This Changes Everything

“The New Climate Warriors” (Pages 293-294)

The chapter begins with Klein introducing an incident where she and fellow environmentalists were stopped and detained by riot police on a roadside in Halkidiki, Greece. This forested area, close to a popular Greek tourist destination, has become the site of a battle between local environmental activists and a government-backed plan for a Canadian company to build a new mining operation.

“Welcome to Blockadia” (Pages 294-305)

Halkidiki is just one example of what Klein refers to as “Blockadia,” a shifting constellation of conflict zones that forms wherever new extractivist projects are attempting to push into new terrains to dig up more fossil fuels. They are met by a new generation of environmentalists determined to stop them. Klein notes the local makeup of these new activists and pockets of resistance; the spark point starts with a local community whose safety, livelihood, and environment are put in danger.

The activists are mostly local and made up of ordinary people, from local shop owners to mothers and university professors: “Resistance to high risk extreme extraction is building a global grassroots and broad based network” (295) and is rooted in a desire for democratic community control over what happens to the lands these communities live and depend on. From there, it’s growing into a wider, interconnected movement.

Klein argues that many young people are not interested in the old top-down model of environmentalism offered by the big greens. They don’t want insider lobbyists in suits; their perspective is shifting back to a roots-up, local, direct-action approach. This movement has broken with the elites and energized a new generation. It’s also taken the extractivist industries by surprise and made their work a lot harder.

Klein sketches several of the recent Blockadia battle sites and victories to show the scale of the movement. There’s Halkidiki in Greece and the bid to protect the forest from mining there, which has gained a national profile and become a major cause for Greece’s progressive political movement. The right-wing coalition government has pushed ahead with the mining plan and used repressive force to take on the activists, including police charges, rubber bullets, and tear gas.

Similarly, in Romania, in the village of Pungesti, there have been local protests over the building of shale gas infrastructure by Chevron that is impacting agriculture and water. In New Brunswick, Canada, the Indigenous people of the Mi’kmaq community are leading a blockade against a major fracking operation on their ancestral lands. Local Canadians have joined them, and protests and blockades have been met again with police force. Klein cites other examples in Britain (blockades at key fracking sites), Australia, and rural China. The US and Canada protested over the huge and now-famous Keystone XL pipeline plan to transport oil from the Alberta tar sands. It was in the struggles here that the term “Blockadia” was coined.

Klein notes the patterns across all these struggles: the shared determination, the prominent role played by women, the spirit of global collaboration, and the combination of a very local passion and issue with a much wider understanding of what’s at stake. These sites see themselves as part of a global movement, and social media has enabled these voices to be heard and unite against a common ecological crisis and more invasive and dangerous forms of fossil fuel extraction: “While these conflicts are invariably sparked by local livelihood and safety concerns, the global stakes are never far from the surface” (304). They are connected by a global understanding that we need to move away from fossil fuels quickly if we are to safeguard the future of the planet, and not extract even more: “before we can effectively solve this crisis—we have to stop making it worse” (304).

“Operational Climate Change” (Pages 305-310)

Klein looks back at the roots of the movement, citing the struggles against oil extraction by Indigenous people in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, in the 1990s. The Niger Delta region had long been a key extraction site, and international companies like Shell had deals with the government to pump out crude oil while they treated the land and water with utter carelessness, spilling petroleum waste into rivers and streams and poisoning fish, animals, and people.

Gas flaring was used to burn off excess gasses, which could potentially have been used to provide energy for the country. However, it was cheaper for companies to simply burn it, rather than capture it. In the early ‘90s, people in the area started to organize to demand redress for the damage done. A small Indigenous group, the Ogoni, formed an organization (MOSOSP) that demanded the rights to their land and an end to oil extraction. Over 300,000 Ogoni staged a nonviolent protest in 1993, and Shell was forced to withdraw from the territory. Since then, oil production on Ogoni land has ceased. However, the Nigerian government, which relied on oil deals, acted against MOSOSP, killing thousands and razing villages to the ground. The leaders of the movement were executed on spurious charges.

Community-led resistance in the Niger Delta continued. In 1998, 5,000 young people of the Ijaw nation held a gathering and made a similar demand for rights to their land and an end to oil extraction. They called themselves “Operation Climate Change,” linking their local struggle to the global environmental cause. Nonviolent demonstrations were held, and oil platforms were occupied. Again, the Nigerian government responded with brutal force, killing innocents, burning villages, and raping women, all apparently to defend oil installations. Two hundred Ijaw people were lost in a few days. During the attack, soldiers were flown into the area on Chevron helicopters. The company did nothing to publicly protest what happened or stop its recurrence. By 2006, the situation had degenerated into a full-blown civil war. With the Ijaw people giving up nonviolence and attacking government targets and oil installations, the noble aims of the movement, set out in the ‘90s, have been somewhat lost in the conflict.

Klein argues the struggles in the Delta in the early-mid ’90s were key in showing the way to the Blockadia movement: linking the local and the global cause, emphasizing community control of resources, and following nonviolent measures to fight further fossil fuel extraction. “The rise in Blockadia is the flip side of the carbon boom—the industry is going further on every front—and this is fueling the backlash” (310).

“All in the Sacrifice Zone” (Pages 310-315)

Extraction of fossil fuels has always required “sacrifice zones,” areas that can be mined, polluted, and dumped on. Historically, these areas have been poor, remote places where residents lack political power. They were easy to ignore by privileged classes in far-off countries who benefited from extraction.

According to Klein, that’s changing. As fossil fuel extraction looks for new, previously untapped resources, more and more areas are being put at risk. With the advancement of the fracking industry, this is happening in previously safe and comfortable regions all over the US and the UK, where huge underground reserves of methane-rich rocks and natural gas and oil supplies have been identified.

Many communities in the developed Western world are now feeling what it’s like to be close to or in a “sacrifice zone,” with water supplies polluted by gas leakage, wells drilled feet from public facilities and houses, and trains carrying tons of highly volatile and explosive oil through towns and villages. In Quebec, one of these trains exploded, killing 47 people.

No place is now off-limits. Hydraulic fracking for natural gas has expanded across the US, with thousands of wells being dug to get at the plentiful gas reserves beneath the land. In Britain, the area under consideration for fracking adds up to about half the entire island. Klein points out this is a surprise to many, who find themselves now on the frontline of the struggle with the fossil fuel industry, their communities and homes undermined by companies that never sought their permission to frack but have the backing of the government to do so.

This situation has made the fossil fuel industry a lot of new enemies, including some people who were perhaps once allies and friends. Perspectives quickly change when the extraction operation suddenly moves close to one’s home. Klein wonders whether the rapid and aggressive expansion of these extractivist activities may end up seriously undermining the fossil fuel industry in the public eye and giving more momentum to the fight against them. She suggests there are no longer discrete sacrifice zones that can be easily written off, especially with the collective impact of climate change coming: “we are all in the sacrifice zone now” (315).

“Choked in Enemy Territory” (Pages 315-324)

The effects of the fossil fuel industry’s rapid expansion into new territories have given force to the climate movement in several ways. It has linked together previously disconnected struggles and allowed marginal voices to be joined by those who have more power and reach.

The Keystone XL pipeline, for example, has affected Indigenous people, people of color, fishers, farmers, and middle-class people, making them potential allies. The power of the oil and coal companies in poorer regions and countries, and their monopoly in the job markets and economies there, previously meant they could pretty much call the shots. Governments supported them because they needed the revenue they brought, and local people put up with a lot because jobs depended on it. However, as the companies move into new frontiers and places with more diverse economies and independent sources of wealth and power, they find the people there far less willing to compromise.

Klein gives several examples of this. The attempt to install fracking wells in Ithaca, New York, met with fierce resistance and turned Ithaca into a hub for anti-fracking activity and academic research. It led to fracking being banned in Ithaca and an additional 180 cities and towns across the state. In the south of France (a fairly conservative region), the attempt to introduce fracking was met with fierce local resistance and a nationwide ban on fracking in 2011. Similarly, in the Pacific Northwest of the US, the coal industry’s attempt to expand its exporting infrastructure has been fought down by a coalition of radical environmentalists, local communities, Indigenous groups, and rural workers. KC Golden writes: “the great Pacific North West is not a global coal depot, a pusher for fossil fuel addiction, a logistic hub for ciliate devastation” (320).

These examples all show it’s easier to win battles against the fossil fuel companies on these new grounds than it is in their old heartlands, where they have operated for decades already. However, Klein argues that these victories in the new frontiers are also reenergizing struggles in the “heart of carbon country” (321) and lending new courage to resist. She cites Richmond, California, a traditional oil town where in 2009, citizens blocked Chevron’s plans to expand its oil refinery there to process more carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

Indigenous groups in tar sand countries have launched lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for the violation of their land rights, and they are actively spreading the fight, making connections with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups that are locked in similar struggles with extractivist industry. The networks and connections are growing, and ironically, it’s the fossil fuel infrastructure itself that connects these places and struggles as the industry looks to expand its supply chain and operations. The Keystone Pipeline is symbolic in this respect; wherever it is laid is another potential site of connected struggle, from the tar fields of Alberta to the coast.

Klein gives the example of a group of the Indigenous Lummi peoples from the Pacific Northwest, who traveled around the country with a totem pole they carved and named “We Draw the Line” (323). They met with other Indigenous groups and communities along the way and stopped to pray with them, understand their shared struggle against the fossil fuel companies, unify their voices, and grow the network of resistance. Klein argues this interconnectedness is key: it stops the fossil fuel companies from finding another way around, and it blocks them at every turn: “one battle doesn’t rob from another, but causes battles to multiply” (323).

“The BP Factor: No Trust” (Pages 324-330)

Resistance is also mounting because unconventional extractivist activities like fracking and tar sand mining are riskier than conventional methods of fossil fuel extraction. Communities in these industries’ paths are being asked to risk a lot with little in return. Worse still, the US government and the companies themselves are doing little to acknowledge these risks or introduce appropriate safety measures and regulations.

Klein argues that the companies and supporting governments are doing insufficient research to understand the risks and dangers of these new methods of extraction. Large knowledge gaps remain. For example, the oil drawn from the Alberta tar sands looks to have more corrosive properties than conventional crude oil, yet the safety standards for piping and transportation haven’t been adapted. We’ve seen a higher number of oil spillages, most likely as a consequence. The pollution around the tar sands contaminates the surrounding waters, but little research has been undertaken on how effective controlling mechanisms are or on the effects of contamination on wildlife and human health.

The approach of the companies and the government is to avoid and downplay the issue, or actively silence protesting voices. A doctor, John O’Connor, noted the rise of aggressive and rare cancers in the region, and he was subject to allegations and attacks from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Alberta. He was finally cleared of these allegations, but it was a warning to others who might speak out. Klein argues that an atmosphere of intimidation had been created to stop health professionals from speaking out. At the same time, environmental research budgets have been slashed.

A similar picture emerges with the fracking industry. The industry has denied any connection between its operations and local water contamination, despite multiple reports of contamination and people being able to set their water on fire.

Under the Bush administration, the industry had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation, exempting them from the regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. They did not have to disclose the chemicals they were using, and it is consequently difficult to prove the link between fracking and contaminated water. Nonetheless, mounting evidence indicates fracking puts drinking water supplies at risk. Studies have also shown a link between fracking and increases in small earthquakes.

“Educated by Disaster” (Pages 330-334)

Klein looks at two recent major disasters that have further eroded public faith in oil and gas companies and exposed their way of working. In 2010, a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and leaking oil from a ruptured wellhead about a mile beneath the sea surface. It was the largest oil spill in history and caused widespread devastation to wildlife. Klein states that BP showed itself completely unprepared for this kind of emergency and scrambled for one failed fix after another. The government response was similarly poor, leaving BP in charge of the clean-up. The investigations that followed revealed that BP put profit before safety. Cost-cutting measures and a willingness to take unacceptable levels of risk played a significant part in causing the accident.

Ten days later, a pipeline run by the oil company Enbridge burst in Michigan, causing the largest onshore oil spill in US history. Investigations found it was the company’s failure to upgrade corroding pipes in time that was chiefly responsible. They had previously assured Congress that they would be able to respond to any leak almost instantaneously. When the pipe burst in Michigan, it took 17 hours to close the leak. After claiming it was only conventional crude oil that was being transported, it was later uncovered that the pipe in question was being used to transport more corrosive Alberta tar sand oils.

Klein links both of these accidents to the new era of high-risk fossil fuel extraction: drilling deeper and transporting bitumen. She lists other examples, including a Quebec train explosion: “If it seems like there are more such spills and accidents than before, that’s because there are” (332). The effect has been a further loss of public trust in these industries, their extreme extractivist practices, and their cost-cutting and profiteering behaviors.

Klein states that in a better world, we would have already seen a movement away from “extreme energy,” but nothing of that sort has happened. Indeed, permits and leases are still being handed out for even more dangerous extractive activities.

“The Return of Precaution” (Pages 335-336)

For decades, the environmental movement worked in partnership with fossil fuel companies and governments: negotiating and working deals to try and balance risk to the environment with profits. Talk of “acceptable risk” formed the basis of the official climate-change discussion (335).

Klein points to the difference with the new Blockadia approach. Talk of acceptable risk has been replaced by a simpler and more militant “precautionary principle” (335). In other words, if something looks unsafe for the environment and people, the burden of proof lies with the industries to show that it is safe, not for the movement to prove it is not: “Fossil fuel companies [are] no longer dealing with those big green groups that can be silenced with a generous donation or a conscience clearing carbon offset program” (335). Instead, they are dealing with communities and activist groups who are not looking to negotiate a deal but to stand in their way: “They are simply saying ‘No.’ No to the pipeline, no to the tar sands, no to fracking. ‘No to new carbon frontiers’ both here and elsewhere (335). Klein argues this sense of moral clarity and firm resistance has come as a real shock to the extractivist industry, which has been used to getting its way for so long.