Club Comments on Keystone Controversy in N.Y. Times

Readers of side-by-side articles on the front page of Business Day in the May 9 New York Times saw the Sierra Club mentioned several times, including prominent quotes by Executive Director Michael Brune and Public Advocacy & Partnerships Director Cathy Duvall.

Foes Suggest A Tradeoff If Pipeline Is Approved speculated whether the Obama administration was contemplating some kind of major climate policy announcement on renewable energy incentives or power plant regulation to "ease the sting" among environmental advocates if the president approves the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. But the article quickly noted that pipeline opponents say there is no quid pro quo deal that could compensate for the environmental damage created by the construction of the pipeline and expanded development of the Canadian oil sands.

"Approving the pipeline would be a deep self-inflicted would on the Obama administration, greater than anything else he has done," Brune told the Times. "This was not inherited from the Bush administration and it can't be passed off to [Obama's] successor. It really is Obama's alone. Whatever damage the decision would do to the environmental movement pales in comparison to the damage it would do to his own legacy."

Brune said Obama should veto the pipeline and pursue climate-friendly policies for their own sakes, not as part of a political deal. "It's hard to argue we should be developing new fossil fuel resources, but particularly such a carbon-intensive source as the Canadian tar sands." The danger to the climate of continuing on the current path demands strong steps like curbing coal-fired power and supporting renewables, he said.

Silicon Valley Group's Political Effort Raises Uproar examined the reaction to television spots bankrolled by Fwd.Us, a new nonprofit advocacy group created by Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. One of the TV spots, which ran in several states for a week, lauded the Keystone XL pipeline, prompting a coalition of groups including the Sierra Club to suspend buying advertising on Facebook.

Duvall told the Times the Sierra Club was especially disappointed to see the technology industry adopt a strategy that was more typical of old-fashioned, brass-knuckled Washington lobbying.

"When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another," she said. "We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics."

The pro-Keystone TV spots took several prominent Fwd.Us backers who are also clean-energy boosters by surprise. "One hopes that most of our 21st-century tech leaders won't end up supporting 18th-century energy technology, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk told PandoDaily, a Silicon Valley-focused web publication.

Take action: Go to Facebook and tell Zuckerberg to stop supporting Keystone XL and Arctic drilling.

Environmental Prize Winners Call on Administration to Reject Keystone Pipeline

20 Winners of Prestigious Heinz and Goldman Awards Sign Joint Letter

Today a group of 20 winners of the prestigious Heinz and Goldman environmental prizes delivered a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking him to reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The controversial pipeline has become a lightning rod for climate activists, including the signatories, who point at Kerry's very positive record on climate in the US Senate. Here is the letter:

 

May 8, 2013

The Honorable John Kerry
Secretary of State
 U.S. Department of State
2201 C St., NW
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Mr. Secretary,

As recipients of Heinz Awards for our work in environment, energy, and public policy, and the Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots environmental activism, we write to you with an urgent appeal to affirm America's commitment to climate solutions by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
 
We are deeply honored and humbled to have been recognized for our achievements. But we are acutely aware that despite your best efforts and ours, the climate crisis is now upon us. After a year of unprecedented weather extremes and disruption, this is no longer only about impacts in the future. It's about social, economic, environmental, and moral consequences, now.

We do not lack for viable solutions. Public and private leaders in America are demonstrating that energy efficiency, clean energy, transportation choices, and a range of other strategies are practical and economic. We are using them to build healthier communities and stronger local economies. We can say this with confidence: sustainable, broadly-shared economic opportunity is possible as we make the necessary transition from fossil fuels to clean energy and efficient energy systems.

But we cannot make the transition overnight. It will take many decades of patient commitment and investment to complete it. And while "winning" a safe climate future is a long game, we can lose it very quickly — within President Obama's second term. Continued investment in capital-intensive, long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure like Keystone XL will "lock in" emission trajectories that make catastrophic climate disruption inevitable. This is the hard bottom line of the International Energy Agency's 2012 World Energy Outlook, which starkly warned that without an immediate shift in energy infrastructure investment, humanity would "lose forever" the chance to avert climate catastrophe.

More Than 1,000 Turn Out to Speak Against Keystone XL

Last week in Grand Island, Nebraska, despite terrible snowy weather, more than 1,000 people showed up for the State Department Keystone XL hearing.

People lined up at 7am to get on the testimony list and attendees estimated that fewer than 20 spoke in favor of the massive proposed dirty tar sands pipeline. Sierra Club and allies received RSVPs from 18 states! People affected by the 2010 tar sands spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and by the recent tar sands spill in Arkansas also showed up to speak.

Questions May Skew Polls, But Americans Clearly Accept Reality of Climate Disruption

Photo by Javier Sierra

By Grace McRae, Sierra Club Polling & Research Strategist

Here in the United States, we are all witnessing the consequences of a disrupted global climate. In 2012 alone, we suffered through extensive droughts that shattered "Dust Bowl"-era records from the 1930s, a "derecho" ripping through 12 states in a single day, the hottest month ever recorded (July), and raging wildfires in the West. And who can ever forget the images and stories of the devastation left by Superstorm Sandy?

It's true that scientists and meteorologists cannot prove that any single extreme weather event was directly caused by global climate change. But they cannot deny that extreme weather events are happening more often and with greater intensity. And survey research is proving that Americans don't need a Ph.D. to recognize that climate disruption is a serious problem; the public has acknowledged its existence for three decades.

The media pays a lot of attention to polls about national belief in global climate change. But different organizations have released surveys with strikingly different results. Just take a random sample of recent public surveys on climate issues to see what I mean. For example, Pew Research Center reports that 67 percent of Americans agree "there is solid evidence that the earth's average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades." But the latest Associated Press/GfK survey reported a higher number, finding that 78 percent of Americans think that "the world's temperature has probably been going up over the past 100 years."

There is quite a spread between the levels of climate belief found by these two reputable survey projects; a difference that's far outside the margins of error. The difference really boils down to how the questions were asked. Both of these survey questions were asking about rising global temperatures over long periods of time, but one asked whether the respondent thought there is solid evidence for this while the other asked for their personal impression. Ask what they personally believe, and most Americans will say global climate disruption is indeed happening. But ask them about the scientific evidence, and you will get lower levels of agreement. Questions matter. Different survey language yields different results.

So what do all these surveys with all of their different questions, taken together, tell us about Americans' belief in climate disruption? The Skull Global Threats Fund hired The Strategy Team, a group of social scientists and psychologists in Columbus, Ohio, to answer just this question. Researchers performed an advanced meta-analysis of hundreds of national public opinion surveys dating back to 1986, collecting data from over 150 organizations. Weighing all the polls together, they concluded that nearly 75 percent of American adults answered affirmatively when asked questions about the existence of global climate change. The graph below depicts the dispersion of these results from different surveys over time. The solid line represents the changing average belief in global climate disruption from surveys in a given year.

As you can see, Americans increasingly agreed on the existence of global climate disruption between 1986 and 2008. At that time, average belief dropped to below 70 percent until 2010, when it continued its upward climb. Even with that dip (which researchers at Stanford University attributed to increasing skepticism about climate science among some Republicans), Americans' belief in climate disruption has remained remarkably high. And much of the difference in levels of climate-change belief among surveys we see today likely has more to do with the way questions are worded than it does with dramatic shifts in American public opinion.

What does this all mean? To those of us advocating for national action to combat global climate disruption, this research tells us that we shouldn't waste any more time "convincing" Americans that the climate is something that requires our attention. Public opinion has actually been ahead of policymakers on the issue for decades; majorities of Americans are already facing the reality that climate disruption is happening. It's time that our leaders do the same. There is much we can do -- and must do -- to stop fueling the disruption of our global climate.

Nothing Funny About Shell Oil Disasters in America’s Arctic

Photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Klingenberg/U.S. Coast Guard

By Stephen Dworkin, Sierra Club Media Intern

Shell’s incompetence in steering its own vessels through the Arctic would be comical, if it hadn’t put American workers in danger and exposed the irreplaceable Alaskan wild coast to the threat of a major oil spill—one that could rival Exxon-Valdez in scope and damage. There’s nothing funny about an oil slick that kills fish and the fishing industry, birds and the tourism revenue from bird-watchers, the health of the ocean and the health of local residents.

Shell’s blunders and retreat might not be comedic, but they are ironic. It was under pressure from Big Oil and its political allies that the Obama administration ended the offshore drilling moratorium it had reinstated after BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The moratorium had originally been put into place by President George H.W. Bush in reaction to older spills which had threatened wildlife, water quality, and local economies, but it was rescinded by his son, President George W. Bush. Now, like a bad joke that won’t go away, these protections have been rescinded once again, and the oil industry’s promises that it could drill safely offshore have once again been broken.

For oil industry officials, the end of protections against the risks of offshore drilling was not enough; the president of the American Petroleum Institute voiced disappointment that the Obama administration hadn’t opened up additional areas to exploitation. Big Oil got its political favor of offshore drilling, but all the economy got were more crashed rigs and threats of leaks and spills. Shell managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and yet its lobbyists had the gall to complain that we didn’t expose more of our coastal economies, our waters and wildlife, to its whims.

The Keystone XL Pipeline: "Game Over?"

Photo by Joshua Lopez | Project Survival Media

By Ivy Main, Vice Chair, Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club

NASA scientist James Hansen famously warned that if the Keystone XL pipeline gets built, it’s “game over” for the climate. That dire warning lit a fire under the feet of activists, who rightly argue that Canada shouldn’t be producing the dirty, carbon-intensive tar sands oil, and the U.S. shouldn’t enable the climate destruction by building a pipeline to get the oil out of North America. But stopping Keystone won’t stop global warming, and building it won’t make environmentalists throw in the towel. If this is a game, we are pawns as well as players, so we can never walk away.
 
Frankly, it’s hard to understand right-wing enthusiasm in the U.S. for a pipeline benefiting a Canadian company extracting Canadian oil intended for the world market. In spite of all the talk about jobs, it will employ only a few thousand workers temporarily, and not in the areas of the country where unemployed construction workers live. Moreover, building it requires the government to seize private property from unwilling landowners to benefit a private interest—usually the sort of thing that makes Republicans go ballistic.
 
I might add that the environmental damage being done to thousands of square miles of Canadian arboreal forests and lakes is staggering—but Republicans have long since made it clear that they do not consider despoiling nature a drawback when there is energy to be had and profit to be made. (If you are a Republican and you bristle at this, see if you can name a recent oil, gas, or coal mining project your party has opposed for environmental reasons. I can only name one, and that doesn’t get beyond “sort of.” See the Tennessee Conservative Union’s ad opposing mountaintop removal coal mining, now that a Chinese company wants to do it.)
 
Some would argue that the climate case against Keystone is overstated. Tar sands oil is “only” 14-24 percent more carbon-intensive than conventional oil, if you ignore a nasty byproduct called petroleum coke that adds to the total carbon footprint. Yet surely if the reverse were true, and the carbon footprint of tar sands oil were less than that of conventional oil, it would be hailed as some kind of a planet-saving fuel. Incremental changes are what got us into this mess in the first place.
 
If Keystone represents evil, though, it has plenty of company, and there is blame enough to go around. Canadians are developing tar sands oil because the worldwide demand for petroleum is high and growing, there is money to be made meeting the demand, and there is no one who will make them stop. The harm done exceeds the profit to be made, but most of the harm is borne by people in other countries.
 
That makes the case against the pipeline mostly a moral one, and moral arguments don’t get much respect these days. Yet when the State Department or the Washington Post urges that if we don’t build the pipeline, the Canadians will just find other ways to get the oil to market, the proper response should be outrage. Their position is the moral equivalent of justifying buying stolen goods on the theory that if you don’t do it, the thieves will just find a fence somewhere else.  
 
Admittedly, lots of people would buy stolen goods if there weren’t a law against it; for such people, morality is most successful when immorality gets you arrested. And there isn’t a law against tar sands oil; Canada is the only country with jurisdiction, and it prefers to look away.
 
Americans also have a little problem that we do, indeed, buy a lot of stolen goods. As the world’s biggest oil consumers, we have a credibility problem. On the other hand, if we don’t set the standards, who will? And if we don’t start here, then where?
 
Keystone or no Keystone, the fight against climate change will go on, because our lives and our children’s lives depend on it. It’s not a game we can stop playing—but we sure shouldn’t make it even harder for ourselves to win.

Riding the Earth Train to Washington

By Claire Currens, MN350.org

On February 15, more than 70 Minnesotans discovered that changing one word can help change the world. As they gathered at the St. Paul Amtrak station, a flash mob blossomed, singing, "Ride on the earth train" — a heartfelt adaptation of Cat Stevens' "Peace Train."

Photo courtesy of Minnesota Progressive Project

The dream of an earth train was born last November 30 as Susan and Jim Lenfestey left Bill McKibben's Do the Math tour feeling inspired and ready for action. Bill had suggested that attendees join him for a rally in Washington, D.C., in February (the Forward on Climate rally), to encourage President Obama to take meaningful action towards a clean, sustainable energy future. Susan joked, "Well, we know we can't fly. Let's take the train!"

Her offhanded joke was really a deeper reflection of a commitment to a clean energy future. Planes are one of the biggest contributors of carbon pollution, and if we are to significantly lower the carbon in our atmosphere, limiting our air travel is an excellent place to start. The train ride to D.C. will be long, but it will be a chance to enjoy the landscape, engage with other passengers, and minimize carbon emissions on a long journey. (Read more about Amtrak's commitment to environmental sustainability). Below, 350.org Minneapolis organizer Julia Nerbonne at the Earth Train sendoff.

"This is a hopeful campaign, not a doomsday campaign," said Susan Lenfestey. The group of 72 Minnesotans comes from all walks of life; the full range of the human family is on board, from one-year-olds to toddlers to retirees. Below, Minneapolis resident Terry Hokenson and Minnesota State Representative Frank Hornstein.

Others climbing aboard the train included storyteller Kevin Kling, National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, musicians Prudence Johnson and Simone Perrin, Kate Jacobson of MN350.org, and Margaret Levin of the Sierra Club (below, speaking, to the right of the banner). They are all united by a hope and a shared sense of urgency. "We're all on the earth train, aren't we?" said author and activist Jim Lenfestey. "It's the responsibility of all of us to keep it on the rails."

Riding the earth train is about bringing forth that message, and encouraging President Obama to make clean energy and a sustainable future his top priority. That means canceling the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. If the pipeline is constructed, it will increase dependence on oil and postpone the implementation of sustainable energy sources. In order to realize this goal, these Minnesotans know they have to bring forth the political will and demonstrate widespread support. Senator Al Franken, for example, supported the president's rejection of the Keystone pipeline last year, and we need him to stand strong again. Riding the train, joining in community together instead of flying, is one of many ways they demonstrate that support.

As the flash mob reached a crescendo, a young woman named Allie Byrd (above, with braid) stepped up and said, "I'm riding the earth train because the adults aren't paying attendion." A poignant message, capturing the urgency of the issue. And while Jim Lenfestey (below) is happy to hear such conviction, he believes the responsibility cannot be placed solely on the next generation. "All of us contributed unwittingly to this problem and we need to take our responsibility seriously," he says.

That's the beautiful part of the Earth Train message, all generations have a responsibility to address the growing threat of climate change, with urgency and hope. We are all on the Earth Train, and we've all played a role in the climate crisis, however inadvertently. Instead of being burdened by guilt or fear of failure, the passengers on the Earth Train are energized and ready to ensure a clean energy future for all aboard the Earth Train.