Launch a Personal Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

Author: Tom Nowak

The case for not investing in the stocks of fossil fuel companies could not be clearer. The growing consensus is that fossil fuel corporations have 5 times more known reserves than scientists have calculated to be safe for use. In other words, 80% of these fuels need to remain untapped to avoid accelerating the rate of environmental damage. Why would a long term-investor want to own a company that is spending a lot of money looking for more product sources that can never be used? Would a pharmaceutical company invest in developing a drug that has no chance of ever being approved for use? 

Environmental organizations such as 350.org, the Sierra Club,

More oil spills

Now that the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been at least temporarily staunched, BP is retrenching. They have a new chief executive and plans to set aside money that should cover their cleanup and compensation costs, and they're already talking about growth. One of the most interesting facets, to me at least, is that their plan rests on the assumption that they won't be found grossly negligent. I am no legal expert, but they may well be right, and that's a really important thing to understand. The media have had a field day excoriating BP as if they are uniquely bad, but really the problem is their whole industry.

I blogged about this back in June, and made the argument that the sheer scale of the oil industry makes spills simply inevitable. The news in the past week could not have done more to underscore that point. I learned that since the main Gulf spill started, there have been at least three other, unrelated oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Then I read about the pipeline leak in Southern Michigan; an incident so comparatively minor that it only gets a paragraph in the New York Times, because 'only' 800,000 gallons of oil fouled the Kalamazoo River. Not to mention the spill in Dalian, China last week, or almost 1000 spills per year in Nigeria. To focus on one incident or one company is to miss the bigger picture that this ongoing catastrophe is ultimately caused by the embedding of oil products through every level of our economy, and getting oil is inherently polluting and dangerous.

The impact of all this is not trivial. Paul Crane, a friend of Sustainable Seattle, described a recent trip to his native Florida recently in the Pensacola News Journal:

As the plane banked over Santa Rosa Island I remembered the many times and ways I have traveled to Pensacola, both to visit and to live there.
As a small child detraining from the L&N Hummingbird at Flomaton and hopping another train to Pensacola's station; later, in grade school and high school when I came to live in Pensacola, with the smells of the Gulf wafting through the car window as dawn broke, after an all-night drive. I remember, at night, lying awake listening to the whippoorwills calling through the pine and oak forests and awaiting endless weekends in the beach dunes, wearing Saturday smiles with my friends.
Now, returning yet again for a visit, I gaze through from the plane on an almost apocalyptic landscape. The coastal barrier island appears a ribbon of white sand with people-less beaches. Lots of cars parked and people scurrying around upland, but human-less in or near the water on a sunny day.
Several hundred yards off shore, just past the murky water, in the littoral zone that was always light emerald green, lay a dark, shiny sheen of oil that spread to the horizon. A sick feeling rose in my stomach and a small tear whelmed in my eye. What I had seen in newsprint and TV screen was now live, right before my eyes.
Only later, when I made my way to Casino Beach for an attempted swim, was the grim reality realized. The best metaphor I could conjure compares the yellow front loaders moving sand as a funeral procession in front of the dying Gulf's dead zone, an aquatic graveyard. As one friend, a native, put it, "I took some of my first steps on that beach, as did my children and grandchildren."
Today the beach sand has been classified as hazardous waste, and the Gulf is dying.

It's worth reading his whole letter, which goes on to suggest some solutions (and assigns blame a little differently from me). I wanted to share this excerpt to underscore that this is not an abstrtact issue. In the end people suffer because of our insatiable appetite for oil.

Escaping despair

This is post 5 of a 5 part series. Previously:

Deepwater Horizon should surprise nobody

What you can do to use less oil

Only better policies can really save us

Why individual action still matters

A few times in this series I've talked about just how dire the status quo is. I think people outside the sustainability advocacy community often fail to grasp that when we describe systems as "unsustainable" we mean this entirely literally. This is neither about some minor luxuries we'll have to live without in future nor about problems so distant or theoretical that we can afford to ignore them: it is about whether society organised the way it is today can survive for as long as I intend to live.

At the same time, we know the task ahead if we are to change the status quo enough is intimidatingly huge. The world has sunk tremendous resources into building a fossil fuel dependent economy, most people seem desperate to keep the status quo, there are immense vested interests in keeping it so for as long as possible, and we are already seeing the damage we have caused to ourselves. This leads inexorably to a state that we must avoid: despair.

I think that despair is a particularly grave sin in so many religions because it leads people to stop trying, and the only way we can guarantee failure is by giving up. It really is a kind of cop-out; "I don't need to change my behaviour because all is lost anyway". But it's also a very understandable, very human trait to fall into this trap. I wrestle with despair routinely—especially when events like the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks shine a light on how bad things really are—and most people who are deeply involved in the sustainability movement do at least some of the time. So it's really important that we work out a way to deal with the risk of despair and not become paralysed by it.

For me at least, despair comes from mistakenly seeing major environmental problems as binary: broken vs fixed; good vs bad; success vs failure. Seen in this light, we have already failed, so despair is inevitable. In the real world, though, there are always degrees of success and failure. We could stop global warming at the 1.5-2°C we're already stuck with and do some serious work to protect coastal communities, limit desertification and manage flood risks, or we could let it run much further. We could continue to accept the virtual inevitability of more Deepwater Horizons, or we could act to reduce this risk. We could accept the significantly shorter life expectancy of residents of the most polluted parts of Seattle (which are also some of the poorest districts), or we could do whatever we can to improve the situation.

Doing something—anything—turns out to be liberating. It's much easier to wallow in despair when using it as an excuse to do nothing at all, but if you start to do something about the problem it's much easier to fight that off. There is also a measure of detachment required, though. Not detachment about the problems we face, or denial of the problems or their scale, but a more personal detachment from the messianic idea of being able to fix everything. Accepting that all I can do is play my small part makes me much more effective at it than I was when I was fixated on the enormity of the trouble we are in, and how limited my own power is to sort it out.

There's no denying that humanity is in deep trouble if we don't change our ways, and it is entirely normal to respond to this with despair. Yet a better world is possible if we all do what we can and don't allow the despair to paralyse us or become an excuse for complacency. Escaping that trap requires us to do what we can to make the world better, and stop beating ourselves up about the limits to what we can do.

Why individual action still matters

This is post 4 of a 5 part series. Previously:

Deepwater Horizon should surprise nobody

What you can do to use less oil

Only better policies can really save us

If you've been reading these posts in order, you may feel that the previous one about the paramount importance of better policy undermines the message from the day before about individual choices we can make to use less oil. There are several reasons why even though it can't be enough alone, individual action is still crucially important.

The first is simply that the status quo is so bad that we must do everything productive, and not allow the pursuit of one avenue to prevent others from being explored. I started this series writing about the direct consequences of oil extraction, but I have barely mentioned the larger problem: global climate change. Unfortunately, the world is almost certainly committed to some warming even if we somehow stop emitting greenhouse gases overnight. This means we have already passed the point where the real question is about whether we suffer serious, painful consequences; it's already a question of how bad it will be. This means that anything which reduces emissions now will have some benefit, and most of the individual actions can be done much quicker than the necessary policy changes.

A deeper reason is that the domains of individual action and policy are not entirely separate. When you choose to bike somewhere instead of driving, you are not only avoiding those miles of driving, but also shifting demand from car to bike infrastructure. This information is tracked and used to plan future investments, so each time you make a choice of how to get around (or where to buy things from, what food to eat, and so on), you are voting with your feet. And if you want to persuade your elected representative to do something, it's much easier if you can say "this will help me, because I'm already practicing what I preach", not to mention simply being more honest.

Finally, individual choices matter as much as anything else because they shift the Overton Window; they change what is considered politically possible. Each person who makes the kind of behavioural choices that contribute to weaning us off oil, makes it easier for the next to follow, and easier for politicians to pass the kind of laws that support them doing so. Changing social trends change what politicians feel they can or should do, and a changing social trend is nothing more than the aggregation of enough individuals changing their own behaviour. A movement is powerful because it leads to political change, but it starts with individuals opting to do the right thing.

So, individual action alone won't save us, but the system-wide changes we need won't happen without the support of many individuals' actions.

This is post 4 of a 5 part series. Coming up:

Escaping despair

Only better policies can really save us

This is post 3 of a 5 part series. Previously:

Deepwater Horizon should surprise nobody

What you can do to use less oil

In the previous posts in this series, I argued that we must reduce our oil consumption and outlined individual actions we can take to do so. Unfortunately, all manner of structural problems conspire to limit how much difference we can make as individuals. As a simple example, consider what happens to the supply and demand of parking if you stop driving: parking becomes easier or cheaper for someone else to find, leaving everyone else with less incentive to change their behaviour. Unfortunately, this is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. Oil is a fungible commodity, meaning that whatever is not used in one place can be trivially transferred to use elsewhere, and without wholesale economic systems change we are on a course to use the last drop we are capable of extracting from the ground, at ever higher costs. If we are really to escape the terrible consequences of oil use, we must change the way our economy is organised comprehensively enough that we can actually leave oil in the ground.

To achieve this sort of change, we have to build up from individual actions to local, national and ultimately international policy. The local part is the easiest to get a handle on. Local governments make decisions every year that have important impacts on the behaviour of, and opportunities open to, the people who live in their jurisdiction. Many of these are straightforward allocations of resources; investing in more, larger or faster roads increases driving while transferring those same resources over to improving public transport, bike infrastructure or the pedestrian environment encourages people to leave their cars behind by giving them better alternatives. Here in Seattle, we face a particularly extreme allocation of resources into oil-dependent infrastructure with the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement megaproject, which will plough $2 billion into a downtown highway bypass while almost certainly sucking away all the resources that might have been spent on improving travel within downtown.

Local government also exerts a lot of control over urban form by means of building codes and zoning laws, and these make a huge difference to resource use. Everything that encourages car-friendly infrastructure over pedestrian-friendly, and especially if it encourages sprawl over dense urban living, contributes to making us all use more oil as we travel past each others' houses to get to anything. Local examples include a set of townhouse design rules which both increase the amount of space one house needs and leads to hostile pedestrian environments, and the very limited area in which developers are allowed to build multifamily housing. Many cities in the US have similar issues, and if they were all fixed we would consume significantly less oil as a country, simply because we'd be travelling so much shorter distances going about our business.

Nationally, we need not only to introduce policies that deliberately reduce oil use (such as Cap and Trade in some form), but also to remove the huge number of subsidies that make enormously resource-wasteful activities economical; the most obvious being highway subsidies. We can and should take this further, and use a huge economic lever to reduce demand for oil by shifting taxes from income and goods to pollution. This is where we start to get multiplier effects that approach the scale of the problem.

Of course, the same argument about fungibility that applies between individuals applies between countries, so ultimately international treaties will be crucial. I won't go further into that here, because the international influence of the US is so huge that it's clear that no worthwhile international treaty can be passed until we are seen to be fixing our own problems, so we must focus on domestic policy first. And domestic policy is somewhere where you can make a difference by educating yourself about the issues, talking about them, and writing to elected representatives wherever you are.

If you take one thing from this whole series of posts, please let it be the importance of advocating for policies that wean us collectively off oil.

This is post 3 of a 5 part series. Coming up:

Why individual action still matters

Escaping despair

What you can do to use less oil

This is post 2 of a 5 part series. Previously:

Deepwater Horizon should surprise nobody

In yesterday's post, I wrote about the inevitability of a disaster like what we're seeing unfold in the Gulf of Mexico right now, given our economy's deep reliance on fossil fuels. This information is only useful if we can do something about it, and today's post will address the first level of that: actions we can all take to reduce our individual contribution to the problem. It's very simple in principle—we have to directly use less oil, and reduce our consumption of things manufactured and delivered in reliance on oil—but it's worth going through a few examples.

The most obvious thing is to drive less. Driving not only consumes oil by burning it as gasoline, it also consumes significant amounts indirectly, which is why driving less is a far more comprehensive solution than getting a more fuel-efficient or electric or biofuelled vehicle. There's an astonishing amount of energy embedded in a car because manufacturing one involves mining large quantities of various metals, melting them down, producing plastic components (generally made from natural gas and with other huge environmental costs), shipping the components around for final assembly and then getting the car to you. Then there's the immense amount of oil used to make tarmac for roads and consumed in their maintenance (powering the road-building equipment itself runs on), and many other environmental costs imposed by them, such as stormwater pollution. Cars also create their own demand, because the more of a city is given over to roads and parking, the greater the distances between people and destinations, and the harder it becomes to get around without a car. That, however, is a hint of the great limitation of telling people to drive less: for many people it's not so much a free choice as one forced by the combination of places where they can afford to live and are able to work.

In light of that, the next recommendation is to use more human power and less machine power throughout our daily lives. Switching from a car to a bicycle is a significant environmental win, but many smaller things are easier to do and more universally accessible. Try growing your own food--even just a pot of herbs in a window--cooking yourself dinner, mending your own clothes, and so on. Completely opting out of manufactured goods takes a large investment of time and many skills, but making the first changes that start to add up only requires a little resourcefulness. Above all, start small and don't be intimidated by not being able to change everything tomorrow. Most people who do this find it empowering to know they can make a few more things themselves, even if they don't have time to do it routinely.

For the things you can't make yourself, whether through lack of time or lack of the specific skills, it remains necessary to buy manufactured things but is almost always possible to consume less. "Green consumerism"— the luxury of choosing items manufactured in a somewhat more environmentally friendly way — is out of many people's reach, but it's also hugely overrated. Buying more stuff still means consuming more resources, and the details are, well, details. Many more thing can be reused than most people do, and as old-fashioned and unflashy as this is, mending clothing instead of replacing it is one of the most powerful ways you can reduce your use of stuff and therefore of the oil that in some more or less direct way is an input to the manufacture and delivery of almost everything. And when you do buy new things, carefully consider whether there's a longer-lasting or more reusable version available. They often cost more up front, but that cost is very often made up for by the longer useful life they will have.

There are many more way to reduce individual impacts, but this is a starting point. Of course, it's impossible to completely opt out of the oil economy without running for the hills and abandoning most of contemporary civilisation, but the next two posts in this series will address ways in which we can magnify the effects of our individual choices, and the final post will argue for why we must keep trying even though the task at hand often looks overwhelming.

This is post 2 of a 5 part series. Coming up:

Only better policies can really save us

Why individual action still matters

Escaping despair

Deepwater Horizon should surprise nobody

This is post 1 of a 5 part series

Like most people who care about anything, I've been watching the news from the Gulf of Mexico with horror. What is almost certainly now the worst ecological disaster in US history will have mind-numbingly huge effects, probably for more than a generation. In all honesty I'm saying so little about that because I can't find a way to be articulate about it. It is entirely appropriate to be horrified, angry and deeply sad. But the level of surprise I'm seeing almost universally expressed just shows how little the public at large understands the implications of how our economy and society are organised.

The first reason we shouldn't be surprised is that there's precedent. If you aren't familiar with the Ixtoc incident, then I urge you to watch this. It's worth the 8 minutes:

Of course, just because there is a precedent that people seem to forget about doesn't guarantee that an event will happen again. It's the sheer numbers that do, and here's why.

Every process has some level of risk attached. Go and look at a package of any medicine and you'll see information about statistical risks. Multiply the risk factors by the number of people taking the drug, and you get an expected number of deaths and catastrophic side-effects per year from people taking that drug. Most countries have a fairly rigourous regulatory regime in place to make sure the benefits outweigh the risks, and most drugs do turn out to bring a net benefit to humanity, but they are approved knowing that there's some level of risk.

The same risks x frequency calculus applies to oil exploration, except that regulation is ineffectual, hard numbers are much harder to find, and the consequences of the worst things going wrong are far larger. I haven't been able to find a count for the number of oil wells in the world, but there are almost 4,000 in the northwestern Gulf Of Mexico alone, and there appear to be over 40,000 oil fields in the world.

If we use the very conservative estimate that the average oil field has 10 wells, we get 400,000 oil wells. At that scale, the risk of any given well blowing out in any given year only needs to be 1 in a million for at least one blowout per decade to be all but inevitable (p=0.98, to be precise). I don't know what the real risk factor is, but I'm pretty sure I'm underestimating the the number of wells....

It's tempting in the face of that to just wring our hands and blame the oil industry, but that's a dishonest way out.

We are all responsible for this. We have oil exploration on this scale because the entire industrialised world is heavily dependent on fossil fuels to make it run. Every time you get in a car, or buy something that was shipped from far away, or use a disposable plastic thing, you are contributing to the leviathan that is the global fossil fuel industry. It's not just the headline-grabbing catastrophes like Deepwater Horizon; we all contribute to the slow-motion oil spill from our streets every time it rains, and it doesn't even take an accident for fossil fuel extraction to be destructive.

The saddest thing about this is that it didn't have to be so. We can have a modern, technological civilisation without relying on oil for everything, but we have what we have because of a series of choices we have made as a society. This is also the most optimistic thing that can be said, because we still have the power to change it, and the rest of this series will address how.

This is post 1 of a 5 part series. Coming up:

What you can do to use less oil

Only better policies can really save us

Why individual action still matters

Escaping despair

Green Jobs

Green Jobs Crossroads
Image from treehugger.com

The following is an excerpt from Sightline.org about the importance of green jobs and the opportunities they present. For the original article please follow the link below.

Sightline PDF

Paychecks with a Purpose: Patriotism, duty, pride

Green jobs help families in our communities: Cut energy costs in our homes and buildings, raise property values in our neighborhoods, and keep energy dollars at home. Green jobs give local economies a competitive edge: Clean energy is happening now. Those who dawdle may be left behind. Green jobs make our families and economy more secure: Green jobs help cushion the economy from volatile energy prices and reduce our dependence on dirty fossil fuels. Green jobs protect our climate: A green workforce contributes to an economy, environment, and future we can be proud to pass on to our children.