December 2008. So, Obama had already been elected. Bush was on his way out. And this was this last-minute land grab, a resource grab. They were handing out these leases in very irregular ways. There was all kinds of dodgy things going on with the way these leases were being handed out, how quickly, the lack of process. And, in fact, Ken Salazar, The Interior Secretary, has agreed with Tim DeChristopher and found that process was not followed. And I think most of the leases, if not all of the leases, are not actually being sold now because of this. So it turns out that Tim was right, but he’s still being prosecuted for taking a stand.
But coming back to the timing, so many of the big environmental groups in that moment were just waiting, waiting to see what Obama was going to do. And there was so much waiting, waiting to see what Obama was going to do. Maybe he’s really going to fix this for us, right? So let’s just give the guy a chance, right? And here’s Tim DeChristopher. Obama hasn’t taken office yet, and he’s going, “I’m just going to be loyal to my issue, to the issues that I care about. I’m not going to play politics at all. I’ll leave that to other people. And there have to be some people out there who are loyal to the science and are not playing politics.” And that is something that I found so moving about his actions, the timing of those actions, that he wasn’t waiting.
But there’s something else which is just so shocking—is that, what did Tim DeChristopher do wrong? They said that he participated in an auction without the intention to pay. And I remember hearing Tim describe why he had gone from taking that test, going straight to that auction, and I remember that he said that part of what outraged him about what the oil and gas companies were doing is that they were externalizing all of their costs. He’s an economics student, and he had been studying the way in which oil and gas companies privatize the profits from their resource extraction but externalize the costs, being the pollution and the cleanup. We see this over and over again. I mean, look at Chevron refusing to pay the cost of the disaster in Ecuador despite the court ruling. But look at climate change, the biggest disaster of all and the highest price tag of all—this, created by the fossil fuel industries. They’ve known it for decades. They have no intention of paying that cost. So I think about this incredible double standard.
Interestingly, Tim DeChristopher said, right after he did this, not intending to do this, but then buying the land, he was able to raise the money to buy the land. but he wasn’t allowed to introduce that into the court. The jury never knew that he was able to raise that money.
Everything these oil and gas companies are doing, they’re doing without the intention to pay the costs, but with such a spectacular price tag. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, that have been offloaded onto the public. Those actions are supposedly legal and—supposedly legal, or, in some cases, they’re—as in the case in Ecuador, the courts are finding that they weren’t legal, but they don’t intend to pay anyway. So, the injustice of this young man, who took this principled position, going to jail because he did not intend to pay for leases that Ken Salazar has said were irregular, and all these oil and gas companies getting away with actions that are so damaging to our world, to the ecology, to our economy, and they have absolutely no intention of paying. So we have to somehow switch this discussion.
Since 2008, we’ve seen an incredible attack on climate science. The project that I’m working on isn’t just about this; it’s a broader project about climate justice. But what we’re seeing now is another example of how an economic crisis is being used to push every issue off the agenda. So, it isn’t just that the economic crisis is used as the pretext to attack unions, to attack public education, to privatize services—all of that’s true; but another way in which it’s been used consistently is to say, “OK, well, you know, back in 2008, 2009, we were all focused on climate change, and there were polar bears on the cover of Newsweek, but we just can’t afford that now, because there is an economic crisis. And taking action on climate change would simply be too costly to our economy. We can’t afford that. We certainly can’t afford that in a recession.”
So there’s been this explicit pitting of the economy against the environment, which is why I think it’s so important for us to connect how we could both address climate change and fix our economy at the same time, which we can do with the right climate justice agenda, because separating the environment out from the economy, which is—you know, we live in a time of single-issue politics, where NGOs have their issues, they stick to their issues, and it can be—it can be really problematic, because if you’re just talking about the environment, but you don’t talk about the economy, then you are open to these attempts to pit these issues against each other as if they’re separate. But it’s interesting. You know, 350.org has launched their campaign against the Chamber of Commerce, which is starting to make these connections and realizing that we’re not going to get any kind of climate action unless we get to the root of the problem, which is the corrosive power of corporate money over politics. So we’re starting to see a lot of the environmental groups realizing that they’ve got to get out of their green silos and start engaging with economics, or we’re going to keep losing.
Discussion with Naomi Klein.
Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist and author. Her most recent book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.
– from democracynow.org