As the San Francisco bureaucrats on the dais murmured about why
they weren’t getting anywhere near what we in the audience passionately
hoped for, asked for, and worked for, my mind began to wander. I began
to think of another sunny day on the other side of the country 13 years
earlier, when nothing happened the way anyone expected. I had met a
survivor of that day who told me his story.
A high-powered financial executive, he had just arrived on the 66th
floor of his office building and entered his office carrying his coffee,
when he saw what looked like confetti falling everywhere -- not a
typical 66th floor spectacle. Moments later, one of his friends ran out
of a meeting room shouting, “They’re back.”
It was, of course, the morning of September 11th and his friend had
seen a plane crash into the north tower of the World Trade Center. My
interviewee and his colleagues in the south tower got on the elevator.
In another 15 minutes or so, that was going to be a fast way to die, but
they managed to ride down to the 44th floor lobby safely. A guy with a
bullhorn was there, telling people to go back to their offices.
Still holding his cup of coffee, he decided -- as did many others in
that lobby -- to go down the stairs instead. When he reached the 20th
floor, a voice came on the public address system and told people to go
back to their offices. My storyteller thought about obeying those
instructions. Still holding his coffee, he decided to keep heading down.
He even considered getting back on an elevator, but hit the stairs
again instead. Which was a good thing, because when he was on the ninth
floor, the second plane crashed into the south tower, filling the
elevator shafts with flaming jet fuel. Two hundred to 400 elevator
riders died horribly. He put down his coffee at last and lived to tell
the tale.
The moral of this story: people in power and bureaucrats seem
exceptionally obtuse when it comes to recognizing that the world has
changed and the old rules no longer apply. The advisors in the towers
were giving excellent instructions for a previous crisis that happened
to be profoundly different from the one at hand. That many had the good
sense to disobey and evacuated early meant the stairwells were less
crowded when the second round of evacuations began. Amazingly, the vast
majority of people below the levels of the impacts
made it out of both buildings -- largely despite the
advice of the building's management, not because of it.
Going Nowhere Fast
Sometimes the right thing to do in ordinary times is exactly the
wrong thing to do in extraordinary times. That’s easy to understand when
something dramatic has happened. It’s less easy to grasp when the
change is incremental and even understanding it requires paying
attention to a great deal of scientific data.
Right now, you can think of the way we’re living as an office tower
and the fossil fuel economy as a plane crashing into it in very, very,
very slow motion. Flaming jet fuel is a pretty good analogy, in its own
way, for what the burning of fossil fuel is doing, although the death
and destruction are mostly happening in slow motion, too -- except when
people are drowning in Hurricane Sandy-style
superstorms or burning in
Australian firestorms or
dying in
European heat waves.
The problem is: How do you convince someone who is stubbornly avoiding
looking at the flames that the house is on fire? (Never mind those who
deny the very existence of fire.) How do you convince someone that what
constitutes prudent behavior in ordinary times is now dangerous and
that what might be considered reckless in other circumstances is now
prudent?
That gathering in which I was daydreaming was a board meeting of the
San Francisco Employees Retirement System. Ten months before, on April
23, 2013, in a thrilling and unanticipated unanimous vote, the city’s
Board of Supervisors opted to ask the retirement board to divest their
fund of fossil fuel stocks, $616,427,002 worth of them at last count -- a
sum that nonetheless represents only 3.3% of its holdings. That vote
came thanks to a growing climate change divestment movement that has
been attempting to address the problem of fossil fuel corporations and
their environmental depredations in a new way.
Divestment serves a number of direct and indirect causes, including
awakening public opinion to the dangers we face and changing the
economic/energy landscape. As is now widely recognized, preventing
climate change from reaching its most catastrophic potential requires
keeping four-fifths
of known carbon reserves (coal, oil, and gas) in the ground. The owners
of those reserves -- those giant energy corporations and states like
Russia and Canada that might as well be -- have no intention of letting
that happen.
Given a choice between the bottom line and the fate of the Earth, the
corporations have chosen to deny the scientific facts (at least
publicly), avoid the conversation, or insist that retrenching is so
onerous as to be impossible. At the same time, they have been
up-armoring political action committees, funding climate change
disinformation campaigns, paying off politicians, and, in many cases,
simply manipulating governments to serve the corporations and their
shareholders rather than humanity or even voters. It’s been a largely
one-sided war for a long time. Now, thanks to climate activists
worldwide, it’s starting to be more two-sided.
The Things We Burned
An extraordinary new report tells us that 90 corporations and states
are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all the carbon emissions that
have changed our climate and our world since 1751. Chevron alone is
responsible for 3.52% of that total, ExxonMobil for 3.22%, and BP for
2.24%. China since 1751 is responsible for 8.56% -- less, that is, than
those three petroleum giants. It’s true that they produced that energy,
rather than (for the most part) consuming it, but at this point we need
to address the producers.
The most terrifying thing about the
study by Richard Heede of
Climate Mitigation Services in Colorado, and the
chart of his data that Duncan Clark and Kiln, a data-visualization firm, made for the
Guardian
is that 63% of all human-generated carbon emissions have been produced
in the past 25 years; that is, nearly two-thirds have been emitted
since the
first warnings
were sounded about what was then called “global warming” and the need
to stop or scale back. We on Earth now, we who have been adults for at
least 25 years, are the ones who have done more than all earlier human
beings combined to unbalance the atmosphere of the planet, and thus its
weather systems, oceans, and so much more.
It’s important to note, as so many have, that it’s we in the global
north and the rich countries for whom most of that fuel has been burned.
And it’s important to note as well (though fewer have) that,
according to the opinion polls, a
majority of individuals north and south, even in our own oil empire, are willing to change in response to this grim fact. It’s the
giant energy corporations
and the governments in their thrall (when they’re not outright oil
regimes) that are stalling and refusing, as we saw when a meaningful
climate compact was
sabotaged in Copenhagen in late 2009.
The most stunning thing about that chart illustrating
Heede’s
study is that it makes what can seem like an overwhelming and amorphous
problem specific and addressable: here are the 90 top entities pumping
carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere. With its own list of the
200 biggest
fossil fuel corporations, the divestment movement is doing something
similar. Next comes the hard part: getting universities, cities, states,
pension funds, and other financial entities to actually divest. They
often like to suggest that it’s an impossible or crazy or wildly
difficult and risky move, though fund managers shuffle their funds
around all the time for other reasons.
Once upon a time, similar entities swore that it was inconceivable to
end the institution of slavery, upend the profitable economics of
southern plantations, and violate the laws of “property”; once upon
another time, you couldn’t possibly give women the vote and change the
whole face of democracy and public life, or require seatbelts and other
extravagant safety devices, or limit the industrial processes that
produce acid rain, or phase out the chlorofluorocarbons so useful for
refrigeration and destructrive of the ozone layer. Except that this
country did all of that, over the gradually declining protests that it
was too radical and burdensome. When radical shifts become the status
quo, most forget how and why it happened and come to see that status quo
as inevitable and even eternal, though many of its best aspects were
the fruit of activism and change.
We tend to think that sticking with something is a calmer and
steadier way to go than jettisoning it, even though that rule obviously
doesn’t apply to sinking ships. Sometimes, after the iceberg or the
explosion, the lifeboat is safer than the luxury liner, though getting
on it requires an urgent rearrangement of your body and your
expectations. The value of fossil fuel corporations rests on their
strategic reserves. Extracting and burning those reserves would
devastate the climate, so keeping most of them in the ground is a key goal, maybe
the key goal, in forestalling the worst versions of what is already unfolding.
The curious thing about fossil fuel divestment is that many highly
qualified financial analysts and, as of last week, the British
parliament’s
environmental audit committee suggest that
such investments are volatile, unsafe, and could crash in the fairly near future. They focus on the much discussed
carbon bubble and its potential for creating
stranded assets. So there’s a strong argument for divestment simply as a matter of fiscal (rather than planetary) prudence.
According to many scenarios, divesting energy company stocks will
have no impact, or even a positive impact, on a portfolio. The biggest
question, however, is what constitutes a good portfolio on a planet
spiraling into chaos. The best way -- maybe the only way -- to manage a
portfolio is to manage the planet, or at least to participate in trying.
How will your stocks do as the oceans die? Or -- leaving out all
humanitarian concerns -- as massive crop failures decimate markets and
maybe populations? Is the fate of the Earth your responsibility or
someone else’s?
For the People Who Will Be 86 in the Year 2100
In that pretty room, a few dozen activists and one San Francisco supervisor, John Avalos, a
great leader
on climate issues, faced off against the San Francisco Employees
Retirement System board and its staff who talked interminably about how
wild and reckless it would be to divest. And it was then that it struck
me: inaction and caution may seem so much more rational than action,
unless you’re in a burning building or on a sinking ship. And that’s
what made me think of the World Trade Center towers on the day they were
hit by those hijacked airliners.
It was as though the people in that room were having different
conversations in different languages in different worlds. And versions
of that schizophrenic conversation are being had all over this continent
and in Europe. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and
across the California system of higher education are launching this
conversation with the university regents and I already dread the same foot-dragging performances I’ve been watching here for almost a year.
There’s already a long list of institutions that have committed to
divestment, from the United Church of Christ and the San Francisco State
University Foundation to the Sierra Club Foundation and 17
philanthropic foundations. Staff leadership at the Wallace Foundation,
one of the 17 divesting,
said, "Who
in our community could proudly defend, today, a decision not to have
divested from South Africa 30 years ago? In hindsight, the moral case
seems too clear. How then might we envision defending, 20 years from
now, keeping our millions invested in business-as-usual fossil energy,
at precisely the moment scientists are telling us there is no time left
to lose?"
In fact, many climate activists point to the divestment movement that
focused on apartheid-era South Africa as a model. That was a highly
successful campaign, but also a relatively easy one for many of the
companies being pressured to withdraw from their investments,
subsidiaries, and other involvements in that country. After all, many of
them weren’t all that involved, financially speaking, to begin with.
What worked then won’t work now, because the situations are so
profoundly different.
The San Francisco Retirement Board finally voted to engage
in shareholder activism, their first and most timorous step. This is the
procedure whereby shareholders chastise a corporation and ask it to
change its sorry ways. Such activism, which was meaningful when it came
to South Africa, is meaningless when it comes to carbon. Politely asking
ExxonMobil or Chevron to divest from fossil fuel is like asking
McDonald’s to divest from burgers and fries or Ford to divest from cars.
It's sort of like a mouse asking a lion to become vegetarian.
The corporations are not going to quit their principal activity and
raison d'être; it’s we who need to quit investing in them -- the step the board was balking at.
Climate activists speak the language of people who know that we’re in
an emergency. The retirement board is speaking the language of people
who don’t. The board members don’t deny the science of climate change,
but as far as I can tell, they don’t realize what that means for
everyone’s future, including that of members of their pension fund and
their children and grandchildren. The words “fiduciary duty” kept coming
up, which means the board’s and staff’s primary responsibility and
commitment are to the wellbeing of the fund. It was implied that selling
3.3% of the portfolio for reasons of principle was a wild and
irrational thing to support, no less do.
But it isn’t just principle. The pensioners receiving money from the
board will be living on Earth, not some other planet. Exactly what that
means in 10, 20, or 50 years depends on what we do now. That we, by the
way, includes money managers, investors, and pension-holders, as well as
politicians and activists, and you who are reading this. What, after
all, does “fiduciary duty” mean in an emergency? Can you make sound
investments on a planet that’s going haywire without addressing the
causes of that crisis? In such circumstances, shouldn’t fiduciary duty
include addressing the broader consequences of your investments?
What does the future look like for a person paying into the pension
fund who will be 60 in 2050? One of my brothers is a city employee
paying into that fund. What will the future look like for his younger
son, who will be 87 in 2100? A retirement board fund manager spoke of
emulating Warren Buffett, who recently bought Exxon shares. Buffett is
83. He won’t be around for the most serious consequences of his actions
or Exxon’s. My sweet-natured, almost-walking, brown-eyed nephew Martin,
who turned one on Sunday, will. I likely will, too, because it’s getting
wilder on this destabilized planet, and even two decades hence is
looking pretty grim.
Here’s what I wrote the board before the meeting:
“Not only prosperity
but human health and food supplies depend on a stable climate, but it’s
getting less stable all the time. How much we will lose, how much we
will salvage depends on whether we act now. I get it that the board’s
first responsibility is to the financial wellbeing of the fund. Even
more so it’s to the pensioners, from those now receiving benefits to the
youngest person paying in. But nothing exists in isolation: the stock
market depends, whether or not Wall Street remembers, on weather, crops,
strong markets for products, and the rest of what a stable world
provides. And even a nice pension would not assuage the need of
pensioners afflicted by tropical diseases moving northward, extreme heat
that disproportionately affects the elderly, rising sea levels that
take away billions of dollars of coastal California real estate --
including SFO runways and the city’s landfill areas. Crop failure and
rising food prices, water shortages, dying oceans, climate refugees.”
Or as a leaked U.N. report recently
put it,
“The planet's crop production will decline by up to 2% every decade as
rainfall patterns shift and droughts batter farmland, even as demand for
food rises a projected 14%.”
I have great faith in the human ability to improvise, but there are
limits to what can be done about a shrinking food supply and a growing
population. The word not used in this cautious, conservative report is
mass famine, which is very bad for your stocks. And infinitely worse for
the people who are starving.
Another new report
says,
“Europe’s financial losses related to flooding, which now total about
4.9 billion euros a year, could increase almost 380% to 23.5 billion
euros by 2050.” There are other versions of these dire projections about
Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Studies about the future impact of
climate change are one thing that’s not in short supply. You can focus
on the
oceans
and fisheries, on polar ice, on species, on food supplies, floods,
fires, hurricanes, and typhoons -- and in the language of the market,
indicators are that catastrophe is going way, way up. How much depends
on us.
Your House Is On Fire
A few weeks earlier, I went to a demonstration at the State
Department’s San Francisco office with a NASA scientist friend who’s an
expert on what makes planets habitable. She told me that we on Earth
have been blessed by the remarkable stability of temperatures over the
long haul and that for any planet the
window of temperature
in which life will thrive is pretty small. We’re already at the upper
end of the viable temperature for an inhabitable planet, she told me.
I’ve heard the news delivered a thousand ways about what we’re facing,
but her version made me feel sick -- as if she’d told me my house was
burning down. Which she had.
I was in Japan for the first anniversary of what they call the great
TÅhoku
earthquake and tsunami that Americans often call Fukushima (a reference
-- speaking of the unforeseen and of the failures of authorities -- to
the six nuclear power plants trashed by the tsunami that began to fall
apart in various highly radioactive ways). The country’s earthquake
building codes worked well: hardly anyone was killed by the giant quake.
Its tsunami alert system worked superbly, too: almost everyone was
given plenty of time to evacuate.
But a lot of people didn’t move fast enough, or they trusted the sea
walls and sea gates to protect them, or they evacuated to the right
level for tsunamis in living memory. In many places, the waves were
higher than any tsunami since 1896, and about 20,000 people died in the
inundation,
90%
by drowning. The most horrible story I heard as I toured the wreckage
and talked to officials, survivors, and relief workers was about an
elementary school. Its teachers argued about what to do: one of them
took several students to safety; the rest of the school, teachers and
small children alike, stayed put and drowned. Unnecessarily. Reacting
strongly to a catastrophe is often seen as an overreaction, but the real
danger is under-reaction.
During 9/11, survival meant evacuating the south tower of the World
Trade Center. In 2011, survival on the northeast coast of Japan meant
going uphill or far inland. Our climate crisis requires us to evacuate
our normal ways of doing things. That will not always be cheap or easy,
but divestment can be done now with no loss, even possibly with an
upside, say many financial analysts. In any case, it’s the only
honorable and sane thing to do -- for the young who will be alive in
2064, for the beauty and complexity of the world we have been given,
including all the other living things on it, for the sake of the people
who are already suffering and will suffer more because of the disruption
of the elegant system that is the Earth we inherited.
© 2014 Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit is an activist, TomDispatch.com regular, and author of many books, the latest of which
, The Faraway Nearby, was published in June, 2013. Her first essay for TomDispatch.com turned into the book
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Other previous books include:
A Paradise Built in Hell, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, The Battle of The Story of the Battle in Seattle (with her brother David), and
Storming The Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. She is a contributing editor to
Harper's Magazine.
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