No Planet B

by Lucy Diavolo

  When the Refuge was designated officially protected public land in 1960, it became, in essence, owned by the American public. After decades of bipartisan efforts to protect the wilderness, the Trump administration mandated a minimum of two massive lease sales of the 1.6 million acres of Coastal Plain to the fossil fuel industry by 2021 to offset tax cuts for corporations and millionaires as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The administration is pushing to have these sales later this year, and the initial draft of its environmental impact assessment didn’t consider oil spills or climate change.

  Republican senator Lisa Murkowski led this provision, and in doing so, also amended the stated purpose of the refuge itself to include oil drilling—a stark contrast to the original stated purposes, such as maintaining environmental health, conserving wildlife, and protecting wilderness values. The move comes following Murkow-ski’s repeated acknowledgments of the effects of climate change on Alaska. Under her legislation, lands leased in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be managed as a petroleum reserve, which undermines adequate environmental protection.

  Nobody really knows just how much oil is in the Coastal Plains area. Before drilling can happen, seismic tests assess which areas have oil. The impacts of these tests alone could be devastating, according to recent reports by Arctic scientists, as seismic exploration sends strong shock waves into the ground. Tests occur on frozen tundra so the vehicles won’t sink, but winter is also birthing season for Southern Beaufort polar bear mothers, who seek refuge on the Coastal Plain—and the species population has already declined by 40 percent from loss of sea ice. Seismic exploration exacerbates erosion and also the thawing of permafrost, frozen ground across the Arctic, which the Refuge has experienced since seismic testing occurred there in the 1980s.

  The Gwich’in organized the summit to connect allies and community members from villages across Alaska and address these threats. Elders, who traveled by plane from the Southwest, and Gwich’in members from Old Crow in Canada, who came by boat, joined hunters, chiefs, community members, youth, traditional and Western scientists, lawyers, and grassroots organizers, who came together to share their research and personal experiences with the rapidly changing climate.

  The Arctic is known as ground zero of climate change because it is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. On July 1, Juneau broke a 110-year-old heat record. Unusually hot and dry summers are fueling rampant wildfires too: as of the first week of July, 120 fires were burning in Alaska, prompting evacuation orders and air-quality alerts. Many of the log cabins in Gwich’yaa Zhee are tilted, which a local explained to me as a result of climate change melting the permafrost and shifting the foundation. “We’ve got rapid warming the last few years,” he said. “I’ve never seen stuff like this.”

  For three days at the Summit, I camped along the river. We gathered outside under an open-air wooden octagon structure overlooking the Yukon River, surrounded by aspen, cottonwood, and bushes of wild roses. To travel such great distances to gather in a remote village requires intention, and there I felt a profound sense of unity, purpose, and community.

  Speakers shared concerns about rapid glacier melt, increasing wildfires, earlier and condensed flowering seasons that lead to mismatched timelines for pollinators. Gwich’in leaders emphasized how drilling would impact their identity, food security, and livelihood. Hunters shared their stories of noticing changes in animal behavior. Elders offered prayers and encouraged healing in the community. Western scientists explained that the rapid rate of Alaska’s increasing heat is also exposing coastal communities in the region to storms and erosion from vanishing sea ice: at least thirty-one villages are in imminent danger from coastal erosion, and three of those villages must relocate soon or cease to exist.

  To come together in the Arctic was fitting. The world’s livelihood depends on this region because it acts as a global climate regulator. When ice melts here, it drives extreme weather across North America, Europe, and Asia, with newly open water creating more extreme temperatures and moisture for storms. Research shows that disappearing sea ice could be affecting continental weather patterns. Melting permafrost releases methane, which also accelerates climate change.

  “Our lands are now slumping, entire lakes draining, and even entire rivers reversing as the permafrost and glaciers that held our ancient lands together are now melting and eroding at accelerating rates,” Chief Tizya-tramm, from Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow, Yukon, testified at a congressional subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., held in March with other chiefs, tribal members, and politicians.

  Proponents of drilling in the refuge claim the Gwich’in will not be impacted because they don’t physically travel to the Coastal Plain, a generations-long choice made so as to not disturb caribou birthing grounds that the community consider too sacred to visit. What the proponents fail to recognize in this logic is that by impacting the caribou, they impact the Gwich’in.

  Hunting and the ability to live off the land is crucial to the community. It can become nearly impossible to have access to affordable food otherwise: grocery stores aren’t often accessible or affordable, and gas often costs more than $7 a gallon. Community members and leaders emphasized the connection between protecting the Coastal Plain and protecting their identity as a matter of spiritual, cultural, and physical survival.

  “I know what it’s like to live in the village and go without a grocery store,” twenty-two-year-old Julia Fisher-Salmon, Draanjik Gwich’in, told me. “The Inupiak people from the upper coast can’t eat their meat anymore because it makes them sick, the oil rigs give off toxic particulate matter…. Oil and gas [are] forcing villagers who depend on this land to leave, to move. It’s all connected.”

  “In the winter you can see black snow on people’s rooftops from the oil field [being] so close,” Siqiniq Maupin, an Inupiaq mother and leader, told me. “We have been advised that they have found such high levels of toxins in the bowhead whale that we have a higher risk of getting cancer by eating our traditional food. The world has made it so that our traditional food is killing us.”

  Oil development could end the way of life that has sustained the Gwich’in and neighboring Indigenous communities for twenty thousand years. Many feel the adverse effects of opening the refuge to the fossil fuel industry would be akin to cultural genocide.

  Following the Arctic Indigenous Climate Summit, my reporting continued as I joined Julia and group of young artists on a six-day trip into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a trip organized by The North Face to bring awareness to the issue, reminiscent of their first-ever expedition to the region in 1972 to protest a proposed pipeline. We took three bush planes to reach our base camp near the Sadler-ochit Mountains, flying over the Brooks Range along the way.

  Knowing that the region is untouched by industry, I was surprised to see countless dark lines intersecting on the tundra below. Daniel, our pilot, identified them as caribou migration trails, imprinted by caribou following their ancestors’ paths for thousands of years.

  Seeing their paths from the sky, the refuge looked like caribou country. This is a birthplace, where mothers feel safe and called to give life, and the trails of caribou mark the landscape rather than the man-made roads. Amid a global refugee crisis, this place shows us the beauty of migration, something that should be a part of every being’s right to move in seeking refuge.

  As we began to land, thousands of caribou ran below us on the flat tundra, the pulse of the plains. I noticed several turned in tightly twisting circles; Daniel explained the animals were disoriented by the noise of the bush plane. I could only imagine the disturbance and impacts seismic testing, trucks, drills, and oil fields would have.

  We set up camp along the banks of the Hulahula River. Our group hiked for hours each day, navigating thick willows and feeling the buoyancy of permafrost and tundra under our feet. On our last morning, after days of exploration, we woke to wildfire smoke: the glacial-fed river was swollen from hot
cloudless days, torrents of water gushed over the rocks and banks. We loaded a bush plane and took to the sky in a haze.

  In a century, when this economic tax bill will be long gone, we will not be able to re-create the refuge. It relies on our collective imagination to see these lands as more than a short-term monetary gain for corporations and the government. As the first chief of Arctic Village, Galen Gilbert, said, “The Coastal Plain is not just a place on the map; it is a foundation of our entire life.”

  There’s still hope that this drilling can be stopped, however. There is a bill currently in Congress, the Arctic Cultural and Coastal Plain Protection Act (HR 1146), that could overturn the legislation that authorized opening this region to development. The Gwich’in Steering Committee, environmentalists, scientists, and grassroots groups are calling for solidarity and action to help support the bill, including signing a petition and amplifying through public actions. According to lawyers and environmentalists at the Arctic Indigenous Climate Summit, lease sales are anticipated to begin as early as October, and the bill could see a vote in the House this month. If you want to join the movement to save the refuge, donate to the Gwich’in Steering Committee and support Indigenous leadership. Follow the Alaska Wilderness League for updates. Urge your U.S. representative to support HR 1146 so that the Refuge can continue to be a sanctuary for generations to come.

  Like their ancestors, the Gwich’in are not giving up, and neither should we.

  Publicly Owned Utilities Could Help Fight the Climate Crisis

  GRETA MORAN

  October 25, 2019

  Earlier this month, Pacific Gas & Electric, the investor-owned utility company that supplies power to much of California, cut off electricity to over seven hundred thousand customers. The company argued that such a drastic measure—the largest planned power outage in the state’s history—was necessary to prevent wildfires.

  Yet, for some activists, this bleakly framed choice served as another reminder that investor-owned utility companies are not positioned to manage our energy futures, especially as climate change raises the stakes.

  In recent years, activists around the country, including in New York City, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Boulder, and Washington, D.C., as well as Northern California and Maine, have been working to transition utilities to public ownership, which would make them accountable to the public instead of investors. In Northern California, the Let’s Own PG&E campaign emerged shortly after the Camp Fire, the deadliest fire in California history, which was caused by PG&E power lines. In other parts of the country, activists are fighting against utility companies’ direct contributions to the climate crisis and systemic inequalities.

  The fight in New York City has grown particularly heated over the past few months. In July, in the middle of a deadly heat wave, Con Edison intentionally cut off power to some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, sparking outrage. Last month, at a rally outside the National Grid office in downtown Brooklyn, activists from groups like Stop the Williams Pipeline Coalition and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) spoke out against investor-owned utility corporations’ continued investment in gas pipelines. In particular, they’re angry about National Grid’s push for the highly contested, twice-denied Williams Pipeline that would cut through New York Harbor and proposed rate hikes from the two major utility corporations.

  “Both ConEd and National Grid are proposing to raise our rates to expand fossil fuel infrastructure,” Lee Ziesche, an activist with Sane Energy Project, told the crowd. “What they are proposing completely fails the climate test.”

  The ultimate goal for some activists is to abandon investor-owned utility corporations altogether and build a more democratic system in their place. Last year, NYC-DSA launched the Public Power NYC campaign to make the energy grid publicly owned. Building on this idea, on October 19, a coalition of grassroots organizations launched Movement for a Green New Deal, a campaign that will demand utilities be publicly owned as a key part of this transition. Giving the public control over New York City’s energy future, activists argue, could lay the groundwork for the just, rapid decarbonization of the energy sector.

  “We could de-commodify clean energy and guarantee it to all New Yorkers as a human right, much in the same way we already guaranteed clean water through our public water utility,” said Amber Ruther, an organizer with NYC-DSA, during a recent hearing before the New York State legislature.

  Ruther argued in her testimony that investor-owned utilities are not positioned to tackle the climate crisis. “The incentive structure for private utilities was designed to encourage them to build as much infrastructure as possible,” said Ruther. “But now that incentive structure is obsolete, and it’s preventing us from achieving our climate goals.”

  To replace investor-owned utilities, the Public Power campaign is calling for a large-scale public utility. This could mean the expansion of the New York Power Authority, the largest state public utility in the U.S., or the municipalization of private utilities. Once established, a public utility would be responsible for the major work of transforming the grid, Aaron Eisenberg, an organizer with NYC-DSA, explained to Teen Vogue in an email.

  Alongside the large-scale utility, the campaign envisions smaller, community-owned energy projects. As a model, Eisenberg points to Sunset Park Solar, a cooperative solar array, which will be owned and operated by the same people who purchase its power in central Brooklyn.

  The idea of publicly owned utilities is quickly gaining traction. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently suggested socializing the city’s utilities. In late July, New York City council member Costa Constantinides partnered with the NYC-DSA to host a town hall in response to ConEd’s proposed rate hikes. Over one hundred people, including assemblyperson Aravella Simotas and public advocate Jumaane Williams, traveled in the pouring rain to attend the town hall, where many demanded public utilities.

  But no one from ConEd or the New York Public Service Commission, which oversees the state’s utilities, showed up.

  Jamie Tyberg, an organizer with New York Communities for Change, sees publicly owned power as an important step in transforming our relationship to resources and energy, which have for too long been regarded as infinite.

  “We are not going to be able to escape this crisis without replacing the system,” Tyberg, who has been volunteering with the campaign, told Teen Vogue.

  In response to the claims made in this article, Michael Clen-denin, ConEd’s director of media relations, wrote in an email, “We can maintain high reliability and have a clean energy future. Con Edison is committed to helping New York State achieve its clean energy goals, and through our Clean Energy businesses we are the second largest solar producer in North America.” A spokesperson from National Grid responded to Teen Vogue’s request for comment by providing links to their plan for “investing in the natural gas networks making them safer and more reliable, advancing a cleaner energy future.” (The idea that more gas networks will advance clean energy has no basis in climate science.)

  A Widespread Movement, With Old Roots

  Public utilities are hardly a new idea—over two thousand public utilities already exist in the U.S.—but the growing demand for a more just energy system has lent this ownership model new energy.

  This summer, Vermont senator and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released his own version of an ambitious Green New Deal, which outlines a plan for renewable, publicly owned energy.

  Sanders’s vision may look something like the energy system in the (admittedly less populous) state of Nebraska, which consists entirely of public power districts, publicly owned utilities, and energy cooperatives. The state abandoned investor-owned utilities in 1946 and remains the only state to operate fully on public power. Since then, Nebraska has been able to maintain some of the lowest rates of electricity in the country.

  This future could also resemble Sanders’s own town of Burlington, Vermont, which has had a municipally owned uti
lity since 1905. In 2014, Burlington became the first city in the U.S. to move to 100 percent renewables, while maintaining the same rates since 2009.

  The city recently laid out a roadmap for an even more ambitious goal: moving to net-zero energy by 2030, which the city defines as “sourcing at least as much renewable energy as it consumes in energy for electric, thermal, and ground transportation purposes.”

  Public utilities were also a component of the Green New Deal’s predecessor: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The 1936 Rural Electrification Act was passed to provide loans to isolated rural areas to start their own electric cooperatives. The goal was simple: to give farmers, left in the dark by profit-motivated utility companies, affordable electricity.

  “At the time, investor-owned utilities were not really willing to go into rural America” because the sparsely populated areas did not promise good business, explained Johanna Bozuwa, who works at the Democracy Collaborative.

  While today’s campaigns have broader visions, the main advantages of a public utility remain. They are designed to answer to the people rather than a profit motive. Public utilities have lower average rates than investor-owned utilities, and any revenue made goes back into the community, rather than the pockets of CEOs and private shareholders. For instance, Austin Energy has used its revenue to support streetlights, public safety, libraries, and parks.

  Investor-owned utilities don’t have the same incentive. “As a top line, investor-owned utilities have a terrible track record,” said David Pomerantz, who works at the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog organization that tracks energy utilities. He points to the fact that investor-owned utilities are often the top contributors to political campaigns and spend millions on lobbyists. This year, National Grid even asked its own customers to help lobby for fracked gas.

  However, Pomerantz cautions that public utilities are not blameless. Like private utilities, public utilities have trade associations, like the American Public Power Association (APPA) and National Rural Electric Cooperative (NREC). Both groups have fought EPA standards for clean air, water, and carbon pollution, Pomerantz explained in an email.