Big Green

By Burkely Herrman - October 1, 2013, (used by permission)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Calls to stop the Keystone XL are growing, even resulting in President Obama making a statement about it to appease people. However, in the midst of the super-focus on TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, there are dirty energy pipelines worse than the Keystone that big environmental organizations (e.g. Gang Green) refuse to focus on.

Using the search bars on the websites of these organizations, I looked up the words “Enbridge,” the company building one of the dirty energy pipelines, and “Keystone XL.” The groups I examined are explained and critiqued more in depth in an article I wrote on State of Nature. Starting with the NRDC, there were 474 results for the search term “Enbridge” and 8,330 results for the search term “Keystone XL.” This means that the NRDC wrote 17 times or 1700% more about Keystone XL than the Enbridge pipeline. The results were similar with Environment America where searching for Enbridge turned up 2 results, but searching for Keystone XL spit out over three pages of results! This pattern continued with other organizations. Even the NWF which had 1500 results for the search term “Enbridge,” had over two times as many results for the term Keystone XL”: 4740 in all. The Sierra Club had 63 total results for “Enbridge” and over five times that for the term “Keystone XL.” Additionally, in a twitter search I did for the Enbridge pipeline, I found that a local organ in Minnesota and another in Canada had written tweets about the pipeline. As for 350.org, there were 66 results for the term “Enbridge” and almost 30 times as many results for the term “Keystone XL.”  Additionally, there were six organizations that had no results when one searched for Enbridge on their websites: The Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife,EDF, The Wilderness Society, The Audubon Society, and the World Wildlife Fund (US). These same organizations had dramatically higher amounts of results for a search for “Keystone XL” on their websites. One organization, Conservation International stood out because there were “no results” for either search term. In every instance, there were more results for Keystone XL than for any of the Enbridge pipelines.

By Burkely Hermann - Originally published at whiterosereader.org, August 14, 2013; reposted by permission of the author.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Yesterday I was walking around Washington, DC with my friend from Chicago and my dad. We walked past a number of government buildings like the USDA (US Department of *Agribusiness*) and the Department of Education on the way to the Air and Space Museum. One of biggest government buildings was the Department of Energy. There was a flag emblazoned with the symbol of the department which has a lightening bolt going through the middle of it and a number of exhibits inside the building. To my companions, in brief I told them about the article I was writing, and how Jimmy Carter created the cabinet-level executive department in 1977. That article is the one that continues on for the next ten paragraphs and is a detailed critique and analysis of how the powerful and influential “energy lobby” corrupts the Energy Department from the inside out.

I first looked at who leads the department itself. The current Energy Secretary, a fracking-lover and nuclear power-lover, Ernest Moniz is one of the many “corrupted” officials of the Obama administration. This is nothing new because over half of the secretaries since the beginning of the department were either corporate-friendly or part of the military-industrial-complex. Only one person didn’t follow this pattern as he was a GOP Governor in South Carolina. On top of this, the sitting Deputy Energy Secretary, Daniel Poneman, “served as a principal of The Scowcroft Group for eight years, providing strategic advice to corporations on a wide variety of international projects and transactions,” before he took his current political office. Additionally the Secretary of Energy’s thirteen member Advisory board is corrupted in a sense. Ten of the members are corporate-friendly, with the rest either connected to universities or the scientific community. This group, while not forming policy, has seemingly profound influence on the Energy Secretary.

By Burkely Hermann - Originally published at State of Nature, Spring 2013; reposted by permission of the author.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

For years, I thought the big environmental organizations were on my side. Just look at the nice logo for the World Wildlife Fund which has a polar bear as its image and the Defenders of Wildlife with wolves howling in the background. However, as I entered my first year of college I had a rude awakening. In researching for a talk, I found that companies ranging from the worst polluters to health insurance firms had representatives on the boards of these organizations. Over two months later I followed up on this and my anger was even greater as I woke up to the reality. In 2008, when the anger over the Sierra Club partnering with Clorox spread nationwide, NBC News quoted Gwen Ruta, a vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, as saying that “partnerships between businesses and advocacy groups can be good for the planet and a company’s bottom line.” I asked myself: are these huge environmental organizations corrupted by the business community and the two-party oligarchy?

Let us jump back to the Forward on Climate protest in DC on February 17th. I went to the protest on this very cold day and wrote something everyone should keep in mind. Looking back, I remember how the rally before the march on the White House seemed like an Obama rally, and a bit like a rock concert. While there were college students and people of all persuasions – races, genders and ethnicities – the rhetoric of the speakers deeply worried me. My friend, who was also equally critical of Obama, concurred. While there were some good speakers such as indigenous rights groups and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, there were also a number of Obamacrats, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, the sponsor of the internet censorship bill, SOPA, and Van Jones, who formerly worked as Obama’s “green jobs” czar. Also, there were some strange speakers like an investment banker, an actor on a reality TV show, a commentator who has a CNN show and the Sierra Club President. It seemed to me that this rally was trying to channel all of the people there to have one demand: end the Keystone XL pipeline. I still think that people were thinking for themselves, and the march itself was inspiring to see, but it seems a lot of people took in the pro-Obama rhetoric without questioning it. As a result, I now believe that the permitted and approved march was almost worthless, and was a waste of time because no sort of political change came, especially since these “pseudo-protests” were on a Sunday, when the federal government wasn’t in town, meaning they were not a threat.

You may wonder how this ties into the environmental movement. Major “partner organizations” of this the Forward on Climate protest included the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club (a main sponsor), Environment America, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), National Wildlife Foundation (NWF), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Wilderness Society. These organizations are part of what will be referred to throughout this article as “Gang Green,” (or Big Green) a moniker which represents the top ten groups in the mainstream environmental movement, all of which have huge staffs and a good number of lobbyists, and bring in millions each year. Journalist Naomi Klein recently wrote in The Nation about these groups, saying how the divestment campaign pushed by young activists has missed an important target: Big Green, which has

led the climate movement down various dead ends [including] carbon trading, carbon offsets, [and] natural gas as a “bridge fuel”… [because] the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations, formed corporate partnerships with [or have stock in] the big emitters… [including] Conservation International… [the] Wildlife Conservation Society… WWF [World Wildlife Fund]… the National Wildlife Federation [and]… the Nature Conservancy.

As Klein says, “the message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one yourself.”

By John Reimann - June 11, 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Fracking kills.

It kills by poisoning the earth, the water and the air.

It kills by destroying wilderness and open space areas.

It kills by destroying our quality of life.

It kills by releasing methane – a potent greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere.

It kills by diverting investment and resources away from developing renewable energy sources, thus enormously exacerbating global climate disruption/global warming.

And the entire gamut of Corporate America-–from the oil and gas industry to the major financiers-–is lined up to continue to rape, plunder and pillage the environment using this disastrous practice. Covering for them, major environmental NGO's and supposedly environmentally conscious politicians, as well as the mainstream union leaders are pretending that it can be made acceptable if properly regulated.

By Alexis Buss - Industrial Worker, October 2001

"They couldn't have done it without the unions," is the sentiment echoed across the environmental movement, as U.S. President George Bush's energy plan passed 240-189 in the House. Although few expect the plan to drill for domestic oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to pass the Senate (although with the potential for war around the comer, political dynamics are bound to change), many are left scratching their heads, wondering what the future will be for a fledgling environmentalist-labor coalition dubbed "Teamsters and Turtles" during 1999's anti-WIO protests in Seattle.

Media pundits had long labeled the ANWR drilling plan as politically unviable because of the Democrats' control of the Senate. A last-minute intervention by the Teamsters played a major part in pushing the plan through the House, and Teamster President James Hoffa plans to help target the Senate when the bill hits the floor in late September.

The Teamsters came aboard as a lobby group for the plan after a closed-door meeting in May with Vice President Dick Cheney and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. Leaders from over twenty labor organizations were present, mostly from construction and maritime. The AFL-CIO also endorsed the Bush plan late in the game, which came as an unexpected move as several power-hitters in the federation including the Service Employees International Union and the Communication Workers of America had stated their opposition to the scheme. (The AFL-ClO's 1993 convention passed a resolution that, in part, called on the country to explore ANWR for oil with safeguards to protect the environment.)

Bush's energy plan - supposedly instigated by the California energy crisis [1] and unstable gasoline prices - calls for building almost 2,000 new power plants and 18,000 miles of fuel pipelines over the next two decades. The Bush teams figures indicated that each new power plant would create 1,000 construction jobs and 200 permanent jobs, while every 1,000 miles of pipeline would bring with it another 5,000 jobs. And there would be another job boom if nuclear power plants came back into the picture. All told, over 700,000 jobs would be created, according to a 1990 report of the Wharton Econometric Institute, paid for by the American Petroleum Institute. (Not to mention the plethora of jobs to be had cleaning up from environmental disasters, guarding radioactive wastes for tens of thousands of years, and such.)

Unions at the Cheney meeting have joined a business-led coalition called "Job Power: Americans for Energy Employment." It's worth noting that Cheney earned more than $20 million last year as CEO of Halliburton, an oil-field services company that would benefit greatly from loosening regulations on refineries and pipelines.