This Changes Everything (57 page)

China, meanwhile, is in the midst of a very public and emotional debate about its crisis levels of urban air pollution, in large part the result of the country’s massive reliance on coal. There have been surprisingly large and militant protests against
the construction of new coal-fired plants, most spectacularly in Haimen, a small city in Guangdong Province. In December 2011, as many as thirty thousand residents surrounded a government building and blocked a highway to protest plans to expand a coal-fired power plant. Citing concerns about cancer and other health problems blamed on the existing plant, the demonstrators withstood days of
attacks by police, including tear gas and reported beatings with batons. They were there to send the message, as one protester put it, that, “This is going to affect our future generations. They still need to live.” The plant expansion was suspended.
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Chinese peasants who rely on traditional subsistence activities like agriculture and fishing have a history of militant uprisings against industrial
projects that cause displacement and disease, whether toxic factories, highways, or mega-dams. Very often these actions attract severe state repression, including deaths in custody of protest leaders. The projects usually go ahead regardless of the opposition, though there have been some notable successes.

What has changed in China in recent years—and what is of paramount concern to the ruling
party—is that the country’s elites, the wealthy winners in China’s embrace of full-throttle capitalism, are increasingly distressed by the costs of industrialization. Indeed, Li Bo, who heads Friends of Nature, the oldest environmental organization in China, describes urban air pollution as “a superman for Chinese environment issues,” laughing at the irony of an environmentalist having “to thank
smog.” The reason, he explains, is that the elites had been able to insulate themselves from previous environmental threats, like baby milk and water contamination, because “the rich, the powerful, have special channels of delivery, safer products [delivered] to their doorsteps.” But no matter how rich you are, there is no way to hide from the “blanket” of toxic air. “Nobody can do anything for special
[air] delivery,” he says. “And that’s the beauty of it.”
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To put the health crisis in perspective, the World Health Organization sets the guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known as PM
_2.5
) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit 671. The
ubiquitous paper masks haven’t been enough to prevent outbreaks of respiratory illness, or to protect children as young as eight from being diagnosed with lung cancer. Shanghai, meanwhile, has introduced an emergency protocol in which kindergartens and elementary schools are automatically shut down and all large-scale outdoor gatherings like concerts and soccer games are canceled when the levels
of particulate matter in the air top 450 micrograms per cubic meter. No wonder Chen Jiping, a former senior Communist Party official, now retired, admitted in March 2013 that pollution is now the single greatest cause of social unrest in the country, even more than land disputes.
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China’s unelected leaders have long since deflected demands for democracy and human rights by touting the ruling
party’s record of delivering galloping economic growth. As Li Bo puts it, the rhetoric was always, “We get
rich first, we deal with the environment problems second.” That worked for a long time, but now, he says, “their argument has all of a sudden suffocated in the smog.”

The pressure for a more sustainable development path has forced the government to cut its targeted growth to a rate lower
than China had experienced in more than a decade, and to launch huge alternative energy programs. Many dirty-energy projects, meanwhile, have been canceled or delayed. In 2011, a third of the Chinese coal-fired power plants that had been approved for construction “were stalled and investments in new coal plants weren’t even half the level they were in 2005,” according to Justin Guay, associate director
of the Sierra Club’s International Climate Program. “Even better, China actually closed down over 80 gigawatts of coal plants between 2001–2010 and is planning to phase out another 20 GW. To put that in perspective that’s roughly the size of
all
electricity sources in Spain, home to the world’s 11th largest electricity sector.” (In an effort to reduce smog, the government is also exploring the
potential for natural gas fracking, but in an earthquake-prone country with severe water shortages, it’s a plan unlikely to quell unrest.)
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All this pushback from within China is of huge significance to the broader fossil-fuel resistance, from Australia to North America. It means that if tar sands pipelines and coal export terminals can be held off for just a few more years, the market for the
dirty products the coal and oil companies are trying to ship to Asia could well dry up. Something of a turning point took place in July 2013 when the multinational investment banking firm Goldman Sachs published a research paper titled, “The Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing.” Less than six months later, Goldman Sachs sold its 49 percent stake in the company that is developing the largest
of the proposed coal export terminals, the one near Bellingham, Washington, having apparently concluded that window had already closed.
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These victories add up: they have kept uncountable millions of tons of carbon and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Whether or not climate change has been a primary motivator, the local movements behind them deserve to be recognized as unsung carbon
keepers, who, by protecting their beloved forests, mountains, rivers, and coastlines, are helping to protect all of us.

Climate activists are under no illusion that shutting down coal plants, blocking tar sands pipelines, and passing fracking bans will be enough to lower emissions as rapidly and deeply as science demands. There are just too many extraction
operations already up and running and too many more being pushed simultaneously. And oil multinationals are hyper-mobile—they move wherever they can dig.

With this in mind, discussions are under way to turn the “no new fossil frontiers” principle behind these campaigns into international law. Proposals include a Europe-wide ban on fracking (in 2012, more than a third of the 766 members of the
European Parliament cast votes in favor of an immediate moratorium).
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There is a growing campaign calling for a worldwide ban on offshore drilling in the sensitive Arctic region, as well as in the Amazon rainforest. And activists are similarly beginning to push for a global moratorium on tar sands extraction anywhere in the world, on the grounds that it is sufficiently carbon-intensive to merit
transnational action.

Another tactic spreading with startling speed is the call for public interest institutions like colleges, faith organizations, and municipal governments to sell whatever financial holdings they have in fossil companies. The divestment movement emerged organically out of various Blockadia-style attempts to block carbon extraction at its source—specifically, out of the movement
against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which was looking for a tactic to put pressure on coal companies that had made it clear that they were indifferent to local opinion. Those local activists were later joined by a national and then international campaign spearheaded by 350.org, which extended the divestment call to include all fossil fuels, not just coal. The idea behind the
tactic was to target not just individual unpopular projects but the logic that is driving this entire wave of frenetic, high-risk extraction.

The divestment campaign is based on the idea—outlined so compellingly by Bill McKibben—that anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic can look at how much carbon the fossil fuel companies have in their reserves, subtract how much carbon scientists tell us
we can emit and still keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and conclude that the fossil fuel
companies have every intention of pushing the planet beyond the boiling point.

These simple facts have allowed the student-led divestment movement to put the fossil fuel companies’ core business model on trial, arguing that they have become rogue actors whose continued economic viability relies
on radical climate destabilization—and that, as such, any institution claiming to serve the public interest has a moral responsibility to liberate itself from these odious profits. “What the fossil fuel divestment movement is saying to companies is your fundamental business model of extracting and burning carbon is going to create an uninhabitable planet. So you need to stop. You need a new business
model,” explains Chloe Maxmin, coordinator of Divest Harvard.
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And young people have a special moral authority in making this argument to their school administrators: these are the institutions entrusted to prepare them for the future; so it is the height of hypocrisy for those same institutions to profit from an industry that has declared war on the future at the most elemental level.

No tactic
in the climate wars has resonated more powerfully. Within six months of the campaign’s official launch in November 2012, there were active divestment campaigns on over three hundred campuses and in more than one hundred U.S. cities, states, and religious institutions. The demand soon spread to Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Britain. At the time of publication, thirteen U.S. colleges
and universities had announced their intention to divest their endowments of fossil fuel stocks and bonds, and the leaders of more than twenty-five North American cities had made similar commitments, including San Francisco and Seattle. Around forty religious institutions had done the same. The biggest victory to date came in May 2014 when Stanford University—with a huge endowment worth $18.7 billion—announced
it would be selling its coal stocks.
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Critics have been quick to point out that divestment won’t bankrupt Exxon; if Harvard, with its nearly $33 billion endowment, sells its stock, someone else will snap it up. But this misses the power of the strategy: every time students, professors, and faith leaders make the case for divestment, they are chipping away at the social license with which these
companies operate. As Sara Blazevic, a divestment organizer at Swarthmore College, puts it, the movement is “taking away the hold that the fossil fuel indus
try has over our political system by making it socially unacceptable and morally unacceptable to be financing fossil fuel extraction.” And Cameron Fenton, one of the leaders of the divestment push in Canada, adds, “No one is thinking we’re
going to bankrupt fossil fuel companies. But what we can do is bankrupt their reputations and take away their political power.”
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The eventual goal is to confer on oil companies the same status as tobacco companies, which would make it much easier to make other important demands—like bans on political donations from fossil fuel companies and on fossil fuel advertising on television (for the same
public health reasons that we ban broadcast cigarette ads). Crucially, it might even create the space for a serious discussion about whether these profits are so illegitimate that they deserve to be appropriated and reinvested in solutions to the climate crisis. Divestment is just the first stage of this delegitimization process, but it is already well under way.

None of this is a replacement
for major policy changes that would regulate carbon reduction across the board. But what the emergence of this networked, grassroots movement means is that the next time climate campaigners get into a room filled with politicians and polluters to negotiate, there will be many thousands of people outside the doors with the power to amp up the political pressure significantly—with heightened boycotts,
court cases, and more militant direct action should real progress fail to materialize. And that is a very significant shift indeed.

Already, the rise of Blockadia and the fossil fuel divestment movement is having a huge impact on the mainstream environmental community, particularly the Big Green groups that had entered into partnerships with fossil fuel companies (never mind The Nature Conservancy,
with its own Texas oil and gas operation . . . ). Not surprisingly, some of the big pro-corporate green groups view this new militancy as an unwelcome intrusion on their territory. When it comes to fracking in particular, groups like the Environmental Defense Fund have pointedly not joined grassroots calls for drilling bans and a rapid shift to 100 percent renewables, but have instead positioned
themselves as brokers, offering up “best practices”—developed with industry groups—that will supposedly address local environmental concerns. (Even when locals make it abundantly clear that the only best
practice they are interested in is an unequivocal ban on fracking.) “We fear that those who oppose all natural gas production everywhere are, in effect, making it harder for the U.S. economy to
wean itself from dirty coal,” charged EDF chief counsel Mark Brownstein.
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Predictably, these actions have provoked enormous tensions, with grassroots activists accusing the EDF of providing cover for polluters and undercutting their efforts.
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But not all the Big Greens are reacting this way. Some—like Food & Water Watch, 350.org, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Friends of the
Earth—have been a central part of this new wave of anti-fossil fuel activism from the beginning. And for others that were more ambivalent, the rapid spread of a new, take-no-prisoners climate movement appears to have been a wake-up call; a reminder that they had strayed too far from first principles. This shift has perhaps been clearest at the Sierra Club, which, under the leadership of its former
executive director, Carl Pope, had attracted considerable controversy with such corporate-friendly actions as lending its logo to a line of “green” cleaning products owned by Clorox. Most damaging, Pope had been an enthusiastic supporter of natural gas and had appeared publicly (even lobbying on Capitol Hill) to sing the praises of the fossil fuel alongside Aubrey McClendon, then CEO of Chesapeake
Energy—a company at the forefront of the hydraulic fracking explosion. Many local chapters, neck deep in battles against fracking, had been livid. And it would later emerge that the Sierra Club was, in this same period, secretly receiving many millions in donations from Chesapeake—one of the biggest controversies to hit the movement in decades.
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