Oil and Honey

by Bill McKibben

  Here is Seeley’s commonsense summation of what bees have to teach us about decision making; interestingly, they are principles that dominate at town meetings: “First, we use the power of an open and fair competition of ideas, in the form of a frank debate, to integrate the information that is dispersed among the group’s members. Second, we foster good communication within the debating group, recognizing that this is how valuable information that is uncovered by one member will quickly reach the other members. And third, we recognize that while it is important for a group’s members to listen to what everyone else is saying, it is essential that they listen critically, form their own opinions about the options being discussed, and register their views independently” instead of slavishly following a leader.

  In every detail, this pretty much describes the exact opposite of how politics work in Washington, and explains precisely why, for twenty years, our elected officials have done nothing to make our earth more secure. We can’t swarm—we’re stuck here on our home planet—and so good decision making is at least as key for us as it is for bees. But we don’t have frank debate, or foster good communication—we have Fox News. It’s hard to imagine a hive that would, say, go over a fiscal cliff of its own making, or consider minting a trillion-dollar coin to solve its financial woes—or, for that matter, approve a pipeline when its most informed scouts had come back with the information that it might mean “game over for the climate.”

  In my town of five hundred people, on the first Tuesday in March 2012, we figured out the road budget and a new roof for the school, and we still had time to vote on a resolution condemning the Citizens United decision and the baleful influence of money in politics. And then I went back to D.C. and the ongoing fight.

  * * *

  And what a fight. It’s not a fight about reason in any way—just a fight about power. The night of the president’s announcement the previous fall, a senator said to me, “You need to understand that Big Oil never loses in this town, not ever. Don’t expect them to take this lightly.”

  He was right. For five months we’d been on the offensive, battling against the odds for an improbable victory—improbable enough that the fossil fuel industry had never bothered mustering its full force. Now we were going to have to defend that win, as small and temporary as it was, against the industry’s massed power. And instead of fighting out in the open, on the White House lawn, the battle now moved to the halls of Congress. I’d been taught in high school civics that the legislative was the most populist branch of our government, and that the lower chamber in particular was the “people’s house.” In truth, it’s almost completely closed, a murky place where after a few hours of hearings the leaders decreed a vote on reviving the pipeline. It passed 234–193. The 234, we quickly calculated, had taken $42 million from the fossil fuel industry.

  When members of Congress bothered to make actual arguments for the pipeline, they were easy to knock down. “President Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese. There’s really just no other way to put it,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner. But if you hadn’t taken $823,475 from the fossil fuel industry over the course of your career, there were, in fact, plenty of other ways to put it.

  Jobs first: pipeline proponents routinely claimed the pipeline would create tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs, basing their figures on one “study,” paid for by TransCanada, that claimed that, among other things, dozens of dance teachers would move to the pipeline route and open academies. In fact, a few seconds’ thought makes it clear that a pipeline is designed to kill jobs, not create them. Yes, building it would occupy a couple of thousand men and women for two years and at good wages, but as a Cornell University study showed and even TransCanada eventually admitted, once the pipeline was built it would take thirty-five people to maintain it. Republicans such as Boehner had voted down every attempt by the administration to create more jobs; crocodiles would have been ashamed at the tears they were now shedding for the unemployed. Energy jobs will come when we commit to a future of solar panels and tight houses—they’ll require lots of people swinging hammers. No one ships their home to China to have it insulated.

  As for “energy security,” it did make a certain brute sense to say, “Let’s take oil from stable North America, not the volatile Middle East.” It made sense, at least, until you actually looked at where the Keystone pipeline ended—in a so-called free trade zone along the Gulf Coast, where it would be cheap and easy to ship it overseas. Which turns out to be exactly what the refiners had in mind—the contracts were with companies owned by, among others, Saudi Arabians, who made it clear that the oil would be turned to diesel and end up in Latin America and Europe. A few of our House allies actually called the bluff on this one, offering an amendment to approve the pipeline if the oil stayed in the United States. Big Oil instructed its harem to vote it down.

  But in political debate, unlike academic debate, the actual facts matter not at all. Politicians continued to insist that there were tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs at stake and that the key to defeating Iran’s nuclear plans lay in constructing a pipeline to Canada’s tar sands. As the winter wore on and fuel prices became a key Republican talking point during the presidential primaries, the candidates kept insisting that gas would cost $2.50 a gallon (Newt Gingrich) or $2.00 (Michele Bachmann) if only we’d hook up Keystone. As usual, actual analyses showed just the opposite—since the new pipeline would actually ease a glut of oil in the Midwest, TransCanada had explained to Canadian regulators in official filings that it would raise gas prices across fifteen states, by some estimates as much as fifteen cents a gallon. But pointing out that fact didn’t slow the flood of talking points; as government expenditure reports would later show, TransCanada’s main response to Obama’s decision to delay was to hire dozens more lobbyists and run thousands more TV commercials. (Which made us, I suppose, job creators.)

  We saved our victory, such as it was, more through Republican ineptitude than Democratic valor. First Boehner attached a provision to a payroll tax cut bill trying to put the president on the spot by giving him sixty days to review the pipeline. But since it was transparent blackmail over a crucial issue, and since TransCanada hadn’t even announced a new route for the pipeline, the president had some cover for saying, “Backed to the wall, I’ll reject Keystone outright.”

  It was semi-brave, really—the president said those words the week after the head of the American Petroleum Institute promised “huge political consequences” if the pipeline were rejected, a threat he had the resources to carry out. But it was only semi-brave, since Obama also said he’d “welcome” a new pipeline application later on, and further that he’d “expedite” the southern half of the pipeline, from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf of Mexico. That was a cynical promise, since this stretch of pipe didn’t cross a border and so the federal government had little authority to block it, but the president was trying to provide himself some political cover at the expense of rural Texans whose land would soon be seized by eminent domain and wrecked. (Those rural Texans immediately began to organize, and their brave stand would be one of the most inspiring parts of this whole fight.)

  After that, the action moved to the Senate, still in Democratic control—and this time it was the filibuster rule, much abused by the Republicans, that saved the day. Everyone knew that Big Oil had fifty votes for the pipeline as “moderate Democrats” started defecting, in this case “moderate” meaning “deeply in debt to the carbon industry.” Joe Manchin from West Virginia went first—he’d taken more money than anyone in his party from the fossil fuel industry (and had run a memorable campaign commercial in which he’d used his deer rifle to literally shoot a copy of climate legislation that he’d nailed to a tree). Knowing someone’s party, in fact, was far less important than knowing how much cash they’d gotten from whom. After one vote I talked to Steve Kretzmann, who compiled the dirtyenergy
money.com database. “I’ve been looking at this stuff for years and it still shocks me how the thesis continues to hold up,” he said. “There are always a few outliers, but by and large they really are bought and paid for. It really is that simple.”

  Long term, this is why we have to amend the Constitution, win public financing for campaigns, and do the other vital work of basic governmental reform. But short term, we were casting about for answers. One was to buy a few thousand referee shirts and plastic whistles; in the weeks before the Super Bowl we rallied on Capitol Hill and then in congressional districts around the country, calling penalties on congressmen for “democratic interference” and “too much money on the field.” (Good fun to get on a subway car with a couple of hundred other referees en route to the Capitol!) Another was more old-fashioned—having sat in at the White House, and having surrounded it with people, we now decided to flood the Senate with messages. May Boeve, who had helped found 350.org as a twenty-two-year-old and was now its executive director, spent a couple of days in nonstop phone calls with the heads of other environmental groups, persuading them that it would be worthwhile—and fun!—to work together on the project: at noon on a Monday in mid-February, everyone started e-mailing their lists asking them to get in touch with their senators. We’d given ourselves twenty-four hours, and a goal of half a million phone calls and e-mails, which would be by far the most concentrated blitz on any issue that the environmental movement had conducted in a generation, so we had no idea if we could do it. I took the train down from Vermont and spent the day at our tiny new office in Brooklyn, doing what we do these days when we can’t think of a better approach: tweeting.

  11:59 a.m.: “Okay, we’re on. The next 24 hours will be crucial in the Keystone fight. You’ve never been needed more.”

  12:01 p.m.: “Half a million e-mails is a lot. I don’t know if we can do it. But we’re sure as hell going to try.”

  12:22 p.m.: I think this is good news. We crashed 350.org for a few minutes so many people tried to sign up, but it’s back up. So go to it.”

  1:29 p.m.: “I’m told we just passed 100k e-mails to the Senate, one hour in.”

  By now it wasn’t just the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation spreading the word, but groups such as CREDO and MoveOn. The numbers were starting to pile up, even as Republican senators chose that afternoon to file their bill to approve the pipeline. In midafternoon we passed 350,000 (“I’m no numerologist, but this is a big number for us here”), and we were growing increasingly confident. I put on my suit and tie and headed uptown to tape that evening’s Colbert Report. I’d done the show twice before, and it’s by far the scariest thing on TV: Stephen Colbert is the nation’s great satirist precisely because you never can guess what he’s going to say next—it’s like playing Ping-Pong with someone who knows five hundred ways to spin. But this night I was buoyant—sitting in the greenroom, just before the taping began at seven, I got to tweet: “Um, I don’t quite believe it. We just hit 500k e-mails in under six hours. Whaddya say we just keep going?” I parried Colbert’s happy ribbing as best I could (“Did you come down from Vermont in some car powered by … self-righteousness?”), and at the end he said, “So, just to make sure that no one out there in Colbert Nation sends an e-mail by mistake, what’s the Web site we should avoid again?”

  “Three-fifty dot org,” I said, and before long we’d passed the eight hundred thousand mark. The next morning young people from the dozens of groups that had been involved filled cardboard boxes with printouts of the messages and carried them, by the dozens, to the office of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. They were in neckties and dresses; it looked like a scene from one of those old Jimmy Stewart movies, where the Western Union boys are stacking telegrams in the Capitol rotunda. My favorite picture of the day, however, was taken surreptitiously with an iPhone as someone passed the reception desk of a Midwestern senator. It showed the day’s “call sheet,” listing the issues that constituents had phoned in to complain about that day. There was one call on Obama and contraceptives, one on payroll tax cuts, two on unemployment insurance, and three on “horse slaughter.” And 115 on the Keystone pipeline. We’d done our job.

  For the next few weeks, the political pros did their job. Groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters are masters of the inside game: they have dedicated lobbyists who shuttled briefing books and PowerPoint presentations to wavering senators, convinced donors to call the candidates they’d funded, and set up local phone banks. The inside game hasn’t worked very well for greens in recent years, mostly because there’s been no outside game to go with it. But everyone had worked for the previous six months to build that muscle. The echoes of our protests were still strong enough, if barely. The climactic vote came in early March, on a day when presidential candidate Rick Santorum was explaining why global warming was no problem (“Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is”), and the low-lying island nation of Kiribati was announcing that it had bought a swath of land in Fiji and was beginning to evacuate its 130,000 residents. I was on the road as usual but watching Twitter as the votes were counted.

  Big Oil was certain it would win. So certain that, as the vote was under way, the American Petroleum Institute put out a press release announcing that a “bipartisan Senate majority approves building the Keystone pipeline” and congratulating the body on “taking a bold step.” But it lost—by two votes. A few minutes later API sent out a “corrected release,” reporting instead that the Senate had “tried to take a bold step.”

  We knew there was still every chance that Big Oil would triumph in the long run—as I told reporters yet again that night, there are no permanent victories for environmentalists. And we knew that stopping Keystone wasn’t going to stop global warming. Still, there’s pleasure in beating the bad guys, especially when the odds are against you.

  I’d grown up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and spent my summers in a tricorne hat, giving tours of the Battle Green (which may explain why I’ve never confused dissent with a lack of patriotism—those guys were, after all, revolutionaries). But today I was thinking of those great men who grew up a generation later and one town over, in the transcendental forests of Concord. Henry David Thoreau: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Or his usually graver neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a more pugnacious mood: “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” I was no resolute young fellow, but many of my colleagues were, and for their sake I hoped that day’s small win was the start of something, not the end.

  4

  SIMPLE

  March is usually about my favorite time of year—the days are getting a little longer, but the snow is still deep. It is cold at night but warming during the day—days are spent skiing the woods for a couple of hours in the morning, then helping the neighbors in the sugar bush all afternoon, hauling sap and watching the boil.

  But the second warmest winter in Vermont history meant that there wasn’t much to ski on: we’d joked all season long about the “‘nor-inchers” that would coat the ground white and not much more. It’s somehow worse with the Internet—now you can check the long-term weather forecast every few hours and confirm that there’s still no snowstorm on the way. It’s like opening the freezer to find that, sure enough, still no ice cream.

  About the middle of March, though, “annoying” started to turn into “spooky.” Jeff Masters is the most widely read meteorologist on the Web, and on March 14, 2012, he reported that “a highly unusual weeklong heat wave is building over much of the United States, and promises to bring the warmest temperatures ever seen to a large portion of the Midwest.” The “exceptional heat will also
be exceptionally long-lasting,” he predicted, moving east as the month progressed.

  I took the dog out for one last slushy ski, and then waxed the boards for storage and oiled the chain on my bike. But I was unprepared for precisely how much reality was about to break over my winter-white head in the next few days.

  The phone rang that evening, and it was the White House—which always makes me a little nervous, just because it’s the White House. It’s not as if Obama was calling me; still, Jon Carson is the guy who ran his field campaign in 2008, and who had met with me at the Hay-Adams back in August. He works down the hall from the president. (Like I said, I’d watched The West Wing.) When I called him it usually meant I was about to cause him some trouble, and vice versa. This was a courtesy call to let me know the president had just announced his travel plans for the next week. He was going on an “energy tour.” It would start at a solar farm in New Mexico and then it would move to Oklahoma, and—“tell me you’re not going to Cushing,” I interrupted.

  “We’re going to Cushing,” he said, and I believe I said, “Shit.” He knew why I was angry, of course—that’s why he’d called to soften the blow. In the game we’d been playing back and forth since August, this was the first time the administration really slapped us, and it stung. Here’s why: Cushing, Oklahoma, is a huge oil depot. Keystone was supposed to go right through there. And when the president had blocked the Canadian crossing, he’d promised to “expedite” the southern leg of the pipeline that ran from Cushing to the Gulf Coast. Since TransCanada didn’t need his permission to build the pipe, he was like a rooster taking credit for the dawn, but taking credit is a finely honed Washington art, and now the president was heading to Cushing to pose for pictures with a stack of pipe behind him. The administration was going to rub our noses in the fact that even our temporary victory was far from complete.