filing a lawsuit every ten days and ensuring that its members voiced opposition to every project.
Crucial to the success of any of these tactics have been the links between poor and working-class Appalachians and mainstream environmentalists, which Parkin, among others, has spent years cultivating. These links have imbued the mainstream environmental justice movement with purpose and brought attention to Big Coal’s economic impacts in coal country. The industry continually argues that the economic well-being of the region is tied to whether coal remains the primary producer of domestic energy. Poverty and infant mortality rates in Appalachia, however, are among the highest in the nation, and county governments throughout the region are shuttering schools and government offices. Mining activity there increased 22 percent between 1985 and 2005, while the number of mining jobs decreased 55 percent, because of the proliferation of surface and mountaintop removal mining, which require far smaller labor pools than underground mining. And, as the recent disaster in West Virginia demonstrates, coal extraction remains a very hazardous activity, especially in those mines owned by Massey Energy—a company with a long list of safety violations and headed by climate change denier Don Blankenship, one of the nastiest coal barons in US history and bagman for Republican politicians. Coal is a resource curse for Appalachia, which mirrors conditions in kleptocratic third world nations, where multinationals and governments prosper and populations continually toil in poverty.
“In Appalachia there is a tremendous intersection between issues of economic class and the environment,” says Parkin.
By focusing on the effects of coal on Appalachia, the mainstream environmental justice movement has subtly transformed the climate change debate from one about what the world might look like several decades from now to one highlighting how the coal industry is destroying the environment and people’s lives—primarily among the poor and working class—today.
More than 600 coal-fired power plants in the United States—many of them fully amortized and thus enormous cash cows for utility companies—spew massive amounts of pollutants that poison the air and water, as well as contribute to climate change. Nearly 200 permits for mountaintop removal sites await EPA approval, and Big Coal is expanding operations in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming and the Illinois Basin. It is also eyeing environmentally sensitive areas in Alaska. So what’s next for the environmental justice movement?
Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity says that using existing clean-water and clean-air laws will be crucial. “The number-one, most important thing in my mind that we need to do to prevent another coal rush is to save the Clean Air Act. The coal industry, aided by people like Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, has a full-out assault on the Clean Air Act right now.” Siegel adds that the act, along with other environmental protections, will help to cut the supply chain, forcing utilities to purchase more expensive—and in-demand—international supplies, which might cause them to reconsider coal altogether.
Other groups, particularly those in Appalachia, are targeting state legislatures and Congress, pushing for passage of an array of environmental protections, including the Clean Water Protection Act in the House and the Appalachia Restoration Act in the Senate, which would strengthen existing water pollution regulations by prohibiting valley fills. Meanwhile, direct-action groups are proceeding with plans for shutting down mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia and pressuring the EPA for more clean air and water regulations.
Essentially, the movement will continue to “swarm” but will also seek to consolidate its victories and build on them. “From the EPA to Wall Street, we’ve had recent success using a variety of tactics,” says Parkin. “Now we need to continue the momentum and keep our eyes on the prize of ending our dependence on coal.”
Robert S. Eshelman is an independent journalist. His articles have appeared in Abu Dhabi’s the National, In These Times and on TomDispatch.com.
Just when articles and editorials parsing the fallout of the Copenhagen climate conference neared zero, a new round of international negotiations is now underway with not one, not two, but four international meetings on climate change occurring in April.
This past week, the UNFCCC held is first post-Copenhagen meeting in Bonn, Germany. NRDC’s Jack Schmidt, blogging from the conference, says that talks pivoted around two issues. 1) Process — whether or not international negotiations continue within the consensus-based UNFCCC process or within a smaller stakeholders group of nations and — how to integrate the Copenhagen Accord, which emerged from negotiations between the U.S., China, Brazil, South Africa, and India, among others, during the waning hours of the Copenhagen talks. 2) Expectations – Several countries – primarily the U.S. – are pursuing an “all or nothing” approach, seeking a comprehensive climate agreement whereby nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Other countries and many NGOs are interested in implementing agreements on, say, deforestation efforts or adaptation and mitigation financing in the absence of a comprehensive agreement.
Bolivia’s UN ambassador released a statement celebrating developing countries success in blocking the U.S.’s insistence on establishing the Copenhagen Accord as the basis for forward negotiations. Alliance of Small Island States Chair Dessima Williams praised the “resuscitation of a positive spirit” during the negotiations. But the divisions between rich and poor countries and the disagreements over how to negotiate a climate agreement remain – little seems to have changed since December.
While the pushback against the Copenhagen Accord and unity among several developing and low-lying nations against the U.S. was certainly a victory, it might be a short-lived one. The Washington Post reported that the U.S. was withholding climate funds from two countries opposing the Copenhagen Accord and the Guardian revealed that U.S. strategy in the months leading up to the next UNFCCC meeting in Cancun later this year will be one of no compromise.
The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a grouping established by Obama in March 2009 and including the world’s 17 leading economic entities, convenes April 18 – 19. U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern will chair the proceedings, pushing hard for jettisoning the Kyoto Agreement and for the Copenhagen Accord becoming the basis for future climate talks. The U.S. will also use this conference as a moment to advocate for small group negotiations rather than within the 192 member UNFCCC process. Think of it as part two of the side negotiations the U.S. undertook during the Copenhagen talks and which resulted in the Copenhagen Accord.
As the U.S.-led MEF talks wind down, the Bolivian government-sponsored People’s Conference on Climate Change will get underway in Cochabamba on April 19th, running through the 22nd. The conference brings together representatives from nation-states and international climate and economic justice movements and indigenous rights organizations. I can’t think of a moment in recent history when there’s been this degree of cooperative work between nation-states and social movements. The New Left of the ‘60s shunned the state, as did the anti-capitalist globalization movements more recently. This conference could produce an new-fangled oppositional movement.
And, as if all this isn’t enough to further fill editorial pages and environmental sections of newspapers, the BASIC block of nations will be meeting in South Africa at the end of the month. As much as I’m hoping the Bolivian conference will be a big boost to oppositional power and a thriving international climate justice movement, the future of international talks is squarely before the BASIC nations. Do they throw their support behind the Copenhagen Accord or remain supportive of Kyoto’s emphasis on the historical role rich countries have played in polluting the atmosphere and triggering global warming?
Stay tuned.
I’ll be blogging for the Huffington Post from Bolivia and keep an eye out for a wrap-up piece at the Nation from me about what comes out of the conference.
This past Friday, the Texas Board of Education gave preliminary approval to a sweeping, conservative-led rewrite of the state’s school curriculum, eliminating sound social science and humanities teaching and including Christian conservative notions of history, economics and sociology. Included in the 120-page curriculum standards are the removal of mention of the separation of church and state in U.S. law, excising of Thomas Jefferson – a deist and proponent of keeping religion out of government – from history lessons, emphasis on America’s Judeo-Christian roots, and removal of references to Latino contributions to American history.
The board also voted to take out mention of hip-hop’s contributions to American culture, while emphasizing those of country-western music. Discussion of institutional racism in America in the state’s textbooks has been struck.
The board approved the curriculum standards by a 10-5 vote, split along party lines. Following a public comment period, the board is expected to cast its final vote on the new requirements in May.
The board’s decision will impact public school education far beyond the Lone Star State. The state accounts for a enormous purchasing block in the textbook market and the amendments, by extension, will be incorporated into textbooks sold throughout the country. Estimates are that 80% of textbooks in U.S. schools will reflect the Texas curriculum.
One particular amendment struck me: removal of the word ‘capitalism,’ which will be replaced by the term ‘free market.’ As conservative board member Terri Leo put it: “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation […] You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”
I was reminded of Leo’s comments this week while reading about the latest US Chamber of Commerce-led attacks on environmental, health care, and workers’ rights regulation.
Leo and the Texas Board of Education are really on to something!
On Tuesday, the Chamber petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public’s health.
Always the strategic political player, the Chamber is targeting not only the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions but also ensure that the Senate climate and energy bill is as meaningless as possible.
And up to now, the Chamber is getting exactly what it wants.
The Chamber has long fought workers’ health and safety protections, including most recently provisions to aid mine workers suffering from Black Lung. And it has fought, for several decades, legislation and damages compensation related to the health effects of asbestos exposure.
Consumer protection and financial markets reform? Here, too, the Chamber is a leader of ‘free market’ enterprise.
Capitalist pigs, indeed.
Obama met early this week with several Senators who are leading negotiations over a climate change … I mean, clean energy and jobs bill. Although details continue to be hashed out, what seems clear at this point is that whatever legislation emerges from these negotiations will not include a comprehensive cap-and-trade regiment similar to that included in the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House this past summer or the Boxer-Kerry legislation that emerged from Senate committee late last year.
And that’s a good thing.
Cap-and-trade, often coupled with carbon offset schemes, sets up a speculative market that, in its nascent form in the E.U., has allowed several of the world’s largest polluters to cash in on pollution credits to the tune of several billion dollars a year without leading to pro-active measures to reduce carbon emissions.
One notable alternative to cap-and-trade that hues to the idea of allowing ‘the market’ to put a price on carbon is the notion of cap-and-dividend. The idea has been promoted, most prominently, by Working Assets co-founder and Who Owns the Sky author Peter Barnes. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-MA), who both attended Obama’s White House discussion, introduced cap-and-dividend legislation – The Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal Act (Clear) Act – late last year.
This website offers some basics on how cap-and-dividend works and Cantwell’s website offers several documents about the CLEAR Act. The Economist has even endorsed the plan.
The Senate bill under negotiation will likely be a hodge-podge of cap-and-trade – perhaps a sectoral cap on energy production, give-aways to fossil fuel and nuclear energy industries, and some attempt to curb EPA regulation of carbon.
While ‘letting the market decide’ is never an ideal I get behind, the U.S. Congress could do worse than implementing a cap-and-dividend approach to pricing carbon.
Mark Lynas serves as advisor on climate change to the President of the Maldives and is a visiting researcher at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment. He has written several books on climate change and is a frequent contributor the Guardian and Independent. I spoke with him about the recent attacks on climate science and the state of climate negotiations in the U.S. and internationally.
Climate science, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., is under concerted attack from climate change skeptics, who have seized upon the hacked University of East Anglia emails and mistakes in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last report. How significant is this assault on climate science and what do you think climate scientists, specifically, need to do in response?
Well it’s had absolutely no impact on the science itself or the data upon which our understanding of climate change is based. If you were to ask the question ‘What do we think differently about either the temperature records or the proxy records or the ice cores or any of the fundamental sources?’, the answer would be nothing.
Nevertheless opponents to substantive measures to address climate change are running with the notion that the science is inconclusive.
Well this is a tremendous gift to the fossil fuel lobby courtesy by and large of freely delivered activism as far as I can tell mobilized in the blogosphere. There’s thousands of people out there doing PR for ExxonMobil for free.
What role, if any, do you think climatologist should play in responding?
Well defending their work is obviously something climate scientists have to do and only they can do it. But, given that this isn’t really about climate science, I suspect that wouldn’t be enough because ultimately what this comes down to is climate science being a proxy battleground for competing ideologies – the anti-regulation, anti-government, pro-fossil fuels ideology on one hand and, on the other hand, an ideology, which is held by greens, and certainly the mainstream in Europe and most Democrats I suppose, which accepts that there are limitations on human activities in the biosphere. That’s to put it at its most fundamental level. If you are anti-big government, anti-regulation, and pro-corporate then you cannot accept the reality of climate change even though not doing so requires the belief in rather absurd conspiracy theories, which involve, depending on who you’re speaking with, tens-of-thousands of scientists in the UN and governments sitting down to conspire to raise our taxes or get the U.N. black helicopters to take over world government. Most of it is palpably absurd but that doesn’t seem to stop people believing in it because they want to and it serves them for purely ideological purposes.
What is your interpretation of U.S. Senate negotiations on climate change and their impact on international efforts at achieving a comprehensive climate change deal?
Well, really, I think that lack of action in the U.S. is really the coup de grace for international climate negotiations. I mean things were at a pretty disastrous level after Copenhagen. I personally put that down largely to the maligned influence of the Chinese. But I think, looking forward, if the U.S. doesn’t move then there really is no incentive for the Chinese, or the Indians, or any of the other big parties to make any concessions at all because they can quite rightly point to the United States as the richest country and, historically, the largest polluter as having done almost nothing.
It’s a very depressing scenario which is unfolding and you can see that there’s backtracking in various other countries as well. In Australia, climate legislation is stalled and is being put off. The same thing is happening in Japan. Even here in Europe, you’re feeling like you’re moving against the current if you’re working on climate change. We’re sort of entering an environmental recession if you like.
What impact will the absence of a U.S. cap-and-trade scheme have on the already existing carbon market – the European Emissions Trading Scheme, the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism, the patchwork of cap-and-trade and carbon offset markets?
Well, the idea of cap-and-trade was an American idea and it was originally introduced at Kyoto by the American delegation in 1997 because it involved a more market-based approach to carbon regulation as opposed to taxes. Carbon taxation is really the alternative and I can’t really see any great enthusiasm in the U.S. for that either, certainly not from the Republicans, because ‘tax’, of course, is a dirty word.
So, let’s not get hung up about the specific mechanism of the carbon regulation regime. What they’re really against is any regulation of carbon at all i.e. to preserve the situation where the atmosphere remains a free dumping ground for anyone who wants to emit carbon into it. Cap-and-trade is about as market-based as you can get and you would think that that would be quite business friendly – and in Europe it’s been far too business friendly with huge amounts of pollution allocations being handed away for free to the biggest polluters. It’s been a billion Euro windfall for those who emit the most. I would have thought the Republicans would love that type of thing.
But I’m not saying I support a tax on carbon. What’s important is that there is a price on carbon on some level – a price signal that internalizes the externality of market failure on carbon emissions, that forces companies to price that into their bottom line on their economic decision-making.
At Copenhagen, and you’ve written about this and it’s become quite a contentious issue, the Chinese opposed developed countries efforts to include in the Copenhagen Accord mid-century targets for reducing emissions. Why do you think the Chinese opposed this and what are the lasting effects on climate negotiations?
I don’t know why they did it and I’ve heard different theories with varying degrees of plausibility. One theory is the mathematical one. That if you take an 80% by 2050 Annex I cut as part of a 50% global cut then if you crunch the figures that still restricts Chinese growth after about 2030. In that case, if that is true, than that suggests that the Chinese want no restrictions on their carbon emissions right up to mid-century, or at least they are not prepared to entertain that at this point.
Another theory is that if you are not prepared to take on targets yourself you really don’t want other people doing so because it makes you look bad. So, therefore, having Annex I countries generally taking an 80% cut, it would make the Chinese look even more retrograde than they actually are.
One other explanation is that they didn’t want to do it at this point and anything that was going to look like a good deal and would be attracting a lot of support would be against their interests.
I don’t know which is the correct explanation to be honest and certainly it just comes down to hearsay. And I think it was a huge, huge mistake on their part because if the Chinese could insist or could go along with a strict carbon cut for rich countries then they would be in a position of being the workshop of the world to actually manufacture all of or a large proportion of the low-carbon technologies that rich countries would be buying.
What other after shocks from Copenhagen do you think are significant?
The death of the Kyoto Protocol? How about that? I don’t see how there can be a second commitment period because there isn’t any enthusiasm for it except on the part of countries that wouldn’t have to take on emission reduction targets and that’s why there enthusiastic – the Chinese, the Indians, and the developing countries that are constantly insisting that Kyoto has primacy. It has this very deep divide between rich and poor. So long as you’re poor you don’t have to take on any carbon target indefinitely. But I can’t see any of the industrialized countries that would be taking on targets having any remaining enthusiasm for it.
Environmentally, Kyoto has been plainly inadequate but it does at least have the beginnings of this carbon market, which has funneled tens-of-millions, perhaps hundreds-of-millions of dollars, of clean-tech investment into China, India, and other countries and that’s now under threat if there’s no Kyoto post-2012, then there’s no carbon market, then the carbon price falls apart and we’re really back to pre-1990 – square one.
So what do you think is the path forward? Is it to mobilize support around the flawed Copenhagen Accord?
Well its difficult to mobilize enthusiasm around something that is so lame. Given that this was largely written – dictated – by these big G77 countries and the U.S., none of whom want a strong climate regime, to then be in a position where you have to defend that as a best possible outcome is just rather demoralizing for everyone.
Maybe its time to just go back to square one and just say this isn’t working. We want an entirely different approach but I don’t think there’s any real emerging sense of what that is likely to be.
Mark Lynas’ website can be found here.
Just wrapping up several days of reporting from Point Carbon’s seventh annual Carbon Market Insights conference in Amsterdam, spending several afternoons in close quarters with carbon speculators, financiers, and UN regulators.
Yvo de Boer, the easily-quotable, outgoing head of the UNFCCC, participated in a Wednesday morning panel discussion on the state of international climate policy. Below are some excerpts from his remarks and from a press conference he held later in the morning.
Commenting on the outcome of COP15: “We are now in the situation where forty-three industrialized nations submitted their national targets and thirty-two developing countries have submitted national action plans, which they intend to implement in order to address climate change. Those industrialized countries together account for more than 80% of energy related CO2 emissions and that group of developing countries includes all the major developing countries in the world. In terms of political intent, expressed through targets and action plans, a very clear change of direction is now evident.”
The Copenhagen Accord, he said, therefore, represents “the writing on the wall that tells you we will be moving in a different direction.” Yet he acknowledge the lack of clarity about what the deal meant for carbon markets and investors in the renewable energy sector. “You could say we’re embarking on a journey […] but you don’t know what the destination is. You don’t know what the mode of transport is. And you don’t know what the speed of travel is because all of those things were not clarified in the Copenhagen Accord.”
He went on to say that a “critical issue” for moving forward on climate talks is to shore up commitments from rich countries to finance mitigation and adaptation in developing nations. Countering claims that developing countries are resistant to market-mechanisms he said: “There’s a huge suspicion on the part of developing countries that rich nations will try and escape from their public finance responsibility through the market. [… ]Their fear is that at the end of the day there will be no public finance or re-cycled poverty eradication money - nothing new and basically the markets will be left to pick up the bill.”
On why developing countries, particularly China, blocked developed countries’ commitment to reducing by 80% their greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century, he said: “[They] were not clear on what the consequence of such a target would be in terms of the carbon space that would remain available to them.”
Teresa Ribera Rodriguez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Climate Change, also participating in the morning panel, suggested that the process for achieving a climate agreement has become too unwieldy and that participants were behaving like children. De Boer responded: “There is no big mother, but I do believe the process needs a big spanking.”
Asked by a Bloomberg reporter during the Q&A if his departure for business giant KPMG represented a feeling that there is more power in addressing climate change in the private sector than in the public one, he said: “What I’ve consistently said [throughout his career] is that if we don’t bring the private sector to the heart of the debate, we’re not going to get to a solution. And I think that is still the core of the problem – that this is too much an inter-governmental process and not enough a dialogue with business. So I wouldn’t put it in the context of power. But if there’s anything I can do over the next couple of years […] to take public-private partnership and public-private dialogue to a deeper level […] that’s what I’d like to work on and it has nothing to do with power.”
Later, at his press conference, I asked him about the retrograde discussion of climate science in the U.S.: “I think one of the problems we’re struggling with – well especially in the United States – is that there is still a large lack of deep understanding amongst the population on the seriousness of climate change and on how climate change is going to impact them directly. And I think the challenge over the coming years will be to invest more in education and public information in order to get that kind of backing. […] It’s only if can convince [voters] that because of climate change that next meal may not come, or may come later – but will definitely be expensive – it is only when you reach that level of understanding that you will have the political support that every politician needs in order to move forward. So that is where education and public awareness is so critical.”
I’ll post early next week on the release of Point Carbon’s annual survey, including on the 28% of respondents who said they had witnessed fraud, embezzlement or corruption related to carbon offset projects in China.
