The Sound of Fossil Fuel - SF and Beyond

We are enjoying our last evening in San Francisco.  If you can say one thing about San Francisco, you can say that it is noisy here.  Sundays are quieter.  There is constant traffic noise along with mixed mechanical background activity; not to mention the sounds from the Bay shipping and the Pacific Ocean traffic.  I finally ran my first red light this afternoon after being so cautious during the visit.  A motorist sharing the road with us at the time relayed her displeasure with my behind the wheel skills.  If she only knew.

So far we have been to the de Young Museum and The Palace of the Legion of Honor.  On Friday evening we attended the San Francisco Symphony with guest soloist, Yo Yo Ma.  We were sitting near a husband and wife.  The husband is an investment broker.  He warned about the shock wave to come this coming week when the US stands to cast the sole "No" to Palestinian statehood in the UN Security Council.  The US loves to spread democracy.  The concert was magic as music in Davies Symphony Hall has always seemed to me.  As movement followed movement, I couldn't keep stop thinking of the Palestinians.  I wear a Tee shirt that reads, "We Are All Palestinians."  The US says that statehood should be negotiated between the two parties.  This assertion actually depends upon maintaining the folly that there will be a territory remaining for the Palestinians while Israeli occupation and settlement thrusts ahead.

This morning we walked to Grace Cathedral for mass.  From our hotel, we needed to walk up a steep stretch of hill.  Once we got to the top the Cathedral was just suddenly there.  On the way up the Cathedral, we happened upon a TV set that someone had abandoned on the sidewalk.  It struck us as humorous because it had been intentionally demolished as we had symbolically done in our home by cutting all cable and satellite services.  Even the fractious disorder of SF streets can not compare to the noise of corporate yammering that streams through the cables and down from the satellites.  In the photo shot above John waved his hand above the remains of the TV as if he had just done to it what everyone should do to their TV's.

We were supposed to be going to the California Academy of Sciences today back in Golden Gate Park.  However, when we got to the parking garage the ruby red  "Full" sign greeted us.  So, as we learned from 12-Steps, you adapt and make another choice.  Our choice brought us all the way west on Geary to the Ocean.  We had lunch in an cash-only restaurant that is family owned.  We wanted to sit at the counter and were willing to wait as it was cleared of the previous diner's plates and silver ware.  This we were told was impossible.  So we would have to wait outside.  I headed toward a door with a ledge overlooking the ocean as it slammed against the cliffs below.  A young waitress rushed out after to me and explained that I could not stand out there as it was an emergency entrance only.  I tried to relieve the tension that I sensed she was experiencing by saying, "Thank goodness you caught me in time.  I was going to commit suicide."  She didn't laugh.  I said, "That was I joke."  She looked at me and said, "I know."  So ...  after our little lunch we explored the Coast Trail above the Sutro Baths.   If you think that San Francisco is just tall buildings and nothing else, you need to spend some time in Golden Gate Park and Land's End where we were this afternoon.  There were thousands of people, locals and tourists, walking, biking, jogging, running and moving about on the trails through forest and along steep cliffs that terminate in rocky-crashing waves.  Someone wanted to know about my 350.org T-Shirt.  I told him it was a web.  "No kidding."  Then I told him it referred to the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere in parts per million.  "We're going to hit 500 for sure," he shouted back to me.  I wanted to tell him about my White House arrest.  But he was gone.

Meanwhile, my thoughts dance around the streets and highways of San Francisco.  A picture of fossil fuel's domination can been seen in the cars, trucks, buses and emergency vehicles which flow like red blood cells through the arteries of the body.  But the body, built upon fossil fuels is aging.  The fuel is becoming more expensive to retrieve from where it has lain in the earth over the millions of years of evolution.  The blood is becoming more expensive to pump.  The heart of capitalism is beginning to fail.  Will it happen all at once and just cease; or will it die in pieces of time with one recession after another where recovery never returns to the previous levels.  Tar sands oils are now within range for exploitation due to the increased price of a barrel of oil.  I kept asking myself, "What will it be like when it all stops?"  It's happening now as the capitalist economy begins to eat its own body to provide the energy for the growth the capitalism requires. 

The sky was blue.  So was the Pacific Ocean.  The air was cool and refreshed by breezes.  But in my mind I knew that the atmosphere I was moving in and having my being was not the same stuff that my ancestors labored and earned their living in.  The differences are measurable.  And, looking out across the ocean and the San Francisco Bay, I also knew that the water has now become irreversibly acidic due to CO2 absorption.  This is what Bill McKibben describes as "The End of Nature."

Why I Got Arrested at the White House

On Friday, September 2, 2011, as I stood with 160 or more climate activists in front of the White House, I was arrested, handcuffed and placed in a police van with twelve other activists.  The people waiting for their turn to be cuffed clapped and cheered as each of us was led from our place in front of the White House to an area where we were frisked and photographed.  Supporters in Lafayette Park across

Pennsylvania Avenue

from us chimed in, "Thank you.  Stop the pipeline."  We received training in peaceful civil disobedience from The Ruckus Society the evening before at a DC church.  Our trainers were professionals and I learned more than I ever dreamed I would about civil disobedience.  I had always thought my reading of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience made me an expert in the area.  The training prevented us from performing inadvertent actions that could have detracted from our mission.  We had a great vegan meal and some of us slept in the church over night.

As was anticipated I was placed in a police van.  What happened next was mind blowing.  I was with twelve other men, six on each side of a separating partition.  We had a chance to share.  Jim Driscoll, the executive director of The National Institute for Peer Support, was seated next to me. He guided us into what turned out to be an hour-long climate activists' support group right in the police van.  We each shared about ourselves and why we had come to DC to risk arrest.  At one point when Jim was sharing, he broke into deep sobs as he visualized the world as it will be if we are unable to turn the tide on global warming.  He reminded me of Jeremiah, "The Weeping Prophet", who being able to peer into the future, experienced the pain and sorrow of what was to come.  I think Jim could see that we could fail.  Two-hundred species a day are being lost in what is now being described as the "Holocene extinction."  We are actually forcing the earth into a new geological epoch.  I contributed the quote that I had always attributed to the Marxists, "Try again. Fail again.  Fail better." As it turns out, seated on my other side was a former editor of Nation Books, who now has his own publishing firm.  He corrected my Marxist attribution by informing us that it was actually Samuel Becket who wrote that.  I had no idea you could learn so much in a police van.

At the police station we were guided into a room separated by wall-like barrier made of metal handcuffs.  We waited in a line on one side while one-by-one we were directed to officers on the other side who wrote our citations and collected our $100.  We were asked, “Pay or stay?”  As instructed by our trainers, we replied, “Pay” and handed over our cash. 

While we were waiting to be processed, one of our fellow arrestees began to sing, “Trouble the Waters.”  At the same time all of us were observing the young officer who was cutting off our plastic flex handcuffs.  Some were white plastic; some were black.  They were being tossed casually in a garbage container.  I finally blurted out, “I wonder if they’re planning on recycling all of those.”  Everyone laughed.  We were all thinking the same thing.

Why in the world, you may ask, would a retired senior citizen living in Mt. Shasta, a place where heaven meets earth, deliberately take part in civil disobedience that would surely provoke arrest?  Actually, there were many people of all ages from the fifty states and Canada at the White House to urge President Obama to stand up to big oil, to stop the Keystone XL Pipe Line and thus stave off an environmental disaster of mammoth proportions.  That was enough reason for me.  My personal call came as a result of listening to daily reports from Democracy Now regarding the Tar Sands Action.  I remember the exact moment when I knew I couldn't stand it any longer.  My partner John and I were hiking with our Irish Wolf Hound, Patrick.  It just suddenly dawned on me.  I told John, "I have to be there."  He told me, "Go.  You need to be there." 

It didn’t take me long to arrange air travel to DC and accommodations near the Capital Mall.  I told people about the trip I was planning and the fact that I would be risking arrest.  People were generally supportive, but expressed concern about what might happen.  However, the most supportive response I received occurred when I shared during the “Joys and Sorrows” time at the Rouge Valley Unitarian Universalist Church where we are members in Ashland, Oregon.  The congregation cheered and clapped.  One member even slipped me some travel money.

As it turns out, I was just one of 1,253 activists who were arrested in Washington DC in the Tar Sands action from August 20th to September 3rd in the largest ever instance of climate related civil disobedience in the US.  The White House action was chosen as President Obama on his own can stop the Keystone XL pipeline without Congress.  The pipe line, if approved,  would cross international boundaries.  Therefore it falls under the aegis of the US State Department.  Why is it so vital for us to stop the pipe line?   First off, the XL Pipe Line, if built, would extend 1,700 miles through the middle of our country.  It would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada across some of our most important water aquifers, the sources of water for agriculture and drinking for millions of Americans, to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas.  There will be spills:  There is no question about that given the history of these pipelines.  But there is more.  This filthy tar sands oil is being off-loaded in the United States by TransCanada.  It is oil that is not for our own consumption.  It will be shipped tax free from our Gulf Coast to Europe and South America.

However, the ugliest part of this story takes place in the indigenous lands that are being destroyed forever.  Alberta, Canada contains the second largest pool of carbon on the planet, second only to the oil fields in Saudi, Arabia.  This oil is contained in sand that is accessed by mining.  Once mined, it has to be heated using large amounts of natural gas.  Then it must be further treated with massive amounts of fresh water.  The resulting sludge has to be stored in huge seeping pools that can be seen from outer space.  If all of this isn't bad enough, just to reach the tar sands oil a large swath of North American forest the size of the Florida must be removed forever.  The people who have been living there for thousands of years, the First Nation Peoples, are already experiencing grossly disproportionate increases in all kinds of strange cancers from their polluted water and from the diseased animals that they depend upon for nourishment.  Their life of hunting, fishing and just plain living is being destroyed.  Native people from Canada reported this destruction and illness first hand when we were arrested together.  The day I was arrested just happened to be chosen as the one to focus specifically on indigenous people's oppression as a result of resource extraction.

But the story gets even worse.   James Hansen, NASA's leading climate scientist has said that opening up the Keystone XL Pipe Line to the tar sands oil would be like lighting a fuse to a massive carbon bomb.  It would be "game over" for the climate.  At this moment, the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is 391 parts per million.  Before people began burning coal and oil, the CO2 measure was 280.  James Hansen, who was incidentally arrested with us at the White House, and fellow climate scientists have concluded that CO2 in our atmosphere must be reduced to a minimum of 350 parts per million in order to maintain any semblance of life as we now experience it on earth.  The earth is no longer the one we were born on.  As a follow-up, a great source for keeping up to date on climate change issues is also http://www.350.org/.

So what does all this mean for us?  What if the tar sands oil remains in the ground where it belongs?  It will buy us some precious time to adapt to more sustainable energy sources that do not add carbon dioxide to our atmosphere.  As it stands our whole economy and very way of life is carbon dependent.  We even use it to fertilize our crops.  I'm part of this problem.  I've bought into oil.  I own cars and I just flew across the US on a passenger jet to Washington, DC so I could take part in the climate action at the White House.  I am not standing on the outside saying that others will have change.  We must all choose to do this together; to be a part of the solution.  That means no more cheap energy.  Our way of life is coming to an end no matter what we do.  The millions of cars, the brightly lit nights, the coal fired electrical plants ... this is all going to stop.  I was in San Francisco recently and I just had an epiphany: I saw all the cars and noise stopping.  This is the world we are entering.  We can stop on our own by changing our civilization, our economic system and our government or we will be stopped by the laws of physics.  Capitalism is killing the earth.  If we intend to survive we are going to have to get off carbon fuels and transfer our energy systems to solar and wind as well as other sustainable energy sources.  This will never, ever be enough to allow us to live the life we had that was enabled by exploitation of cheap carbon. 

When I returned from DC I wanted to share with our UU congregation about my adventures at the White House.  Blurry-eyed from the flight, I went to the microphone and reported that I was arrested.  There was loud cheering and clapping. And, perhaps, over the long haul, more of us will need to risk arrest or whatever form of resistance we can contribute. 

Tar Sands Pipeline action at the White House

I am at home now, back in Mount Shasta, California, recovering from the excitement of being with the XL Pipeline action at the White House in Washington, DC.  As I write I still have the green band on my right wrist, placed there by the police, that displays the number "99."  I was the 99th activist arrested on Friday, September 3rd in front of the White House.  My citation places the location of my arrest at "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."   It was the largest civil disobedience action in the U.S. this century.  There were many native Americans and First Nation People from Canada standing in protest.  Their very presence made the reality of what we were all there for more vital.  They sang Native American symphonies as they were waiting to be arrested.  First Nation People across the street from us in Lafayette Park were singing the American Indian National anthem.  The message for me was beyond the sacred words that I could not know.  Nonetheless, it insinuated itself into the deepest part of my being.  I felt at one. 

The Canadian writer of "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Cline, was arrested along with us.  We clapped for her as we did for each arrestee.  The crowds in Franklin Park clapped with us and added, "Thank you."  The sun shone, the crowds in Lafayette Park chanted responsively as in church to our chants as the energy of democracy and human dignity played our voices like a symphony.  "You say climate, I say justice."  "Climate!"  "Justice!"  You say indigenous, I say rights."  "Indigenous!" "Rights!"  "This is what democracy looks like."  All along drums were beating and young people were chanting with the rhythm, "Stop the pipeline, Stop the pipeline."  Next to me was a clergyman from The United Church of Christ.  Near by were activists from the Rainforest Action Network.  Many of us were senior citizens peppered in among the young people awakened to the somber reality of the climate crisis in which our little blue marble of a planet has entered.