Volume 7 Number 3
by Audrey Newcomb
Bizarre potential voting outcomes
Although Donald Trump’s campaign seems to be tanking, Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers lead doesn’t reflect millenials, swing states, or third parties. The latter, at this writing, poll about 10%. Adele M. Stan of AlterNet writes that former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson is known to have financed a multi-million-dollar no-bid NM highway contract that was financed by the Koch brothers while he was governor. Reports by the Federal Elections Commission at opensecrets.com contain information about other Johnson associations. At least a million dollars from donor Jeffrey Yass has gone to PurplePAC, founded by Ed Crane, who sits on the Cato Institute board along with David Koch and Yass. Yass supports
several right-wing groups, including the extremist Amway, in a corporate plan to replace public schools with charters. He also donates to Club for Growth Action, a super PAC that works to defeat mainstream Republicans. Then there’s Chris Rufer, who for the third time is fighting the California Central Valley Regional Water Quality Supply Board. According to LA Times’ Geoffrey Mohan, “Rufer’s company was fined $1.5 million for enlarging wastewater ponds beyond the limits of the permits,”and polluting groundwater with excess salts, nitrates, and organic matter. He is fighting the charges. Rufer donates directly to the Johnson campaign and AlternativePAC’s vote-trading, That’s a scheme for taking away votes from both major candidates in exchange for Johnson votes in what are must-win Clinton states: Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Maine. In the high-Sanders-turnout states Washingon, Oregon, and Wisconsin, donor money goes for viral videos on social media in hopes that Johnson will attract millenial votes. According to Politico’s Ben Burnham, Johnson donors’ intent is to siphon enough votes from both major candidates to deprive them of the 270-majority needed to win, throwing the race into the House of Representatives, where they somehow believe Johnson will be picked. Although this almost certainly won’t happen, Johnson and Jill Stein are thought by
Nate Silvers’s FiveThirtyEight to likely take more votes from Clinton than from Trump. In close contests, third party votes combined could decide the election.
Industry coalition sues PSC in Cuomo’s nuclear power plant tax grab
An energy industry coalition including competitive non-
nuclear electricity producers sued the NYS Public Service Commission Oct. 19, opposing Gov. Cuomo’s $7.6 million dollar plan to subsidize NYS nuclear power plants with taxpayer money.The lawsuit claims that “the plan to raise electric rates across the state by requiring consumers to pay for zero emission credits (ZECs) infringes illegally into federal regulators’ territory, done solely to save several nuclear plants
that can no longer compete successfully in the federally-regulated wholesale electric power market.” This action against the nuclear bailout is in contrast to the climate change groups that have been silent on this matter. Groups that have come out strongly against Cuomo’s tax—NYPIRG, Public Citizen,
Food & Water Watch, and Hudson River Sloop Clearwater Group—are circulating petitions to oppose Cuomo’s plan to keep 3 upstate nuclear power plants open and charge customers initially $2 a month on their electric bills. The tax is predicted to go up over the 12-year period.The nuclear industry has always depended on public financing; otherwise nuclear
plants would no longer exist. All nuclear power plants have the potential to blow up. Ginna and FitzPatrick are similar to the Fukushima plant that blew up in 2011. All of them leak radiation every single day and create nuclear waste that can’t be stored safely, and is used to build nuclear weapons. An AP investigation in 2011 found radioactive tritium leaks at 48 out of 65 sites, some of which reached groundwater, even
after regulators had loosened standards in an effort to keep these plants open legally. It would be ironic if businesses that may not even care about global warming were to be the ones taking credit for defeating a project that harms us all environmentally as well as economically. Gov. Cuomo’s office can
be reached at 1-866-220-0044.
A different kind of war—on warming
In an August 15 New Republic article, 350.org founder Bill McKibben writes that although we’ve known about climate change since the 1980s, we’ve fallen way behind in acting on our knowledge. We now know what Exxon actually knew. The industry actually hired PR firm ATCO to “manufacture doubt” about climate change, just as APCO had done about tobacco smoke, using the same term “junk science” in both
ad campaigns. This is a major reason why it took so long for us to even take the baby steps we’re taking now to catch up. In an attempt to show what kind of effort this will require, McKibben uses the analogy of World War II mobilization. He writes, “It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing. This is no metaphor. According to most ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. This war’s first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. It’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict, except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planet-wide occupation that follows. The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back?” From 1941 to 1945, the US was focused on one goal: defeating the global threat posed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. But before WWII’s outbreak, world leaders made the same mistake we are making today, ignoring their enemies and then appeasing them. At first, England treated the Nazis diplomatically, and Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to cheering crowds; but Hitler had no regard for diplomacy. Carbon and methane, in contrast, are indifferent. “They couldn’t care less about our insatiable desires as consumers, or the cost of our fossil fuel infrastructure, or the geostrategic location of the petro-states, or any of the host of excuses that
have so far constrained our response to global warming. After the Paris 2015 climate accord, there was hope, somewhat like when Chamberlain returned from Munich. But now, as then, it didn’t solve the problem. Even if every nation complies with the Paris Agreement, the world will heat up by as much as 3.5
degrees Celsius by 2100—not the 1.5 to 2 degrees promised in the pacts’s preamble. World leaders have been working as though we’re looking at what WWII French strategists called the guerre du longue duree, even as it becomes clearer every day that it’s more like a blitzkrieg, setting new record highs for global temperatures in each of the past 14 months.”
Shortly after the Paris talks, earth scientists found evidence that the West Antarctic ice sheet is nowhere near as stable as had been hoped. Atmospheric greenhouse gases caused the ice to melt much faster than previous research predicted. At an April insurance industry conference, a federal official
described the new data as ‘an OMG thing.’ McKibben says, “With each passing week, another 22,000 miles of Arctic ice disappears. Last spring, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier reef, dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space, were reduced to white boneyards; droughts in South Africa are severe enough to ravage crops so that farmers are literally eating their own seed corn. As in all conflicts, refugees are fleeing from the horrors of
war. The long-term effect, NY Times reported, ‘would likely to be to drown the world’s coastlines, including many of its great cities.’ If Nazis threatened destruction on such a global scale today, the US and allies would be mobilizing for war.” If we were to actually do that, what would it look like? As it
happens, US scientists have been engaged in a concentrated effort for what might be compared to WWII’s Manhattan Project. Mark Z. Jacobson (described in the August Sifting & Winnowing) and his team at Stanford U have worked out how each of the 50 states could power itself from renewable resources. Their almost unbelievably detailed numbers demonstrate conclusively that the US could generate 80-85% of its power from sun, wind, and water by 2030 and 100% by 2050. The Stanford team now offers similar plans for 139 nations around the world. Jacobson says we have enough raw materials such as neodymium for wind turbines and lithium for electric car batteries. He says his plan would slow global warming if we move quickly. It’s not going to stop damage already set in motion, but it will prevent the civilization-scale destruction we currently face.
For the Stanford plan to work, a lot of factories will have to be built to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses. Experts have been crunching numbers. Tom Solomon, who oversaw the construction of one of the largest factories built in recent years, Intel’s mammoth Rio Rancho semiconductor plant in New Mexico, took
Jacobson’s research and calculated how much clean energy the US would need to produce by 2050 to completely replace fossil fuels. The answer: 6,448 gigawatts of clean energy in the next 35 years. Solomon also looked at SolarCity, a clean-
energy company currently building the nation’s biggest solar panel factory in Buffalo, which will produce one gigawatt’s worth of solar power every year. He calculates that the US needs 295 solar factories of about the same size, roughly 6 per state. A similar effort would be used for wind turbines. If all this doesn’t sound like warfare, it resembles the kind
of effort that won WWII, when industrial retooling was
needed to build weapons and supply troops on a previously unprecedented scale. In 1941, following Pearl Harbor, the world’s largest industrial plant under a single roof went up in 6 months and managed to build a B-24 Liberator bomber every hour. Bombers were hugely complicated planes, much more complicated than solar panels and wind turbines.
FDR had realized the US might have to get involved in a war with Japan because Japan was running out of oil and felt threatened by an oil embargo. At the time Japan had treaties with Germany, and the US with Britain, France, and Netherlands. Hitler was invading European countries and his atrocities were becoming known. FDR was already building ships while building consensus for a potential war. He had powerful industry opposition and an America First movement with prominent supporters like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. When the Pearl Harbor attacks came Dec.7, the location was a surprise to FDR but the fact that Japan would attack the US was not. But the American people were surprised and shocked, and responded to his call for mobilization to do things that would help win the war: pay more in taxes, buy war bonds, endure shortages and disruptions, use cars less and public transit more, and grow victory gardens. Most of the skeptics who opposed the war effort went along with it because Roosevelt led with a firm hand. The war effort also had the effect of teaching people how to work together. But although it was public capital that won the war, businessmen who had opposed it and cooperated only under pressure, took credit for winning it. They made money during
the war, but longed to make a lot more on their own without pesky government restrictions. So after the war, government agencies that had operated efficiently were privatized by public officials such as Robert McNamara. Ever since then, we’ve been living in the business-dominated world that went on to flourish under Ronald Reagan and presidents who fol-
lowed. Our spirit of solidarity has thinned. So it’s reasonable to ask if we can find the collective will to fight back in a war against global warming as we once fought fascism. McKibben sees enormous benefits: “The right kind of global mobilization would enable out-of-work coal miners to find safer, better-paying and safer jobs in solar installation, averaging $4,000 more a year than mining. Economic benefits
would broaden, as during WWII. Pollution deaths would be reduced by 4 to 7 million a year. The world’s many struggling economies would likely get back on their feet.” And fighting this war would be socially transformative. WWII initiated the push for race, gender, and income equality, but gains since then still leave a lot of people out. Today’s climate change wins against the Keystone Pipeline, fracking in several states, and Arctic drilling are signs that a substantial constituency actually gets what we have to do. The
Standing Rock, North Dakota tribal resistance to the 4-state, $3.8 billion dollar Dakota Access pipeline, which is set to run underneath the Missouri River has been ongoing since Labor Day weekend, when industry-hired goons sicced angry dogs on protesters who were surprised by bulldozers on a holiday weekend sneaking into their land to dig up their sacred burial grounds and pollute the water source that serves 17 million people. Hundreds of other tribes and environmentalists from the US, Canada, and Latin America have joined them in solidarity, have been arrested by police since then. Police have responded with tanks, tear gas, and helicopters. On Oct. 22,
armed forces doubled down on these peaceful protesters, arrested more than 100 more, and were very rough with the crowd, kneeing down on a 19-year-old girl at this peaceful protest, pushing people around, hitting them with clubs, and
strip-searching them. It’s possible that a panicky fossil fuel industry is desperate enough to use military PsyOps tactics on peaceful protesters, which means going after them as if they were military insurgents.
Frontline communities, and particularly indigenous people are at the forefront of this climate fight, as has been seen in the defeat of the Keystone pipeline. These important protests are examples of environmentalists backing up people who are fighting to preserve their native lands and clean drinking water, and by extension everybody’s land and drinking
water—two constituencies joining each other’s causes. This is what Naomi Klein had in mind in her book, This Changes Everything. It’s what we have to continue doing until a catastrophic global warming version of Pearl Harbor hits so close to home that everybody else finally wakes up. We can already
see it’s already happening oftener and harsher, and it’s just a matter of time before it gets as difficult for us to live normal lives as it is for others in places around the world right now.
Meanwhile, a hopeful sign of how government could speed up initiatives to combat climate change is the Democratic Party platform that was hammered out with the assistance of panel members that Bernie Sanders was able to insist on because of the huge number of voters his campaign attracted. Clinton’s panel members agreed to plans for an urgent summit “in the first 100 days of the next administration” where the president will convene “the world’s best engineers,
climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.” Achieving that platform was a struggle. Clinton’s appointees balked at a fracking ban, carbon tax, prohibition against drilling or mining on public lands, and an end to the World Bank financing of fossil fuel plants—all lost 7 to 6. McKibben, who was among panelists chosen by Sanders, said, “the Clinton panelists all claimed to be concerned about climate
change, but were for a phased-down approach. There was the faintest whiff of Munich about it. Like Chamberlain, these were all good and concerned people, just the sort of steady, evenhanded folks you’d like to have lead your nation in normal times. But they misunderstood the nature of the enemy. Like fascism, climate change is one of those rare crises that gets stronger if you don’t attack. In every war there are
very real tipping points, past which victory, or even a draw, will become impossible. And when the enemy manages to decimate some of the planet’s oldest and most essential physical features—a polar ice cap, say, or the Pacific’s coral reefs—that’s a pretty good sign that a tipping point is near.” McKibben found some comfort in the panel’s final meeting. While Clinton’s DNC members were still against a fracking ban and carbon tax, they agreed that carbon should be priced, sun and wind should be prioritized over natural gas,
and that any policy that worsened global warming should be rejected. “Maybe it was the young Bernie voters who influenced them, or the hot summer,” McKibben comments wryly. “You could, if you squinted, create a hopeful scenario. Clinton promised that the US will install half a billion solar panels in the next 4 years, which is not that different from Solomon’s estimate. If we build solar factories of our own, instead of importing cheap foreign-made ones, that will position the US as the world’s dominant clean energy power, just as our WWII mobilization ensured our economic might for 2 generations.” McKibben describes a once-in-a-thousand-year West Virginia storm in July that dropped historic rain, triggering record floods killing dozens of people. A YouTube
video showed a large house consumed by flames as it was swept down a rampaging river until it crashed into a bridge. “We never thought it would be this bad,” one dazed resident exclaimed. “Everybody lost everything.” A state trooper was more succinct. “It looks like a war zone,” he said. Bill McKibben’s response was of course “because it is.”
The skinny on carbon and methane
Climate change activists and sympathetic leaders are fixated on carbon, partly because EPA’s analysis of the relative potential of carbon and methane to cause global warming was wrong. Coal was replaced with low-CO2 natural gas, leaked methane, dismissed by EPA as insignificant, since carbon emissions were coming down. However, Cornell scientists Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea found that 3.6 to
7.9% of methane releases from fracked methane leaking from pipes were causing more climate warming than coal CO2s. For this, they were ridiculed by industry researchers. Other similar studies backed up the Cornell scientists, finding leaks as high as 9%. The fact that CO2 stays in the atmosphere for
centuries and a methane molecule stays only a few decades at a time threw a lot of people off, including EPA. But right now we are at a crucial moment for the planet that happens to be one of those methane-in-the-atmosphere periods. Harvard researchers published a major study in February using satellite data and ground observations from across the country
from 2002 to 2014. The study demonstrates that methane emissions have increased by 30%, accounting for the 30- 60% spike in the entire planet’s atmosphere. The figures coincide with the time period when US fracking was at its peak. This is a very troubling development. These methane leaks have
caused enough warming effects to wipe out a large share of the gains made by the Obama administration; and these new figures undercut the promises made in Paris. EPA’s Gina McCarthy admitted the mistake and apologized. Fracking was well-entrenched in unpopulated states like Wyoming where not as many people were affected, or their complaints ignored before fracking problems became known. But when the fracking industry invaded Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale, the large number of outraged citizens included Josh Fox, whose film Gasland was widely circulated, and was nominated for an Oscar. New Yorkers, with their own Marcellus shale, had already begun to oppose a state fracking proposal. Their campaign expanded, and finally convinced Gov. Cuomo to ban fracking. That was a victory that deserved to be celebrated, but they soon discovered that the campaign was far from over. The fracking industry lost no time in sending North Dakota Baaken fracked oil for export in “bomb trains” through cities and residential areas in NYS. Pipelines and compressor stations for highly pressurized methane, propane, and butane known as liquid natural gas
(LNG) have been turning up all over the state, and citizens are becoming resistance organizers. We Are Seneca Lake conducts ongoing protests to stand up for protecting the lakes and land, and prevent the Finger Lakes from becoming the Northeast fracked gas transportation and storage hub— industry’s goal. Unsuccessful appeals to town legislatures, state and federal regulatory agencies, and to the governor have led to peaceful civil disobedience, from 2014 to the present that has brought about 657 citizen arrests, and counting.