Greenpeace

Great news! Our polar bear friend got word late in the day that the Senate has decided not to consider an offshore drilling bill anytime soon. What made 'em change their minds, I wonder...?  Was it the bad news about the oil rigs? Or the Department of Interior scandal? Or the fact that fixing our teetering economy may be more worth Congress’s time than catering to the whims of the oil industry? Our bear seems to think he had something to do with it. And who are we to tell him different?

But, in any event, after 3 days standing in the hot, hot sun — which is no small feat for a polar bear — he seems to have concluded that his job is done for now. He’s headed off for parts unknown and a well-earned rest. After all that time together, we’ll kind of miss him. But the moratorium is still in peril, so who knows, maybe we'll see him again...

Yet another beautiful sunrise over the Capitol greeted our steadfast polar bear and his support team this morning as the bear entered Day 3 of his vigil in front of Congress. At 8:00 a.m., our early morning crew got a fresh infusion of company and energy when the dayshift arrived with donuts, bananas, new games to play, and just someone new to talk to. The bear was, as ever, friendly but reserved. Very much the strong, silent type.

The morning also brought news: the US Minerals Management Service revealed that 49 offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico were destroyed by Hurricane Ike. Even a week after the storm, most of the remaining 3,800 oil rigs already in the Gulf remain shut down — by which we mean, of course, that they aren’t producing oil. If you recall, most offshore oil rigs in the Gulf were shut down way back in August before Hurricane Gustav (remember Hurricane Gustav? Time flies doesn’t it.) That’s three weeks and counting that more than 90% of our country's oil production has been offline as a result of hurricanes.  

It’s ironic but important news as the Senate considers the nation’s energy future, because hurricanes have been getting more frequent over the last decade. The best science tells us that storms like Gustav and Ike have been getting more intense, almost certainly as a result of global warming. Which leads to a very important question that Congress has seemed reluctant to consider:  

If a single hurricane can destroy dozens of offshore oil rigs — or more than a hundred, in the case of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — and virtually shut down energy production across 600,000 square miles of ocean; and if both the number and intensity of hurricanes is increasing; and if the best science tells us these storms will get even worse as a result of global warming; then how, exactly, does building more offshore oil rigs increase our energy security?  

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. Opening more of our oceans to oil drilling won’t make us more secure, just more dependent on oil, and more vulnerable to the next big storm. And the next one after that. And the one after that. We can’t solve either global warming or the energy crisis by drilling more, but only by using less. We agree with the bear, the world needs more ice, not more oil.

The last few days have brought out lots of other people who agree as well — as evidenced by all the “I’m with the Bear” photos accumulating on the website. Our coolest group of visitors so far today has been a bunch of military photographers on assignment for a class at a local military installation. They were all snapping away happily at the bear, and had lots of great comments about it. None of them wanted their own picture taken because it might cause them trouble with the military brass. Still, it was great to meet them all.

What’s been even better is all the people who stop by having already heard about the homeless bears. For instance, a guy who had just arrived yesterday from California told us his professor had talked about in an art class. Another guy had read about it in his hometown paper in Australia. It’s been great to see word of this spread so widely, and generate so much excitement. And so much awareness of the polar bears and their plight.

To read more, view photos and video, follow the entire story on the blogs, and view our Twitter feed, which our activists were updating in real time during the protest, click here!

This morning's session of Coal USA 2008 wrapped up at 12:30, and I was asked to speak again. I delivered the statement below. They tried to cut me off, but speaking evenly and quietly, I got out almost all of it, including the questions at the end, which were the critical part.

It was one of the final statements of the day.

Here is the statement text:

Thank you for the opportunity to take the floor again. The last two days have been extremely instructive in better understanding not only the challenges the coal industry faces but also how those who work in the industry see their role in coal and in the world.

It is also useful to meet the people behind the companies. It's easy to forget that companies are, at heart, just collections of people. And it's good to be reminded of that. Because ultimately it’s not companies that make good or bad decisions, it’s people. The actions companies take reflect nothing more nor less than the  collective decisions of individual people. People like you.

So, I've been pleased to find that most of the folks we've met here seem like decent, reasonable people with their own problems, their own concerns, their own families to take care of. They are citizens, neighbors, parents. Just like me. And just like me, I've found, they are concerned for the welfare of not only their own children, but children everywhere. So I would like to speak to you not just as Greenpeace, but as a parent.

There has been a significant response here to our young activists yesterday, one of whom was my daughter, Kate. Kate came here because she feels strongly about global warming and, more personally, because her grandmother – one of her closest friends – died of cancer last summer after living for years in the shadow of one of the country's dirtiest coal stations. Drew, another of the kids who came, did so because he has severe asthma himself. And he wanted you to know.

Kate and Drew and Mike were proud to be here. And they were proud of their parents for deciding to let them come.

What I would like you to consider as you leave this meeting is, are your kids proud of the decisions you make? And will they still be proud 10, 20, 30 years from now as the environmental chaos of global warming becomes an ever grimmer reality in our daily lives?

Perhaps you can tell them: "It wasn't me. It was the company that did it.”

Perhaps you can explain to your kids: "I polluted the air because my boss made me do it. I poisoned the water to increase shareholder value. I denied global warming because the board demanded it. I supported CCS because it was the industry's only hope. And I refused to believe in solutions, because I was paid to believe in coal."

Will that answer make your kids happy? Will it make them proud? Will it help them forgive you?

You can choose a better future for them. For yourself. For the world. You can make them proud. The choice is not the company's. It is yours.

I ask you to choose wisely.

It's the beginning of Day 2 here at Coal USA.  We weren't completely sure they'd let us in this morning.  We've played very nice by our standards.  None of us have rappelled from the ceiling or chained ourselves to any of the speakers or taken more than our share of muffins from the muffin table.  

But we learned from a reporter yesterday afternoon that the coal industry guys were really angry about our young activists (Drew, Mike and Kate) giving out asthma inhalers.  Apparently, the coalies said it's unconscionable for us to exploit children like that.   (Even if both the kids and their parents think it's something worth doing.)  Now me, I think it's unconscionable to build a toxic sludge pond on a hill right above a school house.  Or to sell a product that puts thousands of kids in the hospital each year with asthma attacks--kids like Drew, who has severe asthma.  Or to burn a fuel that afflicts thousands more with brain defects, neurological disorders and autism.   But I can see how reasonable minds could differ on these things.

What's interesting, of course, is when we talk face to face, many of the people here ARE reasonable.  Most are also polite.  And a few are even friendly.  I look me and, with a few significant exceptions, I don't see a room full of evil, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash impersonators.  I see a room full of (mostly) normal people.  People, no doubt, with their own problems and their own families and their own kids to worry about.

It makes me wonder how so many seemingly reasonable and decent people could be so heedless about the harm they cause to other families and, for that matter, an entire planet.  How can a reasonable, decent person feel okay about poisoning a town's drinking water?  Or think that wrecking an entire mountain is nothing anyone should complain about?  Or look at a quickly melting Arctic Ocean and think "That's nothing to do with me."

I could get all wonky, and talk about Cognitive Dissonance, and how people rationalize away the bad things they do.  All of us do this, in fact; it's just that some have to do it more than others.  A lot more.

But maybe Paul Vining, the President of Magnum Coal, put it more simply:  "It's about serving shareholders."  Perhaps the folks in the coal industry, like folks in other industries, just say to themselves:  "It's not me doing it; it's the company.  I just do what I'm told."  Or, if you run the company, you tell yourself:  "I have to do this because the shareholders want profits."  And if you own the company:  "If we don't do it, somebody else will."  It's easy to do anything if you do it for a company, because then the company can be evil for you, while you just go on being a normal, decent person.  But what we easily forget is that a company, at heart, is simply a collection of people. Companies aren't real in a human sense--they aren't alive; they don't have souls.  A company can't choose to be evil any more than it can be good.  Only the people within it, individually and together, can make that choice.

So, I think that will be my last contribution to the meeting here.  To remind. the people assembled here that they aren't coal companies.  They are parents.  They are neighbors.  They are friends.  They are human beings.  And like all human beings should be, they are free to make their own choices.  And they are morally responsible if they make them badly.

While their many colleagues in the coal industry may empathize that, together, they had no choice but to wreck the planet.  They should ask themselves whether the children left with that wrecked planet, including their own, may have a harder time with forgiveness.

Carroll Muffett

 

 

It's the Golden Age of Coal! Did you know that? I admit, I myself had no idea. But apparently it's true. "There has never been a better time to be in the coal business and to be an advocate for coal!" How do I know that? Fred Palmer told me. And he must know, because he's Senior Vice President for Government Relations at Peabody Coal, the world's biggest private coal company.

Now, you must be asking yourself, why on earth would Fred confide that sort of thing to Greenpeace? I suspect that right about now, Fred is asking himself the same question. As are any number of other speakers at Coal USA 2008, which, according to its sponsors, is "the 'must attend' event on the Coal industry calendar."  

Maybe because we sponsored their conference! With the biggest wigs from 170 energy companies sitting in a single room and sharing their profit-fueled dreams for a coal-powered future, it seemed like just the sort of place we should be. So, we filled in a form, wrote 'em a check, and got ourselves four bright, shiny invitations to attend the conference.

Of course, coal people aren't the biggest fans of "those Greenpeace f**kers," as one delegate politely put it today. So, we took a play from the coal industry's own playbook, and created an organization they'd be more comfortable with. It's our own version of "astroturf," the fake environmental organizations the coal industry helped perfect decades ago (like the now defunct "Greening Earth Society," which argued that global warming was a good thing because all that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the world greener).  

So, we created "Tomorrow's Energy Today," an upbeat if remarkably ambiguous website about the many virtues of coal. ("It's America's most abundant fossil fuel!"...Hard to argue with that.) And Tomorrow's Energy Today sponsored the conference.  

Lesson for the future: if you've got a few grand to spare, I highly recommend that you sponsor a coal industry conference. It's an amazing bargain! They put our logo and URL all over everything. On the conference website. On signs in the hall. On people's presentations.  And on every single page of the glossy conference brochure. They even gave us a booth!  Now that's value for your money.

And we put it to good use.  As a service to coal industry insiders, who seem a little blind to coal's many downsides, we redirected the URL www.tomorrowsenergytoday.org to take them right to the best information currently available on coal: the Coal is Dirty website.

We decorated the booth with precisely the sort of give-aways you should expect at a coal industry conference:  to educate coal execs about coal's role in America's asthma epidemic, we're giving away asthma inhalers with the label "Coal -- takes my breath away!" To help them understand how coal mining poisons streams and rivers, we brought water bottles filled with mine discharge. And to remind them that burning coal is the biggest single cause of global warming, we're giving away keychains that say "Global Warming? Coal is the key."   

In turn, we're learning alot from our new coal industry friends. For instance, did you know that Alaska is now a target for new coal mines? ("Shhh.  It's our secret", said the coal traders.) Or that you can expect your home energy costs to go through the roof because coal companies are finding it much more profitable to export "excess supply" to foreign markets than to sell it here at home? Or that the only thing the coal industry hates more than environmentalists is the natural gas industry?

Or that "the United States is a developing country." That one from Fred Palmer again. I could listen to that guy talk all day. He's like a Crazy Quote Machine. According to Fred, using MORE coal is in the public interest because "Coal is Life itself (through the medium of electricity)." Wow! Who knew? See, I told you we were learning stuff!

Although the industry guys weren't expecting our presence, they adapted pretty quickly, and at the end of the morning they asked me to speak. (I think they were worried I would stand up on a chair and yell if they didn't give me a mic.) The morning's presenters had talked about how this was a conference about coal, and not about the environment. I told them that for Greenpeace, and other environmentalists across the country, any conversation about coal is a conversation about the environment. When you mine coal, it wrecks the local environment. When you burn coal, the emissions affect the health of communities where it's burned. Acid rain and mercury pollution affect the environment and human health hundreds of miles away. And carbon dioxide from coal burning power plants is the biggest contributor to global warming. In light of these facts, I said, any discussion about coal is a discussion about the environment.  

I told them it was nice to hear coal industry execs admitting the reality of global warming after decades of denying it. It was also nice to hear them no longer arguing (a la The Greening Earth Society) that global warming could be a good thing. But it seems pretty ironic that, after so long denying the problem of global warming, the coal industry is now arguing that it's part of the solution. We can keep burning coal, they all said, we just need to dump the carbon dioxide into the ocean or into the ground. It'll all be fine! Our friend Fred Palmer certainly made that argument.

He gave a presentation on how Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology would allow us to go on using coal for decades while helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Fred called CCS an "Enabling Technology." I couldn't agree more.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an "enabler" is someone or something that "enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior." And that's precisely what CCS does: its a dangerous myth that provides America with a convenient excuse to keep burning coal and pumping carbon dioxide into the air, rather than confronting its fossil fuel addiction and taking real action to stop global warming. You don't get more self-destructive than that. Like Greenpeace noted in its recent report, which we've shared widely at the conference, Carbon Capture is a False Hope and a dangerous distraction from real climate solutions.

As the meeting broke for lunch, the meeting delegates were greeted by 3 unexpected activists. Kate, Drew and Mike, aged 9, 10 and 11, respectively, stood at the door handing out asthma inhalers to everyone who passed. A few people took them and said "Thank You."  Others looked away uncomfortably. And one of them summoned two burly security guards to escort the kids out of the room. "They were really big, scary guys," said Kate.

And the kids laughed. Because they were proud to be brave. And to stand up for what's right. Even against those really big, scary guys.

-Carroll Muffett