James Hansen: Tar Sands and Dirty Tricks

by James Hansen, September 13, 2013

The New Yorker just published (16 September issue) an excellent article "The President and the Pipeline" on Tom Steyer and the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, advocates for the Canadian government's position ("industry officials") were able to slip in a statement that was not fact checked with me "They note that Hansen's dire warning about Canada's unconventional oil deposits was based on the assumption that every ounce of oil in the sands would be burned.

Only a small fraction of the total estimated reserves is recoverable, and doing so will take decades." First, note that the carbon from fossil fuel burning will stay in the climate system for more than 100,000 years before it is buried on the ocean floor as carbonates. So whether it takes a few decades (or even a few centuries) to extract the fuel is pretty irrelevant -- we would be screwing up the planet for our children, grandchildren and, as Native Americans say, the seventh generation.

Second, what I said is that oil in the total tar sands resource is more than double all oil that has been burned in the history of humankind, i.e., less than half of the tar sands is sufficient to match all oil burned so far. (And note that non-tar sands oil is being burned to extract the tar sands goop and process it to make oil, and forests above the tar sands are being destroyed, making the tar sandsimpact even greater.) If we build big pipeline infrastructure, you can be sure that technology developments will allow more and more to be extracted.

There is another error in the New Yorker article, an explanation of the origin of the name of Bill McKibben's organization 350.org: "The name is a nod to Hansen's calculation that once the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds three hundred and fifty parts per million, climate change could become uncontainable."

In reality, 350 ppm is the CO2 level that, other things being unchanged, would restore Earth's energy balance.

So 350 ppm is an estimate of the CO2 level needed to stabilize global temperature. 

Temperature is now near the upper end of its range during the Holocene, the interglacial period now more than 10,000 years long, which is the climate that civilization is adapted to. It may be necessary to go somewhat lower than 350 ppm to avoid multi-meter sea level rise, so 350 ppm is only an initial estimate for a long-term target. We will know better by the time we get CO2 turned around heading toward 350 ppm. It's unlikely we will want to go back all the way to pre-industrial 280 ppm, because there are other significant climate forcings. These include human-made change of the planet's surface albedo and natural forcings, which are providing a slight push toward global cooling. 

Yet the New Yorker's "climate change could become uncontainable," unfortunately, is not science fiction. If we are so foolish as to burn all fossil fuels, including all coal and unconventional fuels, that result is nearly certain. Our paper discussing that topic, "Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide," by Hansen, Sato, Russell and Kharecha, is finally being published next week in the Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. A PDF of the article will be freely available from my web site (www.columbia.edu/~jeh1) or from the journal's web site.

The attached note ("Europe Standing Tall Against a Rogue State") was written to accompany "Tar Sands Debacle and the Hama-Hama-Hama Oil and Gas Corporation," which I hope to finish soon. I include the note now because the situation in Europe is fluid. The Canadian government (not representative of Canada, as I note) is trying to work a backroom deal to avoid an open vote on unconventional fossil fuels.

Does anybody have a guess as to why the Canadian Prime Minister jumped at the chance to line up Canada in favor of Obama's plan to bomb Syria?

I'm sorry to have been so slow in writing -- I have been snowed under working on several things at the same time, including finding support for a new organization -- but I hope to catch up soon.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130913_TarSands+NewYorker.pdf

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John Abraham: Why Greenland's darkening ice has become a hot topic in climate science

Darkening causes the snow to absorb more sunlight which in turn increases melting 

 

Climate scientist Jason Box during an expedition in Greenland in July 2008. Photograph: Byrd Polar Research Center 

 

by John Abraham, Climate Consensus: the 97%, The Guardian, June 12, 2013

Last July, a record melting occurred on the Greenland ice sheet. Even in some of the highest and coldest areas, field parties observed rainfall with air temperatures several degrees above the freezing point. A month before, it was as though Greenland expert Jason Box had a crystal ball; he predicted this complete surface melting in a scientific publication. Box's research then got broader public visibility after climate activist and writer Bill McKibben covered it in Rolling Stone magazine.

The basic premise of Box's study was that observations reveal a progressive darkening of Greenland ice. Darkening causes the white snow surface to absorb more sunlight which in turn increases melting. Given that this process is likely to continue, the impact on Greenland melt, and subsequent sea level rise, will be profound.

There are several mechanisms that are known to darken arctic ice, including desert dust, pollen, soot from natural forest fires, and human biomass burning for land clearing and domestic use. Industrial, shipping, and aircraft pollution also play a role. Some of these effects are increasing. As climate change accelerates, more areas are being burned by wildfire each year. Box wondered how much increasing wildfires with resulting soot landing on the northern ice might amplify what scientists call a "positive feedback" (a self-reinforcing cycle) increasing Greenland melting. The cycle starts with initial warming, leading to more fires, more soot, and in turn more warming and more melt. The feedback is important, particularly in polar regions where observed warming is twice the rate of more southerly locations around the globe. Box calculates this effect has doubled Greenland surface melting since year 2000.

The topic has become hot among ice experts as new observations of ice melt continue to outstrip projections from just a few years ago. Arctic sea ice, another key measure of global heating, is now 60 years ahead of worst-case projections from the last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Arctic snow cover on land has also been declining more rapidly than projected, even faster than sea ice. While mass loss of the enormous Greenland sheet is difficult to measure, satellite data indicate it has doubled in the last decade. If this acceleration continues, sea level rise could be even higher this century than the 1 or 2 meters that mainstream scientists now project – possibly much higher. Despite a recent study that projected Greenland outflow glaciers to slow, surface melting has increased faster than ice flow. The albedo feedback is a critical piece of physics that enables surface melting to continue dominating the loss.

To test his hypothesis, Box has assembled a team of scientists and communicators to collect and analyze samples from key locations on the ice sheet, and report those results directly to the public. The plan is to arrive in Greenland in late June, just as the peak melting season and fire season coincide. Box will be joined by Bill McKibben, who will be covering the research for Rolling Stone, and videographer Peter Sinclair, whose series of climate change videos on YouTube has gained high praise from climate scientists.

The scientific team includes Sara McKenzie Skiles, a researcher at UCLA and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Marek Stibal, a biogeochemist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Dr Stibal will be looking at yet another potential source of darkening, the activity of microorganisms that produce their own darkening pigments, which may be increasing due to atmospheric warming and fertilization by pollutants.

While government funding contracted, Box decided to push forward with a new approach, financing the research as a "citizen science" initiative, funded by internet crowd sourcing. His project is aptly named DARK SNOW and financial support is being collected online.

It is exciting to watch emerging science collide with novel scientific fundraising initiatives. It is possible that this emergence will grow in the coming years as scientific projects grow in cost and complexity, while more traditional funding sources diminish. The costs of funding projects like DARK SNOW are miniscule compared to the costs we endure from climate-change-related weather disasters. The penny-wise pound-foolish attitude we've taken toward science funding is a complicated issue that I'll deal with in a future post.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/jun/12/greenland-darkening-ice-climate-science

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Jason Box, Peter Sinclair: more on Dark Snow Project crowdsourcing

from Peter Sinclair, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, May 14, 2013

On April 21, 2013, the Dark Snow Project brought a bit of Greenland to Manhattan, to illustrate the importance of this summer’s planned expedition to sample Greenland ice. It kicked off the last leg of our historic citizen-science crowd funding campaign.

If this final fundraising push is successful, I’ll be traveling in June to the Greenland Ice sheet as part of a scientific expedition to investigate the steady darkening and increasing melt of that important ice sheet. Bill McKibben will be coming along to write this up for Rolling Stone, as well.

There are 3 ways to help out, if you haven’t already. One, you can go to Darksnowproject.org, and make a donation at the bottom of the page. Two, you can text darksnow to 50555, or Three, you can go to the IndieGoGo crowdsourcing site.

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Peter Sinclair: Bill McKibben to join Dark Snow project in Greenland

 

by Peter Sinclair, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, April 19, 2013

Here’s what I know so far.

The Dark Snow Project is on track, and will jump to a new level of seriousness this weekend, as we point toward a data gathering trip slated for peak melt season in Greenland this summer.

I have confirmation that writer/activist Bill McKibben will be joining Greenland expert Dr. Jason Box and myself early in the trip. With Dr. Box’s expert guidance, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the most sensitive and important features of the Greenland sheet.  More on this as details become available.
Meanwhile, this weekend, darksnow awareness-and-fund raising continues in an Earth Day event in Union Square in Manhattan, New York City – as Dr Box and I, along with thousands of others, will be observing a massive darksnow themed ice sculpture illustrating the effects of darkening on the Greenland ice sheet.

http://climatecrocks.com/2013/04/19/bill-mckibben-to-join-dark-snow-project-in-greenland/

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Bill McKibben: The Fossil Fuel Resistance. As the world burns, a new movement to reverse climate change is emerging: fiercely, loudly and right next door

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine, April 11, 2013

It got so hot in Australia in January that the weather service had to add two new colors to its charts. A few weeks later, at the other end of the planet, new data from the CryoSat-2 satellite showed 80% of Arctic sea ice has disappeared. We're not breaking records anymore; we're breaking the planet. In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

Here's the good news: We'll at least be able to say we fought.

After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world, building on the work of scattered front-line organizers who've been fighting the fossil-fuel industry for decades. It has no great charismatic leader and no central organization; it battles on a thousand fronts. But taken together, it's now big enough to matter, and it's growing fast.

Americans got to see some of this movement spread out across the Mall in Washington, D.C., on a bitter-cold day in February. Press accounts put the crowd upward of 40,000 – by far the largest climate rally in the country's history. They were there to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run down from Canada's tar sands, south to the Gulf of Mexico, a fight that Time magazine recently referred to as the Selma and the Stonewall of the environmental movement. But there were thousands in the crowd also working to block fracking wells across the Appalachians and proposed Pacific-coast deep-water ports that would send coal to China. Students from most of the 323 campuses where the fight for fossil-fuel divestment is under way mingled with veterans of the battles to shut down mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and with earnest members of the Citizens Climate Lobby there to demand that Congress enact a serious price on carbon. A few days earlier, 48 leaders had been arrested outside the White House – they included ranchers from Nebraska who didn't want a giant pipeline across their land and leaders from Texas refinery towns who didn't want more crude spilling into their communities. Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham was on hand, urging scientists to accompany their research with civil disobedience, as were solar entrepreneurs quickly figuring out how to deploy panels on rooftops across the country. The original Americans were well-represented; indigenous groups are core leaders of the fight, since their communities have been devastated by mines and cheated by oil companies. The Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., of the Hip Hop Caucus was handcuffed next to Julian Bond, former head of the NAACP, who recounted stories of being arrested for integrating Atlanta lunch counters in the Sixties.

It's a sprawling, diverse and remarkably united movement, marked by its active opposition to the richest and most powerful industry on Earth. The Fossil Fuel Resistance has already won some serious victories, blocking dozens of new coal plants and closing down existing ones – ask the folks at Little Village Environmental Justice Organization who helped shutter a pair of coal plants in Chicago, or the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which fought to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in Richmond, California. 

"Up to this point, grassroots organizing has kept more industrial carbon out of the atmosphere than state or federal policy," says Gopal Dayaneni of the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. 

It's an economic resistance movement, too, one that's well aware renewable energy creates three times as many jobs as coal and gas and oil. Good jobs that can't be outsourced because the sun and the wind are close to home. It creates a future, in other words.

These are serious people: You're not a member of the Resistance just because you drive a Prius. You don't need to go to jail, but you do need to do more than change your light bulbs. You need to try to change the system that is raising the temperature, the sea level, the extinction rate – even raising the question of how well civilization will survive this century.

Soon after the big D.C. rally, the State Department issued a report downplaying Keystone XL's environmental impact, thus advancing the pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000 people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly, if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his New York Times column to ask activists to "go crazy" with civil disobedience; 48 hours later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a pipeline-company office outside Boston. It's not a one-sided fight anymore.

No movement this diverse is going to agree on a manifesto, but any reckoning begins with the idea that fossil fuel is dirty at every stage, and we need to put it behind us as fast as we can. For those of us in affluent countries, small shifts in lifestyle won't be enough; we'll also need to alter the policies that keep this industry fat and happy. For the poor world, the much harder goal is to leapfrog the fossil-fuel age and go straight to renewables – a task that those of us who prospered by filling the atmosphere with carbon must help with, for reasons both moral and practical. And for all of us, it means standing with communities from the coal fields of Appalachia to the oil-soaked Niger Delta as they fight for their homes. They've fought longest and hardest and too often by themselves. Now that global warming is starting to pour seawater into subways, the front lines are expanding and the reinforcements are finally beginning to arrive.

Right now, the fossil-fuel industry is mostly winning. In the past few years, they've proved "peak-oil" theorists wrong – as the price rose for hydrocarbons, companies found lots of new sources, though mostly by scraping the bottom of the barrel, spending even more money to get even-cruddier energy. They've learned to frack (in essence, explode a pipe bomb a few thousand feet beneath the surface, fracturing the surrounding rock). They've figured out how to take the sludgy tar sands and heat them with natural gas till the oil flows. They've managed to drill miles beneath the ocean's surface. And the hyperbolic enthusiasm has gushed even higher than the oil. The Wall Street Journal has declared North Dakota a new Saudi Arabia. The New York Times described a new shale-oil find in California as more than four times as large as North Dakota's. "We could make OPEC 'NOPEC' if we really put our minds to it," said Charles Drevna of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. "We're talking decades, if not into the hundreds of years, of supply in North America."

But all that fossil fuel will only get pumped and mined and burned if we decide to ignore the climate issue; were we to ever take it seriously, the math would quickly change. As I pointed out in these pages last summer, the world's fossil-fuel companies, even before these new finds, had five times more carbon in their reserves than we could burn if we hope to stay below a two-degree­ Celsius rise in global temperatures. That's the red line almost every government in the world has agreed on, but the coal, oil and natural-gas companies, propelled by record profits, just keep looking for more – and ignore reality. A new report shows that an anonymous group of industry billionaires has secretly poured more than $100 million into anti-environmental ­front groups. Weeks before Election Day, Chevron gave the largest corporate Super PAC contribution of the post­-Citizens United era, making sure that Congress stayed in the hands of climate deniers.

But every flood erodes their position, and every heat wave fuels the Resistance. When the Keystone pipeline first became controversial, in 2011, a poll of D.C. "energy insiders" showed that more than 70% of them thought they'd have permits to build it by the end of the year. Big Oil, of course, may end up getting its way, but so far its money hasn't overwhelmed the passion, spirit and creativity its foes have brought to the battle. And we're not just playing defense anymore: The rapidly spreading divestment movement may be the single biggest face of the Resistance. It's no longer confined to campuses; city governments and religious denominations have begun to unload their stakes in oil companies, and the movement is even spreading to self-interested investors­ now that HSBC has calculated that taking climate change seriously could cut share prices of oil companies by up to 60%.

With each passing month, something else weakens the industry's hand: the steady rise of renewable energy, a technology that's gone from pie-in-the-sky to panel-on-the-roof in remarkably short order. In the few countries where governments have really gotten behind renewables, the results are staggering: There were days last spring when Germany (pale, northern Germany) managed to generate half its power from solar panels. Even in this country, much of the generating capacity added last year came from renewables. A December study from the University of Delaware showed that by 2030 we could affordably power the nation 99.9% of the time on renewable energy. In other words, logic, physics and technology work against the fossil-fuel industry. For the moment, it has the political power it needs – but political power shifts perhaps more easily than physics.

Which is where the resistance comes in. Forty-three years ago, the first anarchic Earth Day drew 20 million Americans into the streets. That surge helped push through all kinds of legislation – the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act – and spurred the growth of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund. As these "green groups" became the face of the environmental movement, they grew adept at playing an inside-the-Beltway lobbying game. But that strategy got harder as the power of the right wing grew; for 25 years, they've been unable to win significant progress on climate change.

Now, energized by the Keystone protests, some strides have been made. The NRDC has done yeoman's work against the pipeline. The Sierra Club, which just a few years ago was taking millions from the fracking industry to shill for natural gas, has been reinvented. In January, the club dropped a 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The following month, its executive director, Michael Brune, was led away from the White House in handcuffs.

But the center of gravity has also shifted from big, established groups to local, distributed efforts. In the Internet age, you don't need direct mail and big headquarters; you need Twitter. In Texas and Oklahoma, hundreds have joined actions led by the Tar Sands Blockade, which has used daredevil tactics and lots of courage to get between the industry and the pipeline it needs to move oil overseas. In Montana, author Rick Bass and others sat-in to stop the export of millions of tons of coal from ports on the West Coast. And all across the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the Northeast, people have been standing up for their communities, often by sitting down in front of the fracking industry. The Fossil Fuel Resistance looks more and more like Occupy – in fact, they've overlapped from the beginning, since oil companies are the 1% of the 1%. The movements share a political analysis, too: A grid with a million solar rooftops feels more like the Internet than ConEd; it's a farmers' market in electrons, with the local control that it implies.

Like Occupy, this new Resistance is not obsessed with winning over Democratic Party leaders. The Keystone arrests in 2011 marked the most militant protests outside the White House during Obama's first term; now Van Jones, who once worked for the president, has taken to calling Keystone the "Obama pipeline." Used to dealing with the established green groups, the administration thinks in terms of deals – "We'll approve the pipeline but give you something else you want" – the kind of logic that gains the approval of op-ed columnists and talking heads. But given that the Arctic has already melted, we don't have room for easy compromises. The president's insistence that he favors an "all of the above" energy system, where oil and gas are as welcome as solar and wind, seems increasingly like a classic political hedge. In fact, if the GOP wasn't in the tank for the oil industry, you couldn't do much worse than Obama's campaign­ trail rhetoric. Last year, the president went to Oklahoma, posed in front of a stack of oil pipes and bragged of adding enough new pipelines to encircle Earth. Since the election, the president has started talking green, promising that now climate change would be a priority – but this growing Resistance is, I think, unconvinced. As climate leader Naomi Klein said, "This time, no honeymoon and no hero worship."

Only grit and hard work. We've watched great cultural shifts and organizing successes in recent years, like the marriage-equality and immigration-reform movements. But breaking the power of oil companies may be even harder because the sums of the money on the other side are so fantastic – there are trillions of dollars worth of oil in Canada's tar sands and the North Dakota shale. The men who own the coal mines and the gas wells will spend what they need to assure their victories. Last month, Rex Tillerson, Exxon's $100,000-a-day CEO, said that environmentalists were "obtuse" for opposing new pipelines. He announced the company planned to more than double the acreage on which it was exploring for new hydrocarbons and said he expected that renewables would account for just 1% of our energy in 2040, essentially declaring that the war to save the climate was over before it started. He added, "My philosophy is to make money."

That same day, scientists announced that Earth was now warming 50 times faster than it ever has in human civilization, and that carbon-dioxide levels had set a perilous new record at Mauna Loa's measuring station. Right now, we're losing. But as the planet runs its spiking fever, the antibodies are starting to kick in. We know what the future holds unless we resist. And so resist we will.

This story is from the April 25th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fossil-fuel-resistance-20130411

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Bill McKibben: Is the Keystone XL the Stonewall of the climate movement? And, if so, is that terrible news?

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

by Bill McKibben, Huffington Post, April 7, 2013

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement.

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline.  And there’s good reason to put pressure on.  After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

Still, let’s put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we’ll be rallying in scuba masks. (I’m not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown DC.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body.  In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia figured out that they had “evolved” on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had “evolved,” once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

Why recite all this history? Because for me, the hardest part of the Keystone pipeline fight has been figuring out what in the world to do about the Democrats.

Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Let’s begin by stipulating that, taken as a whole, they’re better than the Republicans. About a year ago, in his initial campaign ad of the general election, Mitt Romney declared that his first act in office would be to approve Keystone and that, if necessary, he would “build it myself.” (A charming image, it must be said.) Every Republican in the Senate voted on a nonbinding resolution to approve the pipeline -- every single one. In other words, their unity in subservience to the fossil fuel industry is complete, and almost compelling. At the least, you know exactly what you’re getting from them.

With the Democrats, not so much. Seventeen of their Senate caucus -- about a third -- joined the GOP in voting to approve Keystone XL. As the Washington insider website Politico proclaimed in a headline the next day, “Obama’s Achilles Heel on Climate: Senate Democrats.”

Which actually may have been generous to the president.  It’s not at all clear that he wants to stop the Keystone pipeline (though he has the power to do so himself, no matter what the Senate may want), or for that matter do anything else very difficult when it comes to climate change.  His new secretary of state, John Kerry, issued a preliminary environmental impact statement on the pipeline so fraught with errors that it took scientists and policy wonks about 20 minutes to shred its math.

Administration insiders keep insisting, ominously enough, that the president doesn’t think Keystone is a very big deal. Indeed, despite his amped-up post-election rhetoric on climate change, he continues to insist on an “all-of-the-above” energy policy which, as renowned climate scientist James Hansen pointed out in his valedictory shortly before retiring from NASA last week, simply can’t be squared with basic climate-change math.

All these men and women have excuses for their climate conservatism.  To name just two: the oil industry has endless resources and they’re scared about reelection losses. Such excuses are perfectly realistic and pragmatic, as far as they go: if you can’t get re-elected, you can’t do even marginal good and you certainly can’t block right-wing craziness. But they also hide a deep affection for oil industry money, which turns out to be an even better predictor of voting records than party affiliation.

Anyway, aren’t all those apologias wearing thin as Arctic sea ice melts with startling, planet-changing speed? It was bad enough to take four decades simply to warm up to the idea of gay rights.  Innumerable lives were blighted in those in-between years, and given long-lasting official unconcern about AIDS, innumerable lives were lost.  At least, however, inaction didn’t make the problem harder to solve: if the Supreme Court decides gay people should be able to marry, then they’ll be able to marry.

Unlike gay rights or similar issues of basic human justice and fairness, climate change comes with a time limit.  Go past a certain point, and we may no longer be able to affect the outcome in ways that will prevent long-term global catastrophe. We’re clearly nearing that limit and so the essential cowardice of too many Democrats is becoming an ever more fundamental problem that needs to be faced. We lack the decades needed for their positions to “evolve” along with the polling numbers.  What we need, desperately, is for them to pitch in and help lead the transition in public opinion and public policy.

Instead, at best they insist on fiddling around the edges, while the planet prepares to burn. The newly formed Organizing for Action, for instance -- an effort to turn Barack Obama’s fundraising list into a kind of quasi-official MoveOn.org -- has taken up climate change as one of its goals. Instead of joining with the actual movement around the Keystone pipeline or turning to other central organizing issues, however, it evidently plans to devote more energy to house parties to put solar panels on people’s roofs. That’s great, but there’s no way such a “movement” will profoundly alter the trajectory of climate math, a task that instead requires deep structural reform of exactly the kind that makes the administration and Congressional “moderates” nervous.

Energy Independence: Last Century’s Worry

So far, the Democrats are showing some willingness to face the issues that matter only when it comes to coal. After a decade of concentrated assault by activists led by the Sierra Club, the coal industry is now badly weakened: plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants have disappeared from anyone’s drawing board. So, post-election, the White House finally seems willing to take on the industry at least in modest ways, including possibly with new Environmental Protection Agency regulations that could start closing down existing coal-fired plants (though even that approach now seems delayed).

Recently, I had a long talk with an administration insider who kept telling me that, for the next decade, we should focus all our energies on “killing coal.”  Why? Because it was politically feasible.

And indeed we should, but climate-change science makes it clear that we need to put the same sort of thought and creative energy into killing oil and natural gas, too. I mean, the Arctic -- from Greenland to its seas -- essentially melted last summer in a way never before seen. The frozen Arctic is like a large physical feature. It’s as if you woke up one morning and your left arm was missing. You’d panic.

There is, however, no panic in Washington.  Instead, the administration and Democratic moderates are reveling in new oil finds in North Dakota and in the shale gas now flowing out of Appalachia, even though exploiting both of these energy supplies is likely to lock us into more decades of fossil fuel use. They’re pleased as punch that we’re getting nearer to “energy independence.” Unfortunately, energy independence was last century’s worry.  It dates back to the crises set off by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in the early 1970s, not long after… Stonewall.

So what to do? The narrow window of opportunity that physics provides us makes me doubt that a third party will offer a fast enough answer to come to terms with our changing planet. The Green Party certainly offered the soundest platform in our last elections, and in Germany and Australia the Greens have been decisive in nudging coalition governments towards carbon commitments. But those are parliamentary systems. Here, so far, national third parties have been more likely to serve as spoilers than as wedges (though it’s been an enlightening pleasure to engage with New York’s Working Families Party, or the Progressives in Vermont).  It’s not clear to me how that will effectively lead to changes during the few years we’ve got left to deal with carbon. Climate science enforces a certain brute realism.  It makes it harder to follow one’s heart.

Along with some way to make a third party truly viable, we need a genuine movement for fundamental governmental reform -- not just a change in the Senate’s filibuster rules, but publicly funded elections, an end to the idea that corporations are citizens, and genuine constraints on revolving-door lobbyists. These are crucial matters, and it is wonderful to see broad new campaigns underway around them.  It’s entirely possible that there’s no way to do what needs doing about climate change in this country without them. But even their most optimistic proponents talk in terms of several election cycles, when the scientists tell us that we have no hope of holding the rise in the planetary temperature below two degrees unless global emissions peak by 2015.

Of course, climate-change activists can and should continue to work to make the Democrats better.  At the moment, for instance, the 350.org action fund is organizing college students for the Massachusetts primary later this month. One senatorial candidate, Steven Lynch, voted to build the Keystone pipeline, and that’s not okay.  Maybe electing his opponent, Ed Markey, will send at least a small signal. In fact, this strategy got considerably more promising in the last few days when California hedge fund manager and big-time Democratic donor Tom Steyer announced that he was not only going to go after Lynch, but any politician of any party who didn’t take climate change seriously. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people,” he said, demonstrating precisely the level of rhetoric (and spending) that might actually start to shake things up.

It will take a while, though.  According to press reports, Obama explained to the environmentalists at a fundraiser Steyer hosted that “the politics of this are tough,” because “if your house is still underwater,” then global warming is “probably not rising to your number one concern.”

By underwater, he meant: worth less than the mortgage.  At this rate, however, it won’t be long before presidents who use that phrase actually mean “underwater.” Obama closed his remarks by saying something that perfectly summed up the problem of our moment. Dealing with climate change, he said, is “going to take people in Washington who are willing to speak truth to power, are willing to take some risks politically, are willing to get a little bit out ahead of the curve -- not two miles ahead of the curve, but just a little bit ahead of it.”

That pretty much defines the Democrats: just a little bit ahead, not as bad as Bush, doing what we can.

And so, as I turn this problem over and over in my head, I keep coming to the same conclusion: we probably need to think, most of the time, about how to change the country, not the Democrats. If we build a movement strong enough to transform the national mood, then perhaps the trembling leaders of the Democrats will eventually follow. I mean, “evolve.” At which point we’ll get an end to things like the Keystone pipeline, and maybe even a price on carbon. That seems to be the lesson of Stonewall and of Selma. The movement is what matters; the Democrats are, at best, the eventual vehicle for closing the deal.

The closest thing I’ve got to a guru on American politics is my senator, Bernie Sanders. He deals with the Democrat problem all the time. He’s an independent, but he caucuses with them, which means he’s locked in the same weird dance as the rest of us working for real change.

A few weeks ago, I gave the keynote address at a global warming summit he convened in Vermont’s state capital, and afterwards I confessed to him my perplexity. “I can’t think of anything we can do except keep trying to build a big movement,” I said. “A movement vast enough to scare or hearten the weak-kneed.”

“There’s nothing else that’s ever going to do it,” he replied.

And so, down to work.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckibben/democrats-keystone-xl_b_3034671.html

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Justin Gillis, NYT: Maverick climate scientist James Hansen retiring from NASA, can now take a more active role in lawsuits challenging states and the federal government over their failure to limit CO2 emissions

Climate Maverick to Quit NASA

by JUSTIN GILLIS, The New York Times, April 1, 2012

James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be arrested or cited a half-dozen times.

But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the ‘sideshow’ would exit,” Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.

At 72, he said, he feels a moral obligation to step up his activism in his remaining years.

“If we burn even a substantial fraction of the fossil fuels, we guarantee there’s going to be unstoppable changes” in the climate of the earth, he said. “We’re going to leave a situation for young people and future generations that they may have no way to deal with.”

His departure, on Wednesday, will end a career of nearly half a century working not just for a single agency but also in a single building, on the edge of the Columbia University campus.

From that perch, seven floors above the diner made famous by “Seinfeld,” Dr. Hansen battled the White House, testified dozens of times in Congress, commanded some of the world’s most powerful computers and pleaded with ordinary citizens to grasp the basics of a complex science.

His warnings and his scientific papers have drawn frequent attack from climate-change skeptics, to whom he gives no quarter. But Dr. Hansen is a maverick, just as likely to vex his allies in the environmental movement. He supports nuclear power and has taken stands that sometimes undercut their political strategy in Washington.

In the interview and in subsequent e-mails, Dr. Hansen made it clear that his new independence would allow him to take steps he could not have taken as a government employee. He plans to lobby European leaders — who are among the most concerned about climate change — to impose a tax on oil derived from tar sands. Its extraction results in greater greenhouse emissions than conventional oil.

Dr. Hansen’s activism of recent years dismayed some of his scientific colleagues, who felt that it backfired by allowing climate skeptics to question his objectivity. But others expressed admiration for his willingness to risk his career for his convictions.

Initially, Dr. Hansen plans to work out of a converted barn on his farm in Pennsylvania. He has not ruled out setting up a small institute or taking an academic appointment.

He said he would continue publishing scientific papers, but he will no longer command the computer time and other NASA resources that allowed him to track the earth’s rising temperatures and forecast the long-run implications.

Dr. Hansen, raised in small-town Iowa, began his career studying Venus, not the earth. But as concern arose in the 1970s about the effects of human emissions of greenhouse gases, he switched gears, publishing pioneering scientific papers.

His initial estimate of the earth’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases was somewhat on the high side, later work showed. But he was among the first scientists to identify the many ways the planet is likely to respond to rising temperatures and to show how those effects would reinforce one another to produce immense changes in the climate and environment, including a sea level rise that could ultimately flood many of the world’s major cities.

“He’s done the most important science on the most important question that there ever was,” said Bill McKibben, a climate activist who has worked closely with Dr. Hansen.

Around the time Dr. Hansen switched his research focus, in the 1970s, a sharp rise in global temperatures began. He labored in obscurity over the next decade, but on a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testified that human-induced global warming had begun.

Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a sentence that would appear in news reports across the land: “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Given the natural variability of climate, it was a bold claim to make after only a decade of rising temperatures, and to this day some of his colleagues do not think he had the evidence.

Yet subsequent events bore him out. Since the day he spoke, not a single month’s temperatures have fallen below the 20th-century average for that month. Half the world’s population is now too young to have lived through the last colder-than-average month, February 1985.

In worldwide temperature records going back to 1880, the 19 hottest years have all occurred since his testimony.

Again and again, Dr. Hansen made predictions that were ahead of the rest of the scientific community and, arguably, a bit ahead of the evidence.

“Jim has a real track record of being right before you can actually prove he’s right with statistics,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Hansen’s record has by no means been spotless. Even some of his allies consider him prone to rhetorical excess and to occasional scientific error.

He has repeatedly called for trying the most vociferous climate-change deniers for “crimes against humanity.” And in recent years, he stated that excessive carbon dioxide emissions might eventually lead to a runaway greenhouse effect that would boil the oceans and render earth uninhabitable, much like Venus.

His colleagues pointed out that this had not happened even during exceedingly warm episodes in the earth’s ancient past. “I have huge respect for Jim, but in this particular case, he overstated the risk,” said Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist and the head of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, who is nonetheless deeply worried about climate change.

Climate skeptics have routinely accused Dr. Hansen of alarmism. “He consistently exaggerates all the dangers,” Freeman Dyson, the famed physicist and climate contrarian, told The New York Times Magazine in 2009.

Perhaps the biggest fight of Dr. Hansen’s career broke out in late 2005, when a young political appointee in the administration of George W. Bush began exercising control over Dr. Hansen’s statements and his access to journalists. Dr. Hansen took the fight public and the administration backed down.

For all his battles with conservatives, however, he has also been hard on environmentalists. He was a harsh critic of a failed climate bill they supported in 2009, on the grounds that it would have sent billions into the federal government’s coffers without limiting emissions effectively.

Dr. Hansen agrees that a price is needed on carbon dioxide emissions, but he wants the money returned to the public in the form of rebates on tax bills. “It needs to be done on the basis of conservative principles — not one dime to make the government bigger,” said Dr. Hansen, who is registered as a political independent.

In the absence of such a broad policy, Dr. Hansen has been lending his support to fights against individual fossil fuel projects. Students lured him to a coal protest in 2009, and he was arrested for the first time. That fall he was cited again after sleeping overnight in a tent on the Boston Common with students trying to pressure Massachusetts into passing climate legislation. [Camping out in freezing temperatures shortly after having had surgery for prostate cancer, no less.]

“It was just humbling to have that solidarity and support from this leader, this lion among men,” said Craig S. Altemose, an organizer of the Boston protest.

Dr. Hansen says he senses the beginnings of a mass movement on climate change, led by young people. Once he finishes his final papers as a NASA employee, he intends to give it his full support.

“At my age,” he said, “I am not worried about having an arrest record.”

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Rolling Stone: The Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment

On the road with the new generation of college activists fighting for the environment

Bill Mckibben is interviewed by Ira Glass on his 350.org bus tour. Photo: Steve Liptay

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine, February 22, 2013

It's obvious how this should end. You've got the richest industry on earth, fossil fuel, up against some college kids, some professors, a few environmentalists, a few brave scientists.

And it's worse than that. The college students want their universities to divest from fossil fuel – to sell off their stock in Exxon and Shell and the rest in an effort to combat global warming. But those universities, and their boards, have deep ties to the 1%: combined, their endowments are worth $400 billion, and at Harvard, say, the five folks who run the portfolio make as much money as the entire faculty combined.

Oh, and remember – this is supposed to be an apathetic college generation. The veteran leader Ralph Nader, in a speech in Boston last year, said kids today were more passive than any he'd seen in 45 years. "Nothing changes if you don't have fire in your belly," he said. "You are a generation without even embers in your belly." [he doesn't get around much, does he?]

Is Congress Finally Moving on Climate Change?

But here's my bet: the kids are going to win, and when they do, it's going to matter. In fact, with Washington blocked, campuses are suddenly a front line in the climate fight – a place to stand up to a status quo that is wrecking the planet. The campaign to demand divestment from fossil fuel stock emerged from nowhere in late fall to suddenly become the largest student movement in decades. Already it's drawing widespread media attention; already churches and city governments are joining students in the fight.  It's where the action all of a sudden is.

I had a front row seat to watch this explosion – actually, I was up on stage, on a nationwide tour that sold out concert halls across the country early this winter. With a bevy of progressive heroes (author Naomi Klein, indigenous activist Winona LaDuke, filmmaker Josh Fox, Hip Hop Caucus founder Lennox Yearwood) and with Rolling Stone as a media sponsor, we took our biodiesel tour bus from Seattle to Atlanta, Maine to Utah, trying to spark a new front in the climate fight. Unknowingly, we'd timed this DoTheMath tour pretty well: post-Sandy, as the hottest year in American history was drawing to a close, we had no trouble finding allies. In fact, we were serving less as a virus then as a vector, letting activists glimpse their emerging strength. Every night, kids from a dozen local colleges would shout out their resolve, and then gather in "Aftermath" parties to get down to organizing.

By the time we finally finished, in December in Salt Lake City, 192 college campuses had active divestment fights underway, a number that's since grown to 256. And people were noticing. On the Senate floor, Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse told his colleagues that "as Congress sleepwalks, Americans actually are taking action on their own. These students are imploring their schools to weigh the real cost of climate change against the drive for more financial returns, and divest from the polluters." The New York Times, in what became the week's most e-mailed story in the paper of record, said the campaign could "force climate change back on to the nation's political agenda." A few days later, Time magazine ended its account of the mushrooming movement like this: "University presidents who don't fall in line should get used to hearing protests outside their offices. Just like their forerunners in the apartheid battles of the 1980s, these climate activists won't stop until they win."

Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein present during the 350.org bus tour.

Steve Liptay

We even had some early victories. Three colleges – Unity in Maine, Hampshire in Massachusetts, and Sterling College in Vermont – purged their portfolios of fossil fuel stocks. Three days before Christmas, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn announced city funds would no longer be invested in fossil fuel companies, and asked the heads of the city's pension fund to follow his lead. Citing the rising sea levels that threatened city's neighborhoods, he said, "I believe that Seattle ought to discourage these companies from extracting that fossil fuel, and divesting the pension fund from these companies is one way we can do that."

The logic of divestment couldn't be simpler: if it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage. The fossil fuel industry, as I showed in Rolling Stone last summer, has five times as much carbon in its reserves as even the most conservative governments on earth say is safe to burn – but on the current course, it will be burned, tanking the planet. The hope is that divestment is one way to weaken those companies – financially, but even more politically. If institutions like colleges and churches turn them into pariahs, their two-decade-old chokehold on politics in DC and other capitals will start to slip. Think about, for instance, the waning influence of the tobacco lobby – or the fact that the firm making Bushmaster rifles shut down within days of the Newtown massacre, after the California Teachers Pension Fund demanded the change. "Many of America's leading institutions are dozing on the issue of climate," says Robert Massie, head of the New Economics Institute. "The fossil fuel divestment campaign must become the early morning trumpet call that summons us all to our feet."

It won't be an easy fight in most places, of course. At Harvard, say, 72% of the student body voted to demand divestment, only to have the university respond in the most patronizing possible fashion two days later: "We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels." But one of the Harvard student organizers responded with just the right mix of pepper and politeness: "The president is going to have to change her mind, because we're not changing ours," sophomore Alli Welton said. "Climate change is a matter of life or death for millions and millions of people."

And it's that simple truth that, over the next few semesters, will help students overwhelm boards of trustees and reluctant presidents. This movement didn't come out of nowhere, after all – despite Nader's pessimism, if you knew where to look, you could see the pot boiling for several years. On hundreds of campuses, students had persuaded their administrations to build green buildings and bike paths; tens of thousands of students had traveled to Washington for giant PowerShift conventions to learn how to lobby on global warming. And since there's no longer anything theoretical about climate change, this movement's not going to dissipate – with each new storm and drought, it will gain tragic power.

In fact, if you sit down and game out the future, you start to realize that students, faculty, and engaged alumni have a surprisingly good hand. Trustees and presidents may resist at first – they are, almost by definition, pillars of the status quo. But universities, in the end, are one of the few places in our civilization where reason still stands a good chance of prevailing over power (especially since students are establishing some power of their own as they organize). And here's where reason inevitably leads:

(1) Universities need to lead because they are where we first found out about climate change. It was in physics labs and on university supercomputers that the realization we were in trouble first dawned a generation ago. By this point the proverbial man in the street can see their predictions coming sadly true: It wasn't just Sandy, though there's no doubt that the image of the cold Atlantic pouring into the New York subways had imprinted the new fragility of western civilization on many minds. (If that radical rag Business Week used the headline "It's Global Warming, Stupid," then you knew the message was getting through.) But everywhere we went across the nation on our tour, people had their own stories. In the Pacific Northwest, where we began, ocean acidification is so advanced that oyster farmers are in despair; in Nebraska, the week we arrived, scientists determined that exactly 100% of the state was now in "severe drought." Hell, we got to Colorado in early December, and the night we arrived a raging wildfire high in the Rockies forced the evacuation of 500 homes. In December. In the Rockies.

All this means that climate is no longer a fringe concern. Seventy-four percent of Americans said global warming was affecting the weather.  On campus, opinion is near-unanimous. "For one of my classes I just did a poll," says Stanford freshman Sophie Harrison, a leader in the divestment fight. "Out of 200 people I only found three who didn't believe in climate change."

Meanwhile, the scientists keep pushing their research forward. Twenty-five years ago, they were predicting the trouble we're seeing now; when they look forward another quarter century, things get truly scary – and academics get much less academic. In the past, just a lonely few, like NASA's James Hansen, were willing to go to jail, but in November, the premier scientific journal, Nature, published a commentary urging all climate scientists to "be arrested if necessary" because "this is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species' existence." In December, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where most of the year's cutting-edge climate studies are released, one panel examined the question "Is Earth Fucked?" The scientist leading the session finished by saying probably – but "if a global environmental movement develops that is strong enough, that has the potential to have a bigger impact in a timely manner." Make of it what you will: The American scientist who has spent the most time on the melting ice of Greenland, Ohio State's Jason Box, took to the stage at our Columbus tour stop to demand OSU and other colleges divest.

So when, for instance, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust says "our most effective impact on climate change" will come from "what we do with our teaching, our research. . . the students who may be the heads of the EPA or all kinds of organizations," it's partly true – that scholarship is important. But it's also clearly not doing the job alone, since the temperature keeps going up.

Universities have in fact already gone well beyond scholarship in the climate fight. As veteran student organizer Maura Cowley points out, 738 colleges from Adams State to Yeshiva University have already signed the "President's Climate Commitment," pledging that their campuses will go carbon-neutral because they are "deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming." The commitment is more than rhetorical – open up almost any college web page and you'll find a tab for "sustainability," with the PR office lauding the latest effort to install solar panels or convert to a pedestrian campus. "You can't walk 20 steps on the Stanford campus without seeing a recycling station," says Harrison. "I've been very impressed with all of that, which is why it seems so illogical they're invested in fossil fuel." Exactly – if you're committed to greening your campus, why wouldn't you be committed to greening your portfolio, too? Why is the heating system for the new arts center a proper target for environmental concern, but not the $50 million sitting in Peabody Coal, where it helps support climate-denying think tanks and reality-denying Congressmen?

Hence divestment. Sometimes, colleges can exert influence without selling stock – on many issues, like sweatshop labor, they may have been smarter to keep their stock, so they could use their position as shareholders to influence corporate decision-making. "But when we were talking about sweatshops, it wasn't because we were opposed to t-shirts. We just needed some changes in how companies operated," says Klein. Adds Dan Apfel, who as head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition has coordinated much of the emerging divestment furor, "If you're Apple, we want you to produce your computers in ways that are good. But we like computers. The fossil fuel industry, though – its existence is fundamentally against our existence. We can't change them by investing in them, because they're not going to write off reserves. There's no way they can be made sustainable, in the same way tobacco can't be made healthy."

(2) Universities understand math, and in this case the math about who's to blame is Q.E.D. clear. It points straight at the fossil fuel companies.

By now, most activists know the three numbers I outlined in this magazine last summer, in a piece that immediately went viral: If we're to hold planetary warming to the two degrees that the world's governments have said is the absolute red line, we can only burn 565 more gigatons of carbon – but the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned, have 2795 gigatons of carbon in their reserves. That is, they have five times the coal and oil and gas needed to roast the earth, and they fully intend to burn it – in fact, a company like Exxon boasts about spending a hundred million dollars a day looking for more hydrocarbons, all the fracking gas and Arctic oil and tar sands crude they can find. "The math is so irrefutable," says Klein, the veteran anti-corporate activist who's been helping lead the fight. "The fossil fuel companies haven't even bothered to dispute it. And coming to the issue with numbers like that, putting them in an academic context, that's radical. It makes it hard for the boards of trustees – who after all are supposed to be numbers people – to deal with. Suddenly it's the students who are the number crunchers, and the idealistic fantasists are the bank presidents on the board who don't want to deal with the reality staring them in the face."

It's not as if all of us who use fossil fuel aren't implicated – flying to Florida for spring break fills the sky with carbon. But it's only the fossil fuel industry that lobbies round the clock to make sure nothing ever changes. "We've figured out the root of the problem by this point," says Maura Cowley, who as head of the Energy Action Coalition has been coordinating student environmental efforts for years. Individual action matters, but systemic change – things like a serious price on carbon that the industry has blocked for years – is all that can really turn the tide in the short window the science of climate still leaves open. "Going after them directly feels seriously good," says Cowley.

(3) Faced with this kind of irrefutable evidence, colleges have led in the past, conceding that their endowments, in extreme cases, can't seek merely to maximize returns.

In the 1980s, 156 colleges divested from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa, a stand that Nelson Mandela credited with providing a great boost to the liberation struggle. "I remember those days well," says James Powell, who served as president of Oberlin, Franklin and Marshall, and Reed Colleges. "Trustees at first said our only job was to maximize returns, that we don't do anything else.  They had to be persuaded there were some practices colleges simply shouldn't be associated with, things that involved the oppression of people." Since then, colleges have taken stances with their endowments on issues from Sudan to sweatshops. When Harvard divested from tobacco stocks in 1990, then-president Derek Bok said the university did not want "to be associated with companies whose products create a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to other human beings." Given that the most recent data indicates fossil fuel pollution could kill 100 million by 2030, the coal, oil and gas industry would seem to pass that test pretty easily; it's also on the edge of setting off the 6th great extinction crisis, so everyone over in the biology lab studying non-human beings has a stake too. Here's how Desmond Tutu, Mandela's partner in the liberation of South Africa, put it in a video he made for the DoTheMath tour: "The corporations understood the logic of money even when they weren't swayed by the dictates of morality," the Nobel Peace Prize-winner explained. "Climate change is a deeply moral issue, too, of course. Here in Africa, we see the dreadful suffering of people from worsening drought, from rising food prices, from floods, even though they've done nothing to cause the situation. Once again, we can join together as a world and put pressure where it counts." Or, you know, not.

(4) And it's not just people at a distance who are in trouble here, though so far they've borne the brunt – young people, the kind of people you mostly find on campuses, are the next chief victims of climate change.

Let's assume the average age of a college trustee is 60, meaning he or she has another two decades on this planet; they may shuffle off to the great class reunion in the sky before climate change becomes unbearable to well-off First Worlders. But your average student has six decades ahead – and scientists say that at our current pace of unrestricted warming, we could see the planet's temperature rise 6 degrees Celsius in that stretch, with consequences best described as science fiction. "By the time we're ready to have kids, buy a home – it's already a radically different world if we don't put the brakes on as quickly as possible," says Cowley, the national student organizer. "It's difficult to plan your life as a young person right now – by the time we get to 2050, we don't even know where we're going to get our food."

It's not like administrators, faced with global warming, are deciding for themselves. Carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere a century on average, which means, according to the modeling team at Climate Interactive, that "by the time a 55-year-old college president who insists today that a portfolio requires fossil-fuel investment reaches the age of retirement, only 11% of the CO2 released during the class of 2016's education will have left the atmosphere." In fact, says former college president Powell, such an analysis suggests trustees have a quasi-legal duty to do all they can about climate change: "The board is supposed to make sure that the endowment allows for intergenerational equity, that the students who are going to Oberlin in 2075 get as much benefit from it as those there now. But with global warming, you're guaranteeing a diminution of quality of life decades out."

At the very least, it feels bad – like the opposite of what college trustees are supposed to be doing. "I see this generation being betrayed on every front," says Klein. "Youth without a future – that's how they feel about the economy. And then when they understand that thanks to climate change they may literally be facing no future, it makes them really, really angry, as well it should." The good news is, lots of people are already reaching across those generational lines. "Sometimes it's dangerous to separate it by generations," says Alex Leff, a freshman at Hampshire College, which effectively divested this spring.  "My family always said, 'You kids have to do something about this.' I really reject that – what if we dismiss it too, and say it's a job for our kids?  Youth can't be the only ones driving this – it helps a lot to see our elders doing their part too." So at college after college, professors (many of whom were in college during past divestment fights) are signing petitions and joining marches. Alumni are starting to pitch in too – these are early days, but campuses report letters arriving from donors asking if they're planning to do the right thing.

(5) And in this case, they can do the right thing without great cost.

College trustees, of course, are thinking about their endowments. They worry that they'll lose money if they do divest – that if they can't park their money in Exxon et al., their yields may dwindle.

The fear is almost certainly overstated – energy stocks have outperformed the market index the last few years, but lag if you take the last 30 as a whole. Stephen Mulkey is president of Unity College in Maine, which became the first college in the nation to officially divest its fossil fuel holdings. He stood up to give the news in front of the thousands that crowded into Portland's State Theater for that stop on our roadshow, an electric moment that brought the throng to its feet. "You don't have to do it overnight," he pointed out – indeed, campaign organizers have asked only that colleges pledge to sell their shares, and then spend the next five years winding down their positions so they don't have to sell in a fire sale. "There's abundant academic literature showing that social screening such as this, given the most likely market conditions in the near future, will not result in poor performance. You're not divesting and then just forgoing those profits – you divest from BP and invest in something else. You reanalyze your portfolio." In fact, there's been one academic study of the effects of divesting, and it shows the "theoretical return penalty" at 0.0034%, which is the same as "almost none."

At some schools, some of the money can be re-invested in the college itself – in making the kind of green improvements that save substantial sums. Mark Orlowski, head of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, just published a report showing that the average annual return on investment for a thousand efficiency projects at campuses across the country was just under 30%, which makes the stock market look anemic. "College trustees often think of a new lighting system as an 'expense,' not an investment, but it's not," he says. "If you invest a million and can expect to clear $2.8 million over the next decade, that's the definition of fiduciary soundness." At colleges – and elsewhere – the potential for significant reinvestment is large: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, for instance, is considering urging its pension fund to divest a billion dollars. That could do some serious re-greening.

It's also possible that the insights into the future supplied by aroused student activists might actually make for savvy investing advice. As hedge fund founder Tom Steyer, who has advised trustees to divest their stock, put it, "From a selfish point of view, it's very good for colleges that they know something about the future that others don't. Because investing is not about what's happened in the past – all prices are really anticipations of what's going to happen in the future. As soon as the trouble we face is really common knowledge it's going to be reflected in the price. But it's not reflected in the price yet."

Steyer's a good investor – his net worth puts him on the Fortune 400 list, meaning he's worth far more than most college endowments. What he's saying is: Colleges are lucky to have physics departments not just because physics is a good thing. In a sense, universities have insider information – they know how bad global warming is going to be, and hence can get the hell out of fossil fuel stocks before, not after, governments intervene to make them keep their reserves underground. "Once the scientific research filters into the minds of investors around the world, the price won't stand," he says. But since the average investor relies on, say, the Wall Street Journal, which has served as an unending mouthpiece for climate denial, colleges have the advantage.  "The only way you gain an investing advantage over the rest of the world is when you have an edge." As for those who think they'll wait until the last minute, just before the carbon bubble bursts, "That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. No one ever gets out at the top. It's worth missing another couple of good years of Exxon to avoid what's coming."

In the face of logic like that, an increasing number of colleges seem determined to at least engage the debate. For instance, my employer, Vermont's Middlebury College, which always ranks in the top five liberal arts colleges in the country, has held a series of panel discussions and open debates this month and its trustees expect to make a decision in the spring. And since Middlebury was the first college in the country with an environmental studies department, its student body, faculty and ranks of alumni are filled with people who recognize the potential power of the gesture. Similar discussions are underway at Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Earlham, Pitzer. But it's not just small liberal arts schools. Students at the University of New Hampshire delivered a thousand signatures to the president before Christmas demanding divestment; at the neighboring University of Vermont, state legislators have begun pressing for action, at the urging of a big student campaign. At Cal, the student senate has backed divestment by a wide margin; UNC students outdid their Harvard counterparts, voting 77% for divestment.

So let's imagine for a moment that students and their allies are able to convince many colleges and universities to do the right thing. Especially for those who sign on fairly quickly, and with a minimum of rancor, there could be real advantages. "After we divested," said Mulkey of Unity College, "we started receiving donations online. We're seen an uptick in our inquiries from students. I think that will transform into an improvement in enrollment. That's not why we did it, but it's a fact." Powell, recalling the moment when Oberlin divested its apartheid stock, says, "I definitely feel it rallies people behind their alma mater.  Whenever there's change – abolishing fraternities, going co-ed – there's always the worry the alumni won't like change. We see over and over again that these claims are false – you may take a hit for a year or two, but in the end you're changing with the world." Some alumni, says Klein, "may be resentful. But for many more, it will be exciting. Suddenly the university they came from is not just a site of nostalgia, but a place where they can have an influence on the future."

That influence could be decisive, too. Less in financial terms, though the $400 billion in American college endowments is no small sum, than in political and cultural ones. A college is where a society thinks about itself, after all; if suddenly those collections of knowledge denounce the fossil fuel industry for what it is, a rogue force outlaw against the laws of physics, it will make a difference. Fossil fuel companies care a lot about image, after all – it's what makes it easy for them to exert their political control. It's why they run those back-to-back-to-back TV ads about "clean coal," [which exists nowhere] those endless commercials with the polar bears and the drilling rigs. Colleges could strip them of their social license, and if they lead, others will follow. "The speed at which this campaign has spread is causing ripples in the investment community," said Andy Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, a campaign partner that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. "We anticipate more 'carbon-free' investment options coming onto the market over the coming months for endowments, foundations, and other institutional investors who want to move investment dollars to build a clean energy future." Already, at least two major Christian denominations have announced they'll consider resolutions to withdraw their money. One could imagine the fossil fuel industry as the new tobacco, humbled enough that it actually has to come to the bargaining table in D.C. and a dozen other crucial capitals.

On other campuses, it will go less smoothly; in some places, doubtless, colleges will go to war with themselves, with trustees hunkered down against the increasingly strident demands of students and faculty. But even in those cases, the fight will be valuable, educating each new incoming class about the culprits behind climate change. It's hard to imagine that it's all just a short-lived fad. "Global warming is not going away in anyone's lifetime," says Powell – and from now on, each superstorm, each megadrought will become a moral challenge to the university brand, a reminder that one's education or one's salary is being paid for with the not-so-gradual extinction of the planet's possibilities. Students, I think, are determined to believe in the colleges they love – but they're also up to the fight. At Pennsylvania's Swarthmore, for instance, they've been demanding divestment for more than a year without luck. "Particularly at small liberal arts schools, students are conditioned to believe that college boards and administrators will always do what's right – that if we just dialogue with administrators enough, they'll come around," says Hannah Jones, who graduated from Swarthmore last spring. But in fact, even at a school like Swarthmore with a deep Quaker tradition, "the administration and the board are part of an institutional hierarchy designed to support the status quo," so "it's up to students, faculty, and alumni to build power and to apply pressure in a way that demands bold, swift action." And as students learn to build those campaigns, knowledge spreads quickly. Swarthmore students, for instance, are hosting a 'convergence' this week for activists from many campuses; for those who can't make the trip, gofossilfree.org has become a kind of clearinghouse for videos, manifestos, essays, updates.

It's not perhaps a militant generation – maybe that was what struck Nader, more used to the uprisings of the 1960s with their broad themes of cultural liberation. But in the wake of Occupy, many young people are drawing connections. "We want to make sure we don't just get divestment, but that we build real political power across wide coalitions," says Jones. And if you're a college administrator, you should probably fear folks who know how to use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook better than you do; "militant" sounds good, but "persistent," "organized" and "committed" are probably a deeper threat to the status quo. And you can prove it by watching the same students running divestment campaigns quickly joining the larger environmental movement: all of a sudden, they're helping run the opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, or working hard with their Appalachian allies in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining.

The fossil fuel industry may be dominant in the larger world, but on campus, it's coming up against some of its first effective opposition. Global warming has become a key topic in every discipline from theology to psychology to accounting, from engineering and anthropology to political science. It's the greatest intellectual and moral problem in human history – which, if you think about it, is precisely the reason we have colleges and universities.  

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-case-for-fossil-fuel-divestment-20130222

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