This Changes Everything (65 page)

The problem, of course, is that while companies like Enbridge are putting dollars on the table to build pipelines, governments are unwilling to make comparable sums available for these alternatives. And yet in Canada a minimal national carbon tax of $10 a ton would raise
$5 billion a year, the sum in question—and unlike a one-off pipeline investment, it would do so year after year.
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If policy options like that were on the table, the jobs vs. environment dichotomy would all but evaporate.

Which is another reason why today’s climate movement does not have the luxury of simply saying no without simultaneously fighting for a series of transformative yeses—the building
blocks of our next economy that can
provide good clean jobs, as well as a social safety net that cushions the hardships for those inevitably suffering losses.

As discussed, the resources for this just transition must ultimately come from the state, collected from the profits of the fossil fuel companies in the brief window left while they are still profitable. But
until a shift in the political tides makes that necessity a reality, there are ways to start funneling much needed resources to the next economy right now. This is shaping up to be the most exciting aspect of the growing fossil fuel divestment movement: increasingly, participants aren’t just calling on public interest institutions like colleges and municipalities to sell their holdings in the companies
that are wrecking the planet, they are also asking them to reinvest that money in entities that have a clear vision for the healing process.

Dan Apfel, former head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, and a key advisor to the movement, argues that “our colleges, other charities, pension funds, and foundations must be the ones to lead the way.” He points out, “Five percent of the money in
these public purpose and publicly related institutions adds up to about $400 billion. Four hundred billion dollars in new investments could stimulate real climate solutions, help create the market for further investments, encourage policy change and sustain financial returns long into the future.”
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Already, the group of foundations and wealthy individuals that has joined the fossil fuel divestment
movement (see page 357) has taken the additional step of moving the funds that had been profiting from fossil fuel companies and reinvesting them in the clean tech sector (the intiative has become known as “Divest-Invest”). Some colleges are taking a similar approach. As economic analysts Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Kristen Sheeran note, “Duke University in North Carolina has invested
$8 million in the Self-Help Credit Union, in part to fund affordable green housing. Carleton College in Minnesota and Miami University in Florida are directing investment into renewable energy funds.”
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These big investors are taking a solid first step; even better would be
if they dedicated a share of their investments to projects that go deeper: not just switching from brown energy to green
energy but supporting cutting-edge projects that are designed to bolster local economies, improve public transit, and otherwise strengthen the starved public sphere. Critically, smart reinvestment strategies can even give the communities at the front lines of fossil fuel extraction the economic tools they need to resist carbon pollution at source—like the Black Mesa Water Coalition’s plan for a municipal-scale
solar utility, or the solar co-ops employing growing numbers of African American and Latino workers in Richmond, California, who might otherwise see no option besides the Chevron refinery. Brecher, Smith, and Sheeran elaborate on these kinds of creative possibilities for how the divestment movement can “leverage its power to build a new sustainable economy for both the planet and local
communities”:

Institutions should think in much more positive terms: How can their money maximize the transition to a new sustainable economy? Here’s one place to start: There are hundreds of community investment funds, socially oriented banks and credit unions, union pension funds, and other financial vehicles that have long experience in investing for social purposes. There are thousands of
co-ops, worker-and community-owned businesses, non-profits, municipal initiatives, and other enterprises that are engaged on a small scale in creating a new economy.

These are the elements of a growing sector of enterprises devoted to public purposes with augmented control by workers and employees. They are insulating and solarizing buildings; expanding public transportation; developing low-carbon
equipment and techniques for schools and hospitals; developing new recycling systems for handling waste. They are thereby also creating community-based economies that provide economic security, empower local and workplace democracy, and ward off the running away of jobs. But this is a sector that is generally starved for capital. Expanding the resources to grow this sector as rapidly as possible
should be a priority for divestors.
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The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel
companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued.
The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better able to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their
communities.

All of this points to something else that sets Blockadia apart from many previous social movements of its kind. In the past, people committed to social change often believed they had to choose between fighting the system and building alternatives to it. So in the 1960s, the counterculture splintered between those who stayed in cities to try to stop wars and bash away at inequalities
and those who chose to drop out and live their ecological values among like-minded people on organic farms or in manageable-sized cities like Bellingham, Washington. The activists and the exodus.

Today’s activists don’t have the luxury of these choices even if they wanted them. During these times of continual economic stress and exclusion, the communities on the front lines of saying no to dirty
energy have discovered that they will never build the base they need unless they can simultaneously provide economic alternatives to the projects they are opposing. So after three years of just saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline, a group of farmers in Nebraska came up with just such a strategy: they built a barn, powered by wind and solar, in the pipeline’s path. And they pointed out that the
power generated from just that one barn would bring more energy to the region than the oil in the pipeline that was headed for the export terminal in Texas.
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On one level, the Build Our Energy Barn was just PR: the farmers were daring President Obama to tear down a renewable energy installation to make way for dirty oil. But it also showed their neighbors that, if the right policies are in place,
there is another way to earn some much needed extra income without putting their land at risk.

Similarly, after the British village of Balcombe in West Sussex was the site of huge anti-fracking protests and angry clashes in 2013, a new power company formed called REPOWERBalcombe. Its goal is “to supply the
equivalent of 100% of Balcombe’s electricity demand through community owned, locally generated
renewable energy”—with financing coming from residents buying shares in the energy co-operative. The fracking fight continues to play out in the courts, but solar panels are already on their way and residents who were originally in favor of oil and gas drilling are joining the co-op, attracted to the promise of self-sufficiency and cost-saving.
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A comparable process is underway in Pungesti, the
Romanian farming community fighting fracking. The claims by Chevron’s supporters that gas extraction is the only option for jobs in this poor region of the country forced fracking opponents to put forward proposals of their own—like a community wind farm, a processing plant for the vegetables grown locally, and an abattoir for their livestock, all of which would add value to the livelihoods that
are the region’s heritage.

In short, some of the most tangible responses to the ecological crisis today come not from utopian dropout projects, but rather are being forged in the flames of resistance, by communities on the front lines of the battles against extreme extraction. And at the same time, many of those who, decades ago, built alternatives at the local level are finding themselves forced
back to the barricades. That’s because many of the most idyllic pockets where the sixties-era dropouts went to build their utopias are suddenly under siege: oil and coal tankers threaten their shores, oil and coal trains threaten their downtowns, and frackers want their land.

And even in places that are lucky enough to have been spared (so far) all these threats, climate change is demolishing
the idea that any countercultural pocket can provide a safe haven. In August 2011, that became clear to the organic farmers in Vermont who had pioneered one of the most advanced and sustainable local agriculture systems in North America. Probably most famous is the Intervale, a network of urban farms in Burlington that supplies roughly 10 percent of the city’s fresh food, while at the same time composting
its waste and sustainably generating a significant portion of its power. But when Hurricane Irene descended on the state, floodwaters destroyed not only historic covered bridges but as Bill McKibben, a Vermonter and staunch supporter of food localization, said to me shortly after, “It washed away huge amounts of that beautiful local agriculture. The Intervale in Burlington is suddenly under
five feet of water. Nothing gets harvested there. There are tons of farms where the beautiful, rich topsoil is
now just covered with feet of sand from the river.” He took away from that experience the fact that “If we can’t solve the climate problem, then all the rest of this is for naught.”
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I witnessed something similar, if on a smaller scale, in New York City one year later in the immediate
aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. While visiting Red Hook, Brooklyn, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods, I stopped by the Red Hook Community Farm—an amazing place that teaches kids from nearby housing projects how to grow healthy food, provides composting for a huge number of residents, hosts a weekly farmer’s market, and runs a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, getting all kinds of
produce to people who need it. Not only was the farm improving the lives of people in the neighborhood, it was also doing everything right from a climate perspective—reducing food miles; staying away from petroleum inputs; sequestering carbon in the soil; reducing landfill by composting. But when the storm came, none of that mattered. The entire fall harvest was lost. And the urban farmers I met
there—still in shock from seeing so much collective work gone to waste—were preoccupied with the fear that the water that had inundated the fields had been so toxic that they would need to bring in new soil.

In short, dropping out and planting vegetables is not an option for this generation. There can be no more green museums because the fossil fuels runaway train is coming for us one way or
another. There may have been a time when engaging in resistance against a life-threatening system and building alternatives to that system could be meaningfully separated, but today we have to do both simultaneously: build and support inspiring alternatives like the Red Hook Community Farm—and make sure they have a fighting chance of thriving by trying to change an economic model so treacherous that
nowhere is safe. John Jordan, a longtime ecological activist in Britain and France, describes resistance and alternatives as “the twin strands of the DNA of social change. One without the other is useless.”
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The denizens of Blockadia live and know this. Which is why theirs is neither a movement of negation (no to the miners/drillers/pipe layers/heavy haulers), nor solely of protection (defending
cherished but static ways of life). Increasingly, it is also a constructive movement, actively building an alternative economy based on very different principles and values.

They are also learning—in a kind of people’s inversion of the shock
doctrine—that one of the most opportune times to build that next economy may be in the aftermath of disasters, particularly climate-related disasters. That’s
because recurring mega-tragedies like Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan that kill thousands and cause billions in damages serve dramatically to educate the public about the terrible costs of our current system, driving an argument for radical change that addresses the root, rather than only the symptoms, of the climate crisis. In the outpourings of volunteerism and donations, as well as the
rage at any whiff of profiteering, these disasters also activate the latent and broadly shared generosity that capitalism works so hard to deny. Not to mention the fact that, as the disaster capitalists well know, these events result in a whole lot of public money being put on the table—an increasingly rare event during times of relentless economic austerity.

With the right kind of public pressure,
that money can be marshaled not just to rebuild cities and communities, but to transform them into models of nonextractive living. This can go far beyond the usual calls for stronger seawalls: activists can demand everything from free, democratically controlled public transit, to more public housing along those transit lines, powered by community-controlled renewable energy—with the jobs created
by this investment going to local workers and paying a living wage. And unlike the disaster capitalists who use crises to end-run around democracy, a People’s Recovery (as many from the Occupy movement called for post-Sandy) would require new democratic processes, including neighborhood assemblies, to decide how hard-hit communities should be rebuilt. The overriding principle must be to address
the twin crises of inequality and climate change at the same time.