This Changes Everything (51 page)

The endgame, according to Republican politician Rick Santorum, is to “drill everywhere”—and it shows. As
The
Guardian
’s Suzanne Goldenberg reports, “Energy companies have fracked wells on church property, school grounds and in gated developments. Last November, an oil company
put a well on the campus of the University of North Texas in nearby Denton, right next to the tennis courts and across the road from the main sports stadium and a stand of giant wind turbines.” Fracking now covers so much territory that, according to a 2013
Wall Street Journal
investigation, “more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a well that has been drilled and fracked since 2000.”
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In Canada, the ambitions are just as aggressive. “As of mid-2012, the entire underground subsoil of Montréal, Laval, and Longueuil (three of the main cities in Québec) had been claimed by gas and petrol companies,” reports Kim Cornelissen, a former politician turned anti-fracking campaigner in the province. (So far, Quebec’s residents have managed to fend off the gas companies with a moratorium.)
In Britain, the area under consideration for fracking adds up to about half the entire island. And in July 2013, residents of the northeast of England were enraged to hear their region described as “uninhabited and desolate” in the House of Lords—and therefore eminently deserving of sacrifice. “Certainly in part of the northeast where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s
residence where we could conduct [it] without any kind of threat to the rural environment,” said Lord Howell, who had been an energy advisor to David Cameron’s government.
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This is coming as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that
a big distant company can come to
my
land and put me and my kids at risk—and never even ask my permission? How can it be legal to put chemicals in the air right where they know children are playing? How is it possible that the state, instead of protecting me from this attack, is sending police to beat up people whose only crime is trying to protect their families?

This unwelcome awakening has
made the fossil fuel sector a whole lot of enemies out of onetime friends. People like South Dakota cattle rancher John Harter, who went to court to try to stop TransCanada from burying a portion of the Keystone XL pipeline on his land. “I’ve never considered myself a bunny hugger,” he told a reporter, “but I guess if that’s what I’ve got to be called now, I’m OK with it.” The industry has also alienated
people like Christina Mills, who worked as an auditor for oil companies in Oklahoma for much of her career. But when a gas company started fracking in her middle-class North Texas subdivision, her views of the sector changed. “They made it personal here, and that’s when I had a problem. . . . They came into the back of our neighbourhood, 300ft from the back fence. That is so intrusive.”
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And
fracking opponents could only laugh when, in February 2014, it
emerged that none other than Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson had quietly joined a lawsuit opposing fracking-related activities near his $5 million Texas home, claiming it would lower property values. “I would like to officially welcome Rex to the ‘Society of Citizens Really Enraged When Encircled by Drilling’ (SCREWED),” wrote Jared Polis,
a Democratic Congressman from Colorado, in a sardonic statement. “This select group of everyday citizens has been fighting for years to protect their property values, the health of their local communities, and the environment. We are thrilled to have the CEO of a major international oil and gas corporation join our quickly multiplying ranks.”
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In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphlet
Common Sense,
“It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.”
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Well, the distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide. In a way, the name of the company at the center of Greece’s anti-mining movement says it all: Eldorado—a reference to the legendary “lost city of gold” that drove the conquistadors to some of their bloodiest massacres
in the Americas. This kind of pillage used to be reserved for non-European countries, with the loot returned to the motherland in Europe. But as Eldorado’s activities in northern Greece make clear, today the conquistadors are pillaging on their home turf as well.

That may prove to have been a grave strategic error. As Montana-based environmental writer and activist Nick Engelfried puts it, “Every
fracking well placed near a city’s water supply and every coal train rolling through a small town gives some community a reason to hate fossil industries. And by failing to notice this, oil, gas and coal companies may be digging their political graves.”
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None of this means that environmental impacts are suddenly evenly distributed. Historically marginalized people in the Global South, as well
as communities of color in the Global North, are still at far greater risk of living downstream from a mine, next door to a refinery, or next to a pipeline, just as they are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. But in the era of extreme energy, there is no longer the illusion of discreet sacrifice zones anymore. As Deeohn Ferris, formerly with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law, aptly put it, “we’re all in the same sinking boat, only people of color are closest to the hole.”
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Another boundary breaker is, of course, climate change. Because while there are still plenty of people who are fortunate enough to live somewhere that is not (yet) directly threatened by the extreme energy frenzy, no one is exempt from the real-world impacts of increasingly extreme weather,
or from the simmering psychological stress of knowing that we may very well grow old—and our young children may well grow up—in a climate significantly more treacherous than the one we currently enjoy. Like an oil spill that spreads from open water into wetlands, beaches, riverbeds, and down to the ocean floor, its toxins reverberating through the lifecycles of countless species, the sacrifice
zones created by our collective fossil fuel dependence are creeping and spreading like great shadows over the earth. After two centuries of pretending that we could quarantine the collateral damage of this filthy habit, fobbing the risks off on others, the game is up, and we are all in the sacrifice zone now.

The fossil fuel industry’s willingness to break the sacrifice
bargain in order to reach previously off-limits pools of carbon has galvanized the new climate movement in several important ways. For one, the scope of many new extraction and transportation projects has created opportunities for people whose voices are traditionally shut out of the dominant conversation to form alliances with those who have significantly more social power. Tar sands pipelines
have proven to be a particularly potent silo buster in this regard, and something of a gift to political organizing.

Beginning in northern Alberta, in a region where the worst impacts are being felt by Indigenous people, and often ending in places where the worst health impacts are felt by urban communities of color, these pipelines pass a whole lot of other places in between. After all, the
same piece of infrastructure will travel through multiple states or provinces (or both); through the watersheds of big cities and tiny towns; through farmlands and fishing rivers; through more lands claimed by Indigenous people and through land occupied by the upper middle class. And despite their huge differences, everyone along the route is up against a common threat and therefore are
potential
allies. In the 1990s, it was trade deals that brought huge and unlikely coalitions together; today it is fossil fuel infrastructure.

Before the most recent push into extreme energy, Big Oil and Big Coal had grown accustomed to operating in regions where they are so economically omnipotent that they pretty much ran the show. In places like Louisiana, Alberta, and Kentucky—not to mention Nigeria
and, until the Chávez era, Venezuela—the fossil fuel companies treat politicians as their unofficial PR wings and the judiciaries as their own personal legal departments. With so many jobs, and such a large percentage of the tax base on the line, regular people put up with an awful lot too. For instance, even after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, many Louisianans wanted higher safety standards and
a bigger share of the royalties from offshore oil wealth—but most didn’t join calls for a moratorium on deepwater drilling, despite all they had suffered.
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This is the Catch-22 of the fossil fuel economy: precisely because these activities are so dirty and disruptive, they tend to weaken or even destroy other economic drivers: fish stocks are hurt by pollution, the scarred landscape becomes
less attractive to tourists, and farmland becomes unhealthy. But rather than spark a popular backlash, this slow poisoning can end up strengthening the power of the fossil fuel companies because they end up being virtually the only game in town.

As the extractive industries charge into territories previously considered out of bounds, however, they are suddenly finding themselves up against people
who are far less compromised. In many of the new carbon frontiers, as well as in territories through which fossil fuel companies must move their product, the water is still relatively clean, the relationship to the land is still strong—and there are a great many people willing to fight very hard to protect ways of life that they view as inherently incompatible with toxic extraction.

For instance,
one of the natural gas industry’s biggest strategic mistakes was deciding it wanted to frack in and around Ithaca, New York—a liberal college town with a vibrant economic localization movement and blessed with breathtaking gorges and waterfalls. Faced with a direct threat to its idyllic community, Ithaca became not just a hub for anti-fracking activism but a center for serious academic research
into the unexplored risks:
it’s likely no coincidence that researchers at Cornell University, based in Ithaca, produced the game-changing study on methane emissions linked to fracking, whose findings became an indispensable tool for the global resistance movement. And it was the industry’s great misfortune that famed biologist and author Sandra Steingraber, a world-renowned expert on the link
between industrial toxins and cancer, had recently taken up a post at Ithaca College. Steingraber threw herself into the fracking fight, providing expert testimony before countless audiences and helping to mobilize tens of thousands of New Yorkers. This work contributed to not just keeping the frackers out of Ithaca but to a total of nearly 180 fracking bans or moratoria adopted by cities and towns
across the state.
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The industry badly miscalculated again when it began construction on a 12,260-horsepower compressor station carrying Pennsylvania’s fracked gas smack in the middle of the town of Minisink, New York. Many homes were within half a mile of the facility, including one just 180 meters away. And the town’s residents weren’t the only ones whose health was threatened by the station.
The surrounding area is prized agricultural land dotted with small family farms, orchards, and vineyards growing organic and artisanal produce for New York’s farmer’s markets and locavore restaurants. So Millennium Pipeline—the company behind the compressor—found itself up against not just a bunch of angry, local farmers but also a whole lot of angry New York City hipsters, celebrity chefs, and
movie stars like Mark Ruffalo, calling not just for an end to fracking but for the state to shift to 100 percent renewables.
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And then there was the almost unfathomably stupid idea of trying to open up some of Europe’s first major fracking operations nowhere other than the South of France. When residents of the Department of Var—known for its olives, figs, sheep, and for the famed beaches of
Saint-Tropez—discovered that several of their communities were in line for gas fracking, they organized furiously. Economist and activist Maxime Combes describes scenes around southern France at the inception of the movement, where “the halls of the town-meetings in impacted communities were packed to overflowing, and very often, there were more participants in these meetings than inhabitants in
the villages.” Var, Combes wrote, would soon experience “the largest citizen’s mobilization seen in the history of a Department
that is usually on the right of the political spectrum.” As a result of the industry’s French folly, it ended up not just losing the right to frack near the Riviera (at least for now), but in 2011 France became the first country to adopt a nationwide fracking ban.
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Even something as routine as getting heavy machinery up to northern Alberta to keep the tar sands mines and upgraders running has ignited new resistance movements. In keeping with the mammoth scale of everything associated with the largest industrial project on earth, the machines being transported, which are manufactured in South Korea, can be about as long and heavy as a Boeing 747, and some of
the “heavy hauls,” as they are called, are three stories high. The shipments are so large, in fact, that these behemoths cannot be trucked normally. Instead, oil companies like ExxonMobil have to load them onto specialty trailers that take up more than two lanes of highway, and are too high to make it under most standard overpasses.
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The only roads that meet the oil companies’ needs are located
in distinctly hostile territory. For instance, communities in Montana and Idaho have led a fierce multi-year campaign to prevent the rigs from traveling along the scenic but narrow Highway 12. They object to the human costs of having their critical roadway blocked for hours so that the huge machines can pass, as well as to the environmental risks of a load toppling on one of many hairpin turns
and ending up in a stream or river (this is fly-fishing country and locals are passionate about their wild rivers).