Public Lands, Dirty Energy

- by Josh Schloss­berg, Ener­gy Jus­tice Now

Grass­roots advo­cates have done a bang up job alert­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic to the dis­turb­ing health and envi­ron­men­tal impacts of the extrac­tion, trans­porta­tion, and gen­er­a­tion of dirty ener­gy (fos­sil fuels, nuclear pow­er, and biomass/trash incin­er­a­tion). Green­house gas­es, air pol­lu­tion, and water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from ener­gy sources requir­ing smoke­stacks or cool­ing tow­ers have become com­mon knowl­edge to all but the will­ful­ly ignorant.

How­ev­er, to achieve a crit­i­cal mass of action that will influ­ence pub­lic pol­i­cy and shift pri­vate invest­ment away from ener­gy sources that cause more harm than good, dirty ener­gy oppo­nents must find com­mon threads to weave the fab­ric of the move­ment together.

One such thread involves the harm­ful impacts dirty ener­gy pos­es to the forests, prairies, and deserts on pub­lic lands that belong to every U.S. citizen.

Musi­cal Chairs

All too often activists fight­ing one sec­tor of the dirty ener­gy indus­try will ignore — and occa­sion­al­ly advo­cate for — yet anoth­er type of dirty ener­gy, inval­i­dat­ing many of the very con­cerns they pro­fess, con­fus­ing the pub­lic, and harm­ing the over­all movement.

For instance, when anti-coal cam­paign­ers give a pass to bio­mass ener­gy, the coal indus­try gets away with toast­ing trees in their coal-fired pow­er plants. By endors­ing (or allow­ing) bio­mass incin­er­a­tion, anti-coal activists con­tra­dict their own talk­ing points about air pol­lu­tion from coal, since trees or oth­er forms of “bio­mass” actu­al­ly emit high­er lev­els of dead­ly par­tic­u­late mat­ter per unit of ener­gy than the dirt­i­est fos­sil fuel. Iron­i­cal­ly, a coal facil­i­ty that starts burn­ing bio­mass may result in the facil­i­ty oper­at­ing longer than it would have oth­er­wise —  con­tin­u­ing to burn more coal along with trees.

The same dynam­ic is at work when bio­mass ener­gy oppo­nents insist that nat­ur­al gas would be a bet­ter fuel to burn in a pow­er plant. How can the pub­lic, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, and the media take bio­mass busters’ wor­ries about cli­mate and water­sheds seri­ous­ly when they are in favor of an ener­gy source that leaks vast amounts of methane — a green­house gas that is eighty-six times more potent than car­bon diox­ide over a twen­ty-year peri­od  — and can be respon­si­ble for ground­wa­ter con­t­a­m­i­na­tion through hydraulic fracturing?

Or how about orga­ni­za­tions that oppose fos­sil fuels because of threats to health and the envi­ron­ment while turn­ing a blind eye — and in some ways open­ing the door — to the riski­est method of ener­gy gen­er­a­tion in the world: nuclear power?

In the long run, the lack of a uni­fied dirty ener­gy resis­tance allows indus­try to keep propos­ing facil­i­ties in towns with­out orga­nized resis­tance to a par­tic­u­lar fuel source — a kind of musi­cal chairs where, when the music stops, no chairs are missing. 

Com­mon Ground

Despite the valiant efforts of dirty ener­gy oppo­nents, cli­mate change, air pol­lu­tion, ground­wa­ter con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and for­est destruc­tion keep get­ting worse while the cor­po­ra­tions who per­pe­trate these envi­ron­men­tal crimes upon the Amer­i­can peo­ple keep get­ting stronger. What­ev­er we’re doing obvi­ous­ly isn’t work­ing; it’s time to cir­cle the wagons.

The key to move­ment sol­i­dar­i­ty is find­ing com­mon ground between anti-fos­sil fuels, anti-nuclear and anti-incin­er­a­tion efforts. One such strat­e­gy — and by no means the only — lit­er­al­ly involves find­ing “com­mon ground”: pub­lic lands. While the extrac­tion, trans­porta­tion, and gen­er­a­tion of dirty ener­gy occurs main­ly on “pri­vate” land, the exploita­tion of each ener­gy source also impacts Nation­al Forests, Bureau of Land Man­age­ment (BLM) tracts, and oth­er pub­licly-owned lands.

The nuclear pow­er indus­try mines ura­ni­um on BLM lands while push­ing to dump their dead­ly radioac­tive waste in places like Yuc­ca Moun­tain in Neva­da, which includes pub­lic land.

An increas­ing per­cent­age of frack­ing for nat­ur­al gas takes place on BLM lands, as does some coal min­ing. Alas­ka BLM lands are rou­tine­ly drilled for oil, and despite BP’s Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter, off­shore oil drilling con­tin­ues. When the ener­gy prof­i­teers aren’t bleed­ing pub­lic lands for fos­sil fuels, they’re build­ing pipelines through it. 

Mean­while, more and more acres of Nation­al Forests and BLM lands are being logged to fuel pol­lut­ing bio­mass incin­er­a­tors, with the bio­mass and tim­ber indus­try exploit­ing the fear of wild­fire and insects to “get out the cut” before and after these nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring events. 

And no mat­ter the ener­gy source, indus­try wants to hack trans­mis­sion lines through our pub­lic treasures.

Come Togeth­er — Right Now

Each sep­a­rate com­po­nent of the dirty ener­gy resis­tance — anti-fos­sil fuels, anti-nuke, anti-bio­mass/­trash incin­er­a­tion — has tried going it alone with indi­vid­ual cam­paigns point­ing out the ills of one dirty ener­gy source, and pre­tend­ing the oth­ers don’t exist. While there’s been some pos­i­tive trac­tion over the years, the only way we’re going to get up the moun­tain is through mutu­al support. 

Extrac­tion-free pub­lic lands sol­i­dar­i­ty is just one of many ways to link the move­ment together.