ExxonMobil's Mayflower Mess

It's now been almost two weeks since ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spill put at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and contaminated water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower. Many of the evacuated families still haven't been able to return to their homes.

Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up about 20 miles southeast of Mayflower, in Gravel Ridge, attended a meeting for the displaced families at Mayflower High School: "I had to really stare down some ExxonMobil goons who told me to leave because it was a private meeting. I politely explained that it was a meeting in a public building about a public subject with numerous public officials in attendance, and that I was planning to stay."

Glen's soft-spoken, but he's not easily intimidated. Arkansas Business Journal named him an "Eco-Hero of the Year" for his work in helping to stop new coal-fired power plants. During the Mayflower meeting, Glen listened as an ExxonMobil executive apologized to the families and said that the focus was on safety and helping the homeowners. "The meeting then moved into a phase where ExxonMobil met with individual family members about their claims in a side room guarded by no fewer than six uniformed police officers."

Here's something that ExxonMobil probably didn't tell those homeowners: In 2010, it was fined $26,200 by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway.

This is a pipeline that crosses under the Mississippi River (just one of the places ExxonMobil failed to do inspections). It's hard to say which is more shocking: That "safety first" ExxonMobil has been so cavalier about pipeline inspections or that it was fined such a pittance for its irresponsibility. By my calculation, $26,200 comes out to about .00009% of ExxonMobil's net income for 2010. Let's put that in perspective. If ExxonMobil's income were the same as the median family income in Faulkner County, Arkansas, which is where its pipeline leaked, then ExxonMobil's fine for putting the Mississippi River at risk would have been not quite four cents.

No matter how much ExxonMobil ends up spending to clean up the mess in Mayflower, the impact on its profit statement will be miniscule. Unfortunately, no amount of cash can buy peace of mind for the families whose homes were violated by tar sands. Tar sands crude is both more toxic and much harder to clean than ordinary crude. Just ask Enbridge, which has now spent almost $1 billion and two years trying to clean up the Kalamazoo River after the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge has experience, too. There were 804 spills on its pipelines between 1999 and 2010.

No wonder ExxonMobil is doing everything it can to keep reporters and everyone else as far away from the Mayflower disaster as possible. The more the American public learns about the real cost of tar sands crude, the more opposition to the Keystone XL and other tar sands projects will increase.

Keystone XL opponents often point out that Americans assume all the risk of tar sands pipelines, while oil companies will rake in all the profit from tar sands exports. But let's be clear about the sort of risk we're talking about. If the pipeline is built, it's not a question of whether it will fail, but of when and where. We're not risking a disaster. Disaster is certain. We just don't know what the exact magnitude of the disaster will be. What if the Pegasus pipeline had failed under the Mississippi rather than in Mayflower?

Here's something we do know: The first Keystone XL disaster will be far worse than what happened in Mayflower, since TransCanada's pipeline will pump ten times as much tar sands crude as the Pegasus does.

I wish the disaster in Mayflower had never happened. Now that it has, though, I hope we heed its two biggest lessons: 1. How oil companies talk about safety has no connection to how they act. 2. The last thing you want to wake up and find in your backyard is a tar sands spill.

We have a few days left. Tell the president to keep his climate promises.

Tar Sands: A Matter of Time

Forty-five minutes. That's how much time it took a ruptured pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, on Friday to dump at least 84,000 gallons of tar sands crude into a residential neighborhood and force the evacuation of 22 homes. The evacuations weren't just because the oil is messy or inconvenient. Highly toxic and carcinogenic solvents like benzene are used to dilute tar sands crude to make it pumpable. During a spill, those toxics evaporate into the air.

Just over two weeks. That's how much time we have left to tell President Obama he should reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. We'll be living with the consequences of his decision for a lot longer. The climate pollution that mining the tar sands would create is reason enough not to approve Keystone, but last weekend's disaster in Arkansas is a glaring reminder of the other reason: Tar sands crude is much riskier to transport than conventional oil.

The Pegasus pipeline that spilled in Mayflower has only about one-tenth of the carrying capacity that the Keystone XL would. We don't know yet whether it contaminated nearby Lake Conway, an important source of drinking water, but the same pipeline crosses 13 miles of the Lake Maumelle watershed. If the spill had happened there, it would have contaminated the water supply for most of central Arkansas.

That the spill didn't happen in an even worse location is not much consolation to the residents of Mayflower who don't know when, or even if, they will be able to return to their homes. Many of them had no idea there was an oil pipeline in their neighborhood, much less that it was carrying tar sands crude. This was a tough way to find out.

When it comes to tar sands pipelines, what we don't know will hurt us. Here's what every American should know about tar sands pipelines:

1. Tar sands crude oil is much harder to clean up than conventional oil. That's because the bitumen that remains after benzene and other solvents evaporate is thick and heavy -- it sinks in water. Remember the Enbridge spill on the Kalamazoo River nearly three years ago? Despite a nearly $1 billion cleanup effort, 38 miles of the river remain contaminated.

2. Tar sands crude is much more likely to spill than conventional crude oil. TransCanada's first Keystone pipeline leaked 12 times in its first 12 months. Because tar sands must be pumped at higher pressures and temperatures than conventional oil, it corrodes pipes faster.

3. Tar sands pipeline leaks are difficult to detect. It was 17 hours before the Enbridge pipeline that spilled on the Kalamazoo was finally shut off. We can be thankful that the spill in Mayflower was noticed in less than an hour, but that's only because a neighbor spotted it. Then again, it's hard to miss a river of oil flowing down your street.

4. Current pipeline regulations and spill-response methods are completely inadequate for the higher risks posed by tar sands. That's another reason to reject Keystone XL, but it's also a problem for existing older pipelines, like the one that spilled in Arkansas, that have started carrying tar sands during the past decade. The Sierra Club is part of a broad coalition of landowners, former and current government officials, environmental organizations, renewable energy promoters and sportsmen’s groups that has petitioned the EPA and the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to develop stronger safety standards for tar sands pipelines and, in the meantime, put a moratorium on pumping tar sands crude.

Tragic as the disaster in Arkansas is, it could have been much worse. If the Keystone XL is built, it's a certainty that someday, somewhere, even more devastating spills will happen. It's only a matter of time. If you've already told President Obama where you stand, then ask your friends to do the same. There's no excuse in the world for pursuing extreme oil like tar sands when we could be investing in clean energy instead.

 

Who Needs Congress?

Is Congress "sclerotic"? That's the word Al Gore described them last week while speaking at the announcement that Los Angeles will be coal-free by 2025. "You know," he said, "we can't pass this and we can't pass that." The vice-president was talking about climate legislation, but Congress has been, shall we say, clogged up in many ways. It's now been four years since it passed a single bill to protect wilderness -- even though many such bills have been introduced during that time by members of both parties.

Fortunately, we don't have to rely on Congress for good news -- whether it's about cleaning up our air or protecting our public lands. So here's some of both kinds.

Start with the welcome announcement that President Obama has designated five new national monuments. They're all worthwhile, but two of them are also significant and long overdue additions to our wilderness heritage. The new Rio Grande del Norte National Monument includes 240,000 acres of northern New Mexico wilderness and represents hundreds of years of Native American and Hispanic culture. It also provides critical habitat for wildlife such as elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and many migratory birds. And the creation of San Juan Islands National Monument in Washington State protects 955 acres of what Obama's proclamation accurately describes as "a dramatic and unusual diversity of habitats with forests, woodlands, bluffs, inter-tidal areas, and sandy beaches." Not to mention orcas.

Both Rio Grande del Norte and the San Juans had strong local support for protection, both will provide major boosts to local economies, and both had previously been proposed as national conservation areas in Congress. The bills went nowhere. What was that word again? Sclerotic.

Here's some more good news that happened in spite of the current Congress, which has been more interested in weakening the Clean Air Act than enforcing it. During the past two decades, the air in our national parks has dramatically improved. But thanks to the Clean Air Act -- and our nation's move away from coal-fired power plants -- mountains are reappearing from the haze and smog. That's good news both for the millions of people who enjoy these parks and for the plants and wildlife that live in them. You can see a slideshow of "before and after" images from researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

In honor of Los Angeles, which has cleaned up its air dramatically during the past decade, and which is setting an example for cities across the world with its commitment to renewable energy, here's an example from that city's backyard -- The San Gorgonio Wilderness:

Wow. If we can clean up the air in our parks this dramatically in 20 years, maybe there's hope for getting Congress moving again, too. Send your representative a message supporting action on the dozens of wilderness protection bills that are still stuck in the system. 

A Big One for L.A.

We are going to get the United States off dirty fuels and onto clean energy. Of course, it won't happen overnight nor everywhere at once. Our success will come from winning hundreds, if not thousands, of victories -- big and small.

This is about one of the big ones.

Tomorrow, I'll be in Los Angeles to watch as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa officially announces that, within 12 years, the City of Angels will be entirely coal-free. Currently, L.A. gets almost 40 percent of its power from two old and notoriously dirty out-of-state coal plants -- the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

It's impossible to overstate the significance of this announcement from the second-largest city in the U.S. But getting rid of coal is only part of the story. Los Angeles is also leading on clean energy.

Two years ago, L.A. was the first city in California to hit 20 percent clean energy. The city's new CLEAN LA Solar program (which allows local businesses, residents, and organizations to install renewable energy projects and sell the power they generate back to the utility) is the largest program of its kind in the nation. It's also expected to create 4,500 jobs and nearly $500 million in economic development for the city.

More jobs will be created as the city ramps up its already impressive energy-efficiency efforts. When the EPA released its annual ranking of cities with the most Energy Star certified buildings last week, Los Angeles topped the list -- as it has for the past five years.

Certainly, much of the credit goes to Mayor Villaraigosa. When he took office eight years ago, Los Angeles was getting almost half of its power from coal and only three percent from clean energy. When you fly  into LAX and see hundreds of square miles of rooftops soaking up the Southern California sun, it seems obvious that rooftop solar is a huge opportunity for L.A. But it took a mayor with vision and determination to make it happen.

I'm proud to stand by Mayor Villaraigosa as he announces a coal-free Los Angeles on Friday. You can join us -- the event will be live-streamed. In the meantime, let the sun shine!

Sally Jewell: From REI to DOI?

Watching the members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources question Sally Jewell, who is President Obama's nominee for Secretary of the Interior, brought to mind John McPhee's classic Encounters with the Archdruid. To write that book, McPhee spent a year with David Brower (the "archdruid" of the title), who was the Sierra Club's first executive director. Brower's "encounters" were with, respectively, a mineral engineer, a real estate developer, and a dam builder. In the book, Brower stood for what in 1969 was still a somewhat radical idea: That wild places have value beyond whatever natural resources we can extract from them.

One thing that makes Sally Jewell such an interesting choice for Secretary of the Interior is that, if McPhee were writing his book today, she could have played both roles. On the one hand, she's a former petroleum engineer who worked on the Trans-Alaska pipeline and has actually fracked an oil well. Yet at the same time, she's a lifelong outdoor enthusiast, is the CEO of outdoor recreation retail giant REI (where she's pushed sustainability initiatives while boosting profits), and serves on the board of the National Parks Conservation Association. I suspect that, if confirmed, she will be the first Interior Secretary whose resume includes summiting the highest peak (16,077 feet) in Antarctica. David Brower, an expert mountaineer, would have appreciated that!

Jewell's mountaineering experience in Antarctica was probably good preparation for the reception she received from some Republican members of the Senate committee, who greeted her with everything from wariness to hostility, as if she must surely be a tree hugger disguised behind a petroleum engineer's pocket protector. Would she, they asked repeatedly, have the audacity to stand in the way of drilling and mining public lands? Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia (a Democrat) even tried (unsuccessfully) to trick her into supporting mountaintop-removal coal mining. Through it all, Jewell stuck to the Obama administration's ill-conceived "all of the above" party line on energy, albeit with nods toward "responsible" development of energy resources on our public lands and the importance of clean energy.

Clearly, the struggle between those who want unfettered exploitation of natural resources and those who believe we should protect irreplaceable wild places is as relevant now as it was in Brower's day. But the values articulated by Brower are no longer quite so radical. In fact, they're shared by a strong majority of Americans, especially in the West, where so many of our public lands are found. This year's "Conservation in the West Poll," which is sponsored annually by the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project, found more than three-quarters of Western voters believe environmentally sensitive public lands should have at least some permanent protection from drilling. They also strongly support prioritizing renewable energy on public lands over mining and drilling dirty fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. Nearly two-thirds labeled themselves as "conservationists," and that includes not just Democrats and independents, but a majority of Republicans.

Incidentally, 83 percent of Western voters agreed that "children not spending enough time in the outdoors" is a "serious problem" -- a belief that Jewell also strongly expressed in her statement to the Senate committee last week. I couldn't agree more.

From everything I've seen, Sally Jewell has the potential to be a great Secretary of the Interior. Based on the Obama's administration's track record of protecting public lands thus far, though, I have to hope this expert kayaker doesn't find herself paddling into the wind.

Unfortunately, this administration has been too slow to act on making sure that frackers, drillers, and miners don't ruin our public lands.  Some of the areas facing threats -- from the greater Grand Canyon to the San Juan Islands to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- could easily be protected by President Obama as national monuments. As the "Conservation in the West" polling data shows, people in the West understand the value of protecting these special places. A national monument generates economic and recreational value for nearby communities, and it keeps doing so in perpetuity. You can't say that for oil fields or uranium mines. In fact, the opposite is true.

"All of the above" energy malarky notwithstanding, I suspect that Sally Jewell understands the true value of public lands better than most folks who've held the job for which she's been nominated. If she does become Secretary of the Interior, let's hope she carries that infectious enthusiasm for the great outdoors into her new role, and spreads it to her boss.

In the meantime, you can ask President Obama to create more national monuments. 

What's That Smell?

You know what natural gas smells like. Or do you? Natural gas is actually odorless. That rotten-egg smell is added for safety reasons. Otherwise, you might not notice a potentially deadly gas leak.

If only we could add a similar smell to the natural gas industry. Too many people -- especially politicians -- aren't paying attention to the dangers of the current "boom" in natural gas development. Here are three big reasons why we should stop new gas drilling before it starts and replace fossil fuels at every opportunity with clean, renewable energy.

It starts with how we get gas out of the ground. Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," is problem #1. Frackers inject a toxic chemical cocktail underground under high pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas. A lot of that fluid comes back up the well as waste and, when it does, it's even more toxic than it started out.

People who live in areas where fracking is happening are outraged. They should be. What guarantee do they have that their drinking water won't be affected by fracking? None. How do they know that toxic wastewater from fracking will be disposed of in a way that ensures it won't contaminate aquifers ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? They don't.

In fact, a ProPublica investigation has identified more than 1,000 cases of water contamination near drilling sites. The risks don't end when the drilling does, either. The question isn't whether abandoned wells and fracking-waste storage sites can leak, but how many will fail, and how soon it will happen. Yet, incredibly, fracking enjoys exemptions from parts of at least seven major national environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The rush to frack for natural gas has occurred with maximum greed and minimum oversight.

The next time someone tries to tell you that fracking is safe, ask them why, then, the industry spends so much money getting exemptions to our nation's environmental laws. Ask why the gas industry won't fully disclose exactly what's in the billions of gallons of water they are pumping into wells across the country. Ask why the gas industry fights so hard to enforce gag rules on local hospitals so that doctors can't talk about what chemicals are poisoning gas-drilling communities.

The Sierra Club believes no community should be forced to accept the risks of fracking. That's why we're working with local activists to support moratoriums on fracking in New York, Illinois, and eight other states, as well as the right of local communities, like Longmont and Fort Collins in Colorado, to declare fracking off-limits within their borders.

That work's paying off, too: The New York State Assembly just last week passed legislation that would extend the moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the state until May 2015. That victory is a credit to the passionate advocacy of citizens throughout the state who refuse to accept the premise that New York's countryside must be sacrificed for the sake of dirty-fuel profits. Together, we've also won the first round of a legal challenge to Pennsylvania's ACT 13 legislation, which similarly gives communities control over their own fate.

Moratoriums are important because, as currently practiced, fracking simply can't be considered safe. Take what's happening in Illinois. The Sierra Club and many other grassroots groups are fighting hard to get a moratorium in place because the frackers have not proven the safety of their process. But because of massive gas-industry lobbying, we do not yet have sufficient political support. With no regulations in place, and the frackers lining up, our local chapter joined an effort to develop rules that would prevent the worst abuses of the gas industry. And at one level they were successful -- the proposed Illinois rules tighten some of the loopholes found in other states. But here's the thing: Even these improvements do not fully protect the health and safety of the good people of Illinois. In fact, no proposed legislation in any state currently does.

Although problem #1 is how we get gas out of the ground, problem #2 happens far above ground -- in our atmosphere. Natural gas boosters like to claim that it is a climate-friendly energy source, supposedly because it's not as dirty as other fossil fuels. That's like saying it's safer to be attacked with a knife than a gun. If you end up dead, it's a moot point.

It's true that gas doesn't directly create as much carbon pollution as coal when it's burned, but that reality hides a larger story. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane is an extremely powerful climate-disrupting gas all on its own (more than twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide).

We know that during the drilling and transportation of natural gas, methane leaks, but nobody knows exactly how much, because no comprehensive studies have yet been conducted. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that leakage rates are around 2.4 percent. However, a range of studies in recent years have called that figure into question. One of the most recent, from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research group, measured methane leakage from a Utah gas field (not even shale gas!) up to an astonishing 9 percent, and that didn't even include leakage from distribution and transmission. Any leakage rate much greater than the EPA’s 2.4 percent would be enough to make gas worse than coal as a climate disruptor.

But even if drillers could magically eliminate all methane leakage, natural gas would still threaten our climate simply because there's so much of it. If we allow the industry to extract and burn all (or even most) of it, then we're looking at irreversible climate disruption. The International Energy Agency estimates that to have a shot at keeping global warming under 3.6°F (which is a risky target considering the damage we've already incurred with a little more than 1°F of warming), we need to keep two-thirds of our known oil, gas, and coal reserves in the ground. That's all the reason we need to go "all-in" on clean energy.

And that points to one of the biggest secrets the gas industry is trying to keep -- we don’t actually need all this fracked gas. Despite the industry's well-funded misinformation campaigns, the fact is that clean energy is already cheaper than dirty fuels in many places. At the retail level, installing solar on your home is cheaper than traditional utility power for many homes in 14 states. At the wholesale level, solar panel prices have dropped 80 percent in the past five years, and new solar projects are beating out new gas and coal in places like California and New Mexico. We installed more solar and wind energy last year in the U.S. than new gas, coal, and nukes combined. Although clean energy is not yet cheaper than dirty fuels in every part of the country, solar and wind have a nice little side benefit: They don't destabilize our climate. Plus, the cost of clean power continues to drop, while the cost of fossil fuels goes up. We need to build on this progress, not undermine it.

That's going to be even tougher if we don't address problem #3 -- the burning desire of the industry to export U.S. natural gas to foreign markets in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG). That would actually make both of the other two problems worse. Opening up more foreign markets to U.S. natural gas would lock us into long-term contracts that will require us to keep on fracking, regardless of how quickly we move to clean energy at home. And owing to the cooling and pressurizing that are required to make LNG, it would also compound the carbon pollution from natural gas.

Although LNG exports would boost the profits of natural gas producers, they would also mean higher energy prices for American consumers and industries and serious problems for our climate. That's why the Sierra Club Beyond Gas campaign is aggressively challenging permits for new LNG export facilities. Like coal-export terminals, these projects are long-term carbon-pollution disasters waiting to happen.

Fracking, climate, and LNG exports are three reasons why we want to keep natural gas in the ground as much as possible, but it's important to note that the Sierra Club is as committed to developing long-term clean-energy solutions as it is to opposing dirty-fuel problems. Instead of replacing one dirty fossil fuel with another, we can move to clean, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal. Together with upgrading our energy efficiency, that's what can free us from fossil fuels. We've already seen tremendous progress in the past four years, thanks to renewable energy standards, falling prices for solar and wind, innovative financing, and (early in its first term) critical clean energy support from the Obama administration.

We need to maintain this clean-energy momentum. It's the only way we'll ever achieve "escape velocity" from the fossil fuel planet we've been stuck on for two hundred years. But the "get richer quicker" mentality behind the natural gas boom is trying to slow us down and drag us back to a world that runs almost entirely on dirty fuels.

What's that smell? It's not natural gas -- it's greed.

Keystone XL: Cynicism on the Potomac

You know the news is going to be bad when they bury it at 4pm on a Friday. We dealt with this for eight years during the Bush administration. I never thought we'd be doing it again under John Kerry's State Department.

The State Department's analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal acknowledges that tar sands crude is 17 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional oil. But State says that the overall environmental impacts of the pipeline are limited because, according to their analysis, the oil would be mined and drilled anyway. That's not accurate. Currently, 1.8 million barrels of oil per day are being produced in the tar sands. Permits have already been issued that would allow that extraction to expand to 5 million barrels of oil per day, and the oil industry would like to go even higher. But the oil industry is the first to admit that it needs new pipeline capacity before it can expand:

"When I talk to producers in Alberta, as long as Keystone XL goes ahead, they view that there's pretty sufficient takeaway capacity to get us to late in the next decade."  --Alex Pourbaix, president of energy and oil pipelines, Transcanada

"All of the crude oil export pipelines are pretty much full, running at maximum capacity... And we're not likely to see any meaningful capacity added to these networks until the end of the year."  --Vern Yu, VP of business development and market development, Enbridge, Inc.

So the State Department's analysis is not only inaccurate but also incredibly cynical. By this same logic, why would anyone in North America stop new coal plants from being built, if the coal would just be burned in China and India anyway? Why would we try to replace fracked gas or mountaintop-removal coal with solar and wind, if we're powerless as a country to lead the world to a clean energy economy? This is shockingly defeatist thinking from a bureaucracy that is now led by someone who has been a proven and courageous champion of the climate throughout his career.  

I spent this morning on a press conference with Mayor Michael Bloomberg discussing how we've succeeded in securing the retirement of 142 coal plants over the past couple of years. Although we've begun to see a clean energy turnaround outside the Beltway, we're still looking for a real sign of strong leadership inside Washington, D.C. Instead, we keep hearing about the inevitability of fossil fuels: All the oil will be burned, no matter how extreme; coal and natural gas should be mined, drilled and fracked, then exported if necessary. Too often, we even hear these tired arguments from climate champions who should know better.

President Obama needs to reconcile his soaring oratory on climate with strong action to turn away from dirty fuels like tar sands oil. Today, the State Department made the president's job much more difficult. But it's still not too late to stop this pipeline. We have until mid-April to speak out and show the president that there is a national movement demanding he keep his climate promises. Send your message to the administration today.

No Time to Cool Off

Unless you happened to be on a monastic retreat last weekend, you probably know that the Sierra Club, 350.org, the Hip Hop Caucus, and other allies held the largest climate-action rally in U.S. history. More than 50,000 people came out to tell President Obama that we want him to lead on climate, starting with a rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

It was an incredible day. If you were there with us in Washington, D.C., or any of the simultaneous rallies held around the country, you know what I mean. Thank you for being part of it!

Decades from now, we may well look at 2013 as a turning point in climate action. The groundswell of grassroots activism that we’re seeing will keep gathering momentum until it sweeps our nation into a clean energy future.  

You could not see the tens of thousands of people gathered at the National Mall last Sunday without remembering the other great social movements that have found powerful expression there. We've all heard the stirring conclusion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s extraordinary "I Have a Dream" speech: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" But Dr. King also had words that day for those who agreed that segregation was wrong but worried that change was coming too fast. "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism," he said. "Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."

I hear a similar kind of "gradualism" when well-meaning people say that renewable energy is a worthwhile goal, but we're just not ready to start cutting our ties to fossil fuels. For some folks, change is scary no matter how exciting it might be.

Well, we aren't about to cool off, because the clean-energy future is already happening. Here are just three examples I've learned this week alone:

• The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that all of the new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. was renewable. Every single megawatt. Now January was a rather extraordinary month, but did you know that more than half of the total electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. during 2012 was renewable?

• The Electric Reliability Council of Texas set a new wind-power generation record on February 9: 9,481 megawatts -- nearly 28 percent of system load. As coal-fired power plants close in Texas, wind power is taking their place. Last year, wind supplied more than 9 percent of the power in Texas, and that number will go up this year.

• A new report from the Michigan Public Service Commission reviewed the effects of the renewable energy standard that the state adopted in 2008. Thanks to more than $1.78 billion in investments, more than 895 megawatts of new renewable energy projects came online in Michigan through 2012. The cost of new renewable energy there is now lower than new combined-cycle natural gas and new coal.

Across the nation, we're showing we can trade dirty fuels for clean energy. Change is happening, and it's up to us to keep that momentum going if we want to save our climate. We’re only getting started. Stay tuned for more!

Doing the Right Thing

My previous visit to the White House was definitely more fun -- I took my dad to the annual Christmas party. Today, I returned on a chilly D.C. morning to get arrested alongside friends and fellow environmental do-gooders like Bill McKibben, Andre Carothers, Adam Werbach, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Sierra Club President Allison Chin. We enviros didn't have to brave the cold alone, though. There were almost 50 of us: activists and actors, authors and ranchers, reverends and farmers, union leaders and scientists -- and legendary civil rights leader Julian Bond. The one thing we all shared was a conviction: President Obama must act to protect our climate -- and that means saying "no" to the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline.

I'm hopeful. If I weren't, I'd be in the wrong line of work. But the president has come a long way since 2011, when his State of the Union address didn't mention climate even once. Last night, the president stood before Congress to say this:

... if [you] won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

Strong words, and I believe the president when he says he will take action on climate, as well as push for clean-energy solutions and greater energy efficiency. What's at issue, though, is not whether President Obama is willing to do something, but whether he's ready to do the right things.

While preparing for today's protest, I read and thought a lot about the great leaders of the past who fought hard and courageously in the name of righteousness. Less than two months before he was felled by an assassin's bullet, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave this answer when asked why he persisted in taking an unpopular stand against the Vietnam War:

Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of consensus. On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.

We know that enabling the exploitation of Canada's carbon-intensive tar-sands oil would be a huge setback for progress on climate disruption. It could undo all the real progress on  carbon-pollution that the president rightly took credit for during his speech last night

A politician might ask whether stopping Keystone XL would be a politic or popular decision. A leader will only care whether it's the right one. My biggest hope? That this president is ready to lead.

The Day We Move Forward on Climate

On Sunday, February 17, I'll be joining tens of thousands of Americans in Washington, D.C., for Forward on Climate -- the largest climate rally in U.S. history. Our goal is to convince President Obama to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, but we also are asking him to make that decision the cornerstone of a positive, solutions-oriented climate legacy for his second term.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've spoken with thousands of Sierra Club members and supporters, all across the country, who are fired up about the rally because they know we're on the frontline of the movement to stop climate disruption. But this is more than a battle to stop something bad -- it's a fight for something better. That's because we're also on the cusp of a clean energy revolution that will transform our nation, slash carbon pollution, and turn this climate disaster around. We need President Obama to commit to that fight with all the ambition and determination he can bring.

The clean energy technologies we need to reverse climate disruption already exist. They are affordable, competitive, and ready for primetime. Already, we've doubled our wind power to 60 GW (enough to power nearly 15 million homes), and we generate five times more solar power than we did just a few years ago. That's explosive growth, but we're just getting started. Renewables can power America, and they can do it without climate-polluting gases or any other kind of pollution.

Here's how President Obama can make that happen:

First, he must follow through and build on one of the biggest accomplishments of his first term: Holding polluters accountable for the costs of their pollution to our health, to our economy, and to our climate. That means directing the EPA to finish the job it has already begun on cleaning up power plant pollution, including carbon and mercury pollution from new sources, coal ash, and cross-state air pollution.  

Second, President Obama needs to master the art of saying "no" -- and making it stick -- to bad ideas that would condemn future generations to the effects of runaway climate disruption. His final decision on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will be only the first big test of whether he he's truly serious about climate change. There's no excuse for blasting the mountains of Appalachia to scrape the last bits of coal, drilling in our Arctic wilderness, building export terminals to ship coal and natural gas overseas, or continuing to allow the proliferation of under-regulated fracking for oil and gas.

Third, the president needs to permanently shift the debate about our public lands from "how can the mining and drilling industries best exploit them?" to "how can their true owners -- the American people -- most benefit from them?"  For more than a century, we've allowed oil, coal, and other extractive industries to treat our public lands as their personal piggy banks. That must stop for two reasons. First, and most obviously, because the toxic pollution that results is hurting us and destroying our climate. Second, because the climate change that we've already locked ourselves into is going to put intense pressure on all of our public lands and remaining wilderness habitats, which means we need to preserve as much as we can while we can.

Fourth, the president must do all he can to help preserve the hard-won momentum for renewable energy and energy efficiency of his first term. Start by promoting innovative financing and investment avenues that make it easier for individuals and businesses to install clean energy and adopt energy-efficiency measures.

Finally, we must recognize that the effects of climate disruption are already here in the form of droughts, deadly heat waves, wildfires, and powerful storms. We need to protect communities from these climate disasters and plan a robust and just response for those that do happen.

The president can take these important, specific actions right now to show the American people -- and the world -- that he's serious about the climate crisis. But they're not enough. The final thing we need is both the most crucial and the most intangible. We need Barack Obama at his absolute, formidable best.

We need the Barack Obama who was able to inspire millions to believe in the possibility of change and the power of hope. We need that leader to passionately and eloquently show the American people that solving the climate crisis is not a burden but an incredible opportunity. We need him to inspire a nationwide groundswell for clean energy, energy efficiency, and a 21st-century economy. And we need him to bring every iota of his considerable political skill to bear on forging bipartisan solutions to curbing carbon pollution, and to call out those who persist in trying to hold us back.  

When the president talks about the destructive power of a warming planet, no one has to wonder what that destruction looks like. We've seen it -- from the hurricane-ravaged Northeast to the drought-stricken Midwest to the fire-scarred West. It's all too real and scary. But it's hope and change -- not fear or doubt -- that will win the day. See you in Washington on the 17th.