It was
the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it
was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in
sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what
we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that
it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of
everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature
of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed
1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over
again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San
Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last
millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist
fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the
course of a
speech she gave while accepting a book
award she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the
divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human
beings.”
That document I held was written only a few years after
the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an
inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes
and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the
experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again
regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other
liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats
everywhere).
Americans are skilled at that combination of
complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the
people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally
ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country
and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible
changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and
idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands
that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe
with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).
How to Topple a
Giant
To use Le Guin’s language, physics is inevitable: if
you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the
planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are let loose. Politics, on the
other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have
seemed inevitable that Chevron, currently the third biggest corporation in the
country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private
fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed like a given.
Except that people in Richmond refused to accept it and so this town of 107,000
mostly poor nonwhites pushed back.
In recent years, a group of progressives
won election to the city council and
the mayor’s seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that
also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil,
massive contamination from half a century of oil extraction in Nigeria, and
Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle
McLaughin and her cohorts organized a little revolution in a town that had
mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron’s toxic refinery
emissions, which
periodically create
emergencies, sometimes requiring
everyone to take shelter (and pretend that they are not being poisoned indoors),
sometimes said -- by Chevron -- to be harmless, as with
last Thursday's flames that lit up the
sky, visible as far away as Oakland.
As McLaughin
put it of her era as mayor:
“We’ve accomplished so much, including breathing better
air, reducing the pollution, and building a cleaner environment and cleaner
jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in 33 years
and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita.
We’re a sanctuary city. And we’re defending our homeowners to prevent
foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra
dollars in taxes.”
For this November’s election, the second-largest oil
company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other
progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That
sum worked out to about
$180 per Richmond voter, but my
brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that,
if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local
politics, it might be roughly ten times that.
Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were
elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers,
television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign
can come up with, won.
If a small coalition
like that can win locally against a corporation that had revenues of
$228.9 billion in 2013, imagine what a
large global coalition could do against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn’t easy
in Richmond and it won’t be easy on the largest scale either, but it’s not
impossible. The Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was
not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life. They showed up to do the work to
dent that inevitability.
The billionaires and fossil fuel corporations are
intensely engaged in politics all the time, everywhere, and they count on us to
stay on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements, you
can see that they fear the moment we wake up, show up, and exercise our power to
counter theirs.
That power operated on a larger scale last week, when
local activists and public health professionals applied sufficient pressure to
get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign legislation
banning fracking statewide. Until the
news broke on December 17th, the outcome had seemed uncertain. It’s a landmark,
a watershed decision: a state has decided that its considerable reserves of
fossil fuel will not be extracted for the foreseeable future, that
other things -- the health of its
people, the purity of its water -- matter more. And once again, the power of
citizens turned out to be greater than that of industry.
Just a few days before the huge victory in New York,
the nations of the world ended their
most recent talks in Lima, Peru, about a global
climate treaty -- and they actually reached a
tentative deal, one that for the first time asks
all nations, not just the developed ones, to reduce emissions. The agreement has
to get better -- to do more, demand more of every nation -- by the
global climate summit in Paris in
December of 2015.
It’s hard to see how we’ll get there from here, but
easy to see that activists and citizens will have to push their nations hard. We
need to end the age of fossil fuels the way the French ended the age of absolute
monarchy. As New York State and the town of Richmond just demonstrated, what is
possible has been changing rapidly.
facilities, the regulations are yet to be established. And we do not have a clear commitment from Governor Mark Dayton that these rules will be tough and put health, safety and rural communities before frac sand mining interests. This is a critical time to ramp up our efforts to demand that Gov. Dayton uses his authority to create stringent frac sand regulations. 