This Changes Everything
Page 24
—Political scientist William Barnes and intellectual historian Nils Gilman, 20111
“The leaders of the largest environmental groups in the country have become all too comfortable jet-setting with their handpicked corporate board members, a lifestyle they owe to those same corporate moguls. So it is little wonder that instead of prodding their benefactors to do better, these leaders—always hungry for the next donation—heap praise on every corporate half measure and at every photo opportunity.”
—Christine MacDonald, former employee of Conservation International, 20082
6
* * *
FRUITS, NOT ROOTS
The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green
“Our arguments must translate into profits, earnings, productivity, and economic incentives for industry.”
—Former National Wildlife Federation President Jay Hair, 19871
“I know this seems antithetical, but the bottom line here is not whether new coal-fired plants are built. . . . If the new coal plants are coming online under a cap that is bringing total emissions down, then it is not the worst thing in the world. Coal isn’t the enemy. Carbon emissions are.”
—Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, 20092
Before the twentieth century, as many as a million Attwater’s prairie chickens made their homes in the tall grasses along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana.3 During mating season, they were quite a spectacle. To attract females, the males stomped their feet in little staccato motions, made loud, spooky cooing noises (known as “booming”), and inflated bright yellow air sacs on the sides of their necks, giving them the appearance of having swallowed two golden eggs.
But as the native prairie was turned into subdivisions and sliced up by oil and gas development, the Attwater’s prairie chicken population began to crash. Local birders mourned the loss and in 1965, The Nature Conservancy—renowned for buying up ecologically important tracts of land and turning them into preserves—opened a Texas chapter. Early on, one of its major priorities was saving the Attwater’s prairie chicken from extinction.4
It wasn’t going to be easy, even for what would become the richest environmental organization in the world. One of the last remaining breeding grounds was located on 2,303 acres in southeast Texas on the shore of Galveston Bay, a property that happened to be owned by Mobil (now ExxonMobil). The fossil fuel giant hadn’t yet covered the land in oil and gas infrastructure, but there were active wells on its southern edge, closing in on the breeding grounds of the endangered bird. Then in 1995, came some surprisingly good news. Mobil was donating its Galveston Bay property to The Nature Conservancy —“the last best hope of saving one of the world’s most endangered species,” as the company put it. The conservancy, which named the land the Texas City Prairie Preserve, would make “the recovery of the Attwater’s prairie chicken” its “highest priority.” To all appearances, it was a shining conservation success story—proof that a nonconfrontational, partnership-based approach to environmentalism could yield tangible results.5
But four years later, something very strange happened. The Nature Conservancy began to do the very thing that its supporters thought it was there to prevent: it began extracting fossil fuels on the preserve. In 1999, the conservancy commissioned an oil and gas operator to sink a new gas well inside the preserve, which would send millions in revenue flowing directly into the environmental organization’s coffers. And while the older oil and gas wells—those drilled before the land was designated a bird preserve—were mostly clustered far from the habitat of the Attwater’s prairie chickens, that was decidedly not the case for the new well. According to Aaron Tjelmeland, the current manager of the preserve, the spot where the conservancy allowed drilling was relatively near the areas where the endangered birds nested, as well as performed their distinctive mating rituals. Of all the wells, this drilling pad was “the closest to where the prairie chickens normally hung out, or normally boomed,” he said in an interview.6
For about three years, The Nature Conservancy’s foray into the fossil fuel business attracted relatively little public controversy. That changed in 2002, when a piece in the Los Angeles Times exposed the drilling. For traditional conservationists, it was a little like finding out that Amnesty International had opened its own prison wing at Guantánamo. “They’re exploiting the Attwater’s prairie chicken to make money,” fumed Clait E. Braun, then president of the Wildlife Society, and a leading expert on prairie chickens. Then, in May 2003, The Washington Post followed up with a scathing investigation into the organization’s questionable land deals, delving deeper into the surprising fact that on the Texas City Prairie Preserve, one of the most respected environmental organizations in the United States was now moonlighting as a gas driller.7
The Nature Conservancy, sounding like pretty much everyone in the oil and gas business, insisted that, “We can do this drilling without harming the prairie chickens and their habitat.”8 But the track record on the preserve makes that far from clear. In addition to the increased traffic, light, and noise that are part of any drilling operation, there were several points when drilling and wildlife preservation seemed to come into direct conflict.
For instance, because Attwater’s prairie chickens are so endangered, there is a public-private program that breeds them in captivity and then releases them into the wild, an initiative in which The Nature Conservancy was participating on the Texas City Prairie Preserve. But at one point early on in its drilling foray, a delay in the construction of a gas pipeline led the conservancy to postpone the release of the captive-bred chicks by three months—a dicey call because migrating raptors and other predators appear to have been waiting for them.9
The bird release that year was a disaster. According to an internal Nature Conservancy report, all seventeen of the chicks “died shortly after their delayed release.” The science director of the Texas chapter wrote that the months of waiting had subjected the birds “to higher probability of death from raptor predation.” According to The Washington Post report, by 2003 there were just sixteen Attwater’s prairie chickens that The Nature Conservancy knew about on the preserve, down from thirty-six before the drilling began. Though top conservancy officials insisted that the birds had not been adversely affected by its industrial activities, it was a dismal record.10
When I first came across the decade-old story, I assumed that The Nature Conservancy’s extraction activities had stopped when they were exposed, since the revelation had ignited a firestorm of controversy and forced the organization to pledge not to repeat this particular fundraising technique. After the story broke, the organization’s then president stated clearly, “We won’t initiate any new oil, gas drilling, or mining of hard rock minerals on preserves that we own. We’ve only done that twice in 52 years but we thought, nonetheless, we should, for appearances’ sake, not do that again.”11
Turns out I was wrong. In fact, as of this book’s writing, the conservancy was still extracting hydrocarbons on the Texas preserve that it rescued from Mobil back in 1995. In a series of communications, conservancy spokespeople insisted that the organization was required to continue fossil fuel extracting under the terms of the original drilling lease. And it’s true that the 2003 pledge had been carefully worded, promising not to initiate “any new” drilling activities, and containing a proviso that it would honor “existing contracts.”12
But The Nature Conservancy has not simply continued extracting for gas in that same well. A 2010 paper presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference, and coauthored by two conservancy officials, reveals that the original well “died in March 2003, and was unable to flow due to excessive water production,” leading to the drilling of a replacement well in the same area in late 2007. It also turns out that while the original well was for gas, the new one is now producing only oil.13
Given that close to five years elapsed between the death of the Nature Conservancy’s first well and the drilling of the replacemen
t, it seems possible that the organization had the legal grounds to extricate itself from the original lease if it had been sufficiently motivated to do so. The lease I have seen states clearly that in the event that oil or gas production ever stops in a given “well tract,” the operator has a 180-day window to begin “reworking” the well or to start drilling a new one. If it fails to do so, the lease for that area is automatically terminated. If The Nature Conservancy causes a delay in the operator’s work—which the organization claims has regularly occurred, since it restricts drilling to a few months per year—then the 180-day window is extended by the equivalent amount of time. So, the organization insists that though it was “concerned” about initial plans for the new 2007 well, due to the proposed well’s proximity to the Attwater’s habitat, it believed it was “bound by the existing lease and required to permit the drilling of the replacement well,” albeit in a different location. James Petterson, director of marketing strategies at the conservancy, told me that the organization had sought “an outside legal opinion from an oil and gas expert” that confirmed this view. Yet in an internal explanatory document on drilling entitled “Attwater’s Prairie Chicken Background,” the organization emphasizes that it maintains the power to control what can and cannot occur on the preserve. “Given the birds’ endangered status,” the document states, “no activity can take place that is deemed likely to harm the species.” Petterson insists that “bird experts were consulted” and “nobody [here] would want to do anything to harm an endangered species, particularly one as endangered as the Attwater’s Prairie Chicken . . . nobody is going to choose oil and gas development over the last remaining handful of birds on the planet.”14
Regardless of whether the conservancy resumed drilling for oil in Texas because it had no choice or because it wanted to get the petro dollars flowing again after the initial controversy had died down, the issue has taken on new urgency of late. That’s because, in November 2012, and with little fanfare, the last of the Attwater’s prairie chickens disappeared from the Preserve. Aaron Tjelmeland, the preserve manager, said of the birds that there are “none that we know about.” It is worth underlining this detail: under the stewardship of what The New Yorker describes as “the biggest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world”—boasting over one million members and assets of roughly $6 billion and operating in thirty-five countries—an endangered species has been completely wiped out from one of its last remaining breeding grounds, on which the organization earned millions drilling for and pumping oil and gas. Amazingly, the website for the Texas City Prairie Preserve continues to boast that the “land management techniques the conservancy utilizes at the preserve are best practices that we export to other preserves.” And though it mentions in passing that there are no more Attwater’s prairie chickens on the land, it says nothing about its side business in oil and gas.15
The disappearance of the prairie chickens is no doubt the result of a combination of factors—invasive species, low numbers of captive-bred birds, drought (possibly linked to climate change), and the relatively small size of the reserve (the conservancy’s preferred explanation). It’s possible that the oil and gas drilling played no role at all.
So let’s set the birds aside for a moment. Even if a few had survived, and even if a few return in the future, the fact remains that The Nature Conservancy has been in the oil and gas business for a decade and half. That this could happen in the age of climate change points to a painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions: large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests—they have merged with them.
The Nature Conservancy, I should stress, is the only green group (that I know of, at least) to actually sink its own oil and gas wells. But it is far from the only group to have strong ties with the fossil fuel sector and other major polluters. For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF (originally the World Wildlife Fund) has had a long relationship with Shell, and the World Resources Institute has what it describes as “a long-term, close strategic relationship with the Shell Foundation.” Conservation International has partnerships with Walmart, Monsanto, Australian-based mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton (a major extractor of coal), as well as Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Toyota, McDonald’s, and BP (according to The Washington Post BP has channeled $2 million to Conservation International over the years).I And that is the barest of samplings.16
The relationships are also more structural than mere donations and partnerships. The Nature Conservancy counts BP America, Chevron, and Shell among the members of its Business Council and Jim Rogers, chairman of the board and former CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest U.S. coal-burning utilities, sits on the organization’s board of directors (past board members include former CEOs of General Motors and American Electric Power).17
There is yet another way in which some green groups have entangled their fates with the corporations at the heart of the climate crisis: by investing their own money with them. For instance, while investigating The Nature Conservancy’s foray into oil and gas drilling, I was struck by a line item in its 2012 financial statements: $22.8 million of the organization’s endowment—one of the largest in the U.S.—was invested in “energy” companies (that figure has since gone up to $26.5 million). Energy, of course, means oil, gas, coal, and the like.II Curious, I soon discovered that most big conservation groups did not have policies prohibiting them from investing their endowments in fossil fuel companies. The hypocrisy is staggering: these organizations raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is preserving wildlife and attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet some have turned around and invested that money with companies that have made it abundantly clear, through their reserves, that they intend to extract several times more carbon than the atmosphere can absorb with any degree of safety. It must be stated that these choices, made unilaterally by the top tier of leadership at the big green groups, do not represent the wishes or values of the millions of members who support them through donations or join genuinely community supported campaigns to clean up polluted rivers, protect beloved pieces of wilderness, or support renewables legislation. Indeed, many have been deeply alarmed to discover that groups they believed to be confronting polluters were in fact in business with them.18
There are, moreover, large parts of the green movement that have never engaged in these types of arrangements—they don’t have endowments to invest or they have clear policies prohibiting fossil fuel holdings, and some have equally clear policies against taking donations from polluters. These groups, not coincidentally, tend also to be the ones with track records of going head-to-head with big oil and coal: Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have been battling Shell’s and Chevron’s alleged complicity with horrific human rights abuses in the Niger Delta since the early 1990s (though Shell has agreed to pay out $15.5 million to settle a case involving these claims, it continues to deny wrongdoing, as does Chevron); Rainforest Action Network has been at the forefront of the international campaign against Chevron for the disaster left behind in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Food & Water Watch has helped secure big victories against fracking; 350.org helped launch the fossil fuel divestment movement and has been at the forefront of the national mobilization against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Sierra Club is a more complex case: it has also been a part of these campaigns and is the bane of the U.S. coal industry—but between 2007 and 2010, the group secretly took millions from a natural gas company. But under new leadership—and facing pressure from the grass roots—it has cut ties with the fossil fuel sector.19
Even so, almost no one’s hands are clean. That’s because many of the top foundations th
at underwrite much of the environmental movement—including groups and projects with which I have been involved—come from fortunes, like the Rockefeller family’s, that are linked with fossil fuels. And though these foundations do fund campaigns that confront big polluters most do not prohibit their own endowments from being invested with coal and oil. So, for example, the Ford Foundation, which has supported the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council (and helped support a film that is accompanying this book), reported in 2013 that it had nearly $14 million in Shell and BP stocks alone (another multimillion-dollar stock holding is Norway’s Statoil).20 In North America and Europe, it’s virtually impossible to do public interest work of any scale—in academia or journalism or activism—without taking money of questionable origin, whether the origin is the state, corporations, or private philanthropy. And though more accountable grassroots movement financing models are desperately needed (and crowdfunding is a promising start), the fact of these financial ties is not what is particularly noteworthy, nor proof of some nefarious corruption.
Where following the financial ties between funders and public interest work becomes relevant is when there is a compelling reason to believe that funding is having undue influence—shaping the kinds of research undertaken, the kinds of policies advanced, as well as the kinds of questions that get asked in the first place. And since it is generally accepted that fossil fuel money and conservative foundations have shaped the climate change denial movement, it seems fair to ask whether fossil fuel money and the values of centrist foundations have shaped parts of the movement that are in the business of proposing solutions. And there is a good deal of evidence that these ties have indeed had a decisive influence.