Exxon, Keystone, and the Turn Against Fossil Fuels
The New Yorker
Exxon, Keystone, and the Turn Against Fossil Fuels
November 6, 2015
The fossil-fuel industrywhich, for two centuries, underwrote our civilization and then became its greatest threathas started to take serious hits. At noon today, President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, becoming the first world leader to turn down a major project on climate grounds. Eighteen hours earlier, New Yorks Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that hed issued subpoenas to Exxon, the richest and most profitable energy company in history, after substantial evidence emerged that it had deceived the world about climate change.
These moves dont come out of the blue. They result from three things.
The first is a global movement that has multiplied many times in the past six years. Battling Keystone seemed utterly quixotic at firstwhen activists first launched a civil-disobedience campaign against the project, in the summer of 2011, more than ninety per cent of energy insiders in D.C. told a National Journal survey that they believed that President Obama would grant Transcanada a permit for the construction. But the conventional wisdom was upended by a relentless campaign carried on by hundreds of groups and millions of individual people (including 350.org, the international climate-advocacy group I founded). It seemed that the President didnt give a speech in those years without at least a small group waiting outside the hall to greet him with banners demanding that he reject the pipeline. And the Keystone rallying cry quickly spread to protests against other fossil-fuel projects. One industry executive summed it up nicely this spring, when he told a conference of his peers that they had to figure out how to stop the Keystone-ization of all their plans.
The second, related, cause is the relentless spread of a new logic about the planetthat we have five times as much carbon in our reserves as we can safely burn. While President Obama said today that Keystone was not the express lane to climate disaster, he also said that were going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them. ....
.......Snipping...don't want to...its great stuff....
In many ways, the developments of the past two days are more important than any pledges and promises for the future, because they show the ways in which political and economic power has already started to shift. If we can accelerate that shift, we have a chance.
Its impossible, in the hottest year that humans have ever measured, to feel optimistic. But its also impossible to miss the real shift in this battle.
Read in full here~
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/exxon-keystone-and-the-turning-tide-on-fossil-fuels
My step was a little bit lighter today. Anyone else?
Even the birds looked happier. And the frogs probably were as well...