Storms of My Grandchildren (37 page)

However, what is clear, independent of the outcome of specific skirmishes in the U.S. Congress and in international negotiations, such as at the December 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen, is that the results will not yield a “solution” to the climate problem. Whether or not agreements are achieved, the forces for business as usual and continued fossil fuel use assure that any such agreements will constitute, at most, minor steps. The real battle by young people for their future is just beginning.

The battle for the planet, for life on the planet, will surely be conducted on multiple fronts. In addition to the electoral process, there is another option for obtaining justice in our democratic system—the judicial branch. Courts can take a longer view than politicians, who may focus on two-, four-, or six-year election cycles. A judge also has time for thoughtful consideration of a complicated issue.

In the summer of 2007 I went back to Iowa to join a ReEnergize Iowa march organized by the Sierra Club. A discussion of the judicial option came up when I met some people at the march who wanted to prevent the construction of a new coal-fired power plant in Marshalltown. I decided to help them by preparing a sixty-page deposition for the Iowa Utilities Board in an accessible question-and-answer format, including charts with explanatory captions. Halting a single power plant would itself be significant for about four hundred species. But I was hoping that if I prepared written testimony that spoke to the issue of intergenerational justice, it could be used more generally in other judicial proceedings where the matter was relevant.

A decision against the Marshalltown power plant should have been a slam dunk for young people and the planet. The utility’s justification for building the power plant was to provide electricity for a factory that would make ethanol out of corn, a process that by itself is detrimental to the planet’s climate, even without the added coal emissions from the power plant. I returned to Iowa in January 2008 to give oral testimony, but we lost the case by a vote of 2 to 1. The board’s rationale seemed to be the possibility that the power plant would create local jobs. (As yet, the plant has not been built, because of the economic downturn and reduced electricity demand.)

While the decision underlined how difficult it will be to solve the carbon dioxide emissions problem on a case-by-case basis, the judicial option deserves more attention. Of course we must recognize that courts are also subject to fossil fuel influence, as illustrated by the fact that Massey Energy spent $3 million to help elect a judge to the West Virginia Supreme Court; the judge then overturned a ruling against that company. But the likelihood that courts are less beholden to the fossil fuel industry than are the other branches of government is a basis for hope.

How will the judicial branch be brought into play? One way is by young people forcing the issue—not an easy route. The following story, based on an e-mail I sent to my distribution list in October 2008, gives a realistic picture of what young people are facing. I have eliminated here the numerous references supporting the statements; the references are available on my Web site.

“You’re Hannah, right?” Hannah Morgan, a twenty-year-old from Appalachia, Virginia, was one of eleven protesters in handcuffs on the morning of September 15, 2008, at the construction site for a coal-fired power plant being built in Wise County, Virginia, by Dominion Power. The handcuffs had been applied by the police, but the questioner, it turned out, was from Dominion Power.

The earlier discussion between the police and the Dominion man had taken place too far away to be heard by the protesters. But it almost seemed that the police were working for Dominion. Maybe that’s the way it works in a company town. Or should I say a company state? Virginia has one of the most greenwashed, coal-blackened governors in the nation.

It seems Hannah had been pegged by Dominion as a “ringleader.” She had participated for two years in public meetings and demonstrations against the plan for mountaintop removal, strip-mining, and coal burning, and she had rejected their attempts to either intimidate or bargain.

Bargain? What bargain is possible when Dominion is guaranteed a 14 percent return on its costs, whether the coal plant’s power is needed or not. Utility customers have to cough this up, and they aren’t given any choice.

The meetings and demonstrations were peaceful. Forty-five thousand signatures against the plant were collected. But money seems to talk louder. Whatever the Dominion man had said to the police, it must have been convincing. Hannah and Kate Rooth were charged with ten more crimes than the other defendants. Their charges included “encouraging or soliciting” others to participate in the action and were topped by “obstruction of justice.” Penalty if convicted: up to fourteen years in prison.

“Obstruction of justice”? Is the Orwellian doublespeak in the charge of “obstruction of justice” not apparent?

Executives in the coal and other fossil fuel industries are now aware of the damage that continued coal emissions causes for present and future life on the planet. Yet their response is to promote continued use of coal, and in some cases even encourage contrarians to muddy the issue in the public’s mind. Their actions raise issues of ethical responsibility to the young and the unborn, and a question of legal liability, it seems to me.

The governor of neighboring West Virginia asserted that if there were an alternative energy source, there would not be the need to continue mountaintop removal. But coal is not the only potential source of energy in the region. The case has been made that over time wind turbines on the mountaintops could provide more power than coal does, but if the mountaintops are removed for coal mining, the wind quality becomes less useful for power generation. The governor has not taken up the suggestion of using wind instead of coal.

In Wise County the defense case is even stronger than at Kingsnorth in the U.K., because of the demonstrable local effects of strip-mining. Twenty-five percent of Wise County is already devastated by mountaintop removal. Health problems of local residents associated with coal dust have been well documented. Given all this, the peaceful protest of the demonstrators is commendable. They are merely asking business to invest in Appalachia, not destroy it.

I have argued that it is time to “draw a line in the sand” and demand “no new coal plants.” I believe we must exert maximum effort to use the democratic process. But what if new electees turn out like the old? We cannot give up. That’s why I am now studying Gandhi’s concepts of civil resistance.

As for Hannah Morgan et al. and the proposed coal plant, there is no happy ending here, at least not yet. The defense lawyer realized that a trial would be dangerous. An “unfavorable jury pool” made the possibility of prison time real. With fourteen charges against Hannah and Kate, it was unlikely that a jury would find them innocent of all charges. Result: a “B-minus” plea bargain.

O
BSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, indeed. There are other cases against coal protesters that have gone to trial or will go to trial. I mentioned that I testified for the defense in the Kingsnorth trial in Kent, United Kingdom. Six Greenpeace activists had halted the operation of the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station. They were interrupted and arrested before they had completed painting a message intended for Prime Minister Gordon Brown—“Gordon Bin It”—on the smokestack. They were charged with doing sixty-five thousand British pounds’ worth of damage and faced possible prison sentences.

It was a trial by local jury, which had nine women, three men. It was a jury that was interested. In the part that I witnessed, the defense lawyer, Mike Schwarz, did a great job. My written deposition, available on my Web site, was long. But Schwarz had marked certain passages, which he would read aloud and then ask me a question, or ask me to read a statement on such and such a page. It may have lasted an hour or more, but you could have heard a pin drop the entire time.

So there was a lot of publicity and euphoria when the jury found the defendants innocent, on the grounds that breaking a law was justified because they were preventing greater damage in the future. However, the euphoria was rather short-lived. The ruling referred only to this specific case—it did not set a precedent. Furthermore, the British government chose to appeal the verdict, rather than use the verdict and public sentiment as a reason to justify rethinking its position.

The United Kingdom, as the nation most responsible on a per capita basis for fossil fuel carbon dioxide in the air today, could set an example by halting construction of any new coal plants and beginning to phase out existing ones. Britain could achieve this via realistic improvements in energy efficiency and increases of renewable energy and nuclear power. But, in fact, Britain is reopening some coal mines. There is not much hope that other nations will take the sort of actions that are needed if the world’s heaviest carbon polluter is so obstinate.

Unless there is a sudden change of heart in London, it seems likely that Britain will agree to the cap-and-trade sleight of hand with some specified “goals” for future emissions reductions. It may be counting on the probability that many other nations may also prefer to fake it, sentencing future generations to live with their mess.

A potentially important legal case within the United States, in Utah, may come to trial late in 2009. I refer to the trial of Tim DeChristopher, the University of Utah undergraduate who outbid oil companies at a Bureau of Land Management auction for the right to drill for fossil fuels on public lands. DeChristopher had no funds to pay for those rights, so he has been charged with a crime with a potential for seven years in prison.

DeChristopher’s action speaks to the question of whether it makes sense for us, humanity, to go after every last drop of oil and gas in the ground. His action also relates to the nature of the world that DeChristopher and all other young people will live in, and to their future economic well-being. The essence of these matters can be gleaned from figures 22, 23, and 26 (pages 174, 175, and 184).

If we allow energy companies to go after the fossil fuels on public lands, in offshore areas, in the Arctic and Antarctic, then the larger oil and gas reserve estimates in figure 22 become relevant. As shown in figure 23, exploiting these larger reserves would yield an atmospheric carbon dioxide level about 30 parts per million greater than if these marginal fossil fuels were left in the ground. The cost of drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide by 30ppm, with an optimistic estimate of $200 per ton of carbon, would be $12 trillion. Even if such technology is developed, climate damage will be incurred during the period before the carbon dioxide would be removed. The willful dumping of this $12 trillion burden on DeChristopher, and on my and your children and grandchildren, provides strong rationale for his action. This is a gross case of intergenerational injustice. We should all strongly support DeChristopher in his case against the U.S. government. The government cannot realistically claim that it is ignorant of the consequences of its action.

Another legal case, in which I am one of the defendants, concerns arrests made at Coal River Mountain, in West Virginia, on June 23, 2009. About thirty of us were arrested, ostensibly for “obstructing, impeding flow of traffic.” A guilty verdict conceivably could result in a one-year prison sentence. At the time of my arrest I was reading a statement in front of a Massey Energy facility, the statement being a demand that Massey (1) withdraw its plans to build a coal silo, which would emit tons of coal dust within 300 feet of Marsh Fork Elementary School; (2) fund the building of a new school to replace the one sitting 400 yards downstream of a three-billion-gallon sludge dam; (3) withdraw its permits to blow up Coal River Mountain, which would destroy the mountain’s potential for a proposed wind energy project that would provide permanent clean energy and jobs; and (4) halt mountaintop-removal operations, which are destroying the mountains, poisoning water supplies, and increasing the risk of devastating floods.

When I was at Coal River Mountain, I met local resident Larry Gibson, who invited me to drive with him up the mountain to his house. Gibson refuses to sell his property, which includes a two-hundred-year-old cemetery containing scores of his relatives. He has been the target of drive-by shootings—I saw two bullet holes in the side of his house. I hope the FBI is investigating. On the way down the mountain some thick-necked Massey employees gave us a vigorous one-finger salute—but these may have been a minority; others gave a friendly nod as we passed.

Larry mentioned that when Bobby Kennedy Jr. visited his property and looked at the neighboring scalped mountain, he said, “If any foreign nation had done this to us, we would have declared war on them.” But this is not being done by a foreign power—rather by a small number of individuals with enormous political sway. And what we have in Washington is coal-fired senators and representatives who serve as their stooges, advocating this abominable mountaintop-removal practice.

Mountaintop-removal mining poisons water supplies and pollutes the air. Giant sludge dams that hold the waste created by washing the coal are an added hazard for local residents. And yet mountaintop removal yields only 7 percent of the coal mined in the United States, less than U.S. coal exports, so the practice could be prohibited without damage to the country’s energy supplies. Only a handful of jobs are involved with mountaintop removal—about twenty thousand in all of Appalachia, far fewer than would be provided by clean energy alternatives.

The most useful outcome from our West Virginia trial would be to bring attention to the mountaintop-removal issue and the impacts of climate change on young people. What is most needed is attention from President Obama. Students at nearby Virginia Tech, who first pointed me to the Coal River Mountain case when I gave a talk there in the fall of 2008, must be terribly disappointed in the president. They worked hard to get out the vote for him. They took for granted, given his statements about “a planet in peril,” that he would address the blatant case of mountaintop removal and take a fresh, effective approach to the larger matter of climate change. Instead, I am told, he seems to be listening to the political calculations of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. Perhaps he is concerned that the public will not support a principled stand, although all indications are that the public thirsts for that, rather than the usual compromises with special interests. Or perhaps he has been occupied with other matters.