If There's Something Valuable Under the Soil, Life Aboveground Can Be Hard

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

14 November 20

he election is over, and I’ve given my thanks to all who fought so hard—we’ll spend the next months, and the next four years, understanding what it all means. But it’s also worth remembering that we’re a part of a larger world, united by certain commonalities. That includes the fact that it’s usually a curse to be born in a place with something valuable beneath the surface.

In a remarkable Twitter thread last week, just before the endless vote-counting, Latif Nasser, a co-host of WNYC’s “Radiolab,” recounted the history of a stretch of territory that runs through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and into the Carolinas. Every election, it votes Democratic, a slash of blue across the red rural south. At the height of the Cretaceous era, a hundred million years ago, this land was covered by saltwater—a great sea of plankton, which, as it died, dropped to the bottom and formed the basis for what eventually became the belt of incredibly rich soil that made growing cotton so fantastically profitable. As Booker T. Washington wrote, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers.” The descendants of those enslaved people have—since they won the vote in the nineteen-sixties—turned out for Democrats. It is a regular reminder of the centuries of misery that rich land produced.

I’d been thinking of that phenomenon this week, because Tuesday marked twenty-five years since the execution by hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian novelist and playwright who was a leader of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta, a place cursed by the pools of oil beneath the ground. Those pools of oil attracted the interest of outside companies, notably Shell, who turned the region into a nightmare landscape of polluted rivers, contaminated soil, and leaking pipelines. Though oil production has mostly ceased in recent years, the blighted land remains. A Friends of the Earth report from last year states, “We meet Chief Saint Emma Pii who confirms that oil spills in 2008 and 2009 ‘totally destroyed the environment for agriculture and fishing. The whole ecosystem was destroyed.’ He takes us to the river banks, where abandoned wooden fishing boats are slowly sinking into the oily mud. ‘This place was our livelihood, we fished and traded from here. This was a living place.’ He gestures to the horizon. ‘All of these? What you see were mangroves, living mangroves. Before the spills, animals were living here: lizards, even lions and elephants.’ ”

Saro-Wiwa dared to protest this kind of destruction. The Nigerian government hanged him (and eight compatriots) in 1995, with the alleged complicity of Shell, the largest economic force in the country. He’d won the Goldman Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, for his work defending Ogoni territory against environmental despoliation, but the honors were not enough to protect him: two supposed witnesses to his crimes (he was charged with the murder of Ogoni chiefs) later recanted, saying at an international court in the Hague that they’d been promised money and jobs, with Shell representatives in the room. In 2009, the company offered millions of dollars to his family, but no admission of guilt: the money was for “reconciliation.”

Every commodity of value—cotton, rubber, sugar, gold, diamonds, cobalt—has brought with it great human suffering, as a few attempted to grab the profits and impose the inevitable costs on others. Coal, gas, and oil have simply added to that horror by also wrecking the atmosphere of our one, shared planet. Earlier this month, a communications staffer at Shell sent out a Twitter challenge: “What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?” Designed, one supposes, to produce confessions about driving too much, or turning the thermostat too high, the tweet instead provoked an outpouring of fury. A group of English youth in the Extinction Rebellion movement replied, “We’re willing to shut you down before you murder any more environmentalists who get in the way of you extracting oil.”

Passing the Mic

As we contemplate a country whose health and economy have been ruined by the inept response to covid-19, and whose political life desperately needs to be restored to something resembling normalcy, it seemed a good week to talk with Sandra Goldmark. She is a professor at Barnard College and its director of campus sustainability and climate action, and the author of a new book, “Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet.” Since 2013, she has operated Fixup, a pop-up repair shop that employs local theatre artists, stagehands, and technicians to repair broken household items—so far it has diverted more than ten thousand pounds of goods from landfills.

When you do go out to buy something new, how do you figure out if it’s going to be good for the long haul?

When buying new goods (which for me is very, very rare), I check first for good materials and good design. Is the item made of durable materials, like real wood instead of particleboard? Are those materials sustainably and ethically sourced and manufactured? This part can be tricky, since there are no international standards and relatively few certifications for durability, quality materials, fair wages, and repairability. You can look for the certifications that do exist, like U.S.A. Fair Trade, F.S.C.-certified lumber, Greenguard, or iFixit’s Repairability Scorecards, to name a few. But usually there is no indication of what goes into a product, or how it is made. In that case, you can look at the product itself. Does it have joints or stress points made out of plastic? Can it be opened easily for repair, or is everything all glued shut? Finally, price is sometimes—though not always—an indicator. If something is too cheap to be believed, don’t believe it. It’s much better to get a higher-quality item secondhand whenever possible.

Does the mind-set of repair help us get in a different attitude about the planet itself?

You might well ask, while the planet is burning, why we should bother to fix our toasters or chairs or lamps. After seven years spent running pop-up repair shops, I realized that repair is about much more than reducing waste or emissions from manufacturing, though those are, of course, benefits. Repair is about really understanding what we have, how it is designed, who makes it, and under what conditions. In short, it’s about rethinking what we value. We live in a society that drastically undervalues care of all kinds, from repairing toasters to maintaining subways to caring for children. In the U.S., care workers, who are predominantly women and people of color, typically earn at least ten dollars less than the average hourly wage. The pandemic has made the costs of this mentality all the more evident. So, yes, fixing stuff is actually part of a much larger and much-needed shift towards really seeing and caring for the incredible blessings all around us, from toasters to each other all the way up to our shared planet.

When you think about new appliances that save a bunch of energy (induction cooktops, say), how do you make the call?

This is an important question. Manufacturers and government agencies encourage us to think in terms of savings on our utility bills, but we also need to consider the embodied energy of the appliance—that’s the energy that went into extracting and processing the raw materials, manufacturing, and transporting it. For example, a new refrigerator might embody energy equivalent to about sixteen hundred kilowatt-hours: about as much energy as it consumes in two and a half years of normal operation. A new, more efficient appliance should pay for itself over time, but first it needs to break even in terms of embodied energy. And that means that a lot depends on how often you use it. A fridge, running twenty-four hours a day, might recoup its embodied energy in a year; an induction cooktop at a couple hours per day might take four to six years; a washing machine at a couple hours per week might take twelve years. So, yes, when it’s time to replace an appliance, energy efficient designs are much, much better, but that doesn’t mean we should all rush out and replace all of our appliances for the latest model: it’s worth considering the total impact of the item.

Climate School

Young activists in Norway are suing to try and prevent the country from continuing to grant new oil-exploration licenses. They argue that, by continuing to back new fossil-fuel development, the country has breached its constitutional obligation to insure a clean environment.

Vladimir Putin last week signed a decree saying that Russia should try to meet the targets it agreed to during the Paris climate talks, with the rather large caveat that any action must be balanced with economic development. This seems unlikely to amount to much: earlier this month, Putin’s energy minister told the Guardian that Russia does “not see that we will achieve a peak in [gas] production anytime soon.” He added, “I believe natural gas to be an eco-friendly energy source.”

I’ve had the pleasure of being on the advisory board for Round Weather, a gallery that takes the proceeds from selling high-quality art and donates them to a variety of climate-action efforts. An upcoming show, “Creative Reverence,” features works from, among others, Colter Jacobsen and Terri Loewenthal.

Scoreboard

Hurricane Eta did enormous damage to Central America, triggering floods and mudslides across Guatemala, Honduras, and parts of Nicaragua. More than a hundred are dead. As CNN reported, “The scenes out of the country are heartbreaking. People leaving their flooded homes, walking to safety in waist-deep water, some carrying the few belongings they were able to save.” It’s worth remembering that no one in Central America did much to cause the climate crisis.

Numbers from a new study in the journal Science make clear that, even if we stopped burning coal and gas and oil, the food system could still produce enough emissions to eventually heat the planet past the targets set in Paris. Persuading a lot of people to eat a lot less beef would be a place to start.

An excellent survey by the Colorado Sun finds that communities are having to spend lots of money to make the infrastructure changes that a deteriorating climate demands. In the wake of extensive wildfires, for instance, there’s less forest left above the resort city of Glenwood Springs, in the Rockies, to hold back mud after rainfall. So the city is installing sensors to monitor debris flow, and plans to spend two and a half to four million dollars to “buttress the city’s water system.” Multiply that by every place on earth.

On Thursday evening, perhaps jazzed by a press conference so full of lies that the networks cut away from it, President Trump also deposed the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Neil Chatterjee. Appointed by Trump in 2017, Chatterjee apparently erred by voting for a plan that would have let regional power administrators put a price on carbon. He’s not exactly a radical—his former job was as energy adviser to Mitch McConnell. But his support for even modest carbon pricing “aggravated somebody at the White House, and they make the switch,” Chatterjee told the Washington Post. “I’m quite proud of that, and will wear it as a badge of honor.”

A new study from the University of California, San Francisco, finds that global warming will dramatically increase rates of cancer and other diseases around the world, because, the authors state, “extreme weather events such as storms and flooding can destroy or damage health-care infrastructure, reducing health care quality and availability.”

Warming Up

The great Nigerian singer Nneka is, like Ken Saro-Wiwa, from the Niger Delta, and she’s in the same lineage of protest and courage. Check out this interview and performance.

Now We Have to Fight Trump's Tin-Pot Coup - and Biden's Worst Instincts

By Naomi Klein, The Intercept

14 November 20

Republicans keep finding new ways to tell us that they don’t believe in democracy, and we should believe them.

he chorus of Republican voices echoing manufactured claims of mass election fraud hasn’t petered out yet. So, is it:

1. A grift to raise cash for Donald Trump?


2. A ploy to goose aggrieved Republican turnout in Georgia’s high-stakes Senate runoffs?


3. An elaborate scheme to flatter a nuclear-armed narcissist into gradually accepting the reality that he is what he most fears: a loser?


4. An attempt to preemptively drain the Biden-Harris administration of perceived legitimacy, in an effort to clip its wings and then use its ineffectiveness to secure big Republican wins in the midterms?


5. An actual, thought-through, coordinated plot for Republican-controlled state legislatures to use the pretext of public concerns over voter fraud — concerns methodically manufactured out of thin air through sheer force of repetition by Trump and his minions — to claim a constitutional “duty” to override their states’ certified election results and instead directly appoint Republican presidential electors? In short, is what we are witnessing the prelude to an Electoral College coup? As David Sirota first reported, a harrowing paper by Ohio State constitutional law expert Edward Foley warned about this precise scenario last year, explaining how state legislatures could attempt to claim this kind of constitutional cover in order to override certified election results.

My take? A through D are definitely happening, while the risk of E being a real threat is very slim. But slim isn’t nil and given the stakes, that’s makes it enough to deserve some attention.

To be clear, the reason a tin-pot coup attempt remains highly unlikely has nothing to do with the laughable idea that Republican lawmakers have too much respect for core democratic principles to engage is such a brazen power grab. These are people who owe their holds on state power, and in many cases their entire careers, to openly anti-democratic redistricting schemes and other wily tools of suppressing, at all costs, the terrifying prospect of majority rule. They keep finding new ways to tell us that they don’t actually believe in representative democracy, and we should believe them.

Moreover, the tactic of taking minor voting irregularities and outlandishly inflating them to the level of election-stealing, thereby justifying a very real coup d’etat, has been the go-to tactic in countless U.S.-backed “regime-change” operations around the world — schemes supported, it must be said, by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Do not tell yourself they are above bringing the tactic home. If the Republican Party refrains, and I believe it will, it won’t be out of fealty to democracy but rather out of loyalty to market and empire. If multiple state governments were to openly override the express will of their electorates, the result would be massive protest and unrest, as well it should be. In the face of this kind of uncertainty in the world’s largest economy, markets would crash and U.S. global power would further erode. That’s why Rupert Murdoch and other corporate titans are rumored to be trying to talk Trump off the cliff.

Democrats should be out there forcefully defending the integrity of the votes and condemning coup-plotting for what it is.

Still, given the kind of profitable chaos Republicans and their donors have grown accustomed to under Trump, nothing can be ruled out. And as Sirota reported, these are not abstract fears: “Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating that the results may be fraudulent, even though they haven’t produced any evidence of widespread fraud.”

Given this reality, Joe Biden’s “Come on, man” approach of brushing off Republican election denialism as an “embarrassment,” rather than a serious threat, is probably a poor one. The Republican strategy, if they do go down this road, relies on state legislators appealing to a perception — not a reality — that the public has lost faith in the election results. That’s a lot easier to claim if the only people screaming outside your offices and bombarding you with phone calls and emails are Trump supporters shouting conspiracy theories about voter fraud, while the people who would see a challenge to certified results as a straight-up coup have already moved on, convinced that Republicans wouldn’t dare cross yet another democratic red line so they aren’t even bothering to make the point.

To be absolutely clear: The point shouldn’t have to be made. There is zero evidence of widespread fraud, and ratifying certified results should be a formality. But if there is one core lesson to take from the Republican victory in Florida in 2000, when the Bush campaign staged astroturf riots and the Gore campaign told supporters to stay home and trust the process, it is that partisan decision-makers are swayed by street-level messaging wars. If Republican state lawmakers are inclined toward flagrantly overriding the will of the people, the ability to claim that the overwhelming majority of the people they are hearing from have lost faith in the elections may be excuse enough. Remember: they would not be looking for the truth, which they obviously already know, but rather a marginally plausible cover story. One-sided protests could provide that.

It is in this context that Democrats should be out there forcefully defending the integrity of the votes and condemning coup-plotting for what it is. That means not waving it away as “embarrassing,” but, as Sen. Bernie Sanders had done, denouncing it as “an outrage” that is “delegitimizing our electoral process and American democracy.” The public should not wait for Democratic leaders to tell them it’s time to fight back. Anyone who still kind of likes the idea of votes counting for something — regardless of who they voted for or even if they voted this election — should consider taking some time to make their voices heard to legislators in those Republican-controlled houses.

This is an organizing challenge, and for understandable reasons. Many of the progressive organizations that ran massive voter education and mobilization campaigns during the election have closely studied the lessons of Bush v. Gore and were prepared to stay mobilized to defend the vote if it ended up being close enough to steal. In truth, the election is much closer than it should have been given Trump’s murderous reign (a subject as I have discussed elsewhere), but it’s hardly a nail-biter coming down to a few hanging chads. For this reason, most organizers have concluded that, this time around, they don’t need to focus their energies on avoiding a repeat of the Bush v. Gore-style Democratic Party dumpster fire.

Instead, most progressive organizations are working hard to avoid a repeat of a different variety of Democratic Party debacle: the one that unfolded in 2008-2009, in the months between Barrack Obama’s euphoric election win in November and his inauguration in January. That’s when Obama surrounded himself with a team of hardcore neoliberal economists and Wall Street bankers. And so, despite campaign promises to “rebuild Main Street,” address structural market failures, and arrest the climate crisis, they spent the transition mapping out a maddeningly inadequate response to the raging financing crisis, one that grossly failed working people and the planet.

As the new cabinet was being assembled and its agenda set in stone, anyone who raised concerns about where this train was obviously headed was promptly told to pipe down and “Give the guy a chance” — the mantra of those fateful months. Months that were wasted with fantastical narratives about the president’s imagined long game, stories that cast Obama as a progressive hero who was only temporarily appeasing the hungry gods of the market in order to buy time for his transformational popular agenda that was always just around the corner.

It never came. The political window (and Federal Reserve faucet) opened up by Wall Street’s collapse eventually closed, and the logic of austerity soon bore down once again. The racial wealth gap widened. The planet burned. The architects of these crimes faced no consequences. Not until a new wave of far more independent and confrontational movements rose up in Obama’s second term — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matters, the Dreamers, fossil fuel divestment, No Keystone XL, Standing Rock — did we start to see some actual progress. But nothing that administration did matched the scale of the crises it faced, and which have only deepened since.

I take heart in the fact that the militant movements born in Obama’s second term, and which deepened during the Trump years, have clearly learned from the mistakes made in the 2008-2009 transition period. Since Election Day, the reigning attitude toward Biden among groups organizing for racial, economic, and climate justice has been “this guy gets zero chances.” Organizations that have worked relentlessly for months to turn out the vote for Biden did not even take a weekend off to celebrate. Instead, they immediately unveiled detailed plans outlining all the executive actions a Biden-Harris administration could take within its first 100 days: from immediate student debt relief, to generous “people’s bailouts” as part of its Covid-19 response, to the highly detailed “Frontlines Climate Justice Executive Action Platform,” backed by a coalition of powerful groups and published by the think tank Demos.

Most ambitious has been a campaign just launched by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, which focusses not only on what the new administration can do, but also who should be appointed to do it. Quoting the president-elect’s accurate assertion that voters had “given us a mandate for action on Covid, the economy, on climate change, on systemic racism,” the groups laid out their own vision of what it would mean for Biden to actually live up to this high-stakes mandate and solve these overlapping crises.

It begins, they argue, with creating a new “White House Office of Climate Mobilization,” modeled after the society-wide mobilizations of World War II. The person leading this office would have broad powers to put the entire administration on emergency footing and coordinate action across the different agencies so that every part of the government — from housing to health care — was advancing rapid, justice-based decarbonization. Rather than treating climate action as the narrow purview of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, “the Office of Climate Mobilization will deeply embed this mission into all of our spending, regulations, policies, and actions.”

Seeking to avoid Obama-era setbacks, they also call for the Cabinet to be made up of a diverse group of fighters, with “no ties to fossil fuel companies or corporate lobbyists.” They even released their picks for a dream Biden Cabinet, complete with a slick video imagining their favorite candidates being sworn in. The full list is here but highlights include: Sanders for labor secretary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren for Treasury secretary, Rep. Barbara Lee as secretary of state, Rep. Deb Haaland for interior secretary, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison for Justice Department, Rep. Rashida Tlaib for Housing and Urban Development, Rep. Pramila Jayapal for Health and Human Services, and economist Joseph Stiglitz for director of the National Economic Council.

On one level, the whole exercise is a heartbreak — a tortuous glimpse of the government we could have had under a Sanders presidency. In a best-case scenario, maybe two of these movement picks stand a chance of making it through the Beltway gatekeepers running the Biden-Harris transition — and even that is highly unlikely.

But that doesn’t make this aggressive attempt to move the benchmarks a waste of time. The fact that Sunrise and Justice Democrats were so quick to capitalize on record youth turn out in the elections and go on the offense with their vision for a transformational administration speaks to just how different this moment is from 2008. The groups that mobilized to defeat Trump have every intention of staying mobilized and pushing Biden at every stage.

That’s a very good thing. And though it won’t give us Bernie’s would-be Cabinet, it is already yielding some modest results. Every Cabinet-level appointment will be heavily scrutinized for their industry ties, which is already happening to Biden’s transition teams and was far from the case for Obama. And though Biden will likely never use the term “Green New Deal,” there are clear indications that the vision of a holistic, government-wide approach to the climate crisis is already shaping the outlines of the new administration.

Tackling our era of overlapping crises demands this kind of focus, one that aligns every part of the government in the urgent mission of simultaneously bending the curve on Covid-19 cases and on greenhouse gas emissions, all while systematically closing racial and gender inequalities and creating millions of family-supporting low-carbon jobs. An added bonus: a government that can give people that kind of soaring common purpose, one that is expansive enough to have a meaningful role for everyone who wants it, is also best positioned to begin to heal the political ruptures that are ripping apart the country. Joining people in life-saving, job-creating common cause might even be more effective, I would argue, than the various suggestions that we all go out and engage in active listening with a pissed-off Trump voter.

But what of the persistent rumblings of seamless transition to a “second Trump term,” most recently from top trade adviser Peter Navarro? Unfortunately, we cannot pretend it’s not happening. After posting about the need for Biden to be pushed by both the growing Squad inside Congress and by movements on the outside, Will Dana, former managing editor of Rolling Stone, pointed to the ongoing (and escalating) attempts to delegalize the election itself and responded: “Let’s focus on making sure we have a President Biden to be disappointed in.”

The truth, as usual, is we have to do it all: Stop the Republicans from stealing an election they lost and stop the Democrats from blowing a mandate they won.